Coffey

This match feels must watch. The truth is revealed. This was the strategy all along. Johnny has just been working us. Praise everything, even things that an overwhelming majority dislike. New Fantastic Four movie? Amazing! 5-Stars. A++ would watch again. Then when you dump on something, it has more merit.

Oh, man. Thank you for reminding me about this!

Miz is almost worthy of his own thread at this point. He seems to be one of the only people on the entire roster with genuine heat. EVERYONE hates The Miz, it's great. I wish Summerslam was tonight as I have nothing going on. Still two more weeks away. I need to watch some wrestling, as I've not done so outside of a bit of RAW last Monday.

Does WWE ever explain any of the nicknames they come up with for their wrestl...sorry, superstars? Bray Wyatt is "the eater of worlds." Why? Did they just think it would look good on a t-shirt? It sounds corny. Why is Randy Orton a Viper? Jake the Snake had a snake. Randy Orton...gets soundbytes on commentary. Sometimes I feel like WWE is one of those crappy Facebook quizzes where you choose two different numbers, one from the left coloumn and one from the right, to get your WWE nickname. "You rolled a four and a seven. Congratulations, you're the Lunatic Fringe!" My overall point: how are we supposed to get attached or care about anyone on the roster? There's not really anything captivating about the roster. No one to relate to. No one to "wow" us. It's either guys that can work or guys that can't. So I think Big Show & Kane suck but like Luke Harper and Rusev... Heel/Face doesn't even factor into the equation anymore. And now WWE, on their own TV, is referring to matches as "match of the year contenders." When the hell did that start happening? I feel like this is the natural progression of telling us that it's not wrestling but entertainment. So we don't get wrestling matches anymore, we get choreographed athletic exhibitions. Which it feels like that is what you're watching too. "Now it's time where we trade moves and kickouts for ten minutes until the crowd chants this is awesome."

I would honestly be fine with just shit-canning Smackdown, but I know WWE would never do that. The show just seems so pointless & unimportant. I mean, you can literally skip it every single week & not miss a single segment that matters.

The commentary is awful. WWE doesn't seem to care about their own history. WWE treats the fans like they're idiots. WWE perpetuates stereotypes, even in this day & age. The constantly camera cuts & bouncing camera effects are nausea inducing. The shows feel like commercials more than shows - as WWE is constantly trying to get anything and everything other that wrestling over at the expense of their wrestling show. Be it Twitter, YouTube, WWE App, whatever. Too many replays & commercial breaks mid-match on their TV shows. The show doesn't feel like it's changed in twenty years. Always opening with a 20 minute promo. Set still looking the same. Same colors, same ring, same everything. It just feels dated. WWE tries to manufacture organic feel at the expense of genuinely organic moments. I.E. trying to uber push Roman Reigns by killing Daniel Bryan. It just feels like they stopped listening to the fans. WAY too much bad acting, a lot of which coming from people higher-up (like Stephanie McMahon). Even-stevens booking just makes everyone look mediocre. Whenever the fans latch onto something, WWE beats you over the head with it until it's not cool anymore. I.E. "Fandangoing." I don't know how many things I can name if I were to keep going but yeah, there's a lot. Little things add-up.

He was still relevant in the pro-wrestling world. It wasn't like he had faded away into obscurity. He was doing talk shows and podcasts, he just had that stuff with Austin & Podcast One that was news. People have been talking about him very recently, so I reckon several people have had that experience.

I was talking on Facebook about racism in WWE today, over the Hulk Hogan stuff. Someone posted the Wrestlemania picture of Roddy Piper painted half black from his match with Bad News Brown. I went from laughing at that to three minutes later seeing he had died. It was pretty surreal.

I didn't even know he had cancer. EDIT: OK, now it says cardiac arrest.

Pretty sure I'm skipping any (and every) match with Anderson, Yano, Gallows, Tenzan, Takahashi, or Fale. Kinda indifferent on Kojima & Nagata...they used to be good. Makabe is really hit or miss for me. So is Elgin. I'm cool with Okada, Tanahashi, Homna, Ishii, Ibushi, Goto, Shibata, Naito, Nakamura & Styles. Any match that I'm missing by skipping those guys that I should seek out?

