NintendoLogic

The next episode of Impact ends with Eric Bischoff being thrown into an outhouse and coming out covered in shit.

Dude, that's Bizarro World. That doesn't count. It's pretty clear that when adult fans show up, they boo Cena. They'll boo him at house shows too, but they mostly don't go to house shows these days.

It's something I've heard a bunch of people say. I'm pretty sure Dave has said it a few times, but I can't pinpoint where. And every house show report I've read has mentioned that the crowd was overwhelmingly pro-Cena.

Actually, he almost never gets booed at house shows, which kind of proves my point. Cena isn't the sole or even the primary cause of the WWE's current issues. But it's undeniable that a significant portion of the audience has a viscerally negative reaction to him. Whether that reaction is warranted or not is immaterial. And nobody the WWE has offered up recently to appeal to that audience has clicked.

We really need to get away from this idea that the Cena dynamic works so well because he's the top face to one portion of the audience and the top heel to everyone else. That's all well and good, except the latter group no longer goes to house shows or orders PPVs because they hate him so much.

It's especially infuriating considering how WWE management has a long tradition of preaching that the talent need to work hard and get themselves over, that nobody is just handed a push. Which is double nonsense; guys get handed pushes all the time, and there are countless examples of wrestlers being held back despite their hard work and/or popularity with the fans just because they don't fit the office's incredibly narrow-minded view of what a "superstar" is supposed to be. Ask Zack Ryder what happens when you get yourself over without the WWE's permission. Or Luke from Tough Enough. Before their match in FCW, Bill DeMott told him that if he tried to play to the crowd, they'd start fighting for real. They want their talent to show them something, but they only want it from the ones they've already decided should have it.

It could just be them being carnies and implying that in their day, they were all such good workers that everyone thought it was real.

There's also an issue of semantics. "Not truly great" is not the same as "bad" or even "mediocre." There may not be any US tag that blew me away, but there are plenty that I think are really good. It's not an insult to Death Magnetic to say that it's not on the same level as Master of Puppets.

Is this really true, though? I see plenty of callbacks to the past in the WWE. The Orton/Punk feud last year was based on Punk wanting revenge for Legacy jumping him backstage and forcing him to forfeit the title three years previous. And the current Kane/Orton feud was traced back to a match they had on Smackdown last year that I had actually forgotten about before they brought it up. Not to mention all the pre-match video packages that are intended to bring casual fans up to speed. I think it's less an explicit philosophy than it is simple incompetence.

Plenty of wrestlers have done a lot stupider things for a lot less money.

The funny thing about this is that I came out as pro-FIP in this thread. I'm not a fan of some of the peculiarities of the Southern style, but I love Kobashi/Kikuchi vs. Furnas/Kroffat, to take one example. If you think about it, FIP is pretty logical. If you were in a tag team, wouldn't you work on ways to isolate an opponent from his partner and prevent him from tagging out?

If I'm not mistaken, he continues to insist that putting the title on Arquette was a good idea because it's something people still talk about today. There's a good chance he's dumb enough to actually believe that.

I stand by that statement. I don't enjoy cornball Southern wrestling, so Midnight Express matches with stooge spots and comedy bumps do nothing for me. And the WWE has generally treated its tag division as something that workers with potential are supposed to graduate from, which limits the potential for high-end matches on that front. Pretty much this. Think of the most brilliantly executed and well-received angles in wrestling history. How many of them would even rise to the level of a quality soap opera storyline? And the in-ring action is filled with things you simply have to accept. Suspension of disbelief isn't something you can just turn on like a light switch, and just because you buy into one aspect of wrestling doesn't mean you're going to buy into others. It's fun to pretend that watching and liking wrestling is a purely intellectual exercise, but it's really mostly subjective and unquantifiable. Probably 90% of what happens in wrestling boils down to "you either buy it or you don't."

The problem with this is that history has shown that nothing significantly pops buyrates for B-PPVs. They're better off building to Summerslam and risking Brock flaking than hotshotting Brock/Cena and getting 200k buys for Extreme Rules rather than 175k.

And Stan Hansen wouldn't have? In real life, beating the shit out of someone with a cowbell and chairs after the bell would probably result in a multiple-month suspension, not to mention an arrest. '90s All-Japan didn't have any less carny bullshit than JCP, they were just better at hiding it. I don't remember Hansen ever hitting anybody with a cowbell in a Triple Crown match. There's a difference between a heated grudge match and a title match that's supposed to determine the best wrestler in the company.

It's not so much that FIP is always great. It's just that nothing else has consistently produced good matches. It's like that Winston Churchill quote about democracy. FIP is worst tag match structure except for all the others. With that said, I much prefer the Japanese style where the heel team just beats the hell out of the FIP and doesn't do goofy shit like the guy on the apron choking him while the ref's back is turned. Come to think of it, I don't know if there's a single US tag match I would consider truly great. See, this is why I can't really get into 80s JCP. All the real sport pretensions come across to me as absurd with all the carny bullshit that went on. In a real sport, Ric Flair would have been stripped of the title many times over.

I think Dave takes a lot of unwarranted grief on this board, but then he goes and says stuff like this regarding Richards/Elgin: Oh, boy. Where to begin with this one? First of all, small guys can take less punishment than big guys, so shouldn't they cancel each other out? Second, the current trend of no-selling can largely be traced to the 90s All Japan heavyweight division. He goes on to say the following: How does perfect execution improve a match's psychology?

This is the greatest post in the history of our sport. Anyway, issues of professionalism aside, isn't Shawn basically right? Shouldn't top guys avoid doing too many jobs (not slip on a banana peel fluke losses, but actual clean jobs) to guys who aren't on that level?

On the tag team front, I hate it when a wrestler will go to knock the tagged-out opponent off the apron and he'll just stand there and take it like a doofus. 6/9/95 is the only match I can think of off the top of my head that set up the spots in a way that it was plausible that the guy on the apron would be caught unawares. And I've written about this before, but I hate the simultaneous hot tag. I can't think of a single reason to prefer it over a regular hot tag. I also hate sequences where the heel keeps popping up to feed the babyface comeback. I had always viewed it as a WWE exclusive, but the last few times I've watched Impact, it was a pretty common staple of TNA matches as well.

An interesting item in the latest Observer: Who would Jesus job to?

Isn't this just a really roundabout way of saying that he has good heel mannerisms?

Wait, what? I never agreed to this. Anyway, the Cena backlash began when he got moved to Raw and his sloppiness was a lot more difficult to conceal. 2005 Cena really was a limited worker and was awkward as the company ace working 15-20 minute main event PPV matches. Granted, Batista never faced a similar backlash despite being even more limited. But he was also a guy with a badass aura who wore nice suits and beat the Cerebral Assassin at his own game. By contrast, a jorts-wearing white rapper just screams "midcard gimmick act." And let's be honest, Cena just plain looks like a dork.

How about Hogan/Sid? Although in retrospect, Warrior returning wasn't that great a moment.

Just out of curiosity, is this ダニエル? Anyway, this reminds me of a point I've made a view times in the past. The 1989-1997 period is almost certainly the best period from a match quality standpoint in history all over the world, not just Japan. Personally, when I compiled my personal desert island top ten match list a while back, every single match came from between 1990 and 1997. So if you're going to write off a 2012 match as a MOTYC because it wouldn't have stood out in 1993, you might as well resign yourself to never seeing another MOTYC ever again. It's like writing off a right fielder for the Yankees because he isn't on the same level as Babe Ruth.

The way I see it, calling something a MOTYC just means that it's better than most of what's come along so far, not that it's objectively great. It's a relative judgment, not an absolute one.