pantherwagner

From the Stone Cold podcast thread: Is the sledgehammer the dumbest foreign object ever? Tiger Jeet Singh's use (or non-use) of his sword may be actually worse but the sledgehammer has been a centre point for the outcome of more big matches so it may be worse overall. If you are enough of a crappy human being to use a sledgehammer it makes no sense to hit somebody in the gut with it or to hold it with your hand and hit somebody in the face in a very obviously fake and protected way. You swing that motherfucker as hard as you can and aim for the head. Of course, you can't do that, because it's pro wrestling, but then why even use it in the first place? If you are going to use it you have to use it like HHH did on the HIAC vs Undertaker - you try to smash the other dude's head like a watermelon. Though if you hate somebody that much you probably should not hug him at the end of the match because RESPECT. To be fair to HHH... he has used it effectively sometimes (smashing Big Show's hand comes to mind), but most of the time it's silly. At least the Berzerker when he used his word on Undertaker on Superstars he tried to stab him. It's a moment that when I was a child made me see the Berzerker as a crazy bastard because if Taker had not moved, well, he could have died. Thoughts? What are your favourite dumb objects?

This gave me an idea for a new thread.

Good thing that we have NWA Classics filling in the gap. Quite funny that it was reported a few weeks ago that WWE was unhappy that there was a competing "classic wrestling" streaming service and at the same time not consistently providing any classic wrestling on their network. But hey it's been a year and a half and Nitro and Raw up to 1997 are complete. Quite a feat.

Doesn't mean there shouldn't be an attempt to fix it. What would you suggest to fix it? I'm curious, as I can't think of many things that would truly be effective. Unfortunately you can't start taking ballots away from people who should not have one. Boricua's "region limit" is something that has been talked about before in this forum but I don't know if that would actually solve any problems as it could potentially accentuate them even more by letting more undeserving people in (the "lucha expert pool" on the WON HOF has always been somewhat suspect, the Japanese fans sometimes seem to be in their own bubble and use very different metrics than others, a lot of the "modern reporters" seem to be people who shouldn't be allowed near a ballot, etc.). A minimum wait time before the ballot can be sent wouldn't make a difference either. The HOF is what it is and I take it as such. I was a voter for many years but a decade ago I stopped voting because I thought it was getting silly. I eventually stopped getting a ballot but for whatever reason a few years ago I got it back and now I vote again but take it as a learning/teaching/discussing opportunity for us in this corner of the internet. How many of you who considered yourselves BIG lucha fans 10 years ago would have been able to articulate a compelling case for Misioneros de la Muerte (who I consider a slam dunk pick)? And how many of you can do it now? How about Villano III? People like Steve Sims and I made cases for them a very long time ago - this ended up pushing people like Matt Farmer to come up with more facts and data that neither Steve or I knew about. On the other hand, I have learned a lot about people like Koloff, Patera, Lewin - guys that I saw mostly at the tail end of their careers. I like seeing "my guys" getting recognition, but at the end of the day I decided that for me it's about journey and not the destination.

Most of the Japanese games weren't all that great. I believe other than the Funaki game (which I did not know existed) I tried all of them back in the day. The Natsume/AJPW and Kinnikuman games weren't good. The WAR game and the Astral games were pretty bad. Some of the games were card games (one of the girl wrestler games was for sure and there was an All Japan one too). The Onita game was a street fighter type of game and it was atrocious. Jikkyu pro wrestling was my non-Super Fire favourite. You could create guys with all kinds of shooter/Pancrase/RINGS style moves, mid 90s Japan power moves (DVD's, power bomb variations, etc.) and you had the crazy Onita style exploding ring gimmicks. I don't know how well it has aged but back then it was great. I remember back in 1994 getting a pirated CD from somebody at school with 300+ games and the first Super Fire Pro Wrestling women's game was there. I thought I'd never see a game where you could use dives and moonsaults. Now it's a different world but back then the Japanese had the best games by far.

Yeah, me too. Best I can come up with is "I was obsessed with it from ages 10 to 19 and it's a hobby from back then that I still keep", but I couldn't tell you what made me keep this hobby and not my other obsessions like computers/videogames, cycling or football (soccer).

There's Bret Hart too. Shawn has often mentioned that he sometimes doesn't even want to do Raw because he gets home too late. There's a clear difference in attitude between him and, say, Ric Flair.

There was this odd WrestleAid (or something like that) show more than a decade ago, and THE SANDMAN of all people walked to Jaguar Yokota, very respectfully went to shake her hand and told her something along the lines of "it's an honour to meet you, you are the greatest ever". Yokota politely smiled and thanked him and walked away. She had no idea who Sandman was.

I wasn't sure where to put this and I did not want to create a new thread so... here it goes. WTF

You are just jealous of the guy who got a chance to talk to Missy Hyatt and chose not to speak about PRIDE. Whatever happened to that guy anyway? He stayed out of trouble.