So, I'm just now starting the G1 Climax. One thing is for certain about NJPW: I can tell when people are taking a night off. Like all the opening tags from night one. Just nothing happening or going on at all. I feel like I wasted my time watching them. I could have saved an hour if I just skipped ahead. D'oh!

Steph looked a lot younger tonight too for some reason. She looked good. Good for her.

I'm thinking it's going to be Adam Rose in his old Leo Kruger gimmick. Especially after his cryptic tweet today.

It's crazy that pro-wrestlers still have that old school mentality of trying to "work through" so much stuff going wrong. Especially in a post-Benoit world & with all we have learned about concussions recently. I don't understand the rationality. I've never been so passionate about anything in my life where if I was told "stop or you might die" that I would keep wanting to do it. Let alone fucking work. Because although they might not always see it, at the end of the day, this is a goddamn job, that you pay your bills with.

Sounds like it's time to book The Hulkster as a guest star on Duck Dynasty.

I honestly feel like more than 60% of the roster fits into this category. I can't imagine most people, if they're flipping around the channels, are going to stop for Big Show or Kane, no. I also don't think they're stopping for people like Mark Henry, any of the tag guys, Fandango, Slater, etc. If you go to WWE.com and look at the Superstar page... it's as thin as I can ever remember it being. That's not saying that WWE doesn't have talent or there's not great workers there... but there's like an Erick Rowan, Fandango or Jack Swagger on every single page. Albert is still listed there. Jerry Lawler is listed. J&J are listed. It's a joke. A lot of the people on there aren't even active wrestlers or are hurt. It's just a bunch of expendable people & then like 5-6 guys spread thin throughout it. If Brock Lesnar left & John Cena got hurt, what the fuck would WWE do for the next six months? Because whatever the answer to that question is, that's probably what they should be doing right now. Cesaro, Rusev, Ambrose, Reigns, Wyatt...whatever. Losing to top guys & trading wins with each other helps no one. I like some of the guys around. I think PTP is fine. I like New Day... but are people going to tune in to watch them? A big problem with modern WWE is no one has that superstar feel. That's why you get WWE thinking they have to bring back guys like The Undertaker to slap them against guys like Brock Lesnar. Or when they bring back The Rock to defeat CM Punk. It's self-fulfilling prophecy: no one feels like a star, so they bring back old stars, which never makes new stars, so no one is ever a star. When the old stars stop coming back, what are you left with? They call-up a guy like Kevin Owens, make him look strong right out the gate, then spend the next couple months letting everyone know that Cena had it under control anyway. That's not how you make a star... but WWE is so worried about Cena losing his appeal (since then they would have nothing) that they just keep shooting themselves in the foot. WWE is complacent. WWE doesn't feel like they still take risks with the TV show anymore to me. It doesn't feel like a wrestling program anymore because it all feels too by-the-numbers & forced. Like you could make a layout/guideline of RAW and it would follow that same page every week with very little difference. Starting with the 15-20 minute opening promo that could be done in 2 minutes. When a new feud starts, I rarely even get excited, my first thought is usually "how many months will this run and who wins the third match when it's tied 1-1 after the first two?"

I'm not sure. I know on the Stone Cold Podcast with Vince McMahon, Vince said "wrestling is what my daddy did." Like it was a bad thing. Wrestlers have been re-branded to "superstars" or "sports entertainers." They don't even refer to the crowd as fans anymore. I can't imagine if the NBA were to act like it wasn't basketball anymore.

How long until we get reports that Kevin Dunn (or Vince McMahon, I guess) doesn't think she's pretty enough? Wasn't that why they didn't use Sexy Star after her tryout? Bayley is obviously plenty attractive of course, but it wouldn't shock me to read that.

I feel like I explain myself poorly. Let me try again: I miss when pro-wrestling was about the world of pro-wrestling - the matches, the angles, the stories & the characters. Everything was built around that. Most of the business decisions that WWE make now, seem to be trying to take them away to being anything other than pro-wrestling just to attempt to show how popular they are; to try to look more appealing to people that don't give a fuck (nor will they ever). I don't feel like they care about being pro-wrestling anymore. They care about ratings, merch sales, Network subscriptions, shareholders, App downloads, trends on Twitter, views on YouTube, video game sales, Susan G. Komen month, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Be-A-Star Campaigns & other shit instead so they can point to it and say "look at me, look at me!" It might as well be Lassie on the screen and their whole show would be exactly the same. Of course it's a business & they're trying to make money. That was never my intention to say that it wasn't. WWE will always be perceived by everyone else as a wrestling show. WWE is doing everything in their power to not be perceived that way when they should be embracing it instead.

