tomk

This is what I wrote in pique if anger at dvdvr: The WWE created those conditions because that’s the way they normally handle “scandal” ranging from Bret blading when policy was no blading, to Kat exposing her breasts on PPV, etc. -Blame the media for sensationalism. They don’t get it. Wrestling is a secret business but part of the way the “work” “works” is to make the audience feel like they are apart of the world. The audience is inside. The media is positioned as outside. They media is sensationalizing that which you the audience understands but the media doesn’t. -Not allow wrestlers to talk with the media. Thus media is only left with retired wrestlers or wrestlers from different companies. The hope is enough of those guys will want WWE jobs that you will get majority of them to cover for the WWE. Those that don’t are just out of touch/disgruntled /don’t know anything about the current product. -The promotion wasn’t involved/we knew nothing. Over-enthusiastic performer did this on their own. I think enough wrestling fans really want to “believe” that they fall for this, people outside wrestling don’t know enough not to fall for this. That they are treating Benoit slaughtering his family the same way they treat Kat exposing herself really sickens me. But as seen by the Ken Kennedy board they know their audience.

Since this may be based on something I wrote. I'm not sure if he suddenly joined the kangaroo court, or if there was a point where Meltzer suddenly started writting about Benoit as active in it. It's Larry King. For all the shit that Nancy Grace gets for being uninformed. Larry King's schtick is that he is deliberately uninformed. He won't read books or info on guests before show that way he comes in "unbiased". I don't know, Konan is aguy who owes his career to steroids and is currently suffering the health consequencces but I think he still is heavily pushing Cibernetico.

Oh I watched her on the Surreal Life and she was clearly completely nutball (not the worst bipolar drug casualty surreal life cast member ever, but still). She was both completely off her rocker insane (and there look to be some anti-psychotics on prescription list that I don’t think can actually be abused) and a ridiculous drug addict (the majority of the list that jdw posted). So I knew all that before even looking at the prescription list. What I didn’t know was that she had such a filthy vagina. That was new info. From the July 5th Observer, Meltzer writes: I'm not sure whether Classics post is so much a change in his reporting or if just in hindsight Meltzer realizes that McMahon would have aired that show even if he did believe or not. I think McMahon would have aired that show even if he "believed". I think his first priority is to the company. And his experience is that the company's top goal is how to get the show to go on, get past this and move them back to the job of putting smiles on peoples faces. Focusing on that goal could easily blind him into making bad judgement call. I think Meltzer is wrong in his belief that none of these guys would have made comments they did if they believed and accepted. Ross is still saying nice things about Benoit. It’s harder to quickly condemn a friend/colleague then it is to say the good things about them. And I don't see tributes speeches(even if they all "believed and accepted") as being uncharacteristic of normal human behavior after a tragedy. Of course part of that is that people don't really ever "believe and accept". I find myself agreeing with Ohtani's Jacket as when someone you know commits a heinous crime,I don't know if you ever fully register, "My friend was an awful human being" so much as you go "Why did he throw his life away".

Yeah I agree with your explanations of why fans supported Benoit visavis Hogan. Agree completely. But most Benoit fans, fans searching for something "nore physical and realistic" didn't discover Benoit in New Japan. I don't know if Kunze, or Lorefice wrote anything about the three way. I think Coey thought it was well done. I was trying to come up with a hypothetical trad tape trading fan. The modern trader... well the modern traders are mostly guys who got into wrestling during the attitude era or the couple years pre-Attitude. Again not guys who discovered Benoit in New Japan. or Vince for that matter. As midcard (or hot opening) workrate match was a Vince staple too. Same thing is true for most pre-GDI lucha. You wrote: I was trying to argue that there always has been a place on the card for matches that emphasized "performing" over "working." but that card placement and attitude toward what should be in different places on the card has changed. My point wasn't about the booking building to the matches but the actual matches themselves. Was Brock v Angle as a main worked differently from Angle v. Rey as hot opener? Read Meltzer's criticism of Eddie's work: http://wrestlingclassics.com/cgi-bin/.ubbc...ic;f=1;t=060109 Meltzer wanted Eddy v Rey to be worked like Halloween Havoc, at a point where Eddy v Rey was drawing Austin v Vince numbers. Eddy's a guy who worked very differently as main eventer than he did as midcard or undercard worker. If you read the Observer's at the time, that change in style supposedly wasn't respected among the other workers. "A lot of the guys who are in awesome shape in WWE have to slow down for Guerrero." Where would the "modern main event fall"? The modern main event? The Cena v. Khali ones? Those are in exactly the right place.

Ok just finished reading through Tawny Kittaen's prescription list...and I may be misidentifying a bunch of things but most distrurbing thing is that it looks like almost a third of it appears to be for Herpes and yeast infection. I don't know if you can actually abuse those meds. Somehow I expected this to be a list where a crazy woman was abusing huge amounts of ambien/vicodin coctails. About two thirds of it is that. Its the final third that is actually scary.

