Coffey

Anyone that listens to Observer Radio, I assume. I actually prefer him over Dave Meltzer, myself. Although both of them have their pros and cons.

You're the best troll. :-)

I'm going to go ahead & go out on a limb & suggest that anyone disagreeing with me didn't actually pay for the show. And no offense, but if you stole the show, just read results of the show, or didn't watch the show, you're going to have a different mentality than someone that paid fifty bucks to watch it.

If they weren't going to put Ryback over, then they shouldn't have put Ryback in the match in the first place. They panicked because Cena got hurt & instead of going all the way with their decision, they half-assed it & ended up making things worse. THAT is dying days WCW. I don't know what the answer is but it's definitely not making both the wrestlers look worse & pissing off your fans.

They should have just had Ryback win clean over Punk in the middle with his finish in about five minutes, in my opinion. I'm of the Mark Madden defense, I guess. Wrestling ability doesn't matter in professional wrestling & honestly, it never has. It's not about how great a worker you are or how many snowflakes Dave Meltzer gives you when talking about your last match like it's a gymnastic vault. Ryback is a new act, pretty hot & WWE should have gave it a shot. The length of Punk's reign doesn't matter. Hell, his whole reign hasn't mattered. He's still "not John Cena." It's all about making money & the ratings are the lowest they've been in fifteen years, so WWE obviously needs to do something. Naming a new General Manager isn't the answer. Bringing Vince McMahon back to television isn't the answer. Sticking to the status quo is obviously not the answer. So we're just going to keep the belt on Punk so he can lose to The Rock in three months & hope that the ratings don't keep going down? Where does that get us? Punk having a long reign doesn't matter. What, he's going to use it as a bragging point during some promos? Who gives a shit. That doesn't sell tickets. People might actually pay for an unstoppable monster on top. Even if Ryback is the drizzling shits, who cares? It's worked before, it could work again. Instead, all they did was make Ryback & Punk both look worse AND piss off their paying fans on top of that, in a time when the fans are leaving in droves & WWE doesn't have any stars. That's some dying days WCW shit. I kind of wish WWE could get a restart for the whole year. Go back & have John Cena beat The Rock at Wrestlemania & lose to Brock Lesnar & Extreme Rules. That would have been a good starting place. Also don't kill Daniel Bryan in 18 seconds. How different is this year if Brock Lesnar, the former UFC champion, is the unbeatable monster?

A few questions that I had from watching tonight's show that you people might be able to help me with: - Is Mark Henry ever coming back? When The Big Show won the title & cut his backstage promo daring anyone to challenge him, I thought that would be a great time for Mark Henry to walk into camera. - Why does Matt Striker not wrestle anymore? Did he have a concussion or an injury or something that ended his career? - Has anyone else noticed how bored & uninspired Jim Ross has been since his return? It's like he doesn't want to be there at all.

The best part is ADR flapping him arms coming off the top rope like Wyle E. Coyote just fell off a cliff.

Well, that's OK. That make sense. I've noticed in the past that pretty much everything you like I hate & everything I hate you like. So it's not surprising. :-)

Yeah, I was actively groaning & annoying my company so I left the room to get a snack & some drinks. Then came back just in time to see the botch. I think Ricardo is actually more entertaining than both Del Rio or Orton & JBL on commentary was better than both of those guys too. I feel like ADR doesn't give a fuck & is destined to get fired for running his mouth sooner than later to go back to Mexico & I don't think WWE will ever put their eggs in the Orton basket again due to him already having two strikes. So, yeah, to me it was boring & completely pointless. Orton just stalls like he's Rob Van Dam in ECW. Del Rio is just painfully boring. They didn't even have a fucking story either. I mean, I don't watch Smackdown to be fair, but I asked my company what they were feuding for & one guessed that it was a #1 contenders match but he wasn't sure & the other said he had no idea but "at least it's not shampoo." Hard to care about a match that doesn't mean anything between two guys that don't mean anything in a sloppy match in front of a dead crowd. But I guess at least the finish was cool? I mean if I had to rate it, it's like *1/2 So yeah, dreadful. Or any other worse adjectives you can think of.

This could work..or it could backfire & make the Goldberg chants even louder. It's hard to tell with the crowds nowadays. I could say a lot about this show, almost all of it negative. The majority of the things that people can find a silver-lining it, I absolutely loathed. The first three matches, for example, were fucking dreadful & if I didn't have company over, I would have shut it off. Plus, how many unadvertised matches did we get? That Prime Time Players match felt like it was never going to fucking end. And not only did you get the main event fuck finish, they had a tag team title tournament for a month to crown #1 contenders & then on PPV that match ends in DQ too. Just sloppy.

I hated it when WCW ended PPV's with fuck finishes in 1998 & I still hate it in WWE in 2012. Especially when it's $50 to see it.

I liked the leg work in The Miz match. I liked the second half of Show/Sheamus. Gabriel/Cesaro was good enough for what it was. Disliked everything else.

