jdw

Misawa continued to work a match for about 29:30 after Kawada crushed his orbital bones... then worked again two nights later against Jun... and finished out the Carny by winning it over Taue. Clearly Danielson wants to be the New Misawa and this simply is part of the process of proving it to himself... and fanboys who get off on this stuff. "He killed himself for us!" John, who thinks that phrase has taken a new meaning after Benoit...

PDF'ing it is pretty easy: http://www.otherarena.com/z_jdw/WWE_Chairshoots.pdf The videos are: Hogan-DiBiase ECW Chairs Foley-Taker Rock-Foley Awesome-Tanaka Rock-Austin Chavo-Rey Now the problem is... those don't quite right click, instead having another layer to where the files really are. They are at the level of what the preview add has been stripped out (by me editing crap off the URL). If someone can go from that layer to a link that allows for right clicking and saving, I'd be more than happy to put together a presentation that embeds those videos along with the PDF that perhaps Bix can forward on to a certain former WWE wrestler who is investigating Concusions. Someone want to do it before the WWE is bright enough to yank the videos? The article on it's own is pretty good, but the videos are exceptional. John

Then why didn't Rocky Balboa make $423M last year like Pirates 2? Or $250M like Night at the Museum, released the same week? Or $167M like Casino Royale did the prior month? Or the $137M that MI-III did even with Cruse getting the nutter treatment from the press? How about the $80M that Nacho Libre did? That Randy and UFC are hot doesn't have an relevance to Flair, anymore than Pirates did to Rocky. John

I actually think it *originally* was a Meltzer talking point, or something very close to it, or a morph from something he said. It's not something PWI or mark mag - they only would have gotten it from Dave... they simply weren't smart enough about puroresu to do otherwise. Like I said... I think it probably would be in a piece where Dave talked about Sayama finishing surprisingly high on a list in Mexico. John

That's pretty funny. I wonder what website they're monitoring where that was discussed and thought, "Oh shit... pull that quick!" Too bad someone didn't grab all of it. John

Then: Rocky = Stallone's Sport Same difference. Stallone has been as egocentric and loony with Rock (and the Rambo flicks, and others) as Vince has been with the WWE. John

Randy = Real Sports Rocky = Fake Sports Which is Flair? John

I love how much the "Rocky Flair" concept has taken traction and how folks think it's a natural that Flair get a monster push on the way out, even towards one of the World Titles. Do these people even realize the Rocky Balboa *wasn't* that big of a hit? $70M is chump change at the box office. Jackass 2 made more money. Eragon was thought to be a bomb, and it made more money and had a bigger opening. The Pink Panther was a bomb, and it made more money. Rocky Balboa was only a "hit" relative to the cost of making it, since Stallone went bare bones to make it. Other than that... it was only a modest deal to those of us like Dave who grew up in the 70s and were caught up in the original. Hell, considering how ticket prices have gone, it's not like a that many *more* people saw Rocky Balboa than saw Rocky V... which was a big bomb. I just don't get Flair Fan continuing to be delusional to the point they want the old fart to go out with a world title level push. John

I could see Lano making the trip down from NoCal for some of that. John

This is one to ask Jose about (who may also be able to ask Sims about). I'm not sure if the stuff was in origin that Sayama brought flying to Lucha. More along the lines that he had some impact via his flying and whatnot. I seem to recall the support to it being given by pointing to how high Tiger finished in one or more "Greatest Wrestlers Ever" polls in Mexico, such as in the early 90s long after he'd wrestled there. It's possible that Dave read more into it than there was "there", or something got lost in translation. John

Yeah... totally bent them over. There's some stuff that Dave writes in this issue, and to a degree over the past few issues, that makes one wonder how careful he is being about "reportorial privilege". The part where he fielded a call by a wrestler who expected to show up on the list but didn't... when you get in that level of detail, I'd worry about Law Enforcement putting the squeeze on him to identify the source. Dittos some of the other items. There is no national shield law, and the Judith Miller subcase of the Plame affair made it pretty clear that the courts don't give a rats ass about reporter’s privilege. In some part, Dave needs to have the understanding that *anything* he writes may end up having Law Enforcement ask him to identify where it came from. Right down to wanting to see his notes. It's clear that Dave has some contacts within various Law Enforcement entities (or is dialed in via the Sports Illustrated reporters). But that doesn't mean that Law Enforcement won't squeeze him if they think it will give them an important lead. John

Um... no. His feud with Foley made Rock a superstar enough to do record business with Austin at Mania in 1999. He then turned face after finishing the feud so that the company had two monster faces in Austin and Rock. The feuds with babyfaces McMahon, Foley and Rock made *Trip*, not the other way around. Go back and check out some of the stuff from late 1999 when the belt was first put on Trip. He wasn't that over. It's why Vince panicked and took the belt off him and gave it to Show. Then the stealing of Steph, the mini-feud with Vince started him getting heat. Then the feud with Foley elevated him. Then the feud with Rock "made" him. Despite that, Rock-Austin did better business in *both* 1999 and 2001 than Rock was able to do opposite Trip in 2000. The degree to which Trip was over, and "carried" the company, has always been overplayed. John

Tom - people should start on the first page of the thread: Feuds that heels won Starts with the 6th post in the thread. The stuff on the second page is a continuation. The feud with Rock remains jaw dropping. I tend to point to the turning point of the company as being the Triangle Angle where Kurt was fucked over because Trip wasn't willing to work a storyline where he was the cuckolded heel. But in reality, the seeds were getting sown with the feud with Rock. Bangs had become such a power by that point, and Rock such a laid back face who wouldn't put a stop to it, that they were able to convince Vince to do something that I don't recall Vince ever doing before - heel takes Mania and the blowoff of a feud with the Franchise Face. John