So at Schneider’s recommendation I read this thread and this is now up at segunda caida. Hadn’t been able to access this site since I registered in February but using different computer and unfortunately now is the time I can write here and able to contribute some thoughts to this thread. It was there that most wrestling fans discovered Chris Benoit.” Well that’s where I found Chris Benoit, that’s where most in this thread probably found Chris Benoit. Actually, I think I found Benoit when WCW aired a Lyger v Wild Pegasus match on the Pro or some syndie (but point is found through Japanese work). But setting up this with his Wrestlemania win is a separate story. The mass of MSG that was chanting for Benoit and booing everything that HHH and HBK did weren’t tape watchers. That was MSG, not the Murphy Rec Center. My guess is that the MSG fans discovered Benoit in the WWF (some may have discovered in WCW and there may be pockets of folks who had discovered him in ECW but doubt even ten percent of MSG was made up of fans of NJ juniors). I also often make the mistake of mistaking me for a fair representative of basic wrestling tape trader nerdom. But my assumption is that the tape trading community didn’t see vindication in Benoit winning the WWF belt. JDW et al were all about shitting on Raven, DDP, Benoit as a watering down of Benoit’s skills. And HBK,HHH, Benoit was nothing if not a really watered down DDP,Raven, Benoit match. I don’t think I ever read the toa consensus on Mania. Not sure what Lorefice, or Kunze said but I can’t imagine anything positive. I may be completely off base in my assumptions about the tape trading community but I’m certain that my assumptions about MSG are correct. This whole section is really well done and anchors the whole piece. I think somewhere in the part where you explain the development of Hell in the Cell there should be some mention of the development of the really meta “showstopper” gimmick. Not tough guy overcoming the odds but rather guy sacrificing himself to put on spectacle for the fans. Not the traditional midcard workrate match but the “showstopper” that “deserves” to be in the main event. Because somewhere in this section is the reason that the MSG fans who had never seen a Wild Pegassus match were booing the match but cheering Benoit. Somewhere here is explanation of how Benoit went from guy who was presented in U.S. as a modernized Arn Anderson gimmick (blue collar non-flashy "hard working" guy for whom wrestling is his job) to the equation where being “hard working”= ratcheting up ”self destructiveness” for audience pleasure. Kevin Cook: I think it’s a mistake to praise Hogan and Nash because they have yet to have their hearts explode or kill their wives and children. If this happened three years ago would you be praising Luger, Nash and Hogan? Luger is currently living in a minister’s basement. Nash is a guy who was successful because of a combination of height and being likeable and gregarious backstage. Of course it’s wrestling where being likeable and gregarious means feeding Sunny feces as punishment for being too uppity. Reading the recent observer I wondered about the timeline as to when it was exactly that Benoit started to become paranoid about the possibility of loosing his job vis-à-vis when he started appearing regularly in the Observer as being one of the judges for backstage courts. For guy who was always into performance and not backstage politics, there was a point where he suddenly was appearing every week to be involved in protecting the backstage codes. Was he always doing that, and just their came to be a time when Meltzer decided that he needed to report it? Or did Benoit actually learn “the lessons of Nash” and realize that the way to make yourself valuable is to be central figure in locker room socialization? more cook: Somehow the Regal testimonial where he described Benoit as the person “Most dedicated and totally absorbed” to/in this fantasy world was the most creepy testimonial. I absolutely don’t want to come across as Keller but the one thing that felt missing from Loss’ “all angles” was some mention of the Vince goes boom angle from the week before. Its important detail for a couple reasons. If you go to the WWE timeline they write: The Benoit tribute wasn’t in keeping with company policy. It was very different. They canceled a live show, and aired old footage. Company policy is "the show must go on". The reason they broke from that is because a week earlier they had used a wrestler memorial format for dark humor as part of an angle. They essentially killed the gimmick and like any gimmick you can’t do it two weeks in a row. As Cook wrote at time “This show exhibited some real quick thinking in working up a new gimmick to portray solemn emotions. “ Cook and I and a bunch of folks have written before about the crassness of the tribute shows. The burying of guys show must go on stuff, and how fake it all is. In the June 25th Observer Meltzer does a nice job of pointing out the flaws in the Vince is killed angle. That while in terms of management it’s clear that those tributes weren’t real, that the emotions of some of the wrestlers and audience were real. And treating those real emotions as a joke is a way of going “Ha Ha we tricked you”. Benoit was a guy who according to Meltzer had a difficult time “coming to grips with justifying working in the WWE during the exploitation of the death of Guerrero”. An emotionally guarded person who took deaths very hard and let his guard down for the Eddie tribute ( ). The Vince goes boom tributes were a real outward manifestation to everyone who watched and participated that this was “all for nothing”. Again I don’t want to come across as Keller but I think the Vince angle is important to remember for context. Both in terms of explaining the nature of the WWE tribute show on the 25th and also for adding context to the way in which wrestling constantly toys with the margins of what are real and not real emotions. Toys with working the fans and toys with working the wrestlers themselves. There are other "angles" missing form the exploring from "all angles" post. As a lark on dvdvr I wrote a thing on WWE knowingly allowing physical hazing of women who fail to show proper deference to the male performers. In explaining the situation to one of his ex's, I know Phil has gone into underlying mysogyny and told the story of WWE celebrating the end of Austin's probation for spousal abuse by having him come center ring drink alot of beer and then beat up a girl for being unwilling to properly party with him. But really I don't think either of those is neccesary addition. Somehow the story of "Vince goes boom" and nature of wrestling tribute shows feels like ana actual missing piece. Loss again Cornette is as full of shit as anyone else in the biz but when he talks about the difference between the Condry/Eaton MX and the Lane/Eaton MX he always points to the idea that they were supposed to be doing different things. Condrey/Eaton were main event tag team that built matches around building heat, while Eaton/Lane were supposed to be in the midcard to semi-main as the workrate match that gave the audience lots of excitement. Both valuable roles, both respected. If you move the MX to main, they would work a different style than the one they work in a hot opener or exciting midcard match. I don’t think there has been a change in emphasis so much as change in card positioning. What’s necessitated where. Which is why I brought up the “Showstopper” earlier. Jingus says I’m not so sure about this as at least in WCW, Italian Stallion v. Benoit on the Pro was always a workrate sprint, while Sid v Benoit was a pretty methodical main event. But again that was WCW. As to the question of weight classes and drugs, I think Benoit looked his most ridiculously roided when he was in New Japan. There were poiints there where he looked like Davey Boy Smith.