I think that the majority of these are problematic but not all of them. Divas are fine, whether they're wrestling or eye candy. Female valets have always pretty much been a staple of American wrestling. I don't care about that. Overexposure is definitely a real thing though, as are the star vs. star matches as I think they tie-in to one another. When you have that much programming to fill, and you don't really run jobber matches, you burn through all of your potential PPV matches very quickly. Hell even if you didn't give away things on free TV, there's so much PPV a year you would still run through it all fairly quickly. The death of kayfabe is harder to gauge for me, honestly. With the internet being so big now, I think that was inevitable. Granted wrestlers didn't have to agree to do shoot interviews or have Twitter accounts but I don't think the industry could have really done anything to stop it completely. The authority figure is one of my biggest complaints about the shows. Yes, before the Mr. McMahon character, we still had authority figureheads, like President Jack Tunney but we didn't have the entire focus of the company based around him, like they did with Mr. McMahon, Eric Bischoff or even A.J. Lee. Now it has become such a booking crutch that I don't think WWE would know how to write TV without being able to use it. "How can we set up a match without a GM announcing it!?" It's like everyone went fucking retarded. As S.L.L. said in the Current WWE thread, & Loss & others have said in the past, I think the biggest problem is that nothing means shit. Wins/Losses don't matter. Titles don't matter. Feuds don't matter. The shows themselves don't matter. I can't even tell the difference between the last eight Wrestlemania shows. I literally had to look them up to see what the card for them even was & after reading them, I STILL don't remember them. Just complete waste of time. I sure as shit still remember like Wrestlemania 3-8...but I can't remember the non-main event card from last year? Really? That says more about WWE than it does about me. Randy Orton won a 3-way, beating John Cena & Triple H in the same match to win a top title. Who knew!? I sure as fuck don't remember that...and I watched it live. Hell, I just looked it up a couple of hours ago & if I had to take a quiz, I would still have to guess which 'Mania it was on. But those we're just examples. You do understand the point, let's not try to act like you don't. You want me to name more examples? It's not about each one specifically, or individually, it's about all of them collectively. For every Steve Austin beer bath, there's a GTV or "Choppy choppy your pee-pee." Hell, I would argue that the bad far outweighs the good. Pretty Mean Sisters featuring Meat? Naked Mideon? Hell, half the shit people have forgotten about completely because they've blocked it out. They'll remember Trish barking like a dog because it gets brought up a lot. The J.O.B. Squad? Gillberg? The Oddities featuring Golga & his Eric Cartman South Park doll. What about Los Boricuas feuding with D.O.A.? Or Shane McMahon being the toughest kid on the block bringing in the Mean Street Posse? Kane telling people to "suck it" with a voice box. Who can forget Puke!? Or The Truth Commission? The Godfather's Ho: former Hardcore Champion.

Despite being the most popular era in wrestling, featuring the Monday Night Wars & some of the biggest stars ever in Goldberg, Rock & Austin, am I crazy if I think that the Attitude Era did more harm than good for the industry as a whole? Because when I read about people talking fondly about the era, they're always talking about only the peaks, remembering the highs, never remembering the valleys, or the lows. It's always talking about the nWo, or Austin Vs. McMahon, or Foley Vs. The Rock. Where's all the remembering of Beaver Cleavage, or B.B. the nurse? But to me, it's not even really about the talent, or the matches. It's about the long-term implications that the era had on not only the fans but on modern wrestling as well. There's a reason that WWE keeps going back to stars of the past. There's a reason why fans still give a shit about the ratings. There's a reason why WWE '13 features an "attitude" mode & why people point to a lack of blood or TV-PG as potential problems. So, without me writing too much initially, just to get this topic going, what are you views and opinions on the Attitude Era and the Monday Night Wars. How do you think they impacted wrestling & what do you think are the lingering effects that we're still feeling today?

Well now I just want S.L.L. to write about the real problems facing WWE. Don't leave us hanging!

So now Vickie Guerrero is the "managing supervisor" of Monday Night RAW. So is that above or below General Manager?

Other than "be tall" is there anything Daniel Bryan can't do?

I just read that Mike Graham committed suicide and is dead. Can anyone confirm this from more credible sources, please? (if true it probably deserves its own thread but I don't want to get ahead of myself or anything) http://www.prowrestling.net/artman/publish...e10027926.shtml

Taker never shows up until around Royal Rumble time anyway. He's pretty much retired sans keeping his WM streak going.

Wow, I even posted in the thread. My, I have done a 180 on Steen since a year ago. Coincidentally, I was specifically thinking of Jumbo & Liger & Dylan, in the very first reply, said Jumbo. So at least I know I'm not alone! EDIT: vvv I haven't even seen enough Tenryu to form an opinion of him. All I've seen from him has been garbage but he's been a broken down man in all of 'em.

Which speculative matches are you referring too? Because I know that I personally could not give a rat's ass about a John Cena Vs. Rock re-match, that's for sure. Nor a Brock Lesnar Vs. Triple H re-match. But Punk/Taker or Cena/Taker or Punk/Austin would all interest me.

