sek69

Kind of like how they hold a grudge against Rock for going to Hollywood and actually becoming a fairly successful action star, yet continue to pump money into their own studio that churns out flop after horrible flop.

It's clear one of the worst things anyone employed by WWE can ever do is show interest in anything else other than wrestling. If you don't live pro wrestling 24/7 it seems to be highly offensive.

I always got the impression Vince sometimes randomly hates the Hart family. Maybe he took it out on them that the WM angle with Bret went off the rails so badly. I just recall when they broke the team up there seemed to be a lot of blind item "well someone must have fucked up bad to warrant this reaction" comments in the WON.

Wow, however you feel about this whole deal it seems to have killed Todd Martin's enthusiasm in his Raw Report. He usually has some kind of observation about the direction of the show in the summation, sometimes snarky, sometimes his honest opinion. Today it was just "it is what it is".

Having him beat up and storyline injure HHH would seem to be the opposite thing you'd do if you were writing someone off TV. Even if you were going to use it as an excuse to fire him in storyline, leaving the HHH character with no outlet for revenge other than beating up Johnny for putting him in the position to get hurt seems weird.

The funny thing about all of Dave and Bryan's hysterics is one of the acceptable scenarios for Cena winning that they had mentioned beforehand would be having Brock kill him the whole match and then slip on a banana peel. When that was pretty much what happened, it's suddenly the WORST BOOKING EVAR~! The match itself was pretty great, it was like the closest WWE has ever came to having a straight up shoot fight. Both guys looked like they were just beating the shit out of each other (and Dave was right saying anyone else would have got the "these guys can't work" tag since beating the shit out of each other for real =/= working), and since both guys were busted hardway you can see they were. I don't even have an issue with the finish in terms of leaving money on the table with Brock, since it seems pretty easy to just have him come out and kill people on Raw to re-establish his monster status. My issue was it was yet another Superman Cena comeback, which is exactly why so many fans over the age of 13 dislike him. He's reached the point where once he grabbed the chain outside the ring I immediately thought "oh shit, he's going to actually win this match", and that's exactly what happened. For a company that changes plans because they get out on the internet and 10% of the fanbase knows what's coming, their booking of Cena has been aggressively predictable no matter how many people know he's going over.

When the test happens in February, he says no when they ask him to wrestle at Mania, and then the failure is announced in April....well it's easy to come up with theories painting WWE as shady whether they actually were or not. At the very least, it seems kind of a dick move to test a guy who's been out of action for a while and would be so for several months afterward. If he was planning to return soon, fine. But all he did was to visit when Raw was in San Diego and they presented him with a test as soon as he walked in the door.

Steroids can be used safely, or at least with the risks minimized, if used properly. The issue is that in wrestling especially guys just continue to use the stuff without giving their bodies a break. Most athletes in sports that use enhancement drugs usually space out their cycles more, or at least try to peak them in sync with the time their sport is in season. Wrestlers never give their bodies a break from the constant stream of drugs, which causes their system to more or less short circuit.

Todd Martin offhandedly referring to Bryan as "George" (as in George Costanza) made me realize how Dave and Bryan really are like a real life version of Jerry and George.

The timing of this just seems shady. They wanted him to return sooner than he wanted to from his last surgeries, and when he refused to (considering at least part of the reason he keeps needing more surgery is him always returning sooner when asked) they seemed to think he was being a pussy. Add that to them bristling at his demands to work a HBK level schedule, and being tested while on the sidelines, and this just smacks of some WWE bullying shit. Now they can claim the upper hand in any negotiations with the implied threat that if he gets too demanding he might find himself suddenly facing a third strike. edit: Didn't he claim his first strike was due to a prescription running out while he was on an overseas tour and not being able to get it renewed prior to being tested?

Guess that will teach him to request main eventer level perks when he's not HBK or the Undertaker.

There's a reason "what's my motivation" is the classic actor stereotype. The audience needs to know why they should give two shits about someone. If they're a hired gun by the boss to take out the annoying babyface who foils his plans, then say so. If he wants to be world champion, say so. Leaving things up to the fans to figure out is lazy booking at best and at worst you damage your promotion by not giving your fans a reason to be emotionally invested in anything.

