Coffey

I'm currently watching WWF Summerslam 1997. Which thus far has been a pretty damn good card, which opened with Mankind Vs. HHH in a cage match. The British Bulldog Davey Boy Smith has the worst worked punches I've seen this side of Lex Luger. My goodness.

LeBron James is great. If someone wants to call him the best of all-time, fine. He has the numbers & longevity. However, if anyone puts him behind Wilt, Bill Russell, Jordan, Kareem, Kobe, Tim Duncan... I certainly wouldn't tell them that they're wrong.

Eva Marie's NXT match with Bayley in 2015 where the live crowd were losing their minds because they thought Eva Marie was going to win the NXT Women's Title is good shit.

The same way people pretend Trish Stratus & Lita were good?

She got heat, which is more than a lot of the current roster can say. It was funny because at first everyone was saying it was X-Pac Heat, or Go Away Heat or You Can't Wrestle Heat but I'm a firm believer that heat is heat. X-Pac himself was a great heel because everyone wanted to see that slimey bastard get his ass kicked. Or course, X-Pac was a helluva worker. Eva Marie more works her gimmick & character than can work in the ring but at this point in time, I'll take it. WWE had plenty of faceless people that can work & not a lot of people that make the fans give a fuck.

Somewhere along the way, WWE forgot how to do basic pro-wrestling 101. Build a feud to a blowoff match. Now they START with the blowoff match & kill every gimmick match they have in the process. Used to be a cage was the end all, be all. Then Hell in a Cell. Now we have Elimination Chambers. It's never enough.

Listening to the Corny podcasts, his gushing over Theory is surreal. Not even just because I don't see whatever it is that he sees, but like, has Brian Last not even told him about the shit surrounding Theory or does Cornette just not care? Did anything else ever come out about it other than the word of that 13-year-old girl? I don't remember hearing anything else & it kind of just went away.

Are Alexa Bliss & The Fiend still on the same show?

I actually think they could use The Fiend really effectively with The Big Dawg High Chief Roman Reigns. Stupid Bray can cut one of his dumbass "The Fiend is coming, let him in while I ramble for 20 minutes promos" & Roman could just no sell it entirely. Then the Fiend shows up doing his b-movie bullshit & Roman can just bust him in the mouth & lay him the fuck out. Just like when Goldberg squashed that jobber. Take no shit Roman with the Arrive, Wreck Shit, Leave gimmick is cash & turning The Fiend into just another warm body in the path of his Samoan Destruction would really cement him as the top guy, especially with Brock Lesnar AWOL. Of course they would never do something like that & it would drag on for four months with them trading wins & having to sit through "spooky" Fiend bullshit.

The best commentators that WWE current has are Wade Barrett & Samoa Joe. Two former wrestlers that do color commentary. WWE's commentary has two major issues right now: 1. they don't have anyone that's any good at play-by-play & 2. for whatever reason, they insist on not doing a 2-person commentary booth. If they has a 2-person booth on the show & then put Joe on color for one show & Wade on color for the other, they would already been in a huge step in the right direction. But when your lead play-by-play is Michael Cole, whom has sucked for twenty years, and everyone after him is being groomed to sound like... Michael Cole.. it's a recipe for disaster. Cole has no credibility & when your play-by-play guy doesn't have credibility, they're not going to be able to sell the show to the viewing audience. WWE has been blessed over the years to have some great commentators & ring announcers but it's been one of the weakest parts of their game for about two decades now. There's not a big list of good play-by-play commentators anywhere right now in the world of wrestling. AEW also lacks in the commentary department & a big reason why is because 1. the play-by-play of Excaliber sucks & 2. they try to do a 3 person booth. Probably just because WWE does it or Nitro did it. It's unnecessary. If you insist on having multiple commentators on the show, you could just do what Nitro used to do & switch out the color person during the second hour or whatever.

It doesn't draw. You have to grab people emotionally. Make them invest into the characters & angles. Otherwise, they're just going to watch actual competition.

Well shit. Here I was thinking it was already filmed. Well, at least I can still look forward to the new season of Cobra Kai, I guess.

