khawk20

I know one of them did but I couldn't remember which one.

He reminds you of Johnny Sorrow? Both make one think of glass tabletops and the Rock 'n' Roll Express losing their lunch. Altered for clarity.

But does a hot crowd enhance your enjoyment? It does for me. I think if the combatants have a hot crowd it could enhance their own performance through the adrenaline of realizing that what they are doing has connected with the people they are wrestling in front of. As such, the two entities (wrestlers having the match and the crowd watching it) feed off of each other.

Nicely done. Thank you for doing this.

I just can't buy that they would have gone off the air of the biggest event they had with a heel celebrating as champ. It just wasn't they way they did things back then. I will say that they surely considered it, like they would have looked at things from every angle...but I really don't believe it would ever have passed the idea stage. I'm also very glad I never saw the WWF mag cover or heard anything about it before the event. That would have sucked.

That was just constipation.

DiBiase himself has said many times in shoots that he was promised him the world title back when they first offered him the role of Million Dollar Man. We've talked about this before somewhere, but DiBiase was the key asset in UWF and he could have gone to Crockett at that time. I'm pretty sure I've heard other people tell versions of this same story before too (Pat Patterson? Gene Okerlund? Can't remember now). The main source for the HTM story is HTM himself, of course. I believe that DiBiase was promised the belt as part of that initial negotiation but (as described above) later Vince changed his mind and used the HTM situation to get himself out of the promise ... the Million Dollar Belt is the result. Like others though, I don't believe by the time WMIV actually comes around that the plan was still for him to come out of that with the belt. I'd offer that DiBiase would have got the title a few months before Mania somehow and lost it back to Hogan, or Savage, at IV. ...and by that, I mean cheating to an actual pinfall win over Hogan somehow. The Twin refs/loss to Andre/give the title to Ted is something someone thought of that was seen as better than the original way Ted would have won the belt, whatever that was. I think they would have been actively searching for a way for Hogan to job without really jobbing, pretty much exactly what they came up with in the end.

I've never bought this theory simply based on how the WWF Champ was booked in the 80's. Heel Champs didn't get much if any time with the title, and ending a WrestleMania with a heel winning the title just seems so..."anti-wrestlemania" in that time frame, so to speak. I think the plan was simply executed as it was laid out...Savage comes out with the belt, Hogan endorses his title reign, and Savage runs with it until the next WrestleMania, where Hogan could re-assume his place on top as Champ. I've never really seriously thought any other ending was in play, to be honest.

Your next project, perhaps?

Fan? He's Doink the Clown's half-brother. Not Doink, Krusty!

this is the best typo but not really ever Trips + HBK. I'm not going back to edit that, though. That really is too hilarious. If "buys" had somehow become "Bi's" you'd have won the internet.

Bad Weed?

I think it was Georgia, actually.

I have a disc worth of Tito in the AWA from 1981-82, and there is a decent amount of his 79-80 WWF run out there. Only maybe a match or two from before 1979 that I can think of, from Texas. I'm blanking on where he was in 1983 at the moment.

I see what you mean now and I can agree with that. My perspective, unfortunately, is probably different than most simply because of my age when I was watching them in the 80's, and seeing them all first-run, so to speak. My stock in each was set a long time ago, so it doesn't apply to your idea...but your idea does probably apply to more of the board. The Steamboat-Flair series in 89 was magic but the clincher for me on how much I appreciated Steamboat was both his 86 bout vs. Bret Hart in Boston and his GAB match vs. Lex Luger. He helped reveal Bret to me as a real potential singles star down the road, and what he got out of Luger in their match was a huge WOW for me. Martel I watched chase Bockwinkel in 82-83 through his 1984 title win and I followed him closely after that in the WWF. He was more of a whole picture type of wrestler to me, one I followed career-wise and always enjoying the matches he was having (Bock bouts in 83 and 84, Tsuruta, Garvin and Hansen in 85, singles bouts vs. The Islanders in 87 plus his tag work with Zenk and Santana, his heel turn and Model days afterwards...enjoyed all of it). Santana was fun in his feud with Kaissie in the AWA (brief but intense) and his singles challenges of Bockwinkel, plus his initial teaming with Martel, his awesome stint as the IC Champ vs. Valentine, Orton, and Savage, and then being the perfect partner and spurned friend-type for Martel after the Strike Force run. The three of them are almost interchangeable to me based on my viewing experience of them during the time I was most into pro wrestling. There is no wrong choice.

This is probably true to an extent, but in my case Steamer has been slowly losing some luster for the last ten years. So going back to my answer above, are we talking about people that didn't see each man in their "prime", which IMO is the 80's, as it happened? If so....damn, I'm getting old.

Pre-existing how? As someone that watched all three closely during the 80's, I found each had their own dynamic that I enjoyed immensely regardless of the stage they were conducting their matches on. This is a group beyong most others in the sense that they are able to look past the "big stuff" and dig deeper. With each having merit in the context of the question, there is no obvious answer, and nobody is suffering in their vote total because of it. EDIT: With Steamboat winning the poll by a decent margin, I don't see how you think he is suffering in that same poll. Is it because he isn't the unanimous choice? I voted for Martel but Steamboat winning is as right an answer as Martel or Santana. IMO.

Nicely said (I didn't make that comp, FWIW). *** I voted for Martel, although any of the three could win the poll and I would have no argument. They are all in my top tier of all-time favourite workers.

...and there has been some grumbling about that.

1) Thanks for the plug. It needs an update since I did it but a lot of my older comps do at this point. Someday that'll happen. 2) I don't think 89 would have been any better without the TCS. The gimmick matches, as silly as some of them were, helped distract from the limited talent pool. Add in a Larry Z title match or a tag title bout to a program concentrating on the TCS, and it was better than the usual TV squash fare that would have prevailed. Plus if you seriously tried to keep track of the teams and scoring of the TCS it kept you focused on the show, since it was very difficult to follow at times. 3) I think the Texas Hangmen were used just fine. The Destruction Crew was the best AWA tag team they had in that stretch, and the Hangmen were a comfortable second on the heel side of the tag teams. Had the AWA carried forward another year or two, they would have eventually won the tag titles and had a run on top. It was a natural progression for them up the card, IMO, that was cut off with the end of the AWA. The whole 89-90 era of AWA wrestling was so hard for a long time fan to watch (those of us that stuck around, at least). Operating out of a singular arena that had maybe 200-300 in it on a good day (mostly a lot less), old time AWA stars getting older and/ or retiring, new guys being thrust into more prominent roles they weren't ready for, the convoluted nature of the TCS...Not as painful a ride as El-P's run through WCW, but it wasn't good. I wasn't sad when they ran out of first-run TV programming and went to an all-classic match format for several months in 1990, even though I knew that reagular AWA TV was not coming back.