I don't how they would expect it to be over at all based on how there was, what...one or two weeks of videos building his debut (which did nothing to tell people anything about him)? Then they just threw him out there in a ridiculous getup to have a squash match where he worked a style that seemed to almost be done on purpose to make people aggressively not care about him. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's not anything that can't be fixed, but having him beat Cena that soon came off as a huge kneejerk reaction to him not setting the world on fire out of the box.

I think the gimmick is odd, they really haven't explained why Albert suddenly returned after all these years and is now the world's largest Great Muta cosplayer. He's certainly not over, but then there's no reason he should be since they just threw him out there with this 80s style gimmick and expected people to care. What also hurt is that when he was signed, he was supposed to come in as Johnny Ace's hired asskicker, which at least would have given some explanation to why he's around. However they ended up getting Brock to sign and that role seems to have gone to him (which is a far better person to have that role, but it still sucks for Tensai).

For WWE, Raw and Smackdown. I usually order the big 4 PPVs, although I went to a friend's house for Mania this year. I watch Impact and read the PPV reports online. I have ROH and CMLL on my regular DVR rotation along with Monterrey whenever I can find it on the schedule. Used to watch AAA until they lost their US TV, and I follow New Japan via their YouTube channel.

I had suspicions for a while, but I realized after Paul Orndorff debuted in the WWF that he'd been piledriving people for weeks and no one suffered a career ending broken neck yet. Then one of the replays they showed in a squash match showed the jobber's head didn't even come close to hitting the mat (but he still sold it as death) and the horse was out of the barn for me.

I could buy "worked" in the sense that I'm sure someone probably took a dive at some point, but it's not like UFC pays guys enough to take real punches/submission holds if the outcomes are predetermined.

After his big return, Dave mentioned that now there's MMA hardcores who are trying to downplay how big a deal Brock was in UFC because he went back to WWE. I know a lot of MMA purists hate pro wrestling, but that would ironically be some Vince level revisionist history to pull off.

I don't know who was the first to do the moves of doom routine, but Chief Jay was Hulking Up long before Hogan.

This is apropos of nothing, but reading yet another political Facebook post by Eric Bischoff where he comes across as so Republican it veers into Stephen Colbert parody realm. Then I realized he's made the most money in his career working for wrestling companies that were basically welfare queens. You'd think someone so fervent in his beliefs would be offended to be employed by someone who takes and takes and gives nothing in return.

I'm a lot more forgiving towards ROH than most folks here I'd wager, but after the millionth "set up finisher, opponent escapes" spot in the Steen-Generico match I was ready to throw something at the TV. Of all the things that indy guys seem to never learn, "less is more" is #1 by far.

Dusty's Achilles Heel seemed to be not really being all that good at building new stars that stuck. It wasn't all his fault, since you had guys like Nikita and Barry getting derailed by outside issues, but you largely had the same guys feuding in 1988 that you did in 1986. He was good getting mid card and tag team acts noticed, but it's like there was some kind of block about getting guys over the hump to main eventers. Regarding Russo, I watch the Monday Night Wars on WWE OnDemand and they just had the episode of RAW that was like the very essence of Russomania: show opens with Vince calling Taker and Kane pussies (such edgy language!), and that kicks off a show long routine of them coming out to interrupt EVERY MATCH that tries to take place on the show. There's not much that's more Russo than having it slammed in your face for two hours that this in ring stuff doesn't matter when there's STORYLINE that needs to unfold!

That ties into mine, how in lucha the first and second falls are not only rushed through most times but often won with the weakest move possible. It's even worse when they pin the two non captains in a trios match to win a fall with the most basic hold possible and they sell them like instant death. It comes off like the guy losing the fall just decided "fuck this, I'll get em in the next fall" or worse comes off like a pussy for losing to a weak move. Fragile referees are a big one as well, but WWE has noticeably toned ref bumps way down. Gone are the days that refs would go down on the slightest bump in every match, then sell being knocked out to the point that they'd be brain damaged if it was even slightly real.

What makes the Scott Hall story even sadder to a degree is in those brief moments of sobriety you see he is actually a pretty smart guy and seems to have a good business mind. Sort of like a next generation version of Jake Roberts.

So basically Cena is the hero the WWE Universe deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll boo him. Because he can take it.