sek69

TNA has the advantage of having NWA affiliates across the US and Canada they could use for house shows, like how the JJ-Raven title switch took place in Ontario.

That's it precisely. They can't bitch at Vince, so they shoot the messenger. Freud would have a field day with HHH transferring his issues with Vince onto JR.

That reminds me so much of the bosses I had when I worked retail, they'd tell us to never give in to customers no matter what. The customers would then usually just ask to speak to the manager, who would promptly cave in and make me look like an asshole.

Whether TNA wants to compete with WWE or not, Vince is surely going to see this as a threat. I expect him to make moves toward anyone they employ not under an ironclad TNA contract. I'd assume this is Spike testing the waters to see if TNA can hang in prime time. I'd also assume the WWE/Spike breakup wasn't as lovey-dovey as both sides want us to believe and Spike might want to give Vince a parting thumb in the eye by proving they don't need his company if they want to air wrestling.

*points at the BrainBusters*

The Flair Flop to me is just like the People's Elbow or Hulking Up that are intrinsic to wrestling and everyone just accepts. At least the Flair Flop is usually done after taking a pounding from an opponent, he just doesn't randomly do it during the match. One Flair thing that does bug me is how when a wrestler misses a move and hits the canvas, it hurts. When Ric Flair elbowdrops his coat, it doesn't.

LOL @ needing 3 guys and Orton stomping on him to get the guy into police custody.

That really, really, REALLY, (really) bothered me during the match with HHH where the whole match was basically Hunter trying to shatter HBK's spine, and yet he's magically healed enough to kip up which shot the entire point of the match squarely in the ass. Arg.

One thing that surprised me was the VQ on some of these matches. I understand that some of these matches were rare finds but I'm surprised they didn't cause goodhelmet to have a stroke. I've been watching a lot of Adrian Adonis on this set, mainly because he always impressed me as a young mark despite being a fat guy firmly entrenched in the Adorable gimmick. Watching him work without having to sell a gimmick made me really appriciate what a solid in ring talent he was. I used to look at the WWF tag title history and see Adonis and Murdoch listed and think "wtf?" but now thanks to this and the Mid South set I can say they are probably two of the most underrated guys ever.

I have a huge problem with this. George South did so many jobs that he should NEVE be able to look like a viable threat against the world champion. THis is a big criticism against Flair, that he was too giving. How are we to expect Flair to hold his own against a Nikita Koloff or Hawk when he is having trouble with whatever random-jobber-you-choose? I've heard this knock on Flair, and while I think it definately has some merit (especially when he was facing jobbers), wouldn't the opposite of that be what HHH gets knocked for? To me, it's a sign of a good worker where they can wrestle a jobber and make you think (at least for a second) that the jobber might actually pull one out. Flair was always good at making the audience look at his opponent as better than they were. That might have ended up hurting in the long run, since Flair would make guys look like a million bucks, then a lot of those guys would tank as soon as they were programmed with someone else.

They're showing they can hold an audience over a 3 week period. That has to be pleasing to Spike and the Carters.

It'a not quite so bad with a punch, doing it with a weapon is silly because you're basically saying "I went through the effort of getting a weapon to hit you with and now I will protect you from it".

If this is all a work, what's the point? a JR vs Vince match headlining a PPV?

Continuing Sass's rant, when HHH hits people with his sledgehammer (like when he beat up Flair) and he's obviously got his hand over the hammer part just irks the shit out of me. It reminds me of how Hogan would put his hand on his opponent then punch the hand rather than his opponent. Now obviously HHH can't be out there braining people for real with a sledge, but why would such a devoted student of the game-UUH use a weapon that he needs to expose the business to protect people from.

World Class 1985-1988 This is what got me into wrestling, the Von Erichs-Freebirds feud was one of the hottest in wrestling. It's even more amazing when you consider almost everyone in the promotion was coked out of their minds the entire run. UWF 1986-1987 I got into this when World Class was starting to run out of gas. Bill Watts' booking with talent that never really performed at the level they did here anywhere else. Except for that guy with the painted face who was Eddie Gilbert's bodyguard. I hear he was pretty good later on. NWA 1989-1990 For obvious reasons, but even the undercard was better than what WWF was offering for main events. WWF 1997-1999 The last time WWF TV was truly Must See TV. Between Austin and DX, you really didn't know what to expect each week.

