NintendoLogic

Darby (kayfabe) injured his leg against Angelico on Elevation. They kept playing it up on commentary, so I expect it to factor into the coffin match.

I believe it is for the men, but Sasha and Bianca beat them to the punch at Mania. I recall it being made a pretty big deal of. EDIT: Actually, scratch that. Booker T and Lashley had a title match in 2006.

Thank you, Captain Obvious. For real though, loading a guy up with bells and whistles to get him over on the developmental brand only to strip it all from him and force him to sink or swim on his own on the main roster is a peak WWE move.

He had been in rough shape for a while due to dementia. His son posted a video of him a month ago where he looked 20 years older than he was and appeared to have no recollection of his wrestling career. At least his suffering is over.

Never mind all that soccer shit, Brock Lesnar has a goddamn ponytail now.

Spending the first sixteen minutes of WOR after Conor McGregor broke his leg talking about roller derby might be peak Meltzer.

Eddie Guerrero/Tajiri vs. Team Angle on 5/22/03 is right up there with the best Smackdown matches. The best match in Raw history is either Bret Hart vs. 123 Kid or the quad tear match. What's the best match in Impact history? I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but I feel like there are some obvious Samoa Joe or AJ Styles matches I'm missing.

PWInsider is reporting she tore her ACL training at the PC. What the fuck kind of training are they doing there that causes someone to completely blow out their knee?

Nothing Cornette has said about AEW can be rationally construed as incitement to violence. There's no way he can be held responsible for the actions of a guy who's clearly off his rocker. He's been saying far worse things about Vince Russo for decades, and there have been no attempts on Russo's life that I'm aware of.

That idiot clearly has no idea how many times Cornette was arrested or sued for using his racket on rail jumpers. Also, somebody better have read MJF the riot act for this. Fans charging the ring isn't something you can even hint at encouraging.

The current Observer has more details on Funk's condition. Physically, he's been in more or less constant pain ever since he defied doctor's orders to appear on a Tommy Dreamer show fresh off hernia surgery. Mentally, the good news is that he's in nowhere near as bad shape as Red Bastien and Nick Bockwinkel were at the end of their lives. However, he was interviewed for the Mick Foley A&E biography, and the fact that none of the footage was used is not a good sign.

Setting aside the question of whether ECW should be considered a model worthy of emulation, RVD and Lawler were actual wrestlers and their promos led to actual wrestling matches. The Lambert segment isn't going to lead to anything unless they're planning on using him as a heel manager, which seems highly unlikely. It was just an attempt to take potshots at critics. They might as well brought in a Cornette impersonator to cut that promo.

Also, it's quite fitting that a fan tried to jump the ring on the 25th anniversary of BATB 1996.

I'm a bit surprised to see people so high on Lambert. His delivery was great, but the content was terrible. I don't think there's ever a good reason to bring a guy on your show to talk about how much your product sucks, especially when he's an obvious stand-in for your most vocal critic. It only makes you look thin-skinned and insecure.

That doesn't sound right to me. Implied consent means the act of operating a motor vehicle gives consent to a submit to a BAC test after a DUI arrest. There is no requirement to submit to a field sobriety test, but they should have given him a breathalyzer test at the police station. If he refused that (even a conditional refusal like asking for a lawyer to be present), his license should have been automatically suspended. All I can think of is that maybe they thought the dashcam footage was damning enough. Or maybe his lawyer was able to convince the jury that his arrest wasn't lawful because the officer didn't have probable cause to pull him over. That's how Alex Riley beat a DUI charge in 2011.

So Zelina Vega is following the time-honored tradition of currying favor with management by picking a fight with THE SHEETZ. She also deleted her tweet about unionization. It'd be one thing if she pulled a Jesse Ventura and decided it wasn't a hill worth dying on if no one else was going to stand up for their rights (and Ventura at least got his SAG card first). But seeing her go full corporate simp is pretty disappointing.

Don Muraco said on his podcast that Funk is suffering from dementia and has been moved to an assisted living facility. Terrible news if true.

