Jimmy Redman

Yeah I just went and rewatched the Khali match out of interest. It's still awesome. On Cena's punches, if you're someone who cares about the good execution of punches then Cena is probably going to annoy you on that front no matter what - his punches are notoriously loose/goofy/bad. But on the specific point of the Khali match, the body shots Cena was throwing at Khali, particularly early on, I think it kind of helps that they look so lame. It just furthers the story they were telling, which was that Khali was an unstoppable monster and Cena was powerless against him. So his punches (which, bad-looking or not, are always sold by opponents) being completely ineffective was an easy way to get that across. The same way that when Khali first goes for a pin cover, instead of kicking out Cena puts his foot on the rope. It's the first pin attempt of the match and SuperCena can't even kick out. Just another little touch to demonstrate that he's facing something completely new and formidable that he'll struggle to even withstand, let alone overcome. To me, more than anything, the Khali match is an achievement. When people talk about what Flair got out of Gigante and how it shows what a worker he was...this is Cena's. I mean, I like Khali. I really do. I found him fun, I get an inordinate amount of enjoyment from the Khali Chop, and over the years before he completely broke down I think he had a surprising number of good matches with assorted people. But this isn't a random Smackdown match. This was the MAIN EVENT of a PPV. It's not enough to just bounce off him a few times and get something fun and watchable out of him. They had to do something special, something worthy of main eventing a show that people paid good money to see. They had to follow a Hardy Boyz tag, Benoit vs MVP, an Edge main event...it was a good undercard and it went heavy on workrate and action. In fact 2007 as a whole for WWE up to that point went heavy on workrate and action. Cena vs Shawn, Undertaker vs Batista, Benoit vs MVP, the Hardyz run, Orton & Edge...it was all very workrate-y stuff, with shows headlined by Meltzer ****+ matches, a lot of really good undercards and a LOT of great TV matches. And now Cena has to come out and follow all of that up and deliver a PPV main event with KHALI, a guy who the last time he was booked in a PPV main event was replaced at the last minute after being advertised for fear that he'd suck THAT badly. And so Cena goes out there with no gimmicks, no blood, no bells and whistles, takes the Great Khali and has not just a watchable match, but a really, genuinely good, memorable match that had the crowd going apeshit and gave everybody their money's worth. He delivered above and beyond what most people would have considered him capable of. And since the Cena feud, like I said I think Khali had some good matches, but I don't think he ever had anything this good or special ever again. Cena got something out of him that nobody else could. And the most interesting thing of all to me is that Cena went even further next time by having a genuinely great PPV main event with Bobby Lashley, a guy who I think was arguably even worse than Khali. He definitely didn't have as many good matches in WWE as Khali. And he never, EVER had a match anywhere near as good as his Cena match. Nothing in the same universe. Cena getting that match out of him is one of the biggest, most impressive "carryjobs" in recent memory.

My take on the footage issue is that, that's life, and we just have to deal with it. Some guys we have more footage of than others, some guys have their primes missing, some guys have their shitty periods missing, some guys have the benefit of working in a well-viewed company or time period, others don't. That's always been the case, and always will be the case. There will never be a perfect sample to compare everybody with. And even if there were, it hardly matters anyway because nobody could possibly watch every wrestling match that has ever happened (Loss by the time he's 150 years old or so excepted). We're all only ever going to be able to go on what we've seen, and whether gaps are due to lack of footage, disinterest in watching them, lack of time or resources, people are always going to miss out on certain wrestlers, or miss out on "enough" of their work.That's reality, and I don't think that's a flaw in the project because perfection is a complete impossibility. So for the idea that perhaps the only Destroyer matches on tape happen to be his best ones and we're missing the hundreds of other matches where he stunk out the joint...who knows? Could well be! But it also could not be. We'll never know either way, for any of these limited footage guys, unless the tapes magically turn up in the future. But we can't really judge in hypotheticals. We can only judge on what is there. That's the best we can do, and I think that's enough for what we're going for here.

Yeah it's a hard question to answer in the spirit in which it is asked, because technically the low vote for anyone not universally voted upon is all the people who don't rank them at all, not someone who puts them at #90 or so. But anyway, I'll probably end up being a low voter for a lot of luchadors. Lucha is my white whale, it just eludes me every time I try to go there, so if/when any luchadors impress me in the next 18 months, they still probably won't make it too far up my list just on account of working a style that I don't prefer.

