Coffey

Does anyone have a link to the old Live Audio Wrestling commercial of the Bill Alphonso impression singing the Christmas songs? I can't find it!

It's been like this for years. It's why the TV shows suck. What did people think was going to happen when the roster became a bunch of Indy/ROH "workrate" guys? None of them can promo or carry a story & the matches are nothing but everyone getting their shit in until the crowd chants "this is awesome." Kevin Owens, Seth Rollins, Finn Balor, Sami Zayn, AJ Styles, etc. It's the same reason why Chris Benoit sucked when he was on top. Yeah, you can have a good wrestling match on the PPV for twenty minutes... but what do you do for the other multiple weeks of screen time that you have to do? Sufferin' Succotash or fuckin' sheep promos? It's why I wasn't interested when people were talking about how much they wanted Cesaro to be a main eventer. Wins and losses don't matter, titles don't matter, FEUDS don't matter. It's just running shit into the ground, nonstop rematches & matches with no heat or fans even caring who wins. In all honesty, in WWE, the matches are what matter the least. The actual in-ring bell-to-bell part isn't what sells tickets or shows. Elias playing a guitar or Strowman telling someone backstage that they're gonna "get these hands" is more compelling than a Dolph Ziggler or Nakamura working a TV match. It fleshes out the characters & gimmicks to start giving fans a reason to invest emotionally into a character. Everyone remembers The Million Dollar Man or Mr. Perfect & it's not because of the matches they were having. Same reason they remember The Ultimate Warrior. The memorable characters are gone in WWE. It's just a bunch of dudes.

If anyone has animated .gif making capabilities I would love one of Kong sipping the tea!

I think Adam Cole will be the biggest star. Mostly because he reminds me of a young Triple H or Seth Rollins & WWE pushed the shit out of both of them. I wouldn't be surprised if Triple H saw a lot of himself in Adam Cole. Meanwhile, I could see Vince being biased against Velveteen because of his use of previous gimmicks like Randy Savage or Rick Rude. It's hard to guess things in WWE because it feels like you just never know what side of the bed someone in a position of power will get up on. Like, I thought Tyler Breeze would excel on the main roster & he's a jobber. Meanwhile, I thought Nia Jax & Carmella were jokes & they are focal points of the divisions.

Not a single Buckhouse Buck in the entire Steam Marketplace. This is some BULLLLLLLLLLshit. I've now downloaded over 200 wrestlers though, which is crazy. The simming of matches is pretty legit. I had two 100% evaluated matches last night during a cage match tournament: Sting Vs. Regal & Dusty Rhodes Vs. Greg Valentine. I've also gotten custom themes to work finally.

From an entertainment perspective, he was pretty good. Shame about the Twitter stuff though. Also, I'm not touching the Taeler Hendrix story.

My biggest issue with the game is that for a $30 price tag, I thought it would 1. be an improvement over the previous Fire Pro games (it's pretty much identical) and 2. would feature online play. At least on Steam, no one is EVER playing online. So unless you like beating on the computer, the game isn't worth it price wise because it gets boring super quickly. I'm hoping with the New Japan tie-in & console release the numbers will go up a lot & people will start playing online. Right now, it feels like a $15 game with a $30 price tag. A lot of wrestling fans nowadays, certainly WWE game fans, are accustomed to having a lot more game modes & what not. This game has generic entrances, not really any music, generic game modes... it is going to feel incomplete. Like the Landmine match is just... bad. The Steam Workshop community is fantastic though. You can find anyone & everyone. Make all the rings you can think of, get all the wrestlers you want. That part is really cool.

If this is the direction the forums are going to take with the new look PWO, it's going to be a long road. It's a bad look.

Thanks, Rich. That... Tequila Cloverleaf? Was SICK! Never seen that before. Surprised we don't see the Tequila Sunrise itself more often. I think the Usos were using it for awhile.

I'm trying my damnedest to avoid spoilers for the WWE UK Tournament but I can't find the first freakin' round on the network. I can only find where there's eight people left. Which is annoying as the match I was most interested in from the brackets was the first round Drew Gulak Vs. Jack Gallagher match. What am I missing here? Was the first round not shown, or is it not on the Network?

For me, it mostly comes down to defining what big man means. If we're going by weight, height, or both & how much of both. Vader is one of the best to do it but if he's the best "big" or not, to me, depends on if he's in the same category as Stan Hansen or not. If Hansen is too small & gets excluded, then Vader is the best big man to me. I had Big Van Vader at #11 on my GWE ballot. Vader: 6'4", 375lbs Hansen: 6'4", 321lbs.

