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Chris - you might want to add to this one section: The other major sports contract out there after the NBA is the Big 10: http://espn.go.com/blog/playbook/dollars/post/_/id/3163/a-comparison-conference-television-deals The rights to the SEC, PAC, ACC and Big 12 are all locked up into the next decade. This is the last major prize out there after the NBA is off the table. It's also worth noting that ESPN has their hands in everyone else. Fox has pieces of the PAC and B12, so it doesn't "have" to get this like say NBCU does if they bomb out on the NBA. But since ESPN has a piece of *everyone*, and some of them exclusive (ACC) or major-in-bed (SEC), this is one that either Fox or NBC badly want. In addition, always keep in mind who the partners of the Big 10 are in the Big 10 Network, along with the Big 10's past annoyance at ESPN and their negotiating tactics. The other increasing-in-cost rights that Fox will likely chase when they come up is the next EPL contract. The current one covers the 2013/14 - 2015/16 seasons. NBC won them in Oct 2012, stealing them from Fox. The next deal will likely be finalized in late 2015. Why might Fox want to get back in the EPL business? * NBC appears to be doing good business with the new deal * non-conflicting scheduling (most games are early before other Fox sports) * World Cup lead in Remember that Fox stole the World Cup from ESPN. No, not the one this summer but the 2018 & 2022 ones. Next EPL deal is likely to be 2016/17 - 2018/19. How does that work? 2016/17 EPL Season 2017/18 EPL Season 2018 World Cup 2018/19 EPL Season Pretty much the perfect way to lead into the World Cup in 2018 is to have the EPL in the two seasons leading into it. So anyway... You might want to amend it to say that Fox might be saving their money to grab a pieces of one or more of the up coming sports right packages: the NBA, the Big 10 and/or next EPL contract leading into the 2018 World Cup.

Always thought Chris was more of the Elite Oligarch Harvard boy rather than Obama-style Harvard. IRS is a little tricky. It's not like Mike played it as a Dem. I was thinking of that bizarre feud between Nowinski and Scott Steiner over their positions on the War in Iraq (Chris was against it, if you couldn't guess. Scott took the "RAH RAH MURICA" side). Struck me as Steiner playing "face", and that was the "face" position in the country at the time. Cheap heat spot, and forced Chris to be anti-war because it was the heel spot.

Th That is fucking brutal.

I would place Paul above Kane. I've always thought Kane was a joke as a Main Eventer, even as an opponent to someone on top who could carry more than his share of the load (Austin or Rock). Paul was pretty much in the role that Trip should have settled into. A big star who can more than carry his half of a main event feud (against Hogan, Pipper and then Hogan again), but really isn't someone who should be a Long Term Anchor Heel Champ or a Long Term Babyface Champ. Trip's probably is that he got placed into a role that was above where he should have been, or more accurately got placed there and used family relations to keep the spot. Paul was excellent against Hogan, probably his best all around opponent in the 1984-86 stretch of Expansion. He almost certainly could have played the role that Valentine did as IC Champ in 1984-85, and at the time wouldn't have been a bad alternative to Savage as IC Champ in 1986-87. Savage had "it", the hook with Liz and ended up being iconic. But it's really hard to say that Paul took a back seat to him in 1986. His problem after that was two fold: * After being that super nova against Hogan, it's a bit hard to find your footing afterwards. We could again point to Savage, but he really wasn't super nova with Hogan until 1989 and the Mega Powers break up. I don't think it's unreasonable to look at his career after that 1989 feud with Hogan and come to the conclusion that he was never as over as a draw to that level again in his WWF career, and that he often ended up being "disappointing" as a draw despite still being a recognized "top star" in the promotion. Paul was going to face that in the WWF even if the second thing didn't happen. * Injury He worked through it in the Hogan feud because he was making so much money, and it was such a key to the promotion. It pretty much toasted his "look", and we need to be honest that Vince was pretty look-centric at the time. Also, Paul's look was a key part of his persona within the WWF. It's an extreme come, but perhaps the equiv would be if Flair in 1986 suddenly had to shave off his hair *forever* and kept calling himself the Nature Boy. It would be odd. Anyway... Paul got screwed by the injury. Barring the injury, Vince would have kept pushing him, and he probably would have stayed in the WWF for as long as Valentine did. He was a bit more useful than Greg because he could work both as a face and as a heel in the WWF and get reactions from the fans.

Kane is more a Tea Party "libertarian" rather than a deeply philosophical libertarian. Not dissimilar to where a lot of people who were typically GOP ran to during/after the Bush years and "Republican" made some of them a bit uneasy.

Always thought Chris was more of the Elite Oligarch Harvard boy rather than Obama-style Harvard. IRS is a little tricky. It's not like Mike played it as a Dem.

I thought his performance in the 11/30/93 tag was an HR, and his performance against Taue in the 1994 Carny was off the charts. His work with Kobashi the night before was excellent as well. I would say he was still a top worker as late as the 1994 Carny series, but fell off after that for a variety of reasons, likely some of them his fault.

