clintthecrippler

What the hell is the Suzuki thing?

Oh yeah. Whats Styles asking price on the indies? I've heard between $3,000 and $4,000 an appearance. Multiply that by 80 to 90 matches a year for the past two years and that is somewhere around $240k to $360k a year that the WWE has to at least match for it to make sense financially. Or he got the Rhino/original Samoa Joe where he works NXT and non TNA/ROH indies on the side.

Rewatching the 80s run on the WWE Network it is stunning how much more the short ten second promos from every wrestler at the beginning of the show get me so much more hyped to see matches that I know the outcome of than the 20 minute monologues that start Raw every week.

Is that the one where the first minute of the match is just Dusty and Ric circling each other and the first line of commentary is David shouting "Isnt this GREAT, Tony?" Because yeah, he is awesome there. And of course one of the all time great commentary coda lines "The Russian Nightmare has come true"

It's been fun seeing the turnaround in thoughts on David Crockett over the years. Smark community groupthink in late 90s/early 2000s was that he was obnoxious - I myself even fell into this line of thinking for a few years during the indie/"movez" phase of my fandom. But man I frigging love him now. When he is bored with a match he isnt very good but man when theres a Rock N Roll Express or Dusty match and he gets so excited about whats happening, I am so riveted.

Yeah, guessing that was meant for Adrian Adonis. There was an ESPN Classic airing a few years back where there was a GIANT one held up in the front row during one of his matches and ESPN didnt censor it either.

Began watching the next AWA Superstars episode. There's definitely a sense of "Verne left for the evening and we are unsupervised" feel to the wraparounds, as the next episode begins with Larry Nelson sitting on the floor with a woman named Kathleen (another Gagne daughter?) who is covering his face with Shamrock stickers because it's St. Patrick's Day.

Nothing new added to Old School yet, that Houston show is from the original uploading of house shows when the service started.

Are the Stampede episodes posted so far stuff that aired on Classics on Demand, or is there footage that is completely new to the world since its original 1970s airing? Khawk, where did "AWA Superstars" fit into the run of AWA TV? I was aware that "AWA Championship Wrestling" was the ESPN Program and "AWA All-Star Wrestling" was their syndicated show, but where does "AWA Superstars" fit? Was it a show for secondary syndicated markets, or something for Canadian TV perhaps? Just fired up the Best of USWA Vol. 1 under the GWF banner, had no idea that Terry Gordy & Steve Williams dropped by USWA Dallas. Was this just a one-shot or did they have an actual run there?

AWA Superstars 2/28/88 begins with Larry Nelson drunkenly rambling about how uncomfortable his orthopedic chair is. An offscreen female voice yells at him, at which times he realize that the maker of the chair may be a sponsor of the TV show. One of the most bizarre and nonsensical openings to a wrestling TV show ever, yet I'd still rather have that begin a show than any 20-minute monologue put together by WWE's current creative team.

I really hope they got to that conversation simply from someone asking "what was it like to work with Sting?"

Addendum to this one: the footage shows the heel cheating and/or losing and results in the heel complaining that the footage was doctored.

"He defeated sixteen men in a one-night tournament. It took place last Friday night in Denver, Colorado. And now, your new TEXAS Heavyweight Champion is..."

Jim Cornette describing the Mantaur gimmick to Bobby Heenan is very easily on my all-time great shoot interview moments. Seeing the always unflappable Heenan be completely glazed in the eyes and speechlessly dumbfounded as Cornette continued his explanation was full on awkward comedy gold.

The dude survived attempted assaults by Leatherface, the Colossus of Death, and Tagar Lord of the Volcano. Hell, when Freddie Kruger was hanging around Memphis he never made a single attempt at invading Jerry Lawler's dreams, the dude's reputation for defying death was already well known. There is also the whole getting hit by a speeding car driven by Eddie Gilbert.

What the hell matches are THESE from? My favorite Marc Lowrance quote is from when Billy Travis broke a beer bottle over Chris Adams' head and Lowrance starts screaming about how "Adams just had a beer bottle broken over his head. HE MIGHT BE DEAD!"

Never mind that during what's considered the "glory years" of the DVD sales era, undercards had Colt Cabana, Delirious, The Carnage Crew, and the Ring Crew Express. Man, that era where the main event rotation was Davey Richards, Eddie Edwards, and Roderick Strong was the bad variation of the word "brutal"

Thanks to this year's list I am now aware that there are wrestlers named Kay Jutler (is that a rib on Jay Cutler or a wacky coincidence? I only ask since he's British) and Chrisifix. 2015 PWI 500...not completely worthless.

Yeah, there are plenty of reasons to attack WWE, but every time I see someone complaining about them self-promoting their charity/PR work - and someone complaining about WWE's promotion of Twitter trends and social media - I always sincerely think it's a "wrestling bubble" lack of awareness. Most major sports leagues and broadcast have those sorts of promo/PR items aired during telecasts of their games, and social media plugs are everywhere these days as well( "tell @AMCNetwork what you think of tonight's episode of The Walking Dead" before coming back from commercial). WWE's motives for promoting charity work are no more nefarious than any other large-scale company that has a charity/philanthropy division.

A friend of mine performed on a stand up comedy show that also featured Rob Van Dam doing a stand up set and someone brought a replica belt to THAT.