I think it's possible that the roof segment was supposed to be gimmicked not to completely give way but to maybe sag or bend a little, so you get the chokeslam and it basically denting the roof as a visual, and thus they could break a hole in it for them to drop back down to the ring to continue the match. It's probably unlikely, but they were definitely treating that particular segment of the roof differently as shown above, so something was meant to happen. But I don't know, I somehow find it hard to believe that even Foley at his most suicidal would want to be chokeslammed straight from the Cell roof to the mat. He says himself, if he'd have gone up for the chokeslam at all he'd have probably landed on his head and died. But if the plan was for him to do so (and that's what he seems to be saying with "I botched it", which he also says in his book), how did that plan involve him not dying at the end of it? I dunno.

"Flying around" is a gross exaggeration, unless you somehow don't mean that literally. He didn't start flying around. He struggled to come back, and what he did do was climb the ropes or the ladder (slowly, with difficulty) and jump off with something. He kind of ran for the spot where he dived through the ropes with the ladder, but apart from that he literally didn't even run the ropes. Didn't kip up. Didn't hit the ropes for flying forearms. Didn't go on any sequence of moves or extended offense. Not sure where "flying around" comes into it. He was up and doing stuff, yes. But not flying around. But I'm probably just being semantic here.

Yeah but only because they involved actual 6-man teams in The Shield and Wyatts. I mean throwing the top babyfaces and heels in a big multi man main event to prevent them from running the big singles matches on TV every week.

I completely agree. The free TV should be six mans and matches like John Cena vs lower level guy (say Cesaro or Titus O'Neill). If it's a match you might want to pay for it should be on the network or a house show. I imagine they believe three hours of six man matches would cause ratings to tank. They may be right, although since no match on the shows currently feels special anyway because we've seen them all a thousand times maybe it wouldn't make any difference. I doubt it would make much difference. Even ten years ago there used to be a lot more main eventer vs midcarder and random 6-man tags as TV main events for Raw and SD, instead of just throwing star vs star out there every week. They could do well to at least get back to that kind of ratio.

Has anything changed with Naito headliner-wise since he got overwhelmingly voted out of the Tokyo Dome main event? And I thought the word was that AJ wasn't drawing on top of NJ?

I think the point I'm trying to make is that what the "narrative" of a match turns out to be isn't necessarily what you expect it to be at a certain point during the match. Or, for that matter, what you think it should be based on what has come so far. Things can change, and both a story and an athletic contest can turn on a dime. That's as true of wrestling matches as it is of novels and movies and plays and songs and whatever other storytelling medium there is. You can absolutely start reading a novel and think it's going to be about X, but then as it goes on there's a twist, or a turn, or a change in tone and by the end it's far more about Y instead. That isn't an inherent failure of storytelling, unless the execution of said change is bad enough to ruin the book. But again, I'm not excusing bad execution. I'm saying that stories don't always go from A to B to C to D with logic and meaning attached to each move in equal measure. Not even great stories. They jump around, they stutter, they repeat "spots" and themes, they go in a completely different direction than you'd expect, they drag out, they stop abruptly, etc. and etc. And this is especially true of wrestling matches when you add in the intangible of it also involving two guys trying to tell some kind of story whilst also trying to perform athletic feats and trying to get the crowds surrounding them to vocally react. You're not going to get neatly-wrapped, unfailingly logical, perfectly progressing stories as matches. At least, hardly ever. And there's nothing wrong with that, because storytelling isn't meant to be perfect. There isn't always a "why" that you can point to for every minute of a match. Sometimes something completely illogical is the best choice, sometimes that is what works best. Maybe that's not what you like to think or want to get out of wrestling, judging from your modus operandi, and I understand that and respect that. We can agree to disagree. But this is one of those times where, from my point of view, your ultra-logical approach leaves one in danger of missing the forest. On the point of limb work specifically, my main point is, again, that not selling a limb while on offense or later in a match is not inherently a bad choice. It could be if it's the wrong choice for a particular match, or if it's executed badly, but that you don't have to sell everything all the time. To flip around the idea of things being "meaningful", how "meaningful" is it if limbwork is super effective every time? How special is crippling a guy with your limbwork when your limbwork can basically cripple anyone at will? Crippling limbwork becomes as routine as going through your moveset. I think there's something to be said for extended death selling being more "meaningful" if you don't sell like that every single time your leg gets attacked by someone. That's Dolph Ziggler's entire problem. He flops around and sells like death in every match, whether he's facing Big Show or Rey, whether he's above the guy he's facing or beneath. And it renders his big bumps meaningless, because he bumps like that for everyone, so when he does face a big guy and SHOULD be bumping around, what should be a different kind of match with a big-little dynamic is just every Dolph match ever. If every match with limbwork resulted in the victim selling it like death, every match with limbwork in it would look the same. I've been talking in the abstract this entire time, but to bring it back to the original point - Shawn/Razor II - I watched the match again so I can now tie it into my first point, and I do think it is a good example of my point. Sometimes limb work just doesn't cripple a guy. I personally don't think Shawn just "no-sold" the leg work. He was worked over for a while, and then the big turning point was Razor climbing the ladder and Shawn STRUGGLING to climb up the ropes to hit a springboard somethingorother to knock him off. Then he collapsed and sold. Then Razor picked him up for an attempted Razor's Edge. Shawn floated through it and shoved Razor into the ladder. Then he collapsed and sold. These were desperation moves. Then he gradually started to become more active but he was limping around for minutes after his initial hope spot. When he and Razor climbed the same ladder Shawn was noticeably slower. All of this is selling. None of this involves Shawn hopping around on one leg or collapsing under the weight of his leg or whatever else he's supposed to be doing. But it all involves Shawn continuing to sell after he went back on offense, until he reached a point where he had recovered sufficiently enough to do more stuff and win the match. He sold all through the finish, but it was more of an overall, exhausted selling of going through a gruelling ladder match, not selling that his leg was broken. His leg clearly wasn't broken though, because if it was, he'd be selling it, you know? But in terms of there being a transition from limb work to not limb work, there WAS a transition. It wasn't arbitrary or popping up. So I really can't agree with the idea that just because he wasn't selling his leg like death through the finish, that he blew off perfectly good leg work or ruined the story of the match. They may have ruined the story that YOU wanted them to tell, but not the story that was actually playing out in reality. Having said that, if a match disappoints you because they end the "story" of it in a way that displeases you, I think that's a perfectly valid reason for not liking a match.

