Coffey

Says more about the shitty NXT fans than the booking, honestly. Bobby Roode is over because of his theme song, so...

He's a jobber. Just so happens that his gimmick got over with the NXT fans, much like Blue Pants. He's just simply in the role that CJ Parker used to fill but he left, so now we get Tye.

Yes to Dunn/Bate from the UK Tournament. No to Dunn/Andrews from the UK Tournament. No to Goto/Shibata from Wrestle Kingdom...but it's really close. HARD NO to Kushida/Takahashi from Wrestle Kingdom

The problem is Parv and none of you will say it. He's been here a long time & contributed a lot but at this point, he's purposely just trying to piss people off. Look at the Jimmy Snuka thread. Look what he did during GWE. Look at the Puro Vs. Lucha thread. It's just him shitting on people & acting like everyone else is stupid.

I'm surprised with as big as WWE is that they don't do more with music. Some of those old themes, either written by Johnson (I think that is his name) or Jimmy Hart, were pretty over & still inspire some nostalgia. WWE have some bands that do some themes for some of the talent. But why do they not have more original music that they make & compose for their wrestlers that aren't just instrumental? Like, Samoa Joe's theme song, for example, is terrible. And, to me, it really takes away from his aura when he's coming out to what sounds like free domain music off of YouTube. The best thing that ever happened to Mark Henry was getting the Three Six Mafia theme.

Snuka, for me, was more about moments than matches. The Cage leaps, the Piper's Pit coconut, that sort of thing.

What a tremendous, amazing & entertaining show. WWE took 16 people that I didn't know anything about and over the course of two days, made me care about who won & who lost, made me buy into false finishes & made me care about the storyline(s) of the tournament. Michael Cole was great. Dunne and Bate were great. Just good, old fashioned professional wrestling. 2017 has been awesome for being a wrestling fan so far.

Pete Dunne, Tyler Bate, Wolfgang & Danny Burch all made a positive impression on me. Devlin seems quite green/bad. Looked like they blew that finish to me which would explain Burch losing. Maybe that's why Dunne attacked his second round opponent? They can do an angle where the cheap shot blinded him in one eye, so he can't be medically cleared & Burch takes his spot? I don't know. I'm hoping we get Bate/Dunne as that would probably be the best match from these guys - but I say that with my knowledge of each only being what I saw during the first round of this tournament today. I can't believe Tyler Bate is only 19.

I'm also saying No to Okada/Omega. That's not what I want my pro-wrestling to be & not what I want the future of pro-wrestling to look like. We don't need 50-minute "epic" matches where moves like a Guardrail Elevated DDT to the Concrete, A Springboard Moonsault into the crowd and a Top Rope Dragon Suplex don't mean shit. Meanwhile, after two Tombstones, the match ends with a Shortarm Clothesline. We also don't need a bunch of pro-wrestlers trying to recreate or worse, one-up that match. I actually think, if anything, that match hurts pro-wrestling. Just like Mankind being thrown off of Hell In A Cell.

Absolutely second this. Best of the card to me and probably my favorite match in the Dome since they started calling it Wrestle Kingdom.

"That must be an American joke because I don't get it!" - Rusev

Ship their worthless asses back to Japan. No idea why WWE brought them in in the first place.

Why can a good near fall not exist from a Powerslam, Russian Leg Sweep, Spinebuster, Neckbreaker or Backbreaker? Why does it always have to be some ridiculous, outlandish spot to get the fans to buy into the near fall? The crowds need reconditioned. I was watching an old WCW Monday Nitro on the WWE Network yesterday and over the course of the show, several matches ended and all of the finishes were believable. Wallstreet beat Mike Enos with a Samoan Drop after Ted DiBiase distracted Enos. Chris Jericho defeated Bobby Eaton after Eaton missed the Alabama Jam, then Jericho hit a Superkick followed up by a Missile Dropkick. These aren't generic moves and the finishes were believable. The crowds nowadays have just continually been reconditioned over and over again throughout the years. We had Mick Foley being thrown off of Hell in a Cell and then the match continuing. Then he gets Chokeslammed through the Cell and that doesn't end the match either. We had a lot of the craziness that was ECW. Nowadays we have a whole bunch of Money in the Bank ladder matches that try to keep one-upping the last insane highspot. Shane McMahon, not that long ago, just jumped off of a Cell again. So of course in non-gimmick matches the wrestlers feel like they have to do a ton of craziness to get the crowd to notice. There is at no time in pro-wrestling history that a freakin' Top Rope Dragonplex should be a 2-count. That's insane. But here we are. The first time I ever saw a Moonsault was by the Great Muta in the late 80's. It blew me away. I had never seen anything like that. It was incredible. Then the years go by and you see Shawn Michaels do a Moonsault, and Hugh Morrus on Nitro and 60-year-old Terry Funk in ECW, and awful-ass Blue Meanie... and then when you see a Moonsault in 2017, suddenly you don't really care anymore. Look at the DDT. When you have Torrie Wilson doing a DDT in pillow fight matches, it's hard to remember the days of when Jake Roberts was killing people with it. No one seems to care about protecting moves anymore. Everyone wants to keep trying to up the ante. It's frustrating. Wrestling is becoming about the moves for the "ooh" and "awe!" from the crowd instead of about the story or psychology. A bunch of people wrestling like Kurt Angle where they think the hell with selling, I gotta get my next spot in.

