Coffey

Kross has been painfully mediocre for the entirety of his career. You take away Scarlett & he's just another Michael Elgin or Mike Bennett.

I watched this match, which you can see in full now on youtube, it's good! I watched the PPV tonight & it was really good too! They made Brody King look like a monster. I liked both enough that I splurged and bought an ROH hat.

NBA Finals Game 3 is tonight, with Scott Foster as one of the refs. Notorious for having an anti-Chris Paul agenda. Phoenix leads the series 2-0. After game 5, if the series goes that long, the Maria Taylor contract drama comes into play with ESPN & all the drama over her & Rachol Nichols. WWE writers can't even compete with the NBA in terms of storyline anymore, let alone action. I realize that RAW isn't until tomorrow but it needed to be said.

Living in Indiana, I also have the constantly terrified Jesus freaks. When The Passion of the Christ movie came out, we literally had a dude walking around town, wearing a crown of thorns & literally strapped to & dragging a full-size 9'-10' cross like he was heading to his crucifixion. We had crazy moms with protest signs boycotting the opening of a Hot Topic in the mall. It was going to corrupt our children, you see. Same thing when an adult store was opening because of course sex toys & protection leads to the depths of Hell. Magic: The Gathering the card game was banned from schools due to the "Satanic imagery." People literally thought & talked about, openly, that Barack Obama, during his presidential campaign, was the anti-Christ. Until recently, like literally within the last two or three years, you still couldn't buy alcohol on Sundays. You know because alcohol leads to sin & Sunday is the Lord's day or something. Don't even get me started on Planned Parenthood. Everything suddenly becomes "the devil" when they're trying to get it removed, banned, appealed, ran off, whatever. There's a different level of batshit fucking crazy when you bring Religion into the fold as well. Fear + Religion is a bad mix. Take Drake Wuertz in example... he's not just crazy, he's religiously crazy, which is fucking dangerous. Honestly, if you've ever seen the movie The Mist, the crazy religious lady getting a following & power that quickly? That shit is scary. I really don't think it's that far-fetched to think we would only be a couple of bad days away from another Salem witch trial or turning our country into Handmaid's Tale. When the internet was first coming out & first getting into homes, even with dial-up, I remember thinking how great it was that people could look up things whenever they wanted in real time. I thought it would make everyone more educated. I didn't think about the spreading of misinformation & that spawning a growing population. I was naïve. It gave conspiracy theorists & misinformation moguls a platform to spread their ignorance with anonymity.

I'm confident that today assisted-living 77-year-old Terry Funk & brought back from literal death 71-year-old Jerry Lawler could work a match that would show up 85-90% of both the WWE & AEW rosters combined. Those two men have been so good for so long... even when their bodies quit on them, it would be second nature.

I found it interesting on the Drive-Thru this week that it was seemingly the first time either Jim or Brian had heard the Jericho rant after his match with Rob Van Dam in 2002 that he posted online. I remember that being a pretty big topic when it first happened. Good ol' fragile ego Jericho blaming the fans. Somethings never change, I guess.

After her unionization backpeddling & Tommy's post firing "Vince really loves me" podcast bullshit, I don't give a fuck about either of them anymore tbh.

I've heard good things about the Briscoe Brothers Chicken Coop fight. Anyone here seen it & can confirm?

Wrestlemania VI with Warrior is April 1990 & he's still pretty huge there but I do think he was bigger before that. So I feel like 88'-'89 might be right on the nose. It's crazy to me that that was over thirty years ago now. I remember how hype I was to get that Pay-Per-View. Back in the days when you had to go to the cable company & get the box to hook up to your TV to get the show.

When was Hulk Hogan at his biggest, physically? I know he was billed as 6'8", 303 lbs for a long time but I assume that was worked. Obviously it had to have been before the WWF steroid trial or when he went to WCW. He looked enormous in Rocky III but I think a lot of that was because of how small Stallone is. Was he bigger in AWA than he was in WWF? Even at the start of Hulkamania? I know he was gassed to the gills & huge during most of his run but he was always working guys like André, Bundy, Gang, 'Quake, etc. so he didn't look as huge on TV a lot of the time when compared to someone like Warlord that was working guys like Tito.