Maybe there's also a sense of resentment for Sheamus being a very cartoony, derivative Irish stereotype, whereas they can point to the Devitts and Lynchs of the world and see them as more post-modern Irish characters - wrestlers who happen to be Irish and not an Irish tale telling, Guinness drinking, shamrock wearing, ranga caricature. I think there'd be at least a bit of embarrassment at such a caricature from the people he's representing who know far better, the same way that I might cringe if there was a cork hat wearing, boomerang throwing, kangaroo chasing Croc Hunter rip off in WWE.

To be honest I haven't watched that tag since 2010, but my memory was that it was a great TV main event with a cool "underdog gets a massive victory" story. I like Cena in tags mainly because of his apron work, I love him emoting and hollering on the apron and he's such a goofball that he works well with a "little buddy" that he can cheer on. If you don't enjoy that I don't know what to tell you, but you haven't enjoyed any of the cheesy, overacting aspects of Cena so far so that's not a surprise. I think it's pretty clear, and has been for a while, that Cena just isn't your kind of wrestler. Having said that, reading just how unimpressed you are with all of his matches has been quite fascinating in a morbid, masochistic kind of way. Masochistic for me, I mean, in that I'm watching you tear down all of my favourite matches. It's been fun.

Well that makes Vince history, so I'd say very different indeed.

Well my answer, or question, to the first paragraph is that, why MUST they sell when they go back on offense? What if it's not hurting that much anymore? What if it hurt when the guy had his hands on me twisting/kicking/hurting my limb, but didn't cause any lasting damage? What if the adrenaline has kicked in (which in itself accounts for basically every WWE babyface comeback ever)? What if I'm ignoring the pain to hit my shit since I'm in a fight? There are any number of reasons why "I'm not selling right this second" is a valid choice and doesn't destroy the narrative of a match, nor does it circumvent pro wrestling logic. If you want to be absolute about all damage to limbs during a match being super effective, you can ask why guys never sell their stomachs with the amount of times they get kicked or punched there during a match? Why don't guys sell being knocked loopy or concussed with the amount of times they get punched, kicked and hit in the head per match? Why don't guys sell their backs with the amount of times they get slammed, dropped or driven on them per match? Why don't guys sell their chests when they get chopped 50 times in a match? The answer is that not every move that hits a certain area of the body causes significant or lasting damage to that body part. Obviously as a wrestler your goal is to cause damage, but wrestlers aren't supernatural beings who's moves and ideas are always successful all the time. Sometimes you try to, and it doesn't work, or it doesn't work enough. And you can tell when it doesn't work when the other guy manages to make his comeback or go on offense and he doesn't seem to be crippled. That doesn't mean as a wrestler you wasted your time, or that as a fan you wasted your time watching it. It just means that it didn't work. Now, having said that, I'm talking about good execution of this idea, just like with anything. I'm not talking about blowing shit off or flagrantly no selling to the detriment of a match. And obviously I like a good body part sell and it playing into the finish as much as anyone. But I don't think all no-selling (a more appropriate term would be "no-longer-selling" I think) is inherently a bad thing, and I don't think a match that has limbwork that ultimately doesn't work or doesn't play into the finish is inherently a bad thing. There are many ways to work and to sell, and there are valid choices for a worker to make other than "I'm going to sell this like death all match long", as long as you can still see the reasons why. I found the match and it was actually Orton who "blew off" the limb work, and I feel I expressed myself better here:

