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Wrestling mirrors the rest of America. In fact, it trails behind. I'm sure Jerome and OJ can point to movies where things changed well before wrestling. Batman in the movies isn't anymore dark than Frank Miller made him in the comics back in the 80s. John

Meltzer has Taker and HHH retiring in the next year. So the streak is either going to end next year, or Taker is going to Londos/Mil it, or in 2-5 years after retirement Vince will drop a load of cash on him to come back for Mania... in which case the Streak would likely get extended. John

I do the same over sports and movies. Listen to sports talk radio and you'll here folks doing the same thing about their local sports teams. I don't think any of us said we're "casual wrestling fans", akin to a casual sports fan who might go to Dodger Stadium twice a year and watch 10 of the 162 games on TV. But I've watched: * at least 95% of the Lakers game this year * all but 3-4 Duke games this year, 1-2 of them which weren't available on the tube * I suspect every ManU game this year that's available with 1 possible exception Those are the three teams I follow rather strongly. In contrast: * I haven't ordered the AJPW 80s set despite being a hardcore of an AJPW fan * I have about 500 dvds sitting around collecting dust to be watched... eventually * I have to be dragged to the PWG show this weekend, while it was easy get me to a Kings game a few weeks ago... and I don't even follow hockey The first one I want badly, but I also know that it would just go in the pile with the ones in the next group... I don't want to order it until I can carve out time. On the other hand, my dad and I are planning a trip to see a game at Old Trafford. I have no wrestling trips similar planned, and doubt I ever will again. Perhaps one will say I'm a hardcore / smart / smart fan of ManU / the Lakers / Duke. But really... I'm not. There are folks who have season tickets to Old Trafford. I don't. There are guys who pay thousands to watch the Lakers. I watch Lakers games on TV. Watching Duke games is nothing: Bruce watches them all as well, as do lots of people in the Carolinas. Folks watch Raw and Smackdown every week. 4 hours of wrestling a week, 52 times a year. Hardcore / Smart / Smark? I watch one hour of Castle 22-24 times a year. Hardcore / Smart / Smark Castle fan? Or just someone who follows it. Do we invest a lot of time talking about wrestling? Sure. But when I was involved in a online baseball league for six years, pretty much every day... I did the same. None of us involved were really hardcore "gamers". We just had a fun league, were semi-competative and liked talking about it / participating in it. A far cry from those dude on the annual Madden show on ESPN. We are just wrestling fans. On a scale of 1 to 100, we are in the upper quarter in terms of time we spend on it. Some of us more than others. Lord knows, I've watched more hours of The Mentalist this year than pro wrestling, and just did a Top Chef-a-Thon to finish the last season and haven't done anything remotely the same for wrestling in more than a year. Will: you might be beyond a "just a fan" with the amount you watch and all the sets you put together. But the rest of us? Not really different from someone who is a Baseball + Football fan who watches as much of his favorite teams in those two sports. If you followed Kris Z's facebook, you'd see him morph from UNC hoops season right into Braves season... which morphs into Falcons season, with loads of comments about both. The brain has the capacity to follow a lot of shit. John

I'm guessing All Japan and New Japan would be fighting for #1. John

I don't think Stone Cold started out in "supose to be cool" mode. The WWF couldn't have intentionally written a cool heel at that point if their lives depended on it. It just happened. I kind of like cool heels. The best heels when I was a kid was a dude with a helmet over his face and a shark. You didn't see either of those two begging off in the corner, running to the dressing room, or bumping for refs. They put the fear of god in the babyfaces, whose selling for the heels put the fear of god in us: We'd be in deep shit if we were in the place of Luke or Chief Brody. Hell, most of us would have rather been Darth than Luke. John

What do they think of current stuff that is a continuation of cruiser/juniors stuff? In other words, your typical ROH or DG or PWG stuff? I wonder if juniors-style spot wrestling has now gone so far beyond 90s juniors spot wrestling that stuff from 15 years ago is boring. Big heavies like Hansen are drmatic and theatrical, so they're not terribly far removed from say Taker-HHH. John