This reminds me of when Hulk Hogan was looking to wrestle in Japan in the mid 90s and after getting some info on who were his potential big money opponents he said "Japanese wrestling must be in the toilet if Takada is the hottest wrestler in the country" because he was still thinking lightweight young boy Takada.

You are just jealous of the guy who got a chance to talk to Missy Hyatt and chose not to speak about PRIDE.

Not directly related to this show, but I'm not sure if you guys knew about this: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x13jjsv_icw-1990-24-02-90_sport Skip to 22:48

It's a fair statement, but to me it's not surprising. I am a computer engineer. I have been working with the same technology for a decade and a half - basically my entire professional life. When I am home the last thing that I want to do is to study other technologies, to read about technology or to have anything to do with computers other than to fool around like most regular people do (internet, email, etc.). I don't see why wrestlers should be expected to be different to regular people. I will say that it seems shocking at first that Ric Flair didn't know that Steve Austin was the Ringmaster before Stone Cold, or that Sting hadn't seen the Montreal Screwjob until many years after the fact (even though he obviously knew about it). However, when you think about it, it kind of makes sense. These guys literally live and breathe wrestling, I assume that whatever free time they have they want to spend it with friends, family, girlfriends, fishing, hunting or at the bar... not watching wrestling tapes. There's that famous Terry Funk quote: if I was a plumber I wouldn't want to watch somebody else fixing a toilet and doing a lousy job, or even worse, fixing a toilet better than me.

I think that you mean Canada. To add something valuable to the thread... this is the match that made NJPW realise that Tiger Mask looked so defensless against Abdullah that they decided not to book him against heavyweights again during the rest of his run. Exactly like WCW did with the cruiserweights!

Dave comes from a time when most of his non WWF-WCW reviews were for people that were going to see the tapes of the matches after reading his review. 15 years ago unless you were rich or had a very good trading network you had to rely a lot on reviews and star ratings to decide what tapes to buy next. It's a different world today but Dave hasn't changed his match reporting style.

I hate the super rehearsed gimmicky WWE entrances. A guy like Ryback does the same little moves, the same screams, the same looks at the camera, the same poses, every single time. I'm using him as an example but really this applies to 90% of the WWE roster. Their entrances are exactly like a video game entrance. People like Hogan and Goldberg it as well, but I never found it fake or scripted looking.

I'll watch this later but so cool that we've got The Battle Of The Older Brothers Of Los Gringos Locos. Chavo is super underrated as he's never talked about by anyone, perhaps outside of this board. Great pace and moves, very good in singles or tag teams, and could fly, brawl or wrestle technical style.

Eddie ain't in heaven. Eddie is down there. IN HELL!!!!!!!!!

This made me laugh. Pretty much the easiest way to get certain segments of the crowd behind a guy is for there to be stories about how the company is holding them down. Look at how over Ziggler is despite not being very good at anything except being a Billy Gunn tribute act. Both of these posts made me laugh. Ziggler is terrible but people still keep comparing him to Curt Hennig. It's somewhat funny how the crowds are the "smartest" they have ever been, or so they think, but they can still be worked easily. Just look at HHH's reactions on NXT. This is no different than Sid in ECW back in the day.

Go look up Fujiwara porn instead.

With Vince around it will never be fixed. They have already let the new fans know it is not a revolution. The NXT girls coming out to Paige's music doesn't sound like one to most people. Also that segment on Raw with Miz was brutal and killed it with the most hardcore fanbase (the ones there and whoever was watching after SS). Charlotte didn't even get the expected easy pop by referencing the Horsemen. The one that may have a chance if she can wrestle (never seen her) is Alexa Bliss because her looks meet the Vince/Dunn criteria.

And the "Dave Musgrave Memorial Quote Award" goes to... On Summer Slam 1990: "Kerry Von Erich was on his last legs". Good one, Will. Not sure if it was intentional or not, as nobody followed up on it.

I like hearing Parv's view about wrestling when he was growing up because his experience is somewhat similar to mine, even if I was growing up literally on the opposite side of the same continent (Spain). Summerslam 93 was also the first show where I was the only kid in class that gave a shit. Survivor Series the year before had some buzz and Wrestlemania just a little. They didn't even do a special 2 hr show for it and just chopped up some matches and put them in the regular Superstars timeslot. About four or five months later WWE was off national TV for about a decade. We didn't have stores that carried wrestling tapes so we'd have to wait for half a year to get the new releases- first for the Silver Vision UK release to make it to the catalogue and then a couple of months between making the order and the tape actually arriving. I had a rich friend whose family owned a lot of vineyards so I guess that I was lucky that I got to see most of those commercial tapes.

Why I had never seen this before? This was tremendous.