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So apparently Floyd's RIZIN debut was a not very well disguised work. I would assume based on the fight being announced, un-announced, then announced again that the plan was probably for it to be at least somewhat legit at one point. Floyd probably kept insisting on more and more rules and restrictions until it ended up the farce that took place. (also insert joke about Floyd being functionally illiterate and then signing a deal with a Japanese company)

As great as the Rock was/is, one of the legacies he left is that he's largely the reason why WWE thinks 50/50 booking doesn't hurt people and that long promo segments are good. Because Rock was able to spin whatever shit he was given into gold, the company thinks anyone can do it. Just like they think it's fine that they can job half the roster every week and it won't damage anyone's heat because the Rock would put over damn near everyone and it never hurt him because he's THE ROCK.

Liger more or less pioneered the NJPW junior division when it could have just petered out after the Dynamite/Tiger Mask years. Kobashi certainly has the better body of work overall, but there's been very few non lucha guys able to be good to great for so long like Liger.

God dammit, the local ads a few weeks back didn't make it clear that tonight was an actual Smackown taping instead of a throw away house show and now I'm at work while Becky is in my town doing awesome Becky things.

Next Week's Gems:

I would say 100% Vince, USA is still at or near the top of the ratings and despite it being at record lows it's still probably the highest rated show on USA by far.

Yeah there was that period where no one was using it after Benoit and then Shawn started using it sporadically as a way to get everyone accustomed to seeing it again.

Cena's springboard Stunner that seemed like it was a matter of time before it went horribly wrong (yet never did).

I believe the cool kids don't want to say they like Kenny because Dave likes him or some other nonsense. Kobashi-Kawada is like asking what kid is your favorite, it's almost not a fair question. If I was forced to pick I would probably say Kobashi, just because I think his overall body of work is a little better. Styles over Tana for me, AJ spent so much time toiling in TNA that a big chunk of his career gets ignored/forgotten about which is sad. Tanahashi is like the Japanese equivalent of HBK. If you want someone to come through on a big card, he's your man. Kenny-Okada is another close one, but Kenny's had like 3 of the best tag matches in addition to his 47 star singles matches so I give him the edge there. Bryan over Akiyama, since as stated earlier Bryan's been one of the GOATs for seemingly forever. Nagata over Taue. I have a feeling Nagata's going to end up being remembered either as "that guy from WCW long ago" or as being in nearly every opening match on a NJPW card these days. He's kind of like AJ where his peak was during New Japan's dark period where it was at it's low point exposure wise.

He was done with the AWA after that, right? I only remember maybe a handful of rematches then he was gone (to Montreal I assume) until his WWF run.

It's funny how one typo can inadvertantly reveal how many sites use the same source. From what I can tell, Graham Cawthon's site has it listed as Jake instead of Buddy, and since nearly everyone uses his site as the go to for results they all ended up with the same mistake. Also one thing that always struck me as odd is how unusual it was for a babyface to lose a world title clean (more or less) by submission. I know that Martel was on his way out to the WWF, but a babyface champ submitting the title away is still something you rarely see and it's not like Stan needed to build credibility as a tough guy. I always wondered if it was just Verne being petty over losing another top guy to Vince.

Holy crap Rusev vs Nak was great.

Will Hunter even be ready for Mania? Not sure of the healing time for a torn pec on a 40 something year old.

Yeah, Dave mentioned that all the planning went to the women's gauntlet match that took place (last week but the same taping) and they had faith Nattie could go out there and wing it with her and have a good match since she's been the one doing most of Ronda's training. I always wondered, for all the stories of people being stretched and tortured in the Dungeon, Stu must have done a good job teaching match layout since everyone he had a hand in training ended up really good at it.

Interesting that they would decide a pre taped Christmas Eve show was the best time to announce they are creating Women's tag titles, but at least it's a thing that happened.

Shane Taylor announced he signed an exclusive contract for 2019 as well. Time will tell if it works, but at least ROH is making the effort to restock.

The whole PWUSA thing is so fascinating to me. Everyone always asks why didn't the other promotions band together to fight back against Vince, forgetting that they did and it kind of was working briefly before turning in to exactly what you'd expect to happen when old school promoters tried to work together.

Thats.....uhh......exactly what I said in my post. It continues to baffle me that everyone seems to be tripping over themselves to throw money at every B level obvious-front-for-a-money-laundering-scheme MMA league but smaller wrestling companies keep getting told to GTFO by networks.

So it was announced Impact is moving to something called the Pursuit Channel as of January 11. Sucks that apparently they couldn't get any interest at all since the channel is majority owned by Anthem. It's also going to mark the end of me watching it since only a handful of cable companies get the channel and mine's not watching them.

So after announcing Asuka vs Becky for the Rumble on Main Event (which was an odd place to do it), WWE decided nah to that.

Was that not the excuse given as to why he never made it in before? It seems like every time it was mentioned the answer was a variation of "old timers won't vote for him because he probably stiffed them on pay at one point".

Park has no time to think about Halls of Fame when he's busy being awesome all over North America. Also I never thought Jerry Jarrett would get in since all the old timers are still bitter that he was a shitty payoff guy, then Dave mentioned there were far less older voters and far more newer voters and it all made sense.

HOF issue supposed to drop any time now. Dave mentioned on the Monday WON show he only had 4 HOF bios done at that point, so he's probably working like mad to make sure it gets out today since he has a thing about the WON coming out on Wednesdays.

Cubsfan with the line of the night on Twitter saying Bryan's cool with teaming with Almas because he's been on the compost heap for months.

Paige is either doing a tremendous job selling this on Twitter or she found out about the whole "get rid of the GMs" plan when everyone else did.