Coffey

Literally turned RAW off after less than five minutes after starting the show with that New Day/Miz horseshit. Who the fuck thinks that's entertaining? Even kids aren't going to be into that shit nowadays. They have cellphones & YouTube.

This is fair. I will say, that as much as The Hart Foundation may be overrated to some, the Headshrinkers are super underrated to me. I would put them in that top list ahead of some of those teams. I'm also pretty high on The Nasty Boys but feel that may be a more minority opinion there. I do think that Bret's tag stuff is more of a positive for his case than a negative though, for sure.

Now seems like a good time to try. WWE doesn't feel unstoppable anymore. If anything, they feel complacent, even without the pandemic. Patterson & Briscoe are gone. Vince is older. They're publicly traded. Saudi looks to have blown up in their faces & their ratings are tanking. So now seems like a good time to try.. something. When are their Fox & USA contracts up for renewal?

Wiseman is going to be good. Great, maybe, even. If he develops & the Warriors get Klay back healthy while keeping Steph & Draymond, they're going to be title contenders again. As far as WWE is concerned, I heard tonight is another Legends gimmick. While NJPW is doing Wrestle Kingdom & AEW is apparently doing some sort of reverse territory thing & trying to get all the non-WWE promotions aligned & working together. Which is both crazy & something I never thought I would see in my lifetime. Wrestle Kingdom spoilers:

Admittedly I don’t hate the Great O Khan gimmick but the man playing it.. is not great.

I used to not dig him but Yano is a guilty pleasure for me anymore, honestly. Chase Owens though? That dude is the drizzling shits. Still.

I like Nick Aldis, but to me, he comes off - as Rob Van Dam said about Shawn Michaels - as if he is dripping with insincerity. Part of the reason why I was such a big Tim Storm fan as the NWA babyface was because he played his underdog, old man babyface so well. I believed him. I think Aldis is pretty good but I don't really believe anything about him.

Didn't expect to see this here! Tom Waits is my all-time favorite musical artist & I also got into him around 2004ish when I was turned on to him via a burned album, that my manager was listening to when I was working at a local pizzeria. Although for me, it was Small Change that I initially heard. Nighthawks at the Diner is also very special to my girlfriend & I & my personal favorite album of his is Mule Variations. Tom Waits' music is also responsible for getting me back into buying vinyl records.

I'll give you The Rockers, they were great. The Brainbusters weren't together that long in WWF before Tully got popped for coke. Strikeforce were definitely two talented individuals but I don't remember their tag stuff as much as their break-up. It was a bit before my time, so I can't really comment there. Demolition were a Road Warriors rip-off during the twilight of Eadie's career where he could barely even move. The Road Warriors themselves, when they came to WWF, were just doing squash matches, that stupid shit with the Rocco doll that they made Ellering carry around & their best days, like Eadie, were behind them. I don't think Neidhart was some super worker or anything either but honestly, it just sounds like you have disdain for Bret.

I think Bret Hart is top 10 all-time. I think Bryan Danielson isn't. So, for me, it's Bret Hart. That's not to say that Bryan Danielson isn't also great. Also, both wrestlers had flaws & weren't perfect. I think what puts Bret higher for me is the era that he did it in & that the majority of his great stuff was on the biggest stages, not on the Indies. Maybe that's unfair to American Dragon but that's how I feel. Having a great feud & match in Ring of Honor is not the same thing as having a great feud & match in WWF culminating at Wrestlemania. Both men did it, Bret with Austin & Bryan with HHH/Batista/Orton. But it felt like Bret was in the mix of things for years & Bryan was hurt, or retired, or going through a lot of start/stop pushes. Admittedly, some of it is booking. I'm sure some of it is also my age, nostalgia, rose-colored glasses & having a disdain for recency bias. I do think that Bret took himself too seriously & that Bryan Danielson has him beaten by leaps & bounds in the comedy department but at the top of the card, I'm looking for seriousness, so that worked for me. In my Greatest Wrestler Ever list, which crazily is now just a few months away from being five years old, I had Bret Hart at #7 & Daniel Bryan at #36. I do think that Daniel Bryan has moved up for me since then but I actually think Bret Hart has too. He might be in my top 5 now. I remember vividly thinking the board as a whole was insane when Daniel Bryan finished #5 overall.

