NintendoLogic

Is every match with a thread in the nominee folder fair game? There are quite a few matches there that aren't listed on the index of nominees.

She might have some heat over comments she once made about how she thought getting involved in wrestling hurt her career. LT would have been a perfect pick for the celebrity wing this year, but he's another one with sexual misconduct issues.

I've mostly come around on Manami Toyota. I agree with a lot of the criticisms of her work, but I've come to appreciate what she brings to the table. I think it helps to view her as the Energizer Bunny. She just keeps coming at you, so you can't keep her down for too long unless you kill her dead. At the same time, she doesn't have the firepower to put down larger opponents, so she relies on big counters to gain the advantage. This match is a prime example. She gets cut off fairly quickly whenever she tries to mount some offense in the early going. Her first run of sustained offense comes when she boots Kansai off the turnbuckle and onto the floor. And the hurricanrana counter to the Die Hard Kansai wasn't nearly as smooth as when Eddy and Rey did it, but it was a suitably big match ender.

Is there any reason Ronda and Charlotte shouldn't just double-team Becky to death and then both pin her?

I find the name of the Andre Battle Royal interesting because I distinctly remember "battle royal" being on Vince's list of banned phrases at one point. He insisted that they be called over-the-top-rope challenges.

Didn't Undertaker kill Muhammad Hassan?

I plan on submitting a ballot, although I'm certain that nobody will be happy with the final results. Nobody ever is with these kinds of projects.

This way of thinking is outdated, I think. Wrestlemania sells out before the card is even announced, and the Network means that nobody is an individual PPV draw. With WWE's current financial situation, they can easily afford to give everybody a Mania payday regardless of whether or not they appear and then keep the show to a manageable length.

"If you hate WWE so much, why do you even watch?" "How can you criticize WWE when you don't even watch?" Under this formulation, who has standing to criticize WWE? It seems like you've got them coming and going.

When reporters asked Velasquez about his recent comments calling wrestling fake, he said that he was talking about that WWE shit and that AAA was real.

The date is wrong, but this could be big.

Well, she's a better candidate than Torrie Wilson. And it's not like there's any objective standards for induction.

I'm no Seth Rollins fan, but calling him worse than Jinder Mahal can only be described as Rollins Derangement Syndrome. You know you're out to lunch when the argument for Jinder is that he sucks so much that nobody wants to see him in a main event position again.

I'm not disputing that Cena would be a better Mania opponent for Angle than Corbin in every way. I mean, that's a no-brainer. But he hasn't been an actively good wrestler in ages. Anyway, I think a major problem with stories in WWE is that there's simply too much time in between the Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania. There's only so many ways to say "I don't like you and I'm going to take your title," and even the deepest stories don't need ten weeks of buildup. Combine that with the billion hours of TV time they have to fill each week and you get all the twists and turns they think they need to keep things moving.

2019 Cena isn't a good worker, though. He's almost as washed-up as Angle.

Okada/Ishii wasn't quite on the level of their 2016 G1 match, but it was indeed a MOTYC. They match up incredibly well because they seem to cancel out each other's more annoying/problematic tendencies. Ishii's cross armbreaker is the first time I can ever recall him applying a wrestling hold in a match.

When New Japan ran a show in Charlotte last month, they apologized for the lack of Japanese talent and said that the shutdown had prevented their visas from being processed. This led to a "Fuck you Trump" chant, which shows how much both Charlotte and wrestling crowds have changed. Can you imagine a "Fuck you Reagan" chant at a JCP show in the 80s?

There's a niche audience for all kinds of stupid shit that makes the business look like even more of a joke than it already is. That doesn't mean they should be catered to. Then again, this is an era where wrestlers shove tampons down their opponents' throats and sell pictures of their bowel movements online, so we're probably past the point of no return.