Tremendous pro-wrestler. Robust & appreciated career full of great matches. Wish WWF had done more with him, but his Japan and WCW runs are good enough. I'll never forget when he splashed Flair off the top rope. I thought Flair was straight-up dust. Clash of the Champions XXXI.

Good riddance. Cass is fuckin' garb. He brought nothing to the table. At least Rowan is a good fit in some tag team stuff...

And she's also simply not a very good wrestler.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Vince McMahon is always going to be Vince McMahon.

Rolling my fucking eyes harder than they've ever rolled in my life.

PPV is woof so far but TakeOver last night was really good. Big Cass and then a Bobby Lashley squash and now a Nia Jax match. Oof.

Jay White is terrible. Hangman Page is terrible. Evil isn't any good. Yano isn't any good. They can't all be great.

At this point, we're all familiar with the majority of any participating members for matches that the major promotions could come up with. We already know what The Young Bucks, Cody Rhodes, Kenny Omega, Kazuchika Okada, etc. are capable of and if we're a fan of what they do, or if we like their individual styles. Personally speaking, regardless of what rating Dave Meltzer gives a match featuring someone like, say, Zack Sabre, Jr., I know I'm not going to like it the same way that he might. Just different tastes and different wants from professional wrestling. That is not to say that it is not interesting to see Dave's hype train rolling down the tracks full speed ahead but I do think it raises expectations to the point where some fans go into a match or show with a mental bar that can not be met. When a match gets a rating that high, your expectation goes from "this should be pretty good!" to "so, this is the best match of all-time, huh?" At least for me, it makes me watch shit differently, too. Like I go in more jaded & looking for flaws instead of just getting sucked into the story of the match & going for the ride. That's why I hate spoilers so much. I don't want to do that, I'm not looking to do that.. but that's what happens. I can't alter the inner monologue that formulates from the expectations created via praise & hype. I certainly have my own preferences & am more than capable of formulating my own opinions on wrestling. Shit, I've been watching for thirty years, I know what I like & dislike at this point. At the same time, I'm not naive enough to believe that it doesn't affect me in some way when I go into a match already hearing all the hype before I ever watch it. Dave Meltzer's star ratings do still make people pay attention & I think that's part of the reason why the scale is getting so wonky now. If he just gave Okada/Omega 5-stars, I don't know if it would have made anyone bat an eye. He had to do it in a way that made people think "well, he thinks it's better than the last one." If Dave gave a Big Show match 5-stars, people would pay attention. It's all about expectations & previous work in combination with a wrestling journalist trying to get people to pay attention. To me, this is Dave saying with numbers that this isn't just a good or great match, this is a match that you need to go out of your way to watch. It's important to see it to see the direction that pro-wrestling is going & what the cream of the crop from that direction are capable of doing.

My top six in the GWE ballot (submitted in 2016, so it's just a little over two years ago now) was as follows: 1. Hansen 2. Misawa 3. Kobashi 4. Kawada 5. Flair 6. Terry Funk If I were to do it again today, it would be: 1. Terry Funk 2. Stan Hansen 3. Ric Flair 4. Kenta Kobashi 5. Toshiaki Kawada 6. Mitsuharu Misawa Has anyone else had the TOP of their list change that much in two years? Or replaced any of the names? I certainly miss the Terry Funk & Harley Race style men in the climate of today's social media pro-wrestling.

I thought that the ACH/Austin Aries match would have been so much better than it was. Disappointing. I haven't finished the first episode yet, just that twenty minute match, but I plan on marathoning the episodes to catch up.

Only thing I really care about is the verdict. Who knows how far away that will even be. And it'll take like two seconds to read it on Twitter.

Hogan for me as a kid was the superhero babyface that would topple the monster. When I was a teenager, he then turned into the cool nWo bad guy that was protected by his gang. Then as an adult, he had the nostalgia run and Wrestlemania match with the Rock. So for people around my age, he whole run was pretty welcome. People older than me, however, different story. Or the younger fans that didn't see his initial WWF run. I think it's definitely a generational thing. When Hogan did start to wear out his welcome, that's when he left for WCW. His early run in WCW, admittedly, was pretty bad until the heel turn.