I'm honestly surprised the thread has as few replies as it does. I thought this was going to be like the biggest AEW show to date, discussion wise.

Sometimes old wrestling still manages to befuddle & stump me.

1993 WWF Superstars being added to the WWE Network is the best Christmas present. I marathoned & loved rewatching 1992!

The answer is probably honestly just that The Undertaker was doing it in 1990 & The Fiend is doing it in 2020. The Undertaker no selling was being done before the Monday Night Wars & like a decade before a lot of people were getting the internet. Bray Wyatt is doing it in an era when everyone has Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & a podcast. When wrestling is more accessible & more discussed than ever. Granted, they started doing the Kane stuff in the Monday Night Wars era, so, maybe that is a moot point.

I like some of the direction that MLW are doing right now as it feels like they have options going forward, which I'm a fan of. I don't like Lawlor winning the Opera Cup but, I mean, there wasn't really anyone in it that I thought should win it, so it's whatever. But Lawlor winning does cement him as having credibility again going forward if MLW wants to make him a challenger for the title again, which they might. Especially if they have Hammerstone beat Fatu for the title. And they made sure he beat Low Ki in the finals in doing so, as they have a history. Hammerstone right now is dealing with the side hurdle of The Black Hand, Mads Krugger. He's still friends with Richard Holliday as a part of The Dynasty. The Von Erichs have also been entangled with Contra Unit, so they could theoretically set-up another MLW War Games match of like Hammerstone, Holliday & The Von Erichs against Contra Unit (Simon Gotch, Jacob Fatu, Mads Krugger & either Josef Samael or Ikuro Kwon). You also have Salina de la Renta bringing in Mil Muertes on the horizon too. I don't know what MLW will do or where they're going but it's nice to have some intrigue as a fan in pro wrestling again during the pandemic.

Merry Christmas. I look forward to spending another year with you wild & crazy kids. My modern pro-wrestling enjoyment has certainly waned a lot more recently but I'm still just as big of a wrestling fan as ever. I just get my kicks from watching old stuff mostly now. Looking forward to Wrestle Kingdom though! Hope you all enjoy the holiday & rest of the year. 2020 was really tough so I hope we can all close it out on a better, more uplifting note.

I have a lot of thoughts about the whole "send big men back to developmental so they can learn how to work" thing. Of course, it feels like a waste of time & energy to even rant or vent about it. Like an old man yelling at the cloud - which coincidentally is also how I view Vince McMahon, Jr. A couple quick points though & I'll try to keep it brief: • If they didn't know how to work, why were they called up in the first place? Why did you sign them? Isn't that the point of having a developmental territory? • Is "learn to work" just code for "lose weight?" Did Mark Henry & The Big Show have to "learn to work" as well? • Maybe "learn to work" is just about which cameras to face & shit? Who even knows anymore. Keith Lee has had good matches before. He's even had them under the WWE umbrella. We can't deny that Keith Lee had gotten over in certain moments & Otis too for that matter. • How can Vince McMahon, Jr. love Keith Lee one week, praise him & talk about him being a future huge star & then the next week sour on him like that? That quickly? Seems... bipolar. You put him over at Survivor Series with Roman Reigns. You put him over at Royal Rumble with Brock Lesnar. Now he can't work? The one thing I will say, which is a point I've been hammering on since 1999 watching ECW: if you have a 300lb man that can do everything that a 200lb man can do, what makes the 200lb man special anymore? Don't get me wrong, I loved wrestlers like Mike Awesome & Big Van Vader but would they have been worse if they never went upstairs? Mike Awesome didn't need to do a Frog Splash or Suicide Dive & Big Van Vader didn't need to do a Moonsault. Like, I get it, it's a pop spot that gets a reaction & lets people think "holy shit!" But if we're in the middle of the whole "people standing around waiting to catch guys is stupid" talk this week, maybe we could also talk about how a fat/big dude in the mid card doing cruiserweight spots might be counterproductive to the card & the rest of the roster? If you keep it super rare, like when Brock went for an SSP at Wrestlemania, or 'Taker doing his dive, OK. But if it just becomes an every match thing, where it's not special anymore, it feels more harmful than helpful to me.