Here's what I don't get and something that I was talking with a buddy about today: when we were kids, growing up in the 80's & the early 90's, the top guys at the time, at least in WWF which was the TV we got locally, were wrestlers like Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior. When we were teenagers, in the late 90's and even through the early 2000's, the top guys were wrestlers like Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock. If you were a kid that grew up in that era, either era, and you fell in love with pro-wrestling to the degree that you wanted to become a pro-wrestler yourself, why are so many modern wrestlers marks for highspots? I just saw an animated .gif on Twitter of a dude at an Indy show doing a Top Rope Moonsault Styles Clash in front of about maybe two-hundred people. I just don't get it. It's so stupid to me. You're willing to risk your health and your opponents health on something that risky for basically no money in front of no one? Hogan, Warrior, Austin & Rock all made bank. And it appears as if the majority of wrestlers on the Indies today grew up as bigger fans of wrestlers like the Luchadores on WCW Monday Nitro (whom were all basically job guys to the stars), some ECW wrestlers (that were a lot of garbage) or WWF guys like Jeff Hardy. Nowadays, someone like Braun Strowman gets a bad rap because he's a big hoss whereas someone like Kenny Omega gets called the greatest wrestler alive because he's doing Moonsaults into the crowd and top rope Dragon Suplexes. I'm starting to feel like Kevin Nash over here as I don't fucking get it. We need more wrestlers like The Revival and less wrestlers cosplaying as highspot Shawn Michaels.

For me, there's usually a lot of outside factors too. Did I watch the show in person, or on TV? Did I watch it live, or after the fact? Did I go into the match ignorant, or had I already read what people were saying about it? Did I watch it alone, or did I have company over? Was it a match in a vacuum, or as part of an entire event I watched? Was it from years ago, or recent? Even shit like watching a match when I'm hungry can affect how I view it sometimes. I can be more cranky and thus jaded.

As long as the internet has been around, within the confines of the wrestling community or not, you will have people that vary wildly in their opinions. The nature of the internet, due to anonymity sometimes, leads to some pretty outlandish remarks. If a bunch of people say that a match is great, you saying it is "pretty good" suddenly becomes something that people can attack. If a bunch of people say a match is great, you saying it is "the greatest ever" suddenly gets people on your side & talking about you. Like Meltzer's bullshit 6-star rating. But if you think a highly praised match was "just OK" or "not my cup of tea" or whatever, suddenly you're the bad guy & there's something wrong with you & your opinion is wrong. Some people relish on being the bad guy & I think purposely try to get people against them for attention. It's hard to tell the difference between someone being a troll, or someone with a legitimately varied opinion. Especially in a text-based medium, or when you're limited to 140 characters, and you can't look them in the eye. PWO is no different.

...for a 2-count.

I can't wait until JvK and Meltz get into it 'cause Meltz thinks he's just being contrarian by not giving it six stars! This has been a great couple of days of wrestling banter.

I can not wait until you finally get to review Okada/Omega. Just from reading what you said about the KUSHIDA match, I know it's going to be glorious.