"Will the woman who left her kids at Shea Stadium please return to pick them up? They're beating the Mets 6 to 1" - Jerry Lawler in a pre-match promo at Madison Square Garden Art Donovan: "Who's this guy coming to the ring with Diesel?" Gorilla Monsoon: "That's the Heartbreak Kid Shawn Michaels" Art Donovan: "Oh...is he a wrestler too?" "Ha! All those years in the Army and he only made it to Corporal!" - Bobby The Brain Heenan upon being told that Cpl. Kirchner is wrestling on this week's episode of Prime Time Wrestling Vince McMahon: "This week we are coming to you from Fresno, California: the SHIP-building capital of the world!" Jesse Ventura: (laughing) "I don't think I heard that correctly. Can you repeat that?" Vince McMahon: "Fresno, California: the SHIP-building capital of the world. What did you think I said?" Jesse Ventura: "Nevermind" (with a giant SHIT-eating grin on his face)

Random Russo-era WCW story for you. Went to college during the time of the Monday Night Wars. I became known in my dorm hall as "the wrestling guy", and inevitably on Monday nights I would host a room full of people watching Raw and/or Nitro - gradually more RAW as time went on. Some of these people were there every week, some of these people popped in here and there. One night in September 2000, we're watching Raw in my dorm room, while occasionally flipping over to Nitro during commercial breaks. There is a knock on my door. It was someone that was a huge WCW fan during the glory days of the nWo, but had drifted out of watching wrestling after going home and working nights during the final summer of 99 when Bischoff was in charge, so by then he had been mostly checked out of wrestling completely for over a year. The following words come out of his mouth: "Hey guys, I know I haven't really been paying attention to WCW much, but I was flipping through the channels and....so....what's up with the retarded guy?" All of us in the room were confused. This visitor continued... "I was just flipping through the channels and came across Nitro for a minute. And the show ended with this retarded guy wearing a helmet holding the WCW belt over his head and falling down all over the place." I slowly put together what he had just seen. He flipped across Nitro randomly the night that Vince Russo walked out of the cage with the WCW Championship. He had no idea what a Vince Russo was, just that he saw a disheveled looking man wearing a helmet falling down all over the place holding the WCW Championship, and put together in his head that they were doing a full-blown mentally-handicapped gimmick, and put the belt on him. This lapsed fan, the "casual viewer" that Russo always said he was aiming his writing at, came across Nitro and thought THIS was where WCW had gone with its television show. All of us in the room laughed our asses off, but also none of us had the patience to explain what a Vince Russo was, so we told him, "you know what, you're not missing anything by not watching WCW."

Estimating around July/August 1987. I was nine years old living in small-town Northern Michigan at the time, a few hours drive from any town that WWF or NWA was coming to. But I still remained glued to the TV on Saturdays for WWF Wrestling Challenge, NWA Worldwide, NWA World Championship Wrestling, and more. When my father wanted to talk to me about serious stuff, or just needed to get out of the house to sort some things out, he would go for a drive and take me with him. The slang term he used to describe these drives was "going crazy". One Sunday evening he pulled me out of my bedroom to go for one of these drives, and he picked up a couple of his drinking buddies that lived down the street. He drove to a town that was about an hour away from ours. The drive seemed like nothing out of the ordinary, until he pulls into the parking lot of Ogemaw Heights High School in West Branch, MI, a school off of Michigan Highway #33 surrounded by nothing but trees and fields. The letters on the sign of the high school simply said "WRESTLING". I got super-excited, and at first my father and his friends tried to rib me by saying "nah, that's tomorrow night, we're going to bingo tonight!" But sure enough, once we're inside the school we head into the gym and there's a wrestling ring in there. My dad frigging surprised me on a random summer night by taking me to a wrestling show. I don't remember a lot of specifics. I think the league was called Michigan Championship Wrestling. It had some of the guys that I found out years later were part of the final days of the Sheik's Detroit territory, guys like Irish Micky Doyle and Ricky Cortez. And a young Al Snow was part of a heel tag team calling itself the Fantastics (which confused me a little since I had seen the Fulton/Rogers version on World Class TV by that point) against a tag team called The Flying Tigers. The Fantastics cheated to win their match, but sure enough there was a battle royal at the end of the night, with the final four being the Al Snow version of the Fantastics and The Flying Tigers, and the Tigers got their revenge by winning the battle royale. But the biggest actual name of the show was a very long in the tooth by that point Bobo Brazil, once again defending a belt that was billed as "The United States Championship." Bobo was into his sixties by then, but I had read his name in grocery store magazines as a legend of the sport enough to know that he used to be something back in the day and that I was seeing a legend in the ring that night. But the major punchline of the night came when Bobo Brazil came down to the ring. My dad never watched WWF wrestling with me, and would always talk about how phony Hulk Hogan was. He never did it in a mean way because he knew it was something I loved watching, would always be more in a joking manner. But that night, when Bobo came to the ring, my Dad pulled me aside and said the following words..."I used to watch him wrestle when it was real!" It would be ten years before I would witness another wrestling show live again (that would be the ECW debut in Detroit where Pee Wee Moore offered to sell me ECW tickets for weed, but that's another story for another thread), but thank you Dad for that awesome night.

Jon Moxley vs Homicide from EVOLVE 6 is a pretty tight match, but the post-match is one of the damndest and most memorable spectacles I've seen in any fed in the last five years, and was the moment that I knew I would religiously follow Moxley wherever he went and as he headed into WWE and transitioned into Dean Ambrose. Watching this match is kind of like watching Randy Savage matches and promos from Memphis and realizing how fully formed he was by the time he made it to WWE.

The Dusty-Flair match from Starrcade 85 may be my favorite match between the two. The way Dusty sells the leg attacks early on really make you want this to be the night he finally beats Flair. Even knowing how everything turned out on TV that weekend it still feels good when he does. And one of my favorite fans ever which shows you how passionate people were for Dusty: the guy who was sitting near some sort of mic who spent the entire match screaming "Wooooooooo! WOO, WOO, WOOOOOOOOOOO! DUSTY RHODES! " and hooting and hollering every time Dusty landed a punch. it was like Sam Kinison became a wrestling fan for a night.