It's highly unlikely that Vince is going to sell the company, but some reference points on recent Disney purchases of "content providers": Marvel - $4.64B - Aug 2009 $676M 2008 Revenue $205M 2008 Net Income Pixar: $7.4B - May 2006 $289M 2005 Revenue $153M 2005 Net Income LucasFilms: $4.06B - Oct 2012 $1.5B 2011 Estimated Revenue The WWE's 2013 revenue was $508M with a net income of $2.7M, though that down from the $31M they did the year before. The WWE does pay out a decent amount in dividends, but it's not like people weren't finding ways to suck money out of Marvel and Pixar in various ways (which is a large point of the dividends giving Vince a way to suck money out). Point: WWE revenues are pretty good, and of course would go up with the Network and the new TV deals. But... Pixar and Marvel were cash cows with rather rich Revenue/Profit ratios. In turn, a massive amount of Pixar's revenue was actually coming out of Disney's pockets as the distributor of the movies: buying Pixar let Disney keep money. LucasFilm's revenues and profits... who knows. That 2011 number could be high as it was from a firm that estimates revenue of private firms. It's worth noting it was at a time when LucasFilm had no movies out in the year, though various reports indicated the they were still making a killing on licensing in 2011 without it. LucasFilm also has units like ILM that do a ton of work in films, and when you look at skyrocketing costs of films, SFX and other stuff like what they do at LF is one of the reasons. My guess is that revenue number is likely a bit too high, but that LF was also a rather profitable little company and of course Disney saw *easy* was to pull in revenue to pay off that purchases (i.e. instantly announcing they will regularly be making new movies). WWE is a slightly different beast from those.

Boring as all shit.

So this is basically just fapping on the board?

Well... it's not exactly "traditional". Only with the promotions that chose to do it. Similar to the "ref stop" rules. Baba won the third fall (and match) by COR. No "title change". Baba won the third fall by DQ. No "title change". Of course it's moot by the item above. Really? He made these known International Title defenses: 05/15/80 vs Jos Le Duc 07/01/80 vs Gypsy Joe 09/20/80 vs Bill Dromo 10/04/80 vs Umanosuke Ueda 03/04/81 vs Bob Brown And this AWA Title challenge: 03/31/80 vs Nick Bockwinkel It's also somewhat strange that the title would go back to Backlund. Ohki was the Int'l champion. He "gave up" that title after the Brown match, and it (and all claims that went with it) went to the winner of the Int'l tourney that All Japan held on April 26, 1981 - April 30, 1981: http://www.puroresu.com/alljapan/results/aj198103cc.html So the "claim" to the "linear" WWWF Title went into All Japan's International Title. One would have to follow Dory's results to find if he lost a singles match before he and Brody started boucing the title around. If Dory somehow avoided a singles job, it makes its way into Jumbo's International Title reign... which would overlap with his run with the AWA Title and go to Martel. Then we'd have to find if Martel lost any non-title matches before dropping the title to Hansen, and whether any of those non-title matches would roll back into the AWA Title with Martel "winning" it back. Then we'd have to look through Hansen's time in the AWA, as he may have done some non-title jobs to Bockwinkel. If he didn't get those jobs back from Bock before leaving, then the title follows the AWA path... either off it before it got to Lawler, or then into Lawler's post-AWA title claims. Which likely would have eventually gotten in the WWF, unless someone walked out of Memphis without jobbing the title.. This is all moot since Baba didn't win the title from Bruno.

Jerome (and others) keep blowing up thread with the accidental italics. Will & Loss: there must be a patch that deals with this.

Manning was awful. He ref'd like he was one of the Von Erich brothers and sold for the heels even less. The other one that comes to mind is Dick Woehrle in the Spectrum in the WWF. "Spotlight hog" might be too extreme for him, but he wouldn't sell for the heels and just generally had a stick up his ass. By selling for the heels, I don't mean that a ref has to turn into the common stooge that they so often have over the past 20 years. But someone like Tommy Young could balance: * Authority Figure * selling for/reacting to what the heels are up to * work it in a way that didn't make him look like a fool * work it in a way where the heels didn't look weak relative to him Granted, Flair liked to bump for Tommy, but that was a Flair spot. You'd get similar things from other heels if it was part of their routine. Overall, Tommy was part of the "dance" with the heels and faces, adjusted his game to what they were up to, maintained being a Ref, and didn't feel like Being Credible meant he had to make Heels Look Like Shit. Which should be kind of obvious: heels are in the business of showing ass themselves, and letting the Faces get up on them. They don't need to Ref to be a dick as well. Manning acted in the ring like he could kick the asses of all the heels if he really wanted to. Woehrle took Authority and No Nonsense to the level that he's step on stuff the heels were up to, not get out of there way when he should, basically be on his own script when he got into things rather than rolling with the wrestlers. John

I don't know what's worse: Matt compairing Sorrow to the saintly Dude, or Sorrow comparing himself to Flair.