I honestly have a feeling that the WWE thinks Waxie is a fucking pussy and they can pull one over his eyes. Do they know nothing about him and his crack team of staffers? These are the guys who crawled up the ass of Haliburton at a time when the War wasn't so loathed, Cheney was still feared, and to question anything about it was a sign of being a terrorist loving pussy. When the Republican run committe would stonewall full investigations and hearings, Waxie's teams would do their own, put the reports up on their website, and get the stories out in the media. Waxie has far, far, far bigger fish to fry than a bunch of pissants like the McMahons. That said, if your start pissing off his team, they're not exactly going to go away. They will dig. They will find sources (one suspects they and the other committe are already either dialed into Meltzer or Keller or someone seriously hip to the history of the WWE's policies). And they will doing a hearing and report that make the WWE look like dogshit. Whether that has any impact on the WWE... I don't know. Wrestling has long been a cockroach of an industry. It's extremely hard to kill. John

Yeah, that's what WWE and Jerry McDevitt is going to argue. The problem is it's a really dumb tack to take because they'll get laughed out of Congress. This isn't Larry King where John Cena can play dumb without being called out on it. Don't believe me then read this article from the New York Daily News: "The WWE does not have a drug policy that's worth a flip" - U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) Yeah... *on paper*, the WWE policy is a joke. Everyone has known that from the start. Massive drug use was allowable under the policy. It was written that way because Vince didn't want the boyz to get off the sauce, nor not be able to down a high amount of pain killers. It was written specifically to allow people to do what they wanted as long as they were "in condition to work". I don't think any major or semi-major sport drug policy is specifically written to allow such massive drug usage as the WWE's. John

I buy the first sentence and the second paragraph. I don't buy the third one. On Jericho... I don't think Wade was losing his mind at the time. He simply was really, really, really wrong about Jericho. It's a bit like Dave on Jumbo. I don't see Dave as being insane due to Jumbo - just being freaking wrong. Wade was still perfectly sane when starting to get critical of Jericho. If he had a wigging out, it's a bit more recent as the stress piled up. John

Someone selling tapes and merchandise? It wasn't a presence that Wade would give a shit about. That whole segment of wrestling fandom meant less to him than just about any of the major "wrestling fans" of the era, including folks who did sheets of one kind or another, or wrote for them. I'd have to go back and check, but I think he got out of the "plugs" business in the Torch years before Dave did in the WON. Frankly what stopped Dave wasn't that he didn't like doing it, but that he ran out of space first, and then out of time to put it together as things went nuts with the Monday Night Wars and whatnot. Again, if it were a sheetwriter who started up in the Twin Cities, he might take notice... but prank calling isn't him. John

I don't think RF ever rated on Wade's radar. As in I'm having a hard time remember RF's name ever coming up in any conversation that I had with Wade over the years. Unlike Meltzer, Wade never was much interested in the tape trading business. If you said prank calling "the Wrestling Lariat Headquarters" or "Bob.com Central, while I would say that's it's highly unlikely, at least Schemer and RYDER were on his radar. But the obsession tended to go in the other direction. John

Did Trip really look off the juice? John

One really needs to take just about anything Beverly wrote with a grain of salt. The most easily worked of the sheet writers of the era. Also had several axes to grind, and the Torch was one of his major ones. Not to defend Wade, but I've had wrestlers say things about Wade to me, or to others that was passed along to me, that were a 180% from reality. I recall one Foley story from some who talked to Mick regularly in the mid-to-late 90s that was far past reality, and I had to explain that it was more evidence that Mick's losing his grip with reality... or just likes to lie more than people knew at the time. John

Randy needed to use some chairshots, then drop Cena on his head a bunch, then do some dives rather than all those Chinlock-fu. And of course gobble the painkillers backstage and after the show to deal with all the pain. And the somas to sleep. John

But, once again, is the voting for best influence or most influence? What influence? Womens wrestling was a blip before Moolah. It was a blip during her. It was a blip after her, unless one wants to credit the Divas with something. Honestly... one probably could point to 2-3 Divas who had more "influence" than Moolah. Sable for sure. Sable for the HOF, anyone? John

Moolah sucked, and womens wrestling in the country sucked while she controlled it. Stephanie McMahon is more worthy if we want to vote for people who suck. While WWE Creative has sucked cock while she's headed it up, the WWE has turned a profit while she's headed it up. Hell, setting aside the accounting write-offs and Vince's dividends, the WWE has probably turned a higher profit in every *month* that she's headed WWE Creative than Heyman turned in any *year* that he booked ECW. I wouldn't vote for Steph. But on some level, she had done her "job" no matter how poorly we think she's done it - the promotion she heads up creatively makes cash... a lot of it. The segment of the industry that Moolah headed up wasn't even a blip on the radar of wrestling, other than a brief moment in the Rock-and-Wrestling Connection. Nick Gulas probably had a bigger positive impact on pro wrestling as a promoter than Moolah, and Nick is generally thought of as a joke. There are probably 40 promoters/bookers we could come up with who did more than Moohal. So you're left with Moolah holding a title forver that no one really gave a shit about. You could find regional titles that someone dominated that meant more than Moolah's title. What surprised me is that Dave keeps her on the ballot. She's just about the last person he wants in the HOF, but there is the risk that there's enough idiot voters out there to push her past the low 60% threshold. John

Er... Umm... John, resisting the temptation to get the bong picture...

Okay... this is fucking great... and that's coming from someone who is an Al Franken fan. Benoit >>>>> Jesse when it comes to Mainstream. Jesse and Minnesota were national jokes. The only people who didn't get that are wrestling fans who want their fandom legitimized, and elements of the media who get off on jokes like Jesse. John