Alright, well, I would like to list some, although I'll be taking the Flik approach & not trying to put them into order based on favorite, I'll just do it chronologically. Keep in mind that these are favorite matches, not best matches. Some matches were just really instrumental in my fandom during different points in my life. Especially ECW when I was in high school & still in mega-mark mode or when I was a child & a Hulkamaniac. I am never going to be stranded on a deserted island & if I were, I would not have any power or a DVD player & a television anyway! To be fair, I think this paragraph only exists as a defense mechanism anyway as no one wants to have their opinions be called out, but I highly doubt anyone is going over each list with a fine-toothed comb anyway. Hulk Hogan Vs. André the Giant; WWF (3/29/87) Hulk Hogan Vs. "Macho Man" Randy Savage; WWF (4/2/89) Ric Flair Vs. Terry Funk; WCW (7/23/89) The Hulkamaniacs: Hulk Hogan, Demolition & Jake Roberts Vs. The Million $ Team: Ted DiBiase, The Powers of Pain & Zeus; WWF (11/23/89) Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake Vs. Mr. Perfect; WWF (4/1/90) Hulk Hogan Vs. The Ultimate Warrior; WWF (4/1/90) The Steiner Brothers Vs. The Nasty Boyz; WCW (10/27/90) The Ultimate Warrior Vs. "Macho Man" Randy Savage; WWF (3/24/91) "Macho Man" Randy Savage Vs Shawn Michaels; WWF (4/14/92) Sting's Squadron Vs. The Dangerous Alliance; WCW (5/17/92) Bret "Hitman" Hart Vs. "The British Bulldog" Davey Boy Smith; WWF (8/29/92) Stan Hansen Vs. Toshiaki Kawada; AJPW (2/28/93) Stan Hansen Vs. Kenta Kobashi; AJPW (7/29/93) Shawn Michaels Vs. Razor Ramon; WWF (3/20/94) Mitsuharu Misawa Vs. Toshiaki Kawada; AJPW (6/3/94) Akira Taue & Toshiaki Kawada Vs. Mitsuharu Misawa & Kenta Kobashi; AJPW (6/9/95) Bret "Hitman" Hart Vs. "Stone Cold" Steve Austin; WWF (3/23/97) "The Franchise" Shane Douglas Vs. Taz; ECW (1/10/99) Rob Van Dam Vs. Jerry Lynn; ECW (3/21/99) Rob Van Dam Vs. Scotty Anton; ECW (7/16/00) "Stone Cold" Steve Austin Vs. The Rock; WWF (4/1/01) Eddie Guerrero Vs. Brock Lesnar; WWE (2/15/04) Samoa Joe Vs. Kenta Kobash; ROH (10/1/05) The Undertaker Vs. Shawn Michaels; WWE (4/5/09) The Undertaker Vs. Shawn Michaels; WWE (3/28/10) John Cena Vs. Batista; WWE (4/25/10) C.M. Punk Vs. John Cena; WWE (7/17/11) Kazuchika Okada Vs Hiroshi Tanahashi; NJPW (2/12/12) Kazuchika Okada Vs. Tetsuya Naito; NJPW (4/3/12) John Cena Vs. Brock Lesnar; WWE (4/29/12) Hiroshi Tanahashi Vs. Minoru Suzuki; NJPW (10/8/12) I will say that this thread gave me an interesting idea for a new thread subject, which I am way too lazy to write right now. Not necessarily guilty pleasures, but more smark darlings that you can't get into. There are a few guys that are universally praised that I can just not get into, no matter how much of their stuff I watch. They just don't entertain me & in some cases, bore the fuck out of me.

I think making a list for me, personally, would be way too hard. That being said, props to you both, above me, for being able to do so. However, just yesterday I was talking to a buddy of mine via e-mail & he asked me what my favorite Wrestlemania match of all-time was. We talked for a couple of hours & reminded each other of matches. Talked about Hart/Austin, Savage/Steamboat, Austin/Rock, HBK/Taker, etc. At the end of the conversation though, I was pretty sold on being able to say that my favorite was Warrior/Savage & I still believe that. Not just because of the work itself but because of the story leading into the match & the post-match soap opera. It really got me to think about the differences between wrestling promotions and cultures. I can't get that from Puro, as an example, because it's more of a sport & there's a language barrier. I was emotionally invested in the story that WWF had presented & it drew me in. So, if I were to make a list, I think I would have to have a way to include categories. Because although some of the best matches, bell-to-bell, that I have seen in my life come from Japan, sometimes it's not just the bell-to-bell solely that makes something memorable, fun & enjoyable.

Re-watched Richards/Elgin from ROH Showdown in the Sun. I mean, I know I was tipsy the first time I watched it but holy shit, on re-watch, yeah, that match is nowhere near my MOTYC list anymore. Not after the stuff I've seen from NJPW this year. UGH.

What do you mean what happened to him? He's still around. He wrestled Hirooki Goto on the iPPV. He's the NJPW Intercontinental Champion too.