I can feel a rant, a tirade a diatribe building up within myself. I have not went off about professional wrestling in a long time. In all honesty, I just don't really ever feel that connected to it anymore like I used to. I used to spend a lot of time, effort & energy with professional wrestling & honestly, I have lost the passion over the years & became a bit apathetic to it all. I still follow, but mostly out of habit & a lot more seldom & leisurely than I used to. For example, I've still only watched the first night of the G1 Climax. What night are they up to now, eight? I watched this show tonight because the whole thing would begin & end before I had to leave for work. I wasn't interested in the late NFL game & the NBA game didn't start until 9 PM my time. I only knew about the PPV in the first place because of Twitter. As I said earlier in the thread as well, I don't follow the weekly TV, so I didn't have any idea of the angles or matches or anything heading into the show. Other than a quick Google search to see what the card even was, I went in completely blind. I have been watching pro wrestling all of my life. Or at least since I was like six or seven years old, so for over thirty years anyway. Just like a lot of the other regulars around here. We fell in love with wrestling because, for whatever reason, it grabbed us. It pulled us in. Be it a match, a character, a story... whatever. Somewhere along the way, something caught our attention & never let go. I still read about wrestling daily on social media. I listen to a lot of wrestling podcasts when at work. I talk to my friends about wrestling. But it is almost always in the past tense. Reminiscing or being nostalgic about the good ol' days. Wrestling is a business. A carny business, but still a business. And the goal of all business is to make money. Wrestling used to sell tickets, so you would create cards with draws that people wanted to see so they would buy a ticket. Well, right now, there's a pandemic, so no one is buying tickets or attending live shows. Well, wrestling used to sell Pay-Per-Views. So they would use the TV to build up angles & feuds so that people would pay to see the resolution or continuation of those stories on the big shows. Well, until WWE made WWE Network & got rid of Pay-Per-View. OK, well WWE have to sell their programming to networks so they can make money! Despite them currently already having the contracts, eventually they'll have to re-up. Oh & they're publicly traded now too. What the fuck happened to WWE? I honest to god don't even know what the fuck their business model is anymore. They have employees trying to fuck kids & they put them on the Network special shows. They have talent doing third party activities & they're trying to get a cut of it. Like every decision they make feels super scumbag but my point is, regardless of that, what is the business model? They're not selling Network subscriptions because they give those away for free. They're not selling Pay-Per-Views. They're not selling tickets. No live events to hock merch at. So their revenue right now is just the TV contract money & Shopzone merch? Did the Saudi Arabia thing fall through too? I dunno, man. WWE feels like they're in trouble to me. There's not always going to be a Fox TV deal on the table like that. So anyway - it was dead at work tonight so I had a lot of time to think & reflect on the NXT TakeOver show that we all watched. Here's the thing, it wasn't a bad show. It had matches that weren't bad. The issue is that come tomorrow? No one is talking about this show anymore. Just like a weekly RAW or weekly Smackdown. Just like any other throwaway show. And that's why I was talking about the business model. WWE right now knows that they're not selling tickets, or PPVs or Network subs. So they're just coasting. They're just filling time. They're keeping everyone even keel. They're basically just taking up their hours of programming with warm bodies. Yeah, the wrestlers do moves but no one really has a character, no one has a real angle, no one is doing any sort of emotional grab to pull on the heartstrings of a viewer & get them interested in any of the shows. Even the fans just watch out of habit, not because wrestling has grabbed them anymore. It's just apathy all around. You can't just see it, you can feel it when watching the shows. They're... lifeless. Not just because the seats are empty either. Gargano Vs. Priest, aren't both of them heel? Io Shirai Vs. Candice LeRae, aren't both of them heel? Kyle O'Reilly Vs. Finn Balor, aren't both of them heel? Where are the fucking babyfaces? Where are the people that the fans are supposed to cheer for & support & care about & rally behind? It was just people out there doing spots. Forty people in that arena & some jobber is still trying to start "Fight forever!" & "this is awesome!" chants while they pipe in crowd noise over him. And that pretty much sums it up, pandemic or not. It's like that scene in the documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil where they go on "tour" & end up playing in some basement club to a packed house of eight people & there's one oblivious dude there headbanging like it's the best shit he's ever seen. That's us, the fans still watching & sticking around. We're that headbanging out-of-touch burn out still maintaining hope that "it'll come back around, man!" WWE isn't coming back around. They're just waiting for Vince McMahon to die. Nothing is changing until then. Nothing happens until then. They're just killing TV time. Shareholder meetings & conference calls & shit. A bunch of non-fans being placated with bullshit jargon & showing them numbers that they don't know what the fuck they mean but "well they're higher than last time, pal!" WWE is the Tylenol of pro-wrestling. The rest of the industry lives & dies, crashes or thrives based off of how WWE is doing. New Japan has a brief case that they "cash in" for the Wrestle Kingdom title shot, which is a 2-day event now. AEW is breaking thrones & cutting glass ceiling promos. There's 200 Indie shows during Wrestlemania weekend. But WWE isn't the golden goose anymore. It's not even wrestling anymore. It's wanna-be business men, that are in the wrestling business, that want to be anything but in the wrestling business, trying to convince non-wrestling people that their product is not wrestling. It's live sports! It's live programming! You can't DVR us! We're X amount of original hours a week/month/year! For years, YEARS the only people that stuck with wrestling were the *gasp* wrestling fans. Hey, we like wrestling. Hey, we'll pay for wrestling. Hey, we'll watch wrestling! And we've just constantly been beaten over the head & told it's not wrestling & our opinions don't matter, we don't know what we're talking about, we're losers/mom's basement/marks whatever. And now the fans that were always there through thick & thin, they're leaving. They're leaving in droves. They got tired of being told they didn't matter or being told to go do something else by going & doing something else that made them feel like they mattered. So you had this NXT TakeOver show & work rate wise, the matches were OK. But ultimately, it was just another two & a half hour reminder by WWE that they're not really in the business of selling professional wrestling anymore. It was more like watching a boxing exhibition or something at a local arena where you don't know or care about the fighters but see a couple of good shots that make you think "damn, he has a pretty good right hook." You can see there's talent. There's talent all through WWE, up & down the card. The black people are killing it. The women are killing it. The Latinos are killing it. There's so much talent but WWE isn't really providing them a platform to thrive. They're just clocking in, doing their time & clocking out. There's no over the top stars anymore. There's no draws anymore. The events don't feel like special must-see shows anymore. There's no reason to feel like if WWE comes to town you have to buy a ticket because there's nothing on the show you'll be disappointed in missing. When you put on RAW, the actual RAW show feels like the commercial break that just happens in between the ad breaks you're supposed to be watching instead. It just feels so completely artificial that it has lost anything & everything that ever made it feel special. The wonder is gone. The magic is gone. The real life behind the scenes is more entertaining than the fiction they try to come up with & put on the screen. I just want to also add. I fucking love professional wrestling. It has been my whole life. One of the only constants I've ever had in my life. If I am ever feeling down or need to pass some time, I can always put on some Terry Funk or Harley Race or Stan Hansen & just sit there & watch, smile & enjoy myself. I still love talking about it & hearing about it. I can still really get into it & watch it & have a good time with it. I even kind of regret not pursuing a job in wrestling in some fashion when I was younger. But the disconnect nowadays is real. I get more enjoyment from shoot interviews or wrestler autobiographies than I feel like I get from the shows anymore. Something is just missing. It's not just that I have just gotten older or that times have changed.