Rewatching HBK/Mankind reminded me of how much I hate it when wrestlers apply the figure four to the wrong leg. The idea behind the hold is that you're putting pressure on the straight leg with the bent one, but people treat it like the bent leg is the one being impacted. That battle was lost ages ago, though.

I'm probably abnormally high on the Cena match at Summerslam 2007. Beyond that, though...yeesh. There's a famous quote from Moneyball: "If he's a good hitter, why doesn't he hit good?" That's Orton in a nutshell. His swing is mechanically perfect, but his WAR is barely above replacement level. If you made a list of the top 100 WWE matches of the 21st century, how many Orton matches would be on it? Three? It almost certainly wouldn't be double digits. You'd expect way more from a guy who's been a pushed main eventer for two decades at a time when WWE has never been more loaded with talent and in-ring performance has never been more important. It'd be one thing if he rarely delivered a classic but could always be counted on to produce at a certain level, but he's also responsible for a fair number of outright stink bombs. Having bad matches with Bray Wyatt isn't something I'd hold against someone. What I will hold against him is having matches that are bad even by Bray Wyatt standards. As for Ultimo, he at least got over in multiple promotions and deserves some credit as an innovator.

The problem with that scenario is that the WWF was actually serious about steroid testing in 1993 (or at least more serious than they had ever been before or since) and Patriot wouldn't have looked nearly as impressive off the gas. Also, I can't see Vince at that time giving a significant push to a masked wrestler. I mean, he wanted El Hijo del Santo to unmask, for chrissakes.

I don't think you're quite doing justice to his argument. He's saying that accuracy is impossible because things like importance and influence are nebulous and unquantifiable. His secondary point is that a poll of critics has the effect of establishing a canon, and a canon dominated by classic rock seems wrong in a world where rock and roll is increasingly on the fringes of popular culture (remember when Billie Eilish revealed she had never heard of Van Halen?). There's a potentially interesting parallel between that idea and the question of how relevant traditionally revered territory guys are to modern wrestling. Someone like Ric Flair will always have strong backing, but I can easily see guys like Harley Race and Ted DiBiase taking a massive hit. But the important thing to remember is that this isn't a high-profile critical undertaking. To the extent that a wrestling canon exists, this project's impact on it will be negligible at best, so strategic voting for the purpose of sending a message is unlikely to accomplish much if at all. Also, as has been noted, the real value is in the discussion of candidates rather than the actual list. Assigning too much importance to the final outcome is probably the biggest mistake someone can make.

Speaking of Aliyah, she's been at the PC since 2015. And there are guys like Kona Reeves who have been there even longer. Needless to say, it should not take six fucking years to learn how to be a pro wrestler. If they still haven't progressed to where they need to be, cut them loose or at least put them in a position where they can sink or swim. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground, though. Either you get called up way before you're ready or you rot in NXT for eternity.

Xia looked like she was trying to knock a fastball into the upper deck. There's no way you can protect your opponent swinging wildly like that. If you don't know how to pull your kicks, don't aim them at someone's head. On that note, there's no excuse for not putting your hands up whenever a live kick comes anywhere near your head. Especially if it's out of some misguided commitment to "realism." One, everybody already knows it's fake so you're not fooling anybody. Two, people do in fact put their hands up in real fights.

Hair nets just make it easier for sex traffickers to target children.

Here's a map of the old territory system. It should be noted that the boundaries were fluid and not universally agreed upon. For example, Sheik considered Ohio part of his territory when GCW started running shows there. He retaliated by appearing for the opposition group in Georgia headed by Jim Wilson and Thunderbolt Patterson and was suspended from the NWA as a result. By the way, Toronto was actually a Crockett town in the late 70s and early 80s. By the mid-70s, Sheik had killed the town to the point where even Sammartino title defenses didn't draw. It was Flair and Steamboat who turned things around. In 1984, Jim Crockett became convinced that Jack Tunney was planning on switching his allegiance to the WWF. He thus stopped sending top talent to Toronto and gave them guys like Jimmy Valiant and Paul Jones instead. Business fell to the point where Tunney had no choice but to join up with Vince, so it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.