JerryvonKramer

That exists as a handheld. The whole show, or just that match?

Basically the entire cards of the non-televised King of the Ring tournaments. There are some tasty-looking matches on those, including DiBiase vs. Steamboat 15-minute draw.

I think 90% is a significant exaggeration. Here are two Hogan matches walked through back-to-back: 05/18/87 & 06/14/87 Hogan vs Race Hogan is giving to Harley and sells for him, but he also gets plenty of his own licks in. The Hogan Match Formats almost always have some early Hogan Ass Kicking segment, either right off the bat when he's kicking the heel's ass, or coming shortly in as payback for the heel cheap shotting to an early advantage. Totally agree on the general theme that Hogan is a willing seller for heel to set up for the Big Comeback. John Yeah 90% is probably too much, but Hogan's matches (apart from vs. Flair) pretty doggedly follow the universal formula of face shine, heel control, hope spot (usually out of a submission), heel control, face comeback. And more often than not the heel control segment was extended in his matches. The other thing that was extended was the post-match posedown.

Announce team: Vince McMahon and Jesse Ventura An underrated part of any card. I was obviously going to pick Jesse, and Vince I think is the partner he worked best with. Plus Vince made any event seem like a big deal with his insane intros at the top. 1. Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart, WWF Wrestlemania X (03/20/94) Perfect opener. And a nice way to get Bret and Owen on the card without wasting title matches on them. 2. Terry Funk vs. Stan Hansen (4/14/83) You don't want two long matches in a row and don't want two technical matches in a row and this, in my view, is the perfect sprint brawl match. Maximum intensity and carnage, with Hansen at his most brutal and Funk at his bloody best selling. 3. US Title: Rick Rude vs Ricky Steamboat, Iron-man match, WCW Beach Blast (6/20/92) A match that doesn't get pimped enough. Perfectly structured, perfectly worked, one of my all-time favourite babyface performances from Steamboat and Rude at his absolute peak as a despised heel here in 92. 4. Ted DiBiase v. Jim Duggan (Loser Leaves Town, Tuxedo, No DQ, Coal Miner's Glove on a Pole, Cage Match) (3/30/85) DiBiase is my favourite wrestler, so had to get him on the card somehow and this is arguably his career-best match. Also, you need to have a gimmick match on the card somewhere and what better one that the ultimate gimmick match? Also, in terms of flow, this is another short-ish match after a long match, and a brawl after a technical match. So keeping with that structure here. 5. The Rockers vs. The Orient Express, WWF Royal Rumble (1/19/91) You need some "filler" matches somewhere and filler doesn't come any finer than this. One of the all-time great tag matches in the WWF. I toyed with this for the opener but I think Bret vs. Owen starts things off with more of a "bang". 6. White Castle of Fear Strap match: Big Van Vader vs Sting, WCW Superbrawl III (2/21/93) Terrific brutal match in the career feuds of both participants. Nothing else needs saying, best strap match ever probably. 7. Tag titles: Jumbo Tsuruta & Genichiro Tenryu vs. Riki Choshu Yoshiaki Yatsu (1/28/86) One of the best matches I've ever seen period and a legit contender for match of the 1980s in my book. Amazing and want to bring the crowd to a frenzy at this point. 8. Mr. Olympia vs. Chavo Guerrero (6/24/83) Now conventionally, just before the main event, you'd look for a "sleeper" match to bring the crowd down after the last "peak" and leave them go and get a coke or hit the restrooms or whatever. However, I want to keep them STOKED here. Bang. Bang. Bang. However, after the excitement, I need to pull them down a BIT, so I've gone for this very solid MidSouth match which had an electric crowd for it. In this sort of company it might be more of a "come down" type match, but it's not TOO far down. 9. World title: Ric Flair vs. Randy Savage, WWF Wrestlemania 8 (4/5/92) Well I'd used up Vader and Steamer and Sting and Jumbo already and the Hogan matches suck in my book, so it was between this or one of the Kerry Von Erich matches or Dusty. I've gone for this NOT ONLY for the match but for the pre-match build and angle, and Flair's GODLY post-match promo. "1-time means NOTHING to my career". Card ends with the babyface going over, big title change, Miss Elizabeth exonerated, Flair, Heenan and Perfect absolutely pissed off. ----------------------- I guess that means no Hogan, and no Dusty. I contemplated putting the Tully match in, or Tully / Magnum, but I think this card is already stacked enough with both brutal gimmick matches and excitement. You have to balance it. All-in-all, I'm pretty happy with this. There were about 15 other matches I could have picked for match 8 there, but they all seemed too high-end. You need peaks and troughs. If Olympia vs. Chavo and Rockers vs. Orients are your "troughs" then obviously, that's a loaded evening of pro wrestling. Really wanted to get Arn in there somewhere, but couldn't find a place for him. Thought about one of the Wargames matches, but it used up too many guys.

The crowd responses would say otherwise.

You'd use Morton in a 6 man rather than with Gibson? vs., say, Garvin and Hayes? No place for Vader?

I'm definitely going to have a bash at this but I'm also going to very slightly alter the rules: Rather than have it multi-fed and multi-titles, I'm going to strip it down so that there is only 1 world title, 1 tag title and 1 IC / US title and 1 TV title. That should make things even more interesting as it cuts things down even more.

[double post]

How do you say they are Hogan matches? He worked 90% of his matches selling, making the heel shine in his control segment. Flair worked most of those matches from underneath, so how were they Hogan matches?

Does anyone have any info from the WONs at the time as to WHY that match was worked the way it was? I mean whose idea was it to make it a glorified sqaush?

They booked Hogan from feud to feud to feud at that time, every PPV was a feud transition rather than a blow off. But yeah, the contrast between Flair beating Vader and that Havoc match couldn't be greater. One of the few matches to make me legit angry.