This isn't the case at all. 90s workrate style is passe among *some* viewers in 2011. Those would be a small subset of fans. Go to a wrestling show and the same number of fans in the crowd eat up "workrate style" as the did in the 90s. Go look up Alan 4L's list of **** matches in 2010 and you'll find workrate all over it. Alan isn't alone... in fact more fans like what he likes that fans follow the Anti Moves Movement. Before anyone tries to say that everyone in the 90s loved workrate style, you'd be wrong. Anyone remember those Wrestling Classics posters who hated "flippy floppy" wrestlers? There have always been guys like that who hated Rey vs Psic because they weren't Ric Flair stooging for Tommy Young. I'll go to a show on Saturday night and I guarantee you that they will be creaming in their pants over workrate. And despite it being a small hole in the wall, there will be more people in that building than regularly post here... or frankly most boards on line other than the biggest of the big like DVDVR and WO-4. And again, even in places like that you'll find workrate lovers. Someone tell Rob Naylor that the workrate he loves is passe. We all like to project our own opinions, and those of the circle we run in, onto a larger mass. We often make a mistake when doing that. John

I don't think they've forvever blow a chance at someone coming along who can break the streak and have it be a positive. Perhaps we've seen such a lack of true The Next Big Thing guys come along in the last few years, but go back to Austin getting big (let's say 1997/98), and then move forward and tick off the big guys. Granted none of them got as over as Rock or Austin did, but the company did kick out a string: Austin, Rock, Foley, Trip, Angle, Brock, Batista, Cena. Eight in how many years? I'm not advocating a Foley or Batista type being Taker, but they were relatively big stars. Angle is someone who had his knees cut off, and still got over rather large. Brock also got his knees cut off ("Trip... let me hand you think world title" -Eric), but still got over. This a guy that Hogan and Rock put over strongly as he was on his way up. The equiv of that couldn't be the one built towards breaking The Streak, and in a fashion that doesn't help him and the company in a positive way? The problem is that they haven't had someone since Cena, and even there they kind of fluked into it rather than focused effort like Trip (over and over again until it took), Brock and Batista. On the other hand... Austin and Foley were flukes, and Rock was to a degree as he quickly did a 180 in the NOD. I think the reason SLL's comment looks attractive is because that's all we can see right now: a semi-screwed up WWE that will only kick out a cowardly heel who could only get over by screwing Taker in a way that pisses everyone off because the Streak got shat on to end it. I don't disagree with that in general: the WWE is pretty screwed up, and that creative core of Vince, Steph and Trip don't seem likely to un-screw any time soon. But I also think that if they find another flukey lightening in a bottle, they really should act on it rather than try to talk themselves out of it. In a way, I don't mind Taker pulling a Londos/Mascaras and taking equiv of a title to his grave. Especially if he beats a few guys that I don't like such as Shawn and Trip along the way. John

I'm just a wrestling fan. The rest of it is just bullshit. I sometimes wonder if the folks who get wrapped up in smart/mark/smark/workrate/puro-snob tags realize how utterly stupid they are being. Anyone think that a group of Yankees fans obsess about whether another group of Yankees fans are smarks? They frankly worry more about whether other Yankees fans are assholes or jerkoffs. This has always been an utterly useless discussion going all the way back to when Scherer use to play Us ("we're real fans") vs Them ("those Meltzer types who think too much"). No... we were just wrestling fans, while Scherer was the hypocrite trying to be pals with wrestlers and carve a living out of the wrestling business. John

I thought there were Dean matches that were more squashy in the sense of Dean controlling him, not really letting him get up and doing much in the control period until it was time for Rey busting out two minutes of flashy stuff for the finish. With this, Rey was regularly getting up to break the control, tossing out something before getting cut off and taken back down into control. That's *not* a squash. I think we're too use to My Turn, Your Turn these days. John

