Coffey

No comments since Wednesday? No one watched Smackdown!? The Nia Jax entrance was gold. The Bloodline stuff with Roman & Solo continues & Jacob Fatu doing a beatdown in a walking boot was somehow more terrifying. He's so good! The Afa video package was nice.

There was so much good on this show! Orton hitting Gunther with the RKO, then the Drew/Punk brawl which looks to be setting up a strap match. The Dom/Liv/Rhea stuff, leading to the Damian brawl. Carlito was the shits, but whatever. The Bron entrance & the 2/3 falls match with Sami. Another Bronson murder. Those crazy bumps that JD took for Damian. WWE is just a lot of fun right now & they're doing it with a lot of new & a lot of young faces. They're using vets, like Truth and Orton, the help put over & establish those new & younger faces. It's just really entertaining & feels like pro wrestling again.

Wow. Shows how out of the loop I have been. That's awesome.

There should be a case study done on Jeff Jarrett, man. Like, he was just in the midcard during his WWF run & I couldn't stand him. He was boring during his solo push in the IC division but he was fine during his tag stuff with Owen Hart. In WCW, when they tried to make him a top guy, to me, it didn't work at all. To be fair though, most shit in WCW at that time wasn't any good, that wasn't just Jarrett. He's always been fine in-ring but outside of a catchphrase, his WCW run was pretty forgettable, but in smaller promotions, like TNA iMPACT or AEW, he really kinda moves into his own lane & becomes quite entertaining. His Double J Double M A stuff in TNA was a ton of fun & I've really liked his Last Outlaw stuff in AEW. I've never really liked The Stroke as a finish, regardless of who was using the move. The one in this match with Danielson was particularly bad but it's like, with all the issues he's had with concussions, I don't think anyone is blaming Dragon for not taking a better looking bump on the chair. I wouldn't be opposed to Jarrett going into the WWE HOF tbh.

It feels like Charlotte Flair has been gone forever. What's the timetable on her return? She's been gone since last December? I know that Charlotte has already pretty much done everything in WWE but the current champions being Liv Morgan & Nia Jax had me clamoring for her return.

The Big Dog

Wowwwww

The Bron Steiner Era

Dirty Dom! Lmfaoooo

He def got pipes.

I resubbed to Peacock for SummerSlam. So I guess modern WWE is more of a draw for me than the Olympics. Although admittedly, there's things on Peacock, like The Office, that my wife wanted as well, so it's fine. I'm hoping that Roman Reigns returns tonight. That story is enthralling to me. Priest/Gunther & Punk/McIntyre should be fun, too.

I kinda get pumped every time their music starts. It's fun. And honestly, I'm glad to see Nikki Cross doing something new. She got pretty over & was really fun with Alexa Bliss during the CoVid shows & was showing a lot of personality & then just... went away. Like her reward for being fun & dependable was getting buried. It was fuckin' odd, bud. Rowan has always had a pretty bad ass, intimidating look.

"The Immortal" Hulk Hogan was such a huge & instrumental part of not only my professional wrestling fandom but my childhood as a whole. Then, almost as if it were planned & lined-up purposefully, when I was a rebellious teenager years later, suddenly here is "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan playing the bad guy as the top dog in the coolest stable in wrestling during the next peak of the industry. THEN AFTER THAT we got the nostalgia Hulkster return run in WWE & his WrestleMania match with The Rock. Mainstream professional wrestling & WrestleMania as we know it was built off of his back. The man entertained me so many different ways for so many different years & it's all for naught. Not just for the racial tirade that pretty much made him dead to me & was absolutely unforgivable & enough for anyone & everyone to completely write him off forever. Not just for the awful comments he said after his son killed someone in a car crash. Not because of his star dimming & him scraping the bottom-of-the-barrel & doing shit like Comedy Central Roast as the "hey, remember him?" joke appearance. Not for all the lies & finding out as I grew out of childhood about all the drugs & excess. It was that every time I heard anything about the man, outside of the wrestling ring, it was always some negative "hey, this guy is a total piece of shit" news. Hell, now even the stuff you read about his time IN the ring, you read about all the "it doesn't work for me, brother" politics & shit. The Donald Trump appearance isn't exactly shocking - two shit peas in a shit pod - but it's still another paper in the file of The Unfortunate Hulkster. I'll always have Terry Funk.

Jacob Fatu is that guy. I wouldn't be surprised if when Roman returns, Fatu either joins Roman's side or replaces Solo.

Well, the professional wrestling industry must have finally passed me by. I am completely out of the loop. I have no idea who Stephanie Vaquer is. Never seen her before, or heard of her before & certainly haven't seen her work.