Almost as funny as seeing all the people lose their shit on Twitter over Dave's opinion. I unfollowed nearly all the wrestling based accounts I had been following on Twitter just after Christmas bar Meltzer and a couple of people who are involved in the business and automatically feel better for having done so. Wrestling twitter is such a weird place and I'm so glad I don't have to read the majority of that nonsense any more. People take Dave's ratings seriously. I don't think that's something to take for granted on his part. He's one of the few people that when they speak, people listen. I personally think everyone is biased including myself and do think Dave has always been a fan of the current style. I never thought of Dave as a TMZ guy who wants to troll for headlines and I hope that's not the case here. I legit hope he is really to defend his rating or he's going to lose credibility. But holy fuck is it frustrating to be a wrestling fan if that is the new crown jewel of wrestling. Yes because now all future matches are going to try to be like that match. So I hope you like having six-thousand moves, none that mean shit, kicking out of all of them and 50-minute epics again. Top Rope Dragon Suplex. 2-count! Same stupid fucking shit that people killed Davey Richards over but it's in Japan, so it's six stars now. If it were just Dave Meltzer's opinion and he was an everyday dude, no one would care, myself included. But his opinion has influence. Even over some wrestlers in the business. This is definitely going to affect things. People will want to try to one-up this match and get Dave to give them SEVEN stars! If it features the Young Bucks, it has a shot~!

I feel like it took me a long time to even be able to admit to myself that I have a style of wrestling that I prefer. I'm also a pretty pessimistic & negative person in general, so whenever there's a lot of praise for something, it's going to be rare that I'm a part of that group anyway. With the Wrestle Kingdom show, I did genuinely & truly love the Tanahashi/Naito match & think it was the best I've seen Tanahashi look. I have company coming over tonight to watch the show & I can't wait to watch that match again & to gauge the reaction of my friends. After that show aired however all of the post-show reaction that I'm seeing & reading is people arguing over if Okada/Omega was great or not & I just feel so bad because Tanahashi/Naito are going to get lost in the scuffle of bickering. So I'm in an odd spot right now where I'm the positive person trying to praise a match... but it's not the match everyone is talking about. In a similar way to how when you go outside of PWO wrestling fans will sing the praises & talk about how great Shawn Michaels & Kurt Angle are. Even if you initially are trying to praise someone else, like Stan Hansen or Terry Funk, eventually you start bad mouthing Michaels & Angle instead (at least if you're anything like me). I don't want to get caught in that trap again.

There was a time when as a wrestling fan, not only did I never miss a show but I could remember all the cards that I had watched too. I could name off, at the very least, the main event of each of the big shows from the main companies. You ask me to name the main event of Wrestlemania from 2000-2016 and I don't think I could name even half of them. Just... doesn't register anymore. I'm older and probably more forgetful but there's so much more wrestling nowadays and it all seems to mean so much less. The Undertaker losing his streak felt like a big deal because it was such a long-lasting thing. So there was a shock value that it actually ended. But match wise, for at least fifteen years for me, things barely register at all. I remember really liking the Wyatt Family Vs. The Shield from Elimination Chamber in 2013 or whenever it was. 2014 maybe but wrestling is just more forgettable nowadays to me. Maybe it is just because we're getting older. Or because we've seen too much. Or hell, I don't know. It might also just be that shit isn't as memorable/good anymore. I still remember when Shawn Michaels turned on Jannetty on The Barbershop & threw his ass through the window but if that happened on RAW today, it would be forgotten two segments later. They just move on like it didn't matter.

We're just getting older, man. That's how it goes. I lost my mind listening to and reading people trying to say that Steph Curry was better than Michael Jordan in the NBA or that Larry Bird was overrated. Nowadays in pro-wrestling, I see people trying to tell me that Kevin Owens, The Young Bucks or Seth Rollins are great and I just don't see it or get it. There's a formula used in wrestling nowadays that always garners the "this is awesome!" BS. Basically when you start trading finishers & kicking out of everything. I dislike that formula & it seems I'm in the minority on that dislike. So yeah, I feel alienated to a degree.

I summarized it like this: in my mind, there's two kinds of fans. The fans that love Kevin Owens and think he's great... and the fans that don't. If you love Kevin Owens and his style, you would love Okada/Omega... because that's exactly what it was. It was a 50-minute Kevin Owens match. Just hit every big move you can think of and then kick out of all of them over and over again. Okada hit a guardrail elevated DDT on the concrete outside the ring at like the seven minute mark or something and the match went on another forty minutes after that. Just not my kinda wrestling. It feels like the old Ring of Honor that I couldn't stand where people were taking a Superplex onto a guard rail for a 2-count. Less is more.

I didn't love Omega/Okada. I can see it's going to be a very divisive match among fans. To me, it felt more like a 2007 ROH match than a main event Wrestle Kingdom Tokyo Dome NJPW match. It was like a 50-minute Kevin Owens WWE match. Kenny Omega is too corny for me as a main event guy. I've never gotten the love for The Young Bucks either though, so it's obviously not geared toward me. I'm happy that I got the Naito/Tanahashi match and if people loved Okada/Omega I'm happy they got that too.