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Gregor

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Everything posted by Gregor

  1. Gregor
    This was around the time they started mentioning that Vince was the owner. Jim Ross had already done his heel promo in which he talked about how McMahon fired him.
  2. Gregor
    Hey, congratulations. I hope everything went well. When I described Michaels as earning his comeback in this match, the three kip-ups were part of it, but it was more about the stuff that immediately preceded them. He finally muscled his way out of the backbreaker hold, but it took him all of his strength to do that, which left him too exhausted to capitalize. He was about to fight out of the chinlock, but Bulldog headbutted him to stop that. He slipped out of a slam attempt and went for a backslide, but Bulldog overpowered him. Finally Michaels scored with a clothesline, but again he couldn't capitalize. The same thing happened after he ducked a punch and hit a back suplex. It was only after the kip-ups and the dropkick that he was really in control, so it felt like he'd had to fight really hard for it. I can see not liking his shrugging off the clotheslines, but it didn't bother me much because the tide was already in his favor, and the clotheslines weren't there for any reason other than to set up the kip-ups. This isn't really something I'd consider great or anything, just a good showing between two guys in a matchup I don't normally like. Was it a match that you found ultimately hollow?
  3. Gregor
    I don't think that (peak, mid-'90s) Michaels' selling/pacing is bad or anything; his offense is a weak point, but he takes his opponents' moves well. So it's not like, if athleticism and quickness don't move you at all, then you're left with nothing. "Ultimately hollow" is a hard judgment to make. I'd say no, but I'm a Michaels fan. It depends on what you're looking for, I guess. The 1-2-3 Kid vs. Owen Hart from King of the Ring is a match that, stripped of the action and super-fast pace, is kind of hollow. That's fine with me; it's a four-minute match. If a twenty-minute match had nothing but action and a good pace, I'd probably be less satisfied. I don't need every wrestling match to say a whole lot. I think that the high point of Michaels' singles career was his face run in 1995, and I think that he got a bit worse in 1996. In 1995, he generally had to work for his comebacks. He had a lot of hope spots that got cut off, and they were often more convincing than merely elbowing out of a chinlock. In 1996, he was content sometimes just to duck a clothesline, hit the forearm, and begin the finishing stretch that way. I'm more bothered by a lazy setup to the finishing sequence than I am by a lazy finishing sequence. If the guy comes across as having earned his comeback, as having fought hard to regain control of the match, then the match feels less "hollow" to me. Specific examples: Shawn Michaels vs. British Bulldog (MSG, 10/6/95) and Shawn Michaels vs. 1-2-3 Kid (RAW from 3/96). His offense is better in the RAW match, even quite good; it's not good in the Bulldog match, but I think the way that they set up Michaels making his comeback more than makes up for it. I don't know if that's because of Michaels' selling, the Bulldog's offense, the layout of the match, the pacing - it's just a Michaels match that I feel illustrates my point. I should note that I like both, but the MSG one feels better and more substantial despite execution issues that aren't present in the RAW one.
  4. Gregor
    As has been stated in this thread (or the other one - don't remember which), this paints Michaels in the worst possible light. Michaels, for whatever reason, was generally greater than the sum of his parts. His best quality was putting together entertaining matches - that or athleticism, but I'm aware that you don't put much stock in that. Most wrestlers were better when paired with Michaels, and not just because they were given opportunities to have longer matches or anything like that. I'm trying to think of someone who was worse when wrestling Michaels. Maybe Bulldog or Jannetty - I guess Bret Hart could be here, although it's not like his matches with Michaels were garbage. Anyway, an attribute-by-attribute checklist for Shawn Michaels would probably make him look worse than he was, but I guess that's part of the problem with him. If your strongest point is entertaining a live crowd, and you're not excellent at any of the small underpinning stuff, then you've kind of set a ceiling for yourself. The output probably won't be boring, but it'll be devoid of a lot of what makes people connect emotionally, especially on the second view, third view, and so on.
  5. Gregor
    El Mariachi is Solar. Someone more knowledgeable about lucha than I am might be able to explain the gimmick change.
  6. Gregor
    Michaels-Jarrett from IYH 2 maybe isn't the best IC Title match of all time, but I like it a lot in part because it's illustrative of why secondary belts are fun to have around. That match doesn't work as well if it isn't for a title, and if it's for a world title then it looks like a farce. The best European Championship match is clearly the first one. I tried to think of what the second-best one would be, and there's not much to choose from. Michaels-Bulldog? D'Lo-X-Pac? The Owen-Bulldog rematch that Bret interrupted? Do people like that three-way from WM2000? Rude-Steamboat from SuperBrawl isn't up there with Magnum-Tully, but I think it stands a chance as the best US Title match in the WCW era. What are the best choices here? DDP-Goldberg and DDP-Sting are the only really good title matches that I can recall. Were any of the Savage-Flair title matches really good?
  7. Gregor
    Jerry Lawler was really annoying during this. It didn't annoy me when Macho Man was talking during the Backlund interview from September because he was at least helping the angle get over. Vince is awesome in this interview, as he was in the previous one. He sounds like Backlund's dad or something, completely let down by how Bob has turned on all the people who used to support him.
  8. Gregor
    I'm not sure that Russo was a worse booker than Kevin Nash. Russo at least has things that could count as positives - he booked for a company during a successful time for it, and he tried hard to get midcard and undercard acts over. There are arguments against both of those points, yeah, but I don't think Nash has anything that you could even try to spin as a positive from his period of booking. Russo has had a much greater negative impact overall for the companies for which he's booked than Nash has, but a lot of that is the result of Russo being given far more chances than Nash ever was. On the other hand, Nash and Russo both booked WCW in 1999, and Nash-booked WCW was better than Russo-booked WCW, so there you go.
  9. Gregor