I really hope they take the cuffs off Jacob Fatu, especially when WWE gets on Netflix, and just let him go crazy. I've been waiting a long time for a bigger audience to see him. He has that same Samoa-Joe-ROH aura about him where you believe every single word he says, too.

How on earth did Indianapolis of all places get Royal Rumble, SummerSlam AND WrestleMania, all three? I used to live in Indiana, that's crazy. I hope some of my friends from back in Indiana get to go to any of these shows. This will be after WWE is officially on Netflix, too.

Tony Khan as an on-air character was inevitable. Shame.

I had an epiphany today. Bear with me, as I struggle to try to explain myself as I go: When I was a kid growing up, my favorite wrestlers, as you can probably imagine, were just the top pushed babyfaces. Over the years, a lot of nostalgia makes it so that I fondly remember the likes of Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior & Jake "The Snake" Roberts. I'm able to separate the performer from the person, because I learned a lot more about each person over the years & none of them turned out to be super great dudes. I got into Japanese wrestling thanks to the internet become more stable at the end of the 90's. With watching Japan, tape trading & what not, I got into guys like Terry Funk & Stan Hansen. Other greats as well, too, like Kawada, Misawa, Kobashi, etc., but it was the Americans wrestling in Japan that stuck with me. It was kind of surreal to see a guy like Vader mean so little in WWF when he was such a monster in Japan. Or Scott Norton in WCW compared to Japan. When the Monday Night Wars were going on, I loved Raven & I used to really enjoy the Goldberg squash matches. Sting coming down to fight off all of the nWo by himself & hitting the Scorpion Death Drop on someone was must-see TV for me. I was real big into ECW in the late 90's too. Especially when they finally got their PPVs in my areas. I instantly became a fan of Rob Van Dam, The Dudley Boyz (who had the best finish I had ever seen!) and many more. So when my friends & I were talking, since most of us have been watching wrestling since the late 80's, we were talking about our favorite wrestlers over the years. I had my childhood favorites. I had my teenager favorites. I had my tape trading favorites & guilty pleasure wrestlers & all sorts of many guys from over the years, from all over the world. WWF, ECW, WCW, Japan... Then I realized, man, I never really give the proper respect to all the Indie wrestling I've watched over the years. Samoa Joe, despite wrestling in TNA, AEW & WWE, made me a believer because of his ROH run & the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I think Samoa Joe, just based off of the strength of his Ring of Honor run, is one of my favorite wrestlers. There was a time when I think ROH was the best promotion on the planet. Their roster was stacked. You had American Dragon, Jamie Noble, Homicide, Punk, Nigel, etc. all these crazy good wrestlers - many of which went on to much bigger things - and you had Samoa Joe holding down the fort. Looking like the ultimate bad ass. Sounding like the ultimate bad ass. Putting on a ton of good, believable, strong style matches. I still have the Joe Vs. Kobashi ROH DVD. It's a shame that Joe spent so long in TNA & got hurt because he deserved to have a bigger platform for a longer time but I'm glad he got his run in WWE & his run in AEW. Now that he's passed the torch to Swerve, I just wanted to give Joe his flowers because I feel like I've overlooked him a bit & he's one of the all-time greats, even if his peak was on the Indies.

He can barely walk... Just hang it up.

I'm glad that Nyla, at least on the outside, is taking it in stride because that's super fucking shitty. I wouldn't blame AEW if they never went back to Oklahoma ever again. Shit like that should cost the state business, straight up.

Good. I'm happy for him. He's not awful & he has a great look & size. If WWE are going to do the Uncle Howdy stuff with Bo, getting Rowan back is smart. I like Sek's suggestions of Braun & Alexa too. They might not be able to do The Wyatt 6 anymore but it's more intriguing to me without The Fiend. I mean, maybe the idea was to do like the movie Split with The Fiend being The Beast? It would be interesting if WWE were to bring in someone like Raven for creative for it. He had some pretty off-the-wall albeit similar storyline ideas in the past. I remember him talking about that Seven storyline that was on Sunday Night Heat forever.

I know it's faux pas to say nowadays but Hook is just too fucking small. He's not Rey Mysterio. He looks like a literal teenager, and the suspension of disbelief is out the window. It's not like he's doing a Danhausen gimmick, he's trying to be Taz without any of the aura. Taz was small, yes, but he was built like a tank & when he choked people out, it was believable. Hook has NONE of that. I'm not sure WWE would even be interested in him. I don't see him being marketable like Jade is.

I don't get WWE being stingy with all the money that they're rolling in lately. It's the same reason they lost Sasha Banks. Just pay it, you can afford it. Per Google: WWE posted revenue of US$331.2 million in Q4 2023 Like? How much did Austin ask for? Sure, $3M for a 2-minute run-in is probably insane but they could have done it...

Jesus, this company is nothing but weak-willed, petty fucking man children.