That's not really true, though. The classic wrestling holds are mostly modified versions of catch wrestling submissions (somebody actually won an MMA fight with a Boston crab a while back). And suplexes and the like have their origins in Greco-Roman wrestling. As for the Irish whip, it was more of a judo-style takedown in its original form. Obviously every aspect of pro wrestling wasn't sports-like, but the wrestlers themselves were pretty much always presented as elite athletes and genuine tough guys. Managers like Cornette don't count because their heat came from having no physical credibility. The whole idea behind Cornette's feud with Baby Doll was that he was such a sissy that he got his ass kicked by a girl. People like to say that doesn't matter anymore, but WWE's biggest stars are Brock Lesnar and Ronda Rousey. And Becky Lynch standing tall with a bloody face and a broken nose took her to new heights of popularity. And Roman Reigns was at his most over when he was the Shield's silent enforcer. Being perceived as a badass matters. It's much harder to create that perception when you go out of your way to remind everybody that it's all fake and bullshit.

To be honest, I do find Rey working competitively against the likes of Kane and Mark Henry to be absurd on a certain level. He makes it work because he's a once-in-a-lifetime athletic marvel. Being juiced to the gills also helps. There are few, if any, women who are anywhere close to him technically or athletically. That's precisely it. Women's bodies aren't equal to men's bodies for the purpose of competing in combat sports. Even when a man and woman are the same height and weight, the man is going to have more muscle mass and denser bone structure than the woman if he's any kind of athlete. Therein lies the problem. Pro wrestling isn't a comic book or a video game. It's a simulated athletic contest. It has fantastic and theatrical elements, but it has to be grounded in realism or else you get shit like Bray Wyatt projecting maggots onto the mat. The fact that we're having this discussion is another indication of how nerd culture has cannibalized every aspect of American popular culture.

The match I'm looking forward to the most is Lesnar vs. Rollins. I have no love for Seth, but it's pretty much impossible for Brock to have a bad match with a smaller guy who's willing to bump big. Joe vs. Rey would have been off the chain in 2005, but Joe hasn't been that level of worker in eons. And from what I've seen of Rey since returning to WWE, he's basically a PWG wrestler now. Plus, Rey always gets a raw deal when it comes to match time. He's only had two Mania singles matches go longer than 10 minutes.

You can put me in the "uncomfortable for personal reasons" category. A man beating up a woman isn't something I can find entertaining under any circumstances. Plus, a woman having a competitive match with a man makes a complete mockery of any pretense of realism and destroys my suspension of disbelief. It's like deathmatch wrestling. It doesn't matter to me how well-worked it is because it's too inherently offensive to my sensibilities to derive any enjoyment from.

I've never had much interest in Eli Drake, but good on him for taking a stand against that nonsense. Intergender matches have to be the worst trend in wrestling this decade, and think of the ground that covers.

I will say that the story strikes me as suspect for other reasons. It seems implausible to me that a couple of old-school carnies like Hogan and Piper would have been blabbing about the payoff to a major angle in front of some marks. Maybe someone from WCW leaked it and the part about it coming from a movie set was a smokescreen to protect the identity of the leaker.

The difference is that 1998 Austin and 2005 Cena had significant measurable impacts on business. If Braun is drawing like Goldberg, then by all means give him the Goldberg push. But I've seen no evidence of him being a significant mover of ratings, attendance, merch sales, or really anything other than crowd pops. Granted, that's better than no reaction at all, but let's get real. He's a monster who performs superhuman feats of strength and has a monosyllabic catchphrase. It'd be alarming if he didn't get some kind of reaction. At some point, though, you have to deliver some steak to match the sizzle. Great matches may not be the end-all be-all, but in-ring ability is more important than it's ever been. Having him work garbage brawls all the time sounds great in theory, but what do you do when the injuries start piling up? He's already falling apart physically as it is. With all that said, he's obviously not being used to anywhere near his potential. Baron Corbin is this era's Kane: he's supposed to be this heel gatekeeper who gets vanquished by up-and-coming babyfaces, but everyone he feuds with ends up less over than they were beforehand.