sek69

Well yes, she's not going to be as awesome as Aja but she's the blueprint for how to book a female monster.

All I could think if watching that is how that's how Nia Jax should be booked. None of this "try to make the monster look pretty" stuff, just straight up destruction. Also, I'm amazed broken noses didn't happen more often, considering the person doing a spinning backfist is kind of just hoping the person is close enough to make it look legit without smashing their face.

IMO Byron tries too hard too much of the time. That might be due to overproduction, but he comes off to me too much as an announcer version of a wrestler who has to get his shit in no matter what.

Bryan is way more subdued when on with Dave unless they're reviewing an especially bad Raw or something like that. Say what you will about him, but at least he knows to keep his gimmick in check there since he has to know Dave is the reason 99% of people sub to them.

I noticed during the backstage promo on last week's NXT that Billie Kay reminds me of Flo the Progressive Lady and now I can't unsee it.

Hell, that get-up she was wearing might have been from Bob's collection too.

Right. Which is why I said WWE isn't a monopoly in a previous post.

Even if TNA had a clue, WWE would have raided their talent of anyone worth a damn the moment they posed any semblance of a threat to them.

If someone tries a different style and decides for whatever reason it's not their cup of tea, I have no issue with that. It does kind of bother me to see someone dismiss something using criteria that makes it clear they either never gave it a chance or used the worst possible example to do so.

Lucha tends to be built on long feuds leading to mask/hair matches, maybe watching individual matches years later without most of the context hurts it more than other styles? I know that's treading close to Dave's "matches are worked for their time and nothing else" edict, but maybe that's not entirely wrong?

I always found it odd that hardcore fans by and large tend to gravitate more towards Japanese wrestling than lucha. I would have thought that lucha would have been easier to get into from an English speaking standpoint since you can at least usually get the gist of what's being said even if you aren't fluent in Spanish as opposed to Japanese. Also it would be easier for someone North America based to actually travel to Mexico to see it live as opposed to making the trip to the Tokyo Dome. Then again, maybe that was part of the mystique. Watching wrestling from the other side of the world in a completely inaccessable (to most) language.

Technically no, since as Loss noted there are other places for people to work and some make as much or more than they would working for WWE. They are more of a defacto monopoly in the sense that no one can really compete with them on a national level, and any other company is only one talent raid away from being wiped out if WWE feels the need to do so. To be fair, it's not a recent development. The only reason there's ever been any actual competition to Vince is because Ted Turner showed loyalty to the company that helped build his empire.

CMLL especially has some old ass refs that make Bronco Lubich look like Tommy Young, but what I hate most of all is when the rudo ref spots get overused. Actually, to be more precise I hate when Tirantes Jr goes overboard and gloms all the heat on himself. It's like the wrestling version of an Ump Show in baseball.

Someone a few pages back made a point that seems to have been glossed over. There's a fairly big difference between CMLL style lucha and AAA/indy style lucha. CMLL is more or less trying to stay the exact same style that Mr. Lutteroth started in 1933. They have acrobatics and six mans, sure, but I'm not sure I've seen anyone anywhere put on a better professional wrestling performance than Atlantis did in his two Anniversary matches with UG. AAA on the other hand is more like if ECW faked its death and moved to Mexico to hide from creditors. A handful of occasional good matches between tons of garbage that sometimes gets unnecessarily violent. You can't really complain about AAA looking too fakey when Psycho Clown almost burned his arm off at Triplemania this year.

The Raw writers seem stuck in the mindset that you can only have one women's feud at a time and are just now trying to break out of that. SD's women have been running circles around Raw's since the split began.

In the 90s when the internet started to boom, it also happened to coincide with a time when Japanese wrestling was really fucking good. Anyone who had any kind of following at the time was raving about the amazing matches they were seeing and it got everyone interested. Combine that with the fact that we're just now starting to get footage of lucha from before 2000 (the good stuff at least), it's no wonder it never got as popular.

Seems like it would be a waste to build up a monster like Braun just to feed to the guy who's failed at being top babyface for the last 3 years.

He's not heel Michael Cole bad, but he's been largely a useless third wheel. Perhaps in the era of lowered expectations of wrestling commentators he's okay then. No one's saying he's not suited because he's black, that's ridiculous and honestly just insultingly lazy trolling.

Not sure why Dave's the bad guy for pointing out that WWE puts people in positions they clearly aren't suited for to fill an imaginary quota.

How many of the promoter's kids do you actually think this applied to? As far as I can remember it's pretty much just Mike Von Erich that got pushed way harder and faster than he should have. Erik Watts? Gulas's kid? I can't imagine guys were eager to put over Jeff Jarrett back in Memphis.

It should be mentioned how good Spud was in that. I love how he gave the speech every guy in the 80s who had to put over the promoter's kid would have killed to do.

Did Bret ever say himself why he didn't sue, even just to extract a token settlement? The somewhat obvious reason everyone always mentions is that Bret attacked Vince afterwards, so he was afraid of the countersuit. Because he trashed the monitors and other equipment after the match and damaged WWF property and Vince could have counter-sued for that. It would have just led to everything being tied up in court forever.

WWE goes out of their way to avoid having their contract clauses tested in court since that tends to end badly for them.

Not to pull a Dave On Twitter and be all "reading is your friend", but the back issues of the WON from this time are fascinating reading.

He was offering several alternatives, all were being vetoed by HHH who got in Shawn's ear. I know that sounds to some folks like "OMG HHH CONSPIRACY" type shit, but it was reported at the time that Vince, Bret, and Shawn all agreed to do a DQ or some other non finish at Survivor Series and Bret would drop it at the next PPV or some Raw in the meantime. Hunter got Shawn all riled up about not beating a guy on the way out and all bets were off and we got what we got.