Canada? Trip is from New Hampshire. The southern part. Second largest city in the state, not far from the largest. Closer to Boston than Canada. You know... New England Patriots? Trip wasn't into the Man's Man Sports. As Kris says, he was into the non-sports: bodybuilding & pro wrestling. He went across the border to learn pro wrestling with Killer Kowalski... the Massachusetts border, not Canadian. Trip just wasn't and isn't a sports fan. John

Okayama Budokan

She had her implants removed right after she retired last time, so that's one big reason why she looks thinner. Although I'd assume that living as a yoga instructor tends to pack on fewer pounds than the road-life of constant Waffle House meals. I still wonder why they didn't make her dye her hair again, she looks different enough from her famous old self that I can easily imagine some fans not recognizing her. And man, isn't it amazing how quickly they managed to devalue TRISH STRATUS IS BACK into her just being another annoying generic Diva? "Removed" is the wrong word. More likely "swapped out for a smaller pair". From her website, that's an April 2011 issue... so brand new. This was fairly recent: Inside Fitness 111 They do look much better than the larger ones in the WWE days. But would be very suprised if she went from Big Implants to No Implants and could pull off the bikini shot that looks just a bit to symetrically perfect, even if it's obviously a flattering way to pose her. You do wonder how much the WWE is tossing at Austin and Trish to do the show. Clearly they want it to succeed and get another regular chunk of programing in the cycle. I'm a little surprised that they didn't save relaunching it to be one of the anchors of their eventual Wrestling Channel. John

Despite all the stuff that's been tossed out that typically makes me cringe, I was willing to give the match a chance whenever it comes out on DVD. But that one just lost me. John

The SC Poll was Turner Buyout to the Death of WCW. Being right around Top 50 in that stretch isn't underrated: 12+ years of a promotion that wasn't exactly short on good matches. Basically to get in the Top 50 a match on average had to be one of the 4-5 best matches of a given year. Apply that standard to AJPW from 1988 to the 6/2000 split as it's roughly the same amount of time as the WCW poll. Then ponder me calling the Kawada-Albright underrated because it came in 51st. Not really at all. I may have it a bit high for whatever reason, but 51st in that promotion? 101st? That's actually doing well. John

This has never been underrated. It got a ****1/2 from Dave at the time, and as Ditch points out has done well since then. It's underrated if one has the belief that _any_ criticism of something, and failure to have unanimous consent to the greatness of said thing, makes said thing "underated". If that's the case, then Ric Flair is underrated because people point out a few goofy things he does. Is that the next re-re-re-revisionist meme: "Damn... Ric Flair is really underrated. Why hasn't he ever been pimped as great?" John

I thought he'd done Mania history pieces in the past? John

Honestly... who the fuck knows. Order the WONs and look up 10 years of results in roughly 500+ issues. John

This appears to be what Alex is up to: http://www.new-wrestling.de/en/the-wright-...ht-stuff-5.html http://www.prowrestlingschool.de/index.php...dex&lang=en NEW seems to be his promotion, seemingly tied into his wrestling school. John

No. The only Bock that aired on that series were the two title matches. John

So it was the 1991 Puroresu Match of the Year in your mind? John

Those would be the Tokyo Sports Puroresu Awards. They're highly political, even more back in the 70s and 80s than now. I wouldn't treat the "voting" as akin to even the voting of baseball MVP awards. They very much like to spread things around. In the 70s, if Baba/Jumbo got a top award, then Inoki would get a different top award to even things out. Similar in the 80s. That said... that Sayama won in his *only* full year of wrestling in Japan is a positive. Tenryu's Tokyo Sports awards were always a bit odd. Not that he won several. More in the sense that he won all the time, and for strange things like the Tenryu-Hogan match which was pretty inexplicable at the time, and even in hindsight. John