NintendoLogic

Tessa was scheduled to drop the title at Slammiversary on July 18. The problem was that her contract expired on June 30. They tried to get her to drop the title several times beforehand, but they couldn't reach an agreement. She also refused to send it taped promos, which forced them to re-edit several episodes of Impact. I get where she was coming from, but the reality of the situation is that when you have the kind of baggage she does, you have to play ball.

According to the book (or at least the PDF version), Jim Barnett was working on a deal where Hart would manage Ivan Koloff when he beat Bruno for the title. Then, after Koloff dropped the belt to Pedro, he'd bring them both to Australia with a big push as "the duo that beat Bruno." But Bruno shut down any attempts to bring Hart to New York because a WWWF prelim guy who had worked Amarillo told him that Hart had badmouthed him. I can't imagine Vince the Elder putting the heat from ending Bruno's title reign on a fly-in manager, so the story sounds fishy to me.

I'm a huge fan of the Hart Foundation's matches against the British Bulldogs (9/23/85) and the Killer Bees (2/17/86). I'd put them up against any 80s US tag outside of Midnight Rockers vs. Rose/Somers.

Look, all I know about soccer is that UEFA and FIFA are corrupt as fuck and anything that shafts them is likely an unqualified good.

I never would have guessed that someone who thinks he can prove his toughness by stiffing the shit out of people in fake fights might be susceptible to idiotic ideas. And it's not even a case of plausible deniability where maybe he thought "Save the Children" was an innocuous-sounding slogan. He straight-up posted a video of Lin Wood ranting about the House of Windsor and the Vatican. Luckily for me, I never liked the guy even before I knew he was a Trump-supporting anti-masker. If you haven't seen it before, check out this match where he knocks his opponent out legit right at the beginning and then picks him up so he can get his shit in rather than just taking the pin. Looking back, the highlight of his career was when LayCool was making him wear pink shirts.

According to Observers from that period, the WWF seriously considered having Vince manage Doc and William Regal since they both started with the company around the same time, the idea being that he was bringing in two shooters to destroy Austin. I don't know how well that would have worked, but it would've been a million times better than what they eventually did.

I saw Kane in an airport a few years ago. I didn't approach him since he was in the middle of a conversation, but he only looked to be a few inches taller than me. I'd peg him at about 6'5. Certainly nowhere near 7 feet tall.

As others have noted, pro wrestling for much of its history has been a wretched hive of scum and villainy. I decided some time ago that if I wanted to institute a morals clause in my viewing, it would serve me better to simply stop watching altogether. I'd rather not do that because I believe wrestling has enough intrinsic merit to be worth trying to clean up. I also believe that the enjoyable aspects can be decoupled from the problematic ones. In the meantime, I cope by maintaining complete emotional detachment so that it hardly fazes me when a wrestler dies prematurely or is revealed to be a garbage human being. I will say that it took me years before I could bring myself to watch Benoit's matches again. In fact, I stopped watching wrestling entirely for two and a half years following the murders. I don't particularly enjoy watching him these days, but that's because my tastes have shifted significantly over the past decade and a half. It's an aesthetic judgment, not a moral one. I should note that Benoit was my favorite wrestler in the world, possibly of all time, in the mid-2000s. As such, he's still catalogued in my brain primarily as a wrestler I loved to watch rather than a family annihilator. There's a good chance I'd have a different perspective if I'd never seen any of his matches prior to June 2007. The idea of separating art from the artist goes back to the New Criticism school of literary studies, which tried to cast literary criticism as a scientific endeavor. For them, a work of art was self-contained and independent of the world as a whole. Just as a scientist's personal life and views have no bearing on the validity of a scientific theory, neither do a poet's have any impact on the literary merit of a poem. That approach might be questionable for art and literature, but I think it works pretty well for wrestling. For one thing, wrestling matches really are self-contained and outside of everything other than other matches and match builds. More importantly, matches are devoid of any real content, so there's no issue with the creator's worldview seeping into the creation. It's not as if there's a pro-child rape subtext in Lawler's matches or a pro-child murder subtext in Benoit's. In that respect, it's a lot closer to sport than art. Like, the fact that so many of Woody Allen's films are about middle-aged men lusting after much younger women surely has to weigh on the viewer, but OJ Simpson's crimes are irrelevant to how good of a running back he was. In the end, though, where to draw the line and whether the line should be drawn in the first place are emotional decisions rather than intellectual ones.

I don't remember that spot in the Punk match. I'll keep an eye out for it the next time I watch it. It definitely happened in the Balor match. In fact, the story of the match was Brock getting his abdomen worked over after going into the table.

I believe you're referring to the Balor match. But yeah, it was an amazing sell job. His ability to project vulnerability without losing his aura of danger is why you can't just plug any musclehead into his match formula and get the same results. The AJ match is another example. He made the audience actually think he might submit to the calf crusher right before escaping by ramming AJ's head into the mat like a basketball.

I haven't seen it in a while, but I liked this 8/18/91 match against Takako Inoue enough to use it for Secret Santo.

Here's my somewhat contrarian top three of the decade: Shinya Hashimoto vs. Kazuo Yamazaki (8/2/98-G1 Climax Finals) Vader vs. Keiji Mutoh (8/10/91-G1 Climax) Genichiro Tenryu/Takashi Ishikawa vs. Shinya Hashimoto/Michiyoshi Ohara (6/14/93) I wanted to highlight them since they were either undersold in the year-end rankings (the G1 matches) or not on the yearbook at all (the tag match) and would likely get lost in the shuffle otherwise.

