Bix

And now Lawler has dropped most of the lecherous act (he does still play the role of the announcer who's excited about Divas' matches, but he's incredibly toned down) in addition to being presented more seriously now that he's positioned as a legit legend within the company, so he's pretty much completely different.

I once asked Meltzer why a promo guy as good as Stomper used a mute foreigner gimmick outside of Western Canada. He said it was because Gouldie's runs as the Mongolian Stomper drew better than Archie "The Stomper" Gouldie did. Good enough promo guy and big enough star that he should be in the ballot, though.

I always thought the psychology of the easy falls in Texas death matches is that the person who loses the fall didn't kick out so they could have more time to recover from the last move they were hit with.

I remember a WCW TV match from '93-'95ish where Dustin Rhodes accompanies another wrestler to the ring, Ventura/Heenan throws a fit about him not having a manager's license, and Tony Schiavone brushes it off with "There's no such thing as a managers' license!"

Ross explaining that it's the referee's discretion to determine whether or not something that sent someone over the stop was a DQ after someone used a strike to send someone over was a standard talking point of his to get over the over the top rope DQ rule.

So the alleged iNDemand deal means...what, then?

What in the hell was that alleged deal with iNDemand? They're owned by Comcast, Cox, TWC, & BrightHouse, but they're just a PPV distributor that doesn't have any kind of separate function AFAIK.

Yes, but it's a dated one. When I hear hoofbeats, I don't think of zebras. Yes, but in light of that it maks sense that they'd say "heel" and not "babyface." I remember seeing the "Foundation" mistake before in a Santorum article so this might be an updated reprint.

That's probably because heel is a mainstream term for villain.

Peak One Man Gang was pretty awesome, though, even if he was the world champion of a dying company.

Is think like a Syphilis vs Clap question? C'mon, Mooney is far from that bad. His old stuff can be perfectly fine or even somewhat entertaining, but Pettingill is literally unwatchable when he's not being reigned in Vince or JR on Action Zone. And was made worse by his female clone.

"We all know what a guy with black gloves and a black rag on his head is capable of!"

I doubt Alfred screwed up. The way they did things back then was Hennig/Taylor/Windham/Von Erich types to slowly transition to just their nickname.

I didn't say that it was necessarily a good idea (well, I liked CZW Hero; the IWA Hero gets frustrated by Michrome's criticisms of him and turns heel stuff was just strange), but criticizing a wrestler for having long masturbatory WoS cosplay matches when his gimmick was that he was making a mistake by having long masturbatory WoS cosplay matches seems misguided. Also, Michael Cole does a good job at being annoying. If he was a manager, he'd be fantastic. The problem is that he's the lead announcer.

I wanna say early 2000's, starting circa 02 and going on for a while afterwards. Whatever year was it he was having those awful 30 min matches w Trik Davis in IWA MS was probably the peak of my dislike for him. I was a big fan of his before then and i've come back around a bit on him in the past year or 2 but yeah for a time to me he was the epitome of "masturbatory" wrestler. A decent amount of that stuff was supposed to be that way. The IWA stuff that led to his heel turn (where they'd do commentary about how he was relying on cravates too much and letting his matches go too long) and the CZW run (where his gimmick was "masturbatory show-off indy wrestler") come to mind.

This was such a surprise at the time that every WCWSN taping report in the Torch had a "The American Males are still tag team champions" note until they lost them back to Heat in a match that had to be retaped for reasons I forget.

You're right, Warlord is shockingly decent in that Survivor Series match, which is really underrated.

Wait, was Flair saying that Arn Anderson is a walk behinder, and when you're a walk behinder, the view never changes?

At the time it wasn't really clear why Doink was there, anyway, since he had been off TV for so long.

This angle (both the violence and what were referred to Woman's "orgasmic wails") got ECW kicked off The Sunshine Network, which was a big deal since Florida was obviously their #2 market at the time.

Shawn vacating the title came out of nowhere, with Vince's "Oh, and Shawn Michaels is vacating the WWF Championship because he has a career-ending knee injury" announcement at the start of the Thursday Raw Thursday show being one of the all time WTF moments I've ever had watching wrestling. As for Shawn being booed and all that, I went to the Nassau Coliseum show in December '96, where Michaels worked Austin in his first match in the NYC market since Survivor Series. Austin (still officially a strong heel) got a ton of cheers and Shawn got a ton of boos. After the match, when Austin left and Shawn was selling, he got up slowly to milk the boos. Then he cut a promo about being a lot different the next time we see him. It seemed like they were going to turn him or have him go tweener on TV, but then he lost his smile.

It's worth noting that nobody reported the actual gimmick before the first promo video with Dustin. Everyone was under the impression that he was going to be some kind of "Hollywood cowboy."

Matt Hardy did a bulldog headlock, didn't he?

As for the ratings, a rare good letter to WO.com blames this week's MNF being unique: http://www.f4wonline.com/more/more-top-sto...s-weeks-mailbag RAW RATING I listened to the show and read this weeks observer about the RAW main event rating. A couple things you did not talk about. As someone who is a football fan first and occasional viewer of RAW (despite 20+ year of hardcore fandom from the 1980s to early 2000s) there are some things I picked up flipping back and forth. The MNF game drew just under 17 million viewers (they picked up 7 million viewers from last week.) This was the 4th time in NFL History that two teams with 10+ wins and winning pct above .750 were playing each other so some drop off would be expected considering how horrible overall MNF games have been this year. The vast majority of games are decided by second half this year so the competition has been abnormally weak against the WWE. Since there were two major blackouts during the MNF game where all power was lost in the stadium and the game was delayed, the ratings may have been for skewed. For example instead of 49ers-Steelers starting at 8:35, it started about 9:10 - giving a ratings boost to the first segment. Then Orton-Barrett tanks because the game starts and everyone flips over. Then there was the second blackout when I switched back over to RAW and noticed the Alicia Fox/Beth Phoenix match - another segment you noted gained a number of viewers. I think those close to 17 million viewers were flipping channels when the stadium went dark and were waiting for the power to return. With the delays, approximately a half hour the first time, and another twenty minutes the second time, the entire pattern of the MNF game was thrown off. Thus instead of the usual having half-time at 10 PM when I flip over to RAW to watch the 10 PM angle/match - the game was still going on. Half-time hit at about 10:30 and they returned to action at 10:45 or so right as the main event was kicking off the second half of the game, a very close game at that point between two of the best teams in the league was kicking off. Anyway - just putting the thoughts out there as RAW was up against abnormally strong opposition that was in a different pattern than usual. There is a disconnect between seeing the six-man tag set up as doing well but then the match itself tanking. Though no one can disregard the fact that the WWE has made Bryan and Ryder out to be jobbers and one night of giving them titles doesn't make up for months of Michael Cole burying them. Take care, Ryan Kabacynski

"I KNOW YOU! I KNOW YOU TOO!" The tape I have of D-Lo Brown re-enacting this during Fan Week is priceless.