I think I made the exact same point after Bryan vs Orton in February when some people complained about Bryan "no selling" the limbwork. Sometimes limbwork (or any other strategy for that matter) doesn't work. It seems to be working, or it works for a time, or it works at a crucial point, or it doesn't work at a crucial point, but it ultimately fails because the other guy came back and won the match. That's not necessarily the same thing as blowing off limbwork, or perfunctory limbwork that doesn't go anywhere. To me seeing limbwork in an absolutist sense - that if you do it the other guy MUST sell it all through the match and it MUST influence the finish and it MUST NOT be no-sold - is just as narrow-minded a view of wrestling as wanting everything to be highspots or whatever.

It doesn't demand a higher quality of product, but the same quality, and that's exactly why it's not working. People no longer want to pay for PPVs, and they seemingly don't want to pay less for PPVs through a different service. People aren't interested in the PPVs. WWE have been financially stable with the same product, but that ignores the fact that the financial stability comes from basically everything but PPV buys. Bigger TV deals, steady houses, bigger Wrestlemanias and diversifying their revenue streams is what brings home the bacon. Non-Mania PPV buys have been pretty steadily declining in the last decade. I'm sure mookie could draw you a graph. A decade ago WWE have largely lost the ability to sell PPVs other than Manias. So changing to a (perceived) more complicated medium to watch them hasn't seemed to help make a difference to the majority of people who will watch Raw but don't see the value in buying PPVs, because WWE doesn't make them interested enough in PPVs.

Do people hold it against Stan that he didn't/couldn't work light?

My actual problem with forearm exchanges is that it renders the forearm itself as a strike...kind of meaningless. When they get into an exchange, they rarely make the actual forearms look good, because they're rushing them and already thinking about the next one. So you get these really short forearms that barely rock these guys and in the end I just think...you're just two guys standing too close waving your elbows at each other. It hardly ever gives me the impression that they're hurting each other with them. So the idea that they're doing some macho, fighting spirit, 'I can take more pain than you' thing doesn't resonate with me, because I don't see the pain at all. They're just going through the motions. It's either that or the long, drawn out, forearm-sell-recover-yell something-return thing, which I just find a bit silly.

...2013. Last year

I think the last universally praised PPV was Summerslam 2013.

I wish he hadn't gone back to his overly-choreographed 'Feed Me More' stuff like the last 18 months were just a dream, but still, this is a good move.

My God. Stephanie McMahon is just an amazing pro wrestler.

OK, that was the best promo Orton has cut in like five years. I just mentioned how bored I am of him, but crazy cokehead ranting Randy...I dunno, I kind of liked that. Henry/Show tag title shot? Angle alert.

I don't mind Angle in 2001 from my vague memories. I love the Austin matches, and Angle actually does really well as the sympathetic babyface fighting and bleeding buckets and winning for the WWF and America. He was a good foil for heel Austin at the time. The Shane match I think definitely has it's flaws, but it also has it's charms and despite the problems I had I kind of liked it overall. I haven't seen the Benoit cage match in a while, but I remember not thinking much of it the last time I did. 2000 I am less high on. I remember watching a bunch of early Angle one time and they were mainly meh matches that did little for me. The Rock match (No Mercy 00) I found highly disappointing, for example. I think the only match of his from 2000 I liked was the Summerslam three-way, and Angle was unconscious for most of that match. What else is there worth watching from this period?

Of course that's not what I wrote at all. It's kind of what you meant though, when you flat out said that this show was so undeniably amazing and above criticism that anyone who didn't like it must be wilfully refusing to enjoy watching wrestling. That's the oddest part of this whole thing to me. It's really not like this was some amazing top-to-bottom great show that was generally well-received but is being criticised here. At least in that case I could get making the argument, even though it's still a shitty argument. But for THIS show? It's pretty much middle of the pack, with some good matches, and with a very controversial ending. It's being criticised in a lot of places that I've seen, and praise is more along the lines of "I enjoyed it" and not "This was a classic show that you must be crazy to dislike". There have been better PPVs this year. So it's just...strange, I guess, that you'd choose this show in particular to be all "how can you not enjoy that show?" and claiming sinister or psychological reasons why. It was just a show. For what it's worth, my mother is the biggest wilfully enjoying WWE mark I know, and she hated the show. Hated the finish, didn't like any of the matches particularly, and felt awful when it was over.

Basically this. I'm very hot and cold with Orton because at his best he's very good, and there are times when I think he's one of the best guys in the company (2004, 2007, 2011), but then other times where I'm just bored shitless by the guy (now). It's hard when I just can't care about anything he does for long periods. But then I watch some 2004 and the guy is just on fire. So for me it will be about weighing those two sides against each other.