NintendoLogic

I liked Bigelow best teaming with Vader in New Japan. As far as criteria, I'd say anyone whose wrestling style is listed as "Powerhouse" on Cagematch should be eligible. In that case, though, Jumbo Tsuruta is the greatest big man of all time.

Arn has also praised Kane for his ability to convey emotion through body language, which is hard to do when you wear a mask. Honestly, though, the public statements wrestlers make in praise of their colleagues have to be taken with a grain of salt. Meltzer once posted that a lot of the folks who publicly call HHH an all-time great privately say he would have been an average main eventer in the 80s. Regarding Kane, he said that most wrestlers say he's either mediocre or the total shits.

Even if it was a sucker punch, knocking out a guy who outweighs you by some 200 pounds is a hell of a feat. And Orndorff did it with his weak arm to boot.

WWE surely realized that whoever ended the streak would be the target of a massive fan backlash (which is why our old friend Dylan Waco always suggested having Cena end it by cheating and turn heel in the process). That's why the heel transitional champion exists-to put over the new top guy without alienating fans of the old top guy. Roman was still overwhelmingly popular among the fans in 2014 (they legitimately voted him Superstar of the Year), so they clearly never anticipated that they might turn on him the way they did after he won the 2015 Rumble. Also, the streak had to end while Taker still had something left in the tank for it to mean anything. If Roman had ended it at WM33, it would have come across as a sad mercy killing rather than a genuine accomplishment. Brock losing to Cena in his first match back is precisely why he needed the streak. WWE had largely squandered his comeback with the Cena loss and the interminable HHH feud. He needed something huge to restore him to what he should have been all along.

The Death of WCW Debate might be fun to pick apart. My understanding is that Bischoff bullshitted his way through the whole thing and caught Reynolds completely flat-footed.

He's the world champion who just shot a major angle with Goldberg. They can't just put him on ice and pretend he doesn't exist like they could with most of the roster. Actually, the Observer reported a while back that merch sales are virtually identical to what they were pre-COVID due to sales on WWE Shop skyrocketing. Whether the talent is receiving a similar amount of merch revenue as before is another story.

Speaking of NFL figures worthy of hatred, Belichick has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Finally, an impeachable offense everyone can agree on.

People who really like to hunt and fish, in other words. By the way, Bischoff wasn't just on the verge of bankruptcy. He and his wife actually filed for bankruptcy in 2017. https://www.docketbird.com/court-cases/ERIC-A-BISCHOFF-and-LOREE-E-BISCHOFF/azb-2:2017-bk-05021 Note that they filed under Chapter 11, which is what corporations like GM use when they need to restructure their debts to remain in business. It's also used by celebrities like MC Hammer who blow all their money. So the Bischoffs must have been up to their eyeballs in debt.

Lesnar was the perfect choice to end The Streak. In fact, it's probably the only well-booked ending to a winning streak in wrestling history. As is often the case in wrestling, it was the follow-up (WWE getting cold feet on Roman's coronation along with Taker continuing to wrestle to diminishing returns) that ruined it.

Don't even entertain for a second the idea that New Japan could match WWE in a bidding war. They take in $50 million in a good year, and that's only a fraction of what WWE grosses in a quarter. All they can really promise is more creative fulfillment and lack of culture shock/language barrier for the natives.

Thank you for this incredibly detailed write-up. I went back and checked the Observers covering the period Bischoff was in charge of Smackdown, and I didn't see anything about him doing nothing but hanging out in catering. The issue covering his firing contains the following choice excerpts: While Wall Street was pleased with the hiring of two men who had run companies during the late 90s wrestling boom to run the separate brands, there were obvious red flags. Bischoff had worked for TNA in the interim and there were no fond memories from anyone in that company regarding his tenure. Privately, a number of people who had interacted with him during those days that are now working for WWE were completely stunned by the move and predicted failure. ... Bischoff was unfamiliar with the talent and many of the business changes when he arrived. In very short order, it had become more how the company would make the inevitable move and handle it publicly after pushing so strong to investors about the value of the hiring. When Ryan Ward burned out as the head writer of Smackdown, and Ed Koskey from Raw was moved over, a lot of people expected Bischoff to be the next casualty. ... “Eric had absolutely no vision, and once we were headed into FOX, everything was falling through the cracks,” said one WWE official. “He messed up multiple times with FOX. Eric also had no stamina for the rigors of the job.” Of course, "stamina for the rigors of the job" in this case simply means "wanting to have some semblance of a life outside of work," so I have plenty of sympy for Eric in that regard. But I'd love to hear the Bischoff spin on whether he dropped the ball with FOX. He's well-established at this point as a serial fabulist and con man, but even by that standard, "I can't provide any details because of my NDA but fuck Meltzer" is some weak shit.