That they're talking to Viacom was talked about earlier in the thread, along with everyone else they're allegedly talking about. This was all out there in the public last week: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-03-07/wwe-expects-new-cable-tv-deal-by-early-may-cfo-barrios-says I don't think Dave is saying it's a done deal. What we hashed around here in the thread is that a Viacom deal kind of only fits SD also being on Spike in addition to Raw: there doesn't looke to be a good natural fit for SD elsewhere in the Viacom suite of networks. Not that it stopped the WWE in the past, such as tossing SD onto SyFy in the Comcast NBCU slew of channels, which was pretty kooky.

You can't beat Calvin & Hobbes.

It's probably also worth noting: "Star Ratings" = One man's (Dave's) after-the-fact view on the quality of the match / work "Buy Rate" = Number of WWF/WWE Fans who decided to pay for the PPV before the matches even took place They're not really the same thing... or even remotely close. I'd love to come up with a snappy wise ass analogy, but the two things are so divergent that I'm drawing a rare blank.

"YIPPY~!" -A. Skywalker

You could often hear Harley Race called "Mr. Pro Wrestling" in Japan. Thought it was kind of cool.

I think people who read WrestleZone and Lords of Paste did so for the "news". They were interested in more information than they simply got off watching their TV and talking among their offline pro wrestling friends. Same reason people read SKeith: they were looking for more info than they saw on the tube. Backstage stuff, if someone got hurt, what happened to Wrestle X who was off tv, etc. Kobashi is an extremely small niche within that. He meant a great deal to *us*. But we're not the average smart fan. We're a small niche within a niche within a niche.

Sorry... trademarks. I spend time working on trademarks pretty much every working day of the year. So when the topic comes up, I tend to write and have for years.

He would be CM Punk, and the WWE won't chase him over it. But if he wants to continue to do business as CM Punk outside of the WWE, he'll likely ask (and get) the trademarks assigned back to him. There are some funny ones out there. Both Jericho (Chris Irvine) and the WWE have a "Chris Jericho" trademark in Class 41 for pretty much the same thing. Irvine's would have priority: it's older, and cites first use going back 9 years earlier. Jericho actually filed his application right before coming to the WWF, so he's pretty smart about this. It is odd that Chris let them register it rather than simply license usage to them. It's likely there are a lot of goofy ones out there like that.

Well no, but that isn't relevant at all in this discussion. All The Boys Love Mandy Lane sold fuck all next to The Da Vinci Code in 2006; that doesn't mean it wasn't well known and popular amongst the cult horror movie internet community. The Shawn and Flair DVDs weren't exclusively selling to smart fans, which is what we are talking about here. My only point was that Kenta Kobashi was well known amongst the ROH audience and fairly well known in the internet wrestling community as a whole before being an 'internet fan' became normality. It's relevant because the original claim by you was that "most smart fans" in 2004 thought Kobashi was amazing. The reality is that most smart fans in 2004 didn't give a shit about Kobashi: most smart fans were WWE fans, TNA fans, or former WCW/WWF/ECW fans from prior years. Kobashi meant dick to most of them. Okay... so he was pushed to ROH fans rather than some random guy booked against Joe that ROH fans suddenly thought: "OMG!!!! It's Kobashi!!! They never said anything about this... how awesome this is!!!"

Fair enough, didn't know that. How come RVD, Rhyno and others got to keep their names? They had the names before ECW. And Punk only signed his name over the same way people who use their real names do, temp assignments for merch. At least AFAIK. The WWE has the trademarks: http://trademarks.justia.com/771/42/cm-punk-77142597.html http://trademarks.justia.com/853/53/cm-punk-85353466.html http://trademarks.justia.com/860/32/cm-86032111.html The last one is pending, though likely to become a registration soon. The first one reference's Phil's consent. Going to the USPTO and looking at the documents submitted for it... well, it's kind of funny and convoluted on the WWE's part. Anyway, what they cite as "consent" are six heavily redacted pages out of Punk's 2008 book contract. I haven't compared with with the other easily available booking contracts (Vince's, Trip's, Steph's), but the language looks pretty WWE-standard on IP rather than anything unique for Punk. One suspects Punk can get the trademarks transferred to his own name, but he also likely would need to sign a license with the WWE covering their use of those marks in various ways (i.e. all his matches in the library, the inclusion of Punk in games, toys, etc). Use of Punk's performances that are in the library are already covered by his contract elsewhere, and likely well covered after the Ventura lawsuit. But the WWE likely would want a nice clean license to cover transferring them back. In turn, Punk probably would want to try to exclude some things from that license (say being added to future Games or future Toys with Phil's specific consent and perhaps an increase in $$$). Anyway, I suspect this is the manner with most SuperStars. We'll have a better insight into Phil's future when these are transferred to him.