My least favourite Hogan match is vs. Flair in 94 when he GIVES RIC NOTHING and essentially treats what should have been one of the biggest matches of all time as a jobber match. It's the only match I can think of where Hogan is on offence 90%+ of the time. Made Flair look like a chump in his own backyard. Didn't like that at all.

He was easily the most over guy at the TNA show I went to in Lodon a week or so back. He has that charisma and "X Factor" that you just can't teach. Maybe a handful of workers every generation have it. You can count them on two hands from the 1980s till now.

I'm not, I'm saying he's the guy who has taken the biggest knocks from them in the past 30 years and that those knocks are often based on his backstage politicking rather than his in-ring work, which is quite underrated but has suffered from the association. At least in the early 00s, it was de facto assumed that Hogan was a shitty worker -- from the same people who thought Shawn and Bret were the best workers who ever lived. I wasn't taking pot shots at anyone in particular but at the default negative view of Hogan that "smart fans" -- to an extent, myself included -- have had since the late 90s. I was one of the people who hated Hogan even in his red and yellow days, like jdw, I was a heel fan. And there are some things I'll never forgive him for (ruining what WCW had been building in the early 90s, for example), but he's someone I've come to appreciate more and more in the past year or so. There are things he does very well -- basics -- that to an extent people take for granted. However, I think El-P is right, that MOST people -- at least on boards like this one -- have come to accept that Hogan, while never being a GREAT worker, was at least good in the ring and very very good at "playing his role". This is something I've always thought too. He went from being superman to working like the Honky Tonk Man. After 15 years of being the "indestructible force", he was almost too weak as a heel.

He's not given enough credit for his selling and the fact that 90% of his matches are heel control segments. Who is better at getting babyface sympathy? Hogan is top 5 in that bracket. Hogan is the biggest victim of "smart fans" thinking they know it all, and a lot of the criticism comes from backstage stories and so on. The only genuine knock on him is in 93 when he got the belt at WM9 and the gate went down over the next month or so. That was a mistake. But other than that, he's more often than not justified for pushing himself.

Don't see how anyone can say Dusty is a better talker than Flair.

Have I missed the reason Rikidozan isn't automatic #2 here? Why wouldn't he be?

Wasn't Max Payne also a sort of manager at this time? With the two of them tagging shortly after this period?

Why Inoki as a default answer rather than Baba? Anyone care to explain?

Why Barnett over the other regional promoters El-P? What's he got over Watts, Graham, Jarrett, Giegel, etc.?

There is no clear number 2. Cases could be made for Geigel, Vince Sr., Rikidozan, Inoki, Baba, Heyman, Watts, Crockett, Jarrett, Bischoff (or Turner), Graham, Gagne, von Erich, Boesch, Cornette, to name but 15 prominent people. Although looking at that list of names, Rikidozan stands out -- I don't know enough about Japanese wrestling history to say for sure, but it looks to me that without him there wouldn't even be a pro wrestling scene in Japan. Do we know anything about what pro wrestling was like in Japan before him? If he's basically the guy responsible for Japanese wrestling, then he probably challenges Vince for the #1 spot. That would make this thread actually about #3. Some people would have you believe that what Heyman did with ECW "revolutionised" wrestling forever and that he was the main catalyst not only for the hardcore craze that plagued the late 90s but also for the "attitude era" itself. But I think similar arguments about "steering the creative direction of wrestling" for each of the major territorial bosses. Bob Giegel seems like a pretty major deal to me, he continued to weild power and influence and NWA president well into the 80s. Obviously, Inoki and Baba have very strong cases too. Again, I don't really know enough to say who is more important, who did more for business, who was more innovative, etc.

Couldn't sound like less of a big deal ... ... until you see that

There are things I don't get though. Why the lurch towards being so much more corporate? Why the stifling scripting? Why the blandness? Is this all coming from Vince? He was still fully involved personally in the late 90s, is he still? I mean he's known for being very hands on, but there's very little of his personality in today's product.

Question: what is Vince's personal level of involvement these days? Was there a moment where he stepped back? Just wondering how all this shit could happen on his watch that's all. He's the man who CREATED many of the things we're talking about.

I think they were still over. I bet you IRS still got a bigger crowd reaction than 70% of the current roster in 94-5. And he had limited charisma. Pollack and Wai Ting were talking about this the other day: how even the 93-5 guys with colourful gimmicks were more over then (i.e. with the limited amount of people watching) than guys from the past 5 years. The example they pointed to was Doink. The downturn in wrestling in the early 90s was because of a variety of factors -- some internally generated (steroids scandal), some external. Fact of the matter is that wrestling in 94-5 was very simply out of fashion. The fad was over and the moment had gone, kids by and large had moved onto something else. That doesn't mean that the guys left weren't OVER. It's just means business was down, way down even. That said, I do get your point to an extent -- Men on a Mission, Adam Bomb, The Godwinns -- that whole period was horrible and I don't think there are many people with fond memories of that time. Partly, because they weren't watching, but also partly because it was fucking awful, and badly booked on top of that. Fairly sure that gimmicks from 92-3 are more fondly remembered -- the likes of Repo Man, The Mountie, Yokozuna and so on. I think in 94-5 they probably went overboard, when everyone on the roster had a gimmick based on a day job. I've never been able to get my head around quite what the thinking was coming out of 93. I did make a long post about it somewhere -- about how Vince and Pat Patterson wanted to strip things back to WWF rock 'n' roll era fundamentals with Luger etc. -- but somewhere along the line they totally lost it, went insane and booked a 100% cartoon undercard and mid-card with Bret playing a 94-version of Bob Backlund on top. That was a good thread if anyone can find it, Loss was on fire IIRC.