I didn't really know where to put this. A buddy & I were talking pro-wrestling today & it got a bit heated over the discussion of me saying that I think Roman Reigns is already better & has surpassed John Cena as a top guy. I didn't really think that it was that outlandish of a statement but apparently it touched a nerve. I don't even dislike John Cena, nor want to discredit what he did for WWE, especially when he was pretty much the flag bearer for a decade plus. I just think that Roman's run in The Shield, his babyface run & now especially his Head of the Table heel run have as a whole surpassed, in my mind, what Cena did. And The Shield debuted on November 2012, so it's not like Roman hasn't been there long enough at this point. Granted, I might like Roman Reigns more so than most but I don't think it's that far fetched that I favor him over Cena.

If you listen to the newest Jim Ross podcast, the second part of the Lex Luger story, he frequently goes off on sidetrack diatribes & starts shitting on flips & thigh slaps seemingly out of nowhere. I have no doubt in my mind that he hates AEW and wishes he was back in WWE. Zero.

The WWE "developmental" as a whole has always seemed like it was more about getting you ready for WWE TV than it was about getting you ready to be a professional wrestler. Like if you go to a normal wrestling school, I don't think you're learning about how to talk to the hard-cam & stand on your markers & shit. I don't like that NXT is a televised program in so much that it is its own "brand" but I understand that the young talent has to get experience on TV & ideally in front of real people. I think the biggest detriment to the NXT program was when Dusty Rhodes passed away. I think that is right around the time that the development of the young new faces drastically changed.

My goodness, Florida in the 70's. Holy crap. WWF from 85-90 is on another level too. Imagine being caught up in that on the roster at the time.

On a lighter note, because he's a goddamn national treasure, this will never not lighten the mood & get some chuckles:

It's amazing what a night & day difference it is between trying to go in the direction of EVIL & trying to go into the direction of Shingo, eh?

Some of the greatest carnies to ever carn could barely read. Professional wrestling as a whole isn't exactly recruiting scholars & astrophysicists. It's people that get hit in the head & dropped for a living while living on the road & out of motels. Even in, hell especially in modern times we shouldn't be propping these people up like they're heroes or something; that never pans out well. Look at Hulk Hogan & The Ultimate Warrior as examples. Or even Stone Cold Steve Austin. Political discourse aside, nothing a professional wrestler says or does should be surprising to us anymore, even if it is someone that currently had higher expectations from their fan base. Like, yeah, if it came out after all these years that Terry Funk was harboring a bunch of vile skeletons in his closet, it would hurt me, so I get it if it's a favorite of yours letting you down, but honestly anymore, I just expect the worst from people in the public eye. What is interesting to me, however, is that this issue with Sasha Banks is coming on the heels of Gina Carano losing her Disney gig with The Mandalorian, a show which Sasha Banks is also cast in. Let's hope Sasha doesn't start liking Holocaust social media posts or some shit. I will say, the one thing that drives me crazy is when fans (or "stans" I guess now) try to defend someone saying something stupid with "it's just their opinion" - like, no, when it's a health issue that affects others, it's not an opinion anymore, it's spreading harmful misinformation that could hinder the well-being of others. That's why the Drake Wuertz shit is an issue. If he were just a loon, no one would give a fuck; there's a lot of loons in wrestling. But when you're a batshit insane misinformation smuggler & the shit you're spreading is potentially harmful to others, then it because an issue that is going to garner interest & response.

Maybe the WWE cut strategy is just to fire so many wrestlers that AEW can't hire them all. Yeah, that's the ticket! Seriously, they have to be setting up to take selling offers, right? This is like the third round of cuts in just the last couple of months.

100%. You're not lying. One of the biggest issues in my opinion with modern professional wrestling. And that's not just a WWE thing, that's an everywhere thing: NXT, RAW, Smackdown, AEW, NJPW, ROH, MLW, iMPACT... everywhere.

The Miz doesn't get enough credit for making people care about Alex Riley, Damian Sandow & John Morrison. When Alex Riley turned on The Miz finally, people lost their minds because they wanted to see The Miz get beat up so bad. It felt very old school.

I'll say this about the Nikki Cross gimmick: it's been apparent for awhile now that Nikki has gotten herself into a lot better shape lately & the new outfit really accentuates that. It's night & day difference from her Sanity days. She's definitely lost some weight.

I have nothing against Julia Hart but what does she bring to the table that puts her ahead of someone like, say, Skye Blue? Is it just the Hart name?

I agree with this but only if those are the two scenarios available & we have to pick one or the other. Ideally, I would prefer something more in the middle, where like Blehschmidt said, you have someone willing to tell the talent if an idea is terrible instead of just giving the green light to everything. If it's just all freedom or zero freedom of character, that a boring wrestling landscape.

Now how many of those went through a commercial break since you want to just single me and that point out.

Randy Orton in particular is super bad about this.