    I really liked how, after Savage jumped up from the booth to help pull Backlund off the writer, there was no commentary, just a frenzied scene centered on the innocuous looking middle-aged man. They even had the cameraman drop his camera and go to help, so we got a shot from the camera that made it clear that no one was holding it. It struck me as a good way to present one man as capable of causing a huge amount of chaos.
  10. Gregor
    This was so much fun. There were a lot of pre-planned spots, many of which involved Michaels and Walter Payton on the outside, and these generally kept something interesting happening at every point in the match. I'd seen this maybe once before, and I'd always assumed that Payton was just kind of there to get some money, but that's not true. He's enthusiastic enough (he was generally known as a low-key guy during his career, so having him be as animated as Michaels would look fake to the Chicago crowd), and he gets his spots down right, which is a must because most of them are crucial parts of the match. He starts to crack up before Michaels clotheslines Razor at one point, but I'm not going to hold his having fun against him. Diesel looked good throughout this. I feel like Bret Hart kind of underestimated him, because he could be okay carrying parts of a match. Maybe that was just because of all the other stuff going on here, though.
  11. Gregor
    I know he didn't wrestle from WM 10 until this, but what was the reason for it?
  12. Gregor
    Yeah, what struck me about this was just how different it was from the typical good or better match that features Ric Flair. The spotlight isn't on Flair at all. It's impressive to see his performance here as almost a bit player.
  13. Gregor
    It's kind of funny that the end of regulation is almost exactly the same as that of WrestleMania XII, although the fact that Owen is the challenger changes the dynamic a little bit. Still, it's not hard to imagine Owen griping that they shouldn't have made him break the sharpshooter before heading to overtime, or that they should have let Owen put Bret back in the sharpshooter to restart the match.
  14. Gregor
    Was IRS a direct response to the steroid trial stuff, kind of like when the Lakers beat the Nuggets on RAW? I don't know when the government started getting on Vince, so I don't know if it's even possible for that to be the case.
  15. Gregor
    You've watched three full matches from this pay-per-view, and you haven't mentioned Art Donovan once. Give us something.
  16. Gregor
    I don't mind generic opinions. To me, they're no better or worse than outlier opinions. As long as you explain why something is your opinion, that's fine with me. And if you don't, and you say something like "I dunno why I like it. I just do,"* then my reaction would probably be something along the lines of "Yeah, sometimes it can be hard to explain why certain things resonate more strongly than others."* But I'm not a very confrontational person. *Please note that neither of these quotes is intended to serve as an exact representation of anything that anyone has said. Please also note that I am not ruling out the possibility that someone, somewhere, actually has said these things.
  17. Gregor
    Eh...Dale Murphy's Hall of Fame case wasn't really derailed by his playing for forgettable teams. It's more that his ability vanished overnight in the late eighties, whereas a normal, more gradual decline would probably have been enough to get him in. During his peak, he was generally considered a lock for the Hall.
  18. Gregor
    Thanks. Another one to file under "I Cannot Understand the Thought Processes of Vince McMahon."
  19. Gregor
    So Vince admitted that he'd stolen another man's shoes at a party? What exactly did he say? It's not that I don't believe you; I just can't wrap my head around Vince deciding that he needed that famous sportswriter's shoes.
  20. Gregor
    This wasn't as spectacular as the PPV match, but wrestling at that pace for 10+ minutes would have been hard to do, anyway. These guys were a good fit for each other, and it's a bummer that they didn't get a long PPV match against each other until 1998, when the 1-2-3 Kid was recovering from an injury, and both guys had lost a little bit in the four years since this. I don't understand why they'd have Owen lose via DQ just before his shot at the championship. Even if they wanted to build up Neidhart as a threat on the outside, there was probably a better time to do it than right before a cage match.
  21. Gregor
    There was an AP article this morning that mentioned that the CEO had falsely claimed to have a computer engineering degree. It didn't mention Meltzer. I know nothing about this, though, and wasn't familiar with the situation before reading that article. EDIT: Should probably have linked to the article. Here you go. It was a computer science degree that he falsely claimed to have - sorry.
  22. Gregor
    I think that's something that Russo actually did well. Maybe he didn't always get them involved in meaningful storylines, but he actually did give a crap about the presentation of undercard guys and helped get their personalities over. I remember D'Lo Brown talking about collaborating with Russo on the chest protector gimmick. Of course, Brown said this around the time he joined TNA as an agent, so that might just have been D'Lo being smart.
  23. Gregor
    I know you were asking Loss, but: 1) Michaels didn't go for quick pins as often as Steamboat. 2) Michaels spent much of his pre-injury singles career (including 1994) working heel, a role in which those attributes aren't as useful as they are when working face.
  24. Gregor
    I agree 100%. He's amazing in the Bob Backlund interviews later in the year.
  25. Gregor

    Other 1994 worth watching

    Gregor replied to jdw's topic in 1994

    The yearbook already has one of the Michaels/Ramon house show ladder matches on it, so it's not an oversight or anything, but I preferred the 1/15/94 ladder match to the 1/14/94 one. It's only about 14 minutes, so they don't have as much time to worry about filling, and (possibly as a result) all of the stuff they do is interesting and fits the flow of the match. I actually prefer it to the WrestleMania one, too, just because the pre-ladder portion is less flashy and more violent than that from WrestleMania, so it doesn't seem like they switch what they're doing all of a sudden when they bring in the ladder. There are none of the ladder moments from Michaels that made him a star, but the match doesn't feel like it needs those. There's also a Coliseum Video match between the two without the ladder. It's from February (I think), so it could be an interesting comparison to the ladder matches. I wouldn't recommend it, though, because the set already has the RAW match, and also the Coliseum Video match was pretty boring if I remember it correctly.
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