NintendoLogic

The people who are constantly down on WWE booking are far less exhausting, and far more consistently correct, than the dead-enders who continually insist that WWE never makes booking mistakes.

Davey Richards vs. Eddie Edwards at Best in the World is by far the worst match I've ever seen that's been pimped as great. Just comically bad on every level. MST3K-worthy. And I hear that their match at Final Battle (which I believe is where the infamous superplex gif comes from) is even worse. Someone should upload it for the lulz.

I don't know if it's possible to condition fans to the extent it was in the past. We live in an era of instant gratification, and I'm not sure fans have the patience to be re-educated. Then again, with the way promotions these days change course at the first sign of a headwind, maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Wasn't that Stevie Richards' gimmick in TNA?

So HHH likes really big matches because he's compensating? That explains a lot, actually. Anyway, I don't think there's any reason for a match to go longer than 30 minutes. With that said, my three favorite matches of all time are all longer than 35 minutes, and two of them are longer than 40. So who knows.

*raises hand* Sorry, small men doing gymnastics does nothing for me. Funny you should mention that. I was watching Dean Malenko vs. Norman Smiley the other day, and I don't know what you could call it other than a mat-based spotfest. I don't think matwork for its own sake has any more merit than high spots for their own sake.

I am. Spotfests without any real psychology are just athletic exhibitions, and if I want to see that, I'll watch Olympic gymnastics or something.

Nick Bockwinkel had his own way of dealing with the "boring" chants that started to appear in the 80s. If he was getting them, he'd lock in a chinlock and show them what boring really looked like. He felt that if he sped up because of fan chants, he was letting the fans call the match, and that was supposed to be his job. Oh, and fuck realism in wrestling. Real fights are boring. Wrestling is great precisely because it's fake.

I'm not seeing it. By my reckoning, he's had one really good year (2012) and a few solid but unspectacular ones while apparently producing nothing of note during his pre-WWE career.

Wrestling was a lot better back when the goal was to work the fans rather than entertain them.

It depends on the team. If I'm not mistaken, the Freebirds were inducted largely as a way of getting Terry Gordy in through the back door.

In the case of KENTA, there's also the fact that his real name (Kenta Kobayashi) bears a strong resemblance to that of Kenta Kobashi.

The issue isn't really Cena's selling during the match. It's in the days afterward. When he suffers a big loss, he usually shows up on Raw the next night and laughs it off. I guess the idea is to keep him from coming across as a sore loser, but it's hard enough to get people to care about wins and losses without one of the few guys who's protected in that regard treating losing like it's no big deal. That's outside the scope of his working ability, but I think it's an example of how the insufferability of his character often overshadows his merits as a worker.

Yeah, post-neck injury Austin's matches were filled with punches and kicks with little or no mat wrestling and lots of blood and international objects. How is that not brawling? I think he's unquestionably more of a brawler than Finlay. Also, put me down as a big fan of the SS98 Austin/Taker match. Austin spent the bulk of the match working from underneath, and I really liked his Misawa-esque drawn-out comeback.

Ideally, you want to draw in casuals and present a show that turns them into the base. Basing the biggest shows around part-time guys just sends the message that the everyday talent isn't worth watching.

Don't forget the 6/3/94 of pole matches.

A big part of that was how he was booked. UFC isn't popular in most of the countries where WWE runs PPV, so Brock the UFC guy means nothing to them. His only value there was as an unstoppable monster, which went out the window when he lost his first match back. I think that's the best explanation for the Summerslam 2012 buyrate. If you remember, buys were way up from the previous year in the US but way down internationally.

I can see how someone can view things like this. What I can't see is how someone can view things like this while simultaneously ranking Kurt Angle top 20 all time. Pretty much anything you can ding Shawn for, Angle is far worse.

Wrestling would really be improved these days if more matches had powder in them.

Haven't Atlanta crowds been dead for years?

Savio Vega? Takao Omori? Yoshinari Ogawa?

Yeah, let's copy the promotional strategy that nearly put New Japan out of business.

All I know about this guy is that I voted against him in DVDVR's March Madness tournament a few years ago without watching a single one of his matches. I have lucharesu filed in the "DO NOT WATCH UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES" compartment of my brain.

I decided to list everybody off the top of my head who who was more likely than not to finish in the top half of my ballot and came up with 34 names. Aja Kong Akira Taue Barry Windham Billy Robinson Bret Hart Bryan Danielson Chris Benoit Devil Masami Eddy Guerrero El Dandy El Hijo del Santo Genichiro Tenryu Jerry Lawler Jumbo Tsuruta Jun Akiyama Jushin Liger Kenta Kobashi Mitsuharu Misawa Negro Casas Nick Bockwinkel Rey Mysterio Ric Flair Ricky Steamboat Riki Choshu Satanico Shawn Michaels Shinya Hashimoto Stan Hansen Steve Austin Tatsumi Fujinami Terry Funk Toshiaki Kawada Vader Volk Han

They actually had a guy doing a Gestapo gimmick? How the hell did they get away with that in Florida of all places? Setting that aside, you really need to watch that Jumbo match like right now. It's awesome.