I have a lot of nostalgia for that whole Zeus era of WWF. No Holds Barred was a big movie for me when I was a kid, during the height of my wrestling fandom when Hulkamania was in full swing. I remember the movie, I remember Zeus teaming with Randy Savage & a promo that Macho Man & him cut. Savage pointed at Tiny's cross eye & said he "had the eye of the madness!" Also a Hulk Hogan cage match where Zeus was blocking the door when he got to the ring. Despite the fact that Tiny wasn't a worker, they made it work. No, granted, No Holds Barred is a cheesy, b-movie but I still love it anyway. Even Stan Hansen is in that bitch! Rest in peace.

Why? Why do they have to have a third person, regardless of who it is? Just take Jim off commentary & run the two-person booth. I don't know why wrestling switched to three people anyway. That shit sucked in WCW. It sucks in WWE & it sucks in AEW. Jim Ross is an invaluable resource but he doesn't need to do commentary anymore. Put him in a backstage role. He's been involved in pro-wrestling since the early 70's in damn near every capacity - he's a great person to have around, especially for a new, rising wrestling company. He's seen & done it all. He's been through it all. The low, bottom rungs to the tippy-top peaks of the industry. Getting rid of him entirely would be a mistake. But I think his commentary days are behind him & I don't think that's an AEW thing. His last years calling in WWE were bad & his stint in New Japan was awful. Jim Ross's criticism may have been factually correct but it didn't need to be said publicly in the way that it was. All that does is bury your talent & make Ross come off as a bitter, grumpy old man again. Neither of which is helping anyone. It's similar to a lot of the shit that Jim Cornette says: like you might agree with the idea of his comment but more often than not, he expresses it in such a negative, hyperbolic way that it completely kills the message. Less is more, we know that. Moves should have a point, we know that. Psychology is important, we know that. The shit you do shouldn't look so choreographed & business-exposing, we know that. We know all this shit. But they still do it anyway.

I remember getting a kick out of his RNN shoulder injury updates. That was pretty early on but after he was already off of Velocity fodder.

Here's a question: If Randy Orton didn't get to join Evolution & thus get the rub from Triple H & Ric Flair & if he didn't take the Diamond Cutter from Diamond Dallas Page, would he even be over? Because like, on his own, he's just bland as shit.

Stone Cold Steve Austin also played the common everyday man. His entire feud was basically the working man being able to beat up his boss. And he would wear jorts & a t-shirt all the time. Sometimes even with like a camo jacket or camo hat. But he still put on ring gear for matches. I think that's the biggest difference for me. Although Cena wrestled in the denim shorts & he did pretty OK for himself...

I've never been able to take Kevin Owens seriously specifically because of the way he looks. He was a pick-up basketball game dude with a beer gut. Even worse since using the Stunner but at least he's in better shape now. Definitely could have used real gear.

I've never been able to take Kevin Owens seriously specifically because of the way he looks. He was a pick-up basketball game dude with a beer gut. Even worse since using the Stunner but at least he's in better shape now. Definitely could have used real gear.

Sasha Banks was also talked about & mentioned last night during the Tyson Pay-Per-View, during the Nate Robinson squash,. by Mauro & Snoop Dogg.