You and I will never see eye-to-eye on pro-wrestling. Honestly, I would rather watch jobber squashes than what wrestling has turned into today. Regardless of if it's in high-def or not. That's not to say there weren't some bad workers back then too but the majority of them at least knew what they were doing. When I watch highly pimped Indy matches, in example, I just shake my head & say "I don't get it." I don't get why people think Kenny Omega is the second coming of Ric Flair. I don't get why the Young Bucks and their Super Kicks and flips are so popular. I don't get a lot of things, like why people thought New Day were funny, or that Sasha Banks was one of the best in the world, or why the Broken Matt Hardy wrestlecrap was ever over, including in TNA. I find my views fall a lot more in line with Jim Cornette nowadays than the people following Dave Meltzer on Twitter. I don't know if it's a generational thing or what but the shit today, to me, is never going to stand-up to the days of Ric Flair, Rick Rude & Ricky Steamboat. That's not to say that there aren't thing about modern pro-wrestling that I can find that I enjoy but when I want to watch wrestling nowadays, if it's not a live PPV, it's usually me putting on something from the late 80's or early 90's on the WWE Network. Character work is certainly a lot of it. Honestly, I think it's more than just the wrestlers themselves. There's a lot more to it in WWE, for example. It's all about being TV-PG and selling for the hard camera and making sure that you hit every minute correctly because of the next commercial break or whatever time management bull they're working around. It's overly micromanaged & nothing about it is organic. And Indy wrestlers nowadays are always thinking of how to get bigger on social media, do something that will make a nice animated .gif (that could go viral) or come up with a way to hock some more overpriced, low-quality t-shirts. In modern professional wrestling the workers are afraid of getting heat. No one wants to get real heat. Part of it is probably because in this day and age they think it's impossible. Kayfabe is dead, everyone has camera phones, everyone has social media, no one can just be a bad guy 24/7 anymore. No one wants to be the giant dick, they all want to be the cool bad guy like the fucking nWo. No one wants to be The Sheik. WWE would have sponsors pull out, or who knows what. Wrestling used to be a male soap opera based around good against evil that the fans would believe and get into while watching. Now it's an athletic display where the crowd feels like a part of the show & applauds athletic feats like they're watching the OIympics. It went from being believable to being totally unbelievable but full of a bunch of "holy shit!" moments for the crowds to get their chants in. I guess I take professional wrestling maybe too seriously because it's been such a huge part of my entire life. When even the workers themselves don't take it seriously anymore and make a mockery of it (in the name of "comedy"), it makes me feel.. bad? Slighted, I guess. So I guess I get where Jim Cornette is coming from because it was his entire life and he fed his family with it. He watched his friends & co-workers go through hell & deal with miles, bad pay, injuries, addictions & death, so seeing Kenny Omega wrestle a 9-year-old, Kota Ibushi fight a blow-up doll or Joey Ryan doing dick spots is probably going to be a sore spot. There's always been comedy in wrestling & there always will be. You can still have fun but it just feels too over-the-top for my taste nowadays. It's hard for me to watch that shit. It's business-exposing nonsense. Vince McMahon is guilty for doing a lot of it too. So where did all the characters go? It's more where did all the heels go? nWo made it so heels can be cheered & sell merch... so why would anyone want to be a lame babyface or heel without the cheers & merch? The top heels are the top faces. The top faces are the top heels. John Cena and Roman Reigns get booed. Also, think about the influences. The wrestlers that are wrestling today grew up watching guys like Shawn Michaels, Jeff Hardy and Rob Van Dam. That's a lot different than wrestlers that grew up watching Harley Race, Terry Funk & Bruno Sammartino. They saw the atmosphere of the ECW Arena. They played the video games. I love when professional wrestling is treated like a legitimate sport; a contest between two wrestlers to determine who is better on any given night. When I can get immersed in the match/story. Wrestling now is more a performance than a contest. The only thing it's missing is judges holding up score cards... but I guess star ratings kind of do that... You don't have to have a great character anymore. You just have to have a great spot that people can retweet on Twitter.

I used to love the Tazmission/Katahajime in ECW as a finish. I wouldn't mind seeing that again. Especially since everyone taps out nowadays & no one has to verbally give up anymore. It makes for a good visual because it's easy to see the tap out in that move. That's probably my number one. Chickenwing was AWOL for awhile after the Bob Backlund days but there's a few people, like Asuka & Marty Scurll that use it now. So that's pretty cool. I also miss the good, old fashioned Piledriver but I understand why WWE has moved away from that. Seeing the Torture Rack as a finish again would be awesome. I never thought Lex Luger was a super worker or anything but I was always hype for his matches because someone might get Racked. When he put up Hogan and The Giant, I marked out. Barry Windham style floatover Superplex would be cool to see make a comeback.