If that Ember Moon comeback was the big return, immediately following the Toni Storm video, that's pretty damn lackluster. Needless to say, following the Toni video made it feel like Ember was set-up to fail as well.

It is kind of interesting how the WWE brand split never really worked how WWE wanted, with the feeling of the Monday Night Wars. With RAW & Smackdown being like WWE & WCW. But they still get the surprise/return pop when someone from the main roster goes back to NXT. Like Breeze, Fandango, Balor.

Naw, that'll be a dude in the main event probably going back to NXT from the main roster.

Ha! I just tweeted this as well. Immediately made me think of Beyond the Mat. That backstage scene where the wrestlers are like "Oh, you're working the leg in your match? OK, we'll do something else."

Superstar status. Jesus.

He's supposed to be dressed like Doc Brown from Back to the Future because KUSHIDA is always dressed like Marty McFly.

I like the arena set-up. Damien Priest really looks like a star as well. Any of y'all that follow NXT TV, are both of these guys heel?

Corey Taylor of Slipknot wearing a Badstreet U.S.A. shirt was pretty damn cool.

Who is worse: WWE TV Producers or WWE Make-up Department?

Alexa Bliss gets graded on a different scale because she's so attractive. Just like Trish Stratus used to get. There were even a few odd people that claimed Trish Stratus was the best woman worker in the world at one point. Hyperbole at its best but I mean, what can you do? You can't tell someone their opinion is wrong, really. It might not be that big of a thing here, but if you read other wrestling corners of the internet, it's vary apparent - not just Twitter "Stans" but wrestling fans as a whole appear to be quite the horndogs. So Alexa Bliss wearing pigtails, acting "spacey" & channeling some Harleyquinn, is definitely some sort of fetishizing cosplay shit.

Or the Foley/Taker HIAC or the Brock/Angle Wrestlemania match. There's been a lot of "just tough it out" in the history of wrestling. Definitely not a good look.

I think it's more just that she's not very good & keeps fucking up. She seems green as shit, not just her hair color. And it's not going to end well.