Hey, one of the folks who died storming the Capitol was a guy who had a heart attack after tasering himself in the balls. Talk about life imitating art.

Not only did Bischoff promise a surprise that would change the face of the industry, he made a point of noting that there was nothing Vince McMahon could do about it. Of course, there's no way he would have stopped them from doing something so idiotic even if he had the power to.

I'd just like to point out that the role of the Fingerpoke in WCW's demise has been greatly exaggerated by revisionist history. If anything, it popped business in the short term as Superbrawl did either the third or fourth biggest buyrate in company history. It was the Hogan/Flair double turn at Uncensored that did the real damage.

So that Jay White promo might not be a work. Rumors are swirling that his contract is up at the end of the month and WWE is making a serious play for him. Anyone who signs with the E at this point surely has to be going in with eyes wide open, so I can't say I'll feel sorry for him if things go south. But if he wants to just make bank and surf for a few years a la Nakamura, who am I to knock him?

Good thing there hasn't been anything like a mob storming the Capitol to draw people's attention to the news and away from wrestling. AEW just can't catch a break lately.

The third hour doing better than the second among 18-49 viewers is what stood out to be. Is Goldberg the real Demo God?

I've never been a Dump fan. Garbage brawling is fine in small doses, but you have to back it up with some actual wrestling or at least strong non-weapons-based offense to hold my interest. The only straight wrestling matches I've seen Dump in are tags where Bull Nakano does all the heavy lifting. And stabbing people with scissors and the like has no place in pro wrestling as far as I'm concerned. She does have an awesome presence, but so did Sid (who incidentally was also fond of scissors).

That's only really the case after she wins the red belt and supplants Bull as the ace of the company. If you look at her 1990-91 work, it's pretty much all crowd brawling and international objects. As best I can tell, the Aja-as-Dump-clone talking point dates back to when Dave saw her live for the first time in 1990 (and again, it was largely accurate at that point). Dave seems to have a hang-up that makes him reluctant to reconsider first impressions, and when someone of his stature says something, there will inevitably be folks who lack the knowledge base to draw their own conclusions taking his word as gospel. For what it's worth, he's always said that Aja was a better worker than Dump.

Why does Goldberg think Drew has no respect for the legends? Didn't he spend most of last year defending the legends from Orton? On the plus side, WWE managed to get the rub from a mainstream celebrity.

Even if WWE does offer to raise people's downsides, seeing the company perform mass releases in the face of record profits surely had a chilling effect on the locker room. All the zeroes on a contract don't mean much if the money isn't guaranteed.

Calling her a cheap knockoff is a bit much, but I'd agree with describing her as largely a Dump clone in the early years of her career. By the time she came into her own as a worker around 1993, I'd say she was a synthesis of the best elements of Dump and Bull, with less emphasis on workrate than the latter but far more actual wrestling than the former.

Update: Aja Kong/Bull Nakano vs. Akira Hokuto/Kyoko Inoue (AJW, 6/3/93) I can't think of any other instances where I'm significantly higher on a joshi match than the overall consensus, but this just about knocked my socks off. This is the best I've seen the Aja/Bull team look, as they deliver an absolute mauling to the other team while giving up just enough to make it a competitive match rather than a glorified squash. The two things that kill most joshi matches for me are the interminable stretches on the mat where they're blatantly killing time and shifts in momentum coming too suddenly and easily. Neither is an issue here. Other than a few restholds, this is all action. And the Aja/Bull team mostly dominates throughout, with the closest thing to a sustained advantage from the other side coming after Hokuto catches Bull coming off the turnbuckle with a Fujiwara armbar that looks like it should have dislocated Bull's shoulder. However, Bull manages to turn the tide with her trusty nunchucks. There's a fair amount of classic-style joshi weapons brawling, including with a sword (which Hokuto uses as a bludgeoning instrument rather than a stabbing one), but it never descends into a Dump Matsumoto-style circus. There's also some cool learned psychology, most notably when Aja and Bull counter Kyoko's reverse tope by shoving her out of the ring. I'll admit to being picky in my wrestling tastes, but I think I'm pretty easy to please. And a match with sound big vs. little psychology and no downtime or overkill will always make me a happy camper. As of now, this is #100 on my list. ****1/2 EDIT: Upon further review, I think I drastically overrated this. It's still a pretty great match worth checking out, but it's borderline at best for an all-time top 100.

It can also all be chalked up to him being loaded 90% of the time during that period.

For me, the Bret/Owen cage match works more as a thought experiment ("If wrestling were real and you had to win a match by escaping a cage, what would it look like?") than a wrestling match. If anything, it should have put the nail in the coffin of escape-the-cage matches because it laid bare the inherent silliness of the concept.