I agree but I also think that's a big part of the problem. Everything doesn't have to be complicated, they just make it that way. Micromanaging everything down to the minute, being publicly traded, asking for so much money for TV renewal, leaving PPV & starting the Network, starting their own farm league like baseball franchises, having to appease network executives, etc. And WWE is the big fish in pro-wrestling, so when they do stuff, other people try to follow in their footsteps. Now NJPW is going public? Why? They have their own version of WWE Network now. I think I read they're starting some developmental initiative too? A lot of that stuff is business decisions but those decisions do effect the television product & the wrestling as well. Especially when things like TV ratings or merchandise sales factor into them writing/booking, or how WWE is seemingly so paranoid about a wrestler getting more over than the brand. WWE bends over backwards for the TV and USA but at the end of the day, still can't sell any ads. I won't act like I have a clue about any of the financials or the business side of things though. So I shouldn't talk about that. I just know that in 1980 or 2015, if you make a bad guy people wanna see get his ass kicked and a good guy that people wanna get behind and put them against each other, people will pay for it. I feel like we never even get THAT anymore, the most basic story. We have "cool" heels, and top babyfaces getting booed, and "shades of grey" tweeners & people with no heat trading wins on free TV and everyone just looks like a geek. Brock feels like a star for a reason. He's not wrestling on TV each week either.

Another bonus of jobber squashes? The job guys don't kick out of thirty fucking finishes.

RAW is 3-hours long, which is obviously WAY too long in 2015. That being said, all of RAW doesn't have to be wrestling matches. I mean, I'm not a subscriber to the "wrestling doesn't matter" Vince Russo philosophy or anything but the characters need more character, the stories need more story & the winners/losers need more consequences/repercussions. WWE doesn't feel like anything actually builds to a match anymore. It's more like Wrestler A beats Wrestler B. Then Wrestler B beats Wrestler A. So here's match #3 because it's one win apiece. Kevin Owens knew he was good enough to be on the main roster. Then he beat John Cena to prove it. Cena gave him props, said you're good, Owens didn't need his seal of approval...then Cena beats him twice and now Owens is just there and Cena is challenging Seth? There wasn't any direction. Although beating John Cena in his main roster debut was obviously huge, after a couple months, did it do more for his perception to the WWE audience than his debut squash over CJ Parker in NXT did to that audience?

I would love to see NXT live, especially one of their big shows. Lately, as in the past few weeks, NXT has been boring & lackluster but it's still probably my favorite current show. Just people have been called-up to the main roster, been hurt or were busy with Japan so the weekly TV has felt more rushed & less important. Brooklyn TakeOver would be a 900 mile drive for me, so that's obviously not feasible. I did see they were in Columbus, OH a few weeks ago though & my friends and I seriously considered it. We talked about it & if it was financially feasible, as that was like a 3 1/2 hour drive for us. If they ever come as close as say, Indy, I would be there. I've traveled to see ROH before farther away so I would def. go see NXT if it were closer. So if I were closer to Brooklyn or had tickets to Summerslam, I would be there for sure. I imagine there's quite a few people in that same boat.

I actually wish we had more non-established jobbers that could just go out & get crushed to help get someone (and their offense) over. Even the throwaway matches on RAW are superstar vs. superstar, which is a layover from the Monday Night Wars rating battle days and just makes everyone feel like they're not special. Why is Rusev Vs. Cesaro on free TV even happening in the first place, let alone them trading wins?

They're gonna turn Rusev babyface & put him back with Lana. That's what I feel this is all building up to. Dress Summer up as Lana because Rusev misses Lana. Lana fights Summer because she still likes Rusev & is jealous. Summer will turn on Rusev & Lana will fight her off. Just like Savage/Liz/Sherri. Rusev was left in a 3-v-1 tonight & ate all the offense. He's gonna get sympathy.