Carlito, after trying to imitate Ric Flair and failing: "Whatever. Wooing isn't cool anyway" Also, I was watching the WWF set and the famous Mean Gene "fuck it" goof was in there. What cracked me up was Jesse's HILARIOUS rant afterwards that seemed half-cover, half-shoot on how he was happy something finally bad happened to Gene. No one made sounding pissed as funny as Jesse.

TNA needs to stop putting Styles in three ways every PPV. They can't seem to resist putting as many high flyers in the ring as possible, which does nothing but encourage spot-mania. I'd like to see Styles go one on one with someone and let that decide once and for all if he's worth all the praise or not.

Another sub-argument to this discussion is a lot of the people who "say a supposedly "great" American match is only **1/2" are usually parroting someone else's opinion and can't really define why they rate the match like they did. It also doesn't help when every paragraph includes passive-aggressive comments on how everyone who disagrees with you is a fucking moron.

I wouldn't call you a snob, helmet (well maybe a VQ snob, but not a wrestling snob ) Anyone who can acknowledge that it's possible for a US promotion to have a good match with no puro workers involved is okay by me. The puro snob would say the bad Japanese match was still better than the bad American match. I've seen that before a million times where a review of a shitty puro match was topped off with something like "it sucked but it was better than watching a Kane match".

Biased opinons tend to get dismissed because: A) Those of us who've been around online discussion forums have heard them thousands of times before. They're biased opinions. C) Intellegent, plausible arguments in return usually get ignored by the person with the assumed bias, since they don't want to hear anything not complementary towards their bias. Maybe sometimes people jump the gun when it comes to elitism in wrestling, but 99 times out of 100 you can see the train coming well in advance.

I respectfully disagree. Anyone who's been online longer than five minutes has run into someone who thinks the worst Japanese wrestling is far superior than the best North American wrestling. I can actually understand how people get led in this direction, watching tons of classic Puro can raise your internal expectation bar when it comes to wrestling, and sometimes you can't adjust it when you go back to WWE stuff. What raises my ire is when people get all passive-aggressive over bashing anything not puro in wrestling. They never come out and say it, but the sarcasm and condescending tone are unmistakeable. Neither is the faux-oppression they exclaim when someone calls them on their bullshit. *on edit* I know not all fans of non-American wrestling are elitists. In fact, it's probably a very low percentage that qualify as snobs. It's just that that minority tends to be the most vocal, especially online.

The same Samoa Joe who was on WO last night talking about his Puro and MMA background, and working with Kobashi and Liger....yeah that really proves me wrong. Not to mention Aries and Strong work for ROH, who book for the smart crowd, so it's no shock you like them as well. I'm not seeing how that makes me look foolish, but okay. Here's a question, have you ever seen any AJ matches beyond his recent TNA work or are you pulling a Batista and just dismissing the guy based on clips?

Well if you act like a puro snob, don't get your panties in a bunch when someone calls you on it. A lot of AJ's TNA matches have been spot fests because they put him in 3 ways that are booked for maximum spottage. I just happened to pick up a DVD set of AJ Styles from his NWA Wildside days, and while it was from 2003 or so, it showed to me the guy can work in a non-spotfest and do it well. It's already been mentioned that he's had a few good non-spotfest matches in TNA, but hey it must mean AJ and TNA are starting to make inroads to becoming popular when the smarts start turning on them.

It's your opinon, and you're entitled to it. There seems to be a fairly wide consensus among both smart and markish fans that AJ is one of the top ten (if not top five) US based workers. You seem to have a personal bias against him, and I'm going to go out on a limb here based on your username and assume you're a puro fan. It sounds like if someone doesn't go out there and structure a match like Misawa or Kobashi, then they're a spot monkey. Just my two cents.

I think Styles and Daniels would be having great matches without Joe. He makes them better, no doubt, but it's not like he's working with schlubs that need carried. I'm not really a huge Styles fan but to dismiss him as a mere "spot monkey" is just beyond stupid.