I completely disagree that 2010 Brock's matches only work in the moment. That might be true of his lesser outings, but the high-end stuff absolutely holds up to repeated viewings. I'll likely have four matches from that run on my 2021 GME ballot (2012 vs. Cena, 2013 vs. Punk, 2015 vs. Reigns, 2017 vs. Styles), and my favorite of the bunch (the Punk match) is the only one I didn't see live. The other three I liked even more on rewatch than I did on initial viewing. I can see the argument that his booking and match construction broke the rules and hurt the rest of the product, but modern WWE is completely incapable of telling compelling stories to begin with. If anything, they've gotten worse since he left. All I expect from them is the occasional standalone match that holds up as entertaining and fulfilling in a vacuum. On that front, Brock likely delivered better than anyone possibly could.

It looks like this is the new NXT logo. Because you can't have a HHH-run brand without skulls.

Budget cuts. This fucking company.

Good on the Bucks for picking a lane and sticking to it. All the evidence we have suggests they're best as cocky prick heels. The fact that they keep trying to be conflicted tweeners is baffling. They've done "I don't want to fight my friend and it's tearing me apart" storylines what, three times since AEW began? Absolutely nobody on Earth wants to see that shit.

Nobody could have predicted that someone who burned her bridges with every single promotion she's worked for would end up burning her bridges with AEW. For those who like to read the tea leaves, AEW ref Frank Gastineau tweeted "My character would never take that finish." He deleted the tweet shortly afterward, but not before Thunder Rosa liked it. Speaking of Rosa, Ivelisse gave the following statement to Fightful Select: I spoke up about mistreatment from a Coach, even to other women too, there were witnesses and I was the one suspended and left in limbo and just now let go, and nothing has been done at all the entire time about (Thunder Rosa) slandering my name the entire time in AEW and doing everything to sabotage my position there, I kept quiet, (Thunder Rosa) also has a history of getting involved with officials in order to get ahead which there was a lawsuit and everything in (Lucha Underground). Given her track record, "mistreatment" likely refers to being asked to sell and put people over. And accusing another wrestler of sleeping her way to the top is the kind of thing that gets you kicked out of locker rooms. Whatever locker rooms she hasn't already been kicked out of, I mean.

Rick Rude. Worked Memphis, World Class, Crockett, 80s WWF, early 90s AJPW/NJPW, and early 90s WCW and faced a lot of the top guys in each spot.

Too many PPVs is a problem from a storytelling standpoint, but so is too few. If there's too much time between big shows, you end up spending a lot of time spinning your wheels or making storylines needlessly complicated. And if you fill in the gaps with supercards on free TV, that makes the PPVs less special. I'd say in most cases, the ideal build for a PPV is 6 to 8 weeks. That maps out to 7 or 8 PPVs a year.

Regarding Kitao, his obit in the Observer notes that the scandal that led to him being expelled from sumo is believed to be at least partially a frame-up. The details are murky, but apparently Tatsunami was embezzling from the stable and got in trouble with the mob. Kitao got caught up in it without his knowledge and ended up as the fall guy. This article in Sumo Fan Magazine covers it in more detail: https://www.sumofanmag.com/content/Issue_30/Rikishi_of_Old.pdf

Even when babyfaces are presented strongly and given lengthy title reigns, they invariably get the rug pulled out from under them and end up back where they started if not worse. Take Kofi, for example. After losing the belt, he went right back to throwing pancakes in the midcard without missing a beat. We're seeing the pattern repeat with Drew right now. After spending the better part of a year as a kick-ass babyface champion, he loses the title to The Miz, who up to that point had won zero singles matches in 2021 and only won two in 2020. Then he loses clean to Lashley at Mania and gets laid out by T-Bar the next night on Raw. He'll be feuding with Baron Corbin or Dolph Ziggler over the US title by Summerslam.

Well, gee. If Steamboat couldn't have great matches with legendary workers like Shunji Takano and Shinichi Nakano, that changes everything. I agree that Steamboat's style didn't naturally lend itself to touring NWA champion style, but I don't think you can grade him that harshly off a sample size of three matches where he was set up for failure. Takano and Nakano speak for themselves, and Misawa ruptured his ACL during their match. It ended up putting him on the shelf for nearly a year. Keep in mind that taking significant time off for injury is basically unheard of in Japan, so that tells you how severe it was. I don't know when exactly the injury took place, but I have to imagine it played a major role in dragging the match down.

Leading up to Mania, a lot of people, myself included, were convinced that the WWE audience was rejecting Edge and Bryan had to be added to salvage the match and that Tribal Chief Head of the Table Roman was too badass for fans to boo. As it turns out, Edge got a huge reaction-even bigger than Bryan-and Roman was roundly booed. It just goes to show how hard it is to get a read on fan sentiment without actual live feedback. On that note, my favorite development of the weekend was the Fiend horseshit dying a horrible death as soon as it took place in front of a crowd whose reactions couldn't be controlled. That should put an end to arguments that there's a silent majority of Fiend superfans who need to be catered to.

Beyond that, the heels are the ones who form factions and look out for each other while the babyfaces are only in it for themselves. I don't know if it's Ayn Rand Kool-Aid seeping into the booking or what, but it surely plays a role in WWE's inability to get babyfaces over.

I was legitimately impressed that Roman made sure Edge's shoulders were on the mat and didn't just stack him on top of Bryan. Nice attention to detail. Beyond that, it's nice to see that WWE remains a crapsack world where evil always triumphs because good is dumb. Of WWE's 14 championships, only three are currently held by full-fledged babyfaces. And one of them is the 24/7 title, which doesn't even really count.