Carnival

I think it's a mistake to focus on whatever specific "creative control" clause Hogan had in his contract. At his level of fame and star power, he was going to rule the roost regardless of what the contract said. Especially in an environment where no one knew which way was up. I doubt Austin had any creative control clause - at least in the initial stages of his boom - but I also doubt he ever had to do anything he really didn't want to do. And when he finally did, we saw how he handled it. This is the danger of having a star who outshines the company, a situation WWE is clearly eager to avoid repeating. Of course, that has its own problems.

What are some of those times when you thought for sure the promotion was going in one direction - a direction you didn't want to see them go - and, miraculously, they made you proud by going the other way? For example, I remember watching the instantaneous rise of The Patriot in 1997, and I was so sure that they were going to let him win the belt at the Ground Zero PPV. I marked out hard when Bret beat him (of course not knowing what was coming around the bend). Had a similar experience with Luger/Flair in Feb '90, although I was a much bigger Luger fan than I was a Patriot fan. Anyway, got anything like that?

The money problems must be overstated, because they appear prepared to burn some more of it. Unless their new marketing strategy is to make television so remarkably bad that it becomes a cult hit.

JBL's subdued, philosophical, "We may be seeing the final hurrah of a once proud gunslinger, mounting his mighty steed one last time in the glimmer of a red horizon..." type of commentary. The way the fans act during the Hall of Fame ceremony. The way they act during the actual events, for that matter. All the other inane chants aside, how are we still hearing "WHAT" chants in 2015?

Guilty pleasure: God forgive me, Vince Russo's WCW run. I was so extraordinarily bored with WCW by the time he made the jump that I was ready for anything to make Nitro watchable again. The cut to 2 hours was a big help, but I enjoyed the return of that unpredictable energy. Yeah, a lot of the stuff was pretty stupid, but I was a helpless mark for the work/shoot stuff too. There's also, for some reason, almost no one I would rather listen to in a shoot interview than Russo. Maybe Cornette. Guilty displeasure: Tag team wrestling comes to mind. I liked it when I was a kid and first getting into it. Back when you had mighty teams like the Road Warriors, Midnight Express, Rockers, Demolition, Hart Foundation, and so on. When that kind of pre-packaged, color-coordinated era came to an end and most tag teams became this guy-and-this guy vs that-guy-and that-guy, blah. You can keep that shit.

My biggest pet peeve is probably when people use the lingo out of context. "Oh my wife cut a promo on me last night when I forgot to get eggs." "I'm a huge Star Wars mark", and so on. I've probably done it myself a time or two, but it grates.

How did Dibiase come into his fortune?

"Kevin Nash is a pimp. He never could have outfought Yoko. But I didn't know until this day that it was Michaels all along."

Ha, I remember going into a video store in 1997 or so and seeing the video for Wrestlemania 11. Shawn Michaels vs Diesel as the main event? Jeez, shit has really gone downhill...

I think certain aspects of signature selling can fall under the heading of bad wrestling. I love Bret Hart, but how does his chest-first turnbuckle bump make sense as a thing that happens every match?

I don't know about Alex Wright in the WWE. They don't like that body type at all. I'm trying to think of someone that skinny that got a real shot in the company. Edge is the closest I can think, but he just had such a great look. But yeah, in terms of being negatively affected, it's certainly a valid answer.

It's not a message board, exactly, but Reddit's /r/squaredcircle gets a lot of traffic/activity. There are also some huge wrestling communities in subsets of other message board types. For instance, bodybuilding.com's wrestling board is pretty active. There you can participate in stimulating discussions like "Do you prefer a clean shaven Orton or with hair?"

I think as we get older and more entrenched in behind-the-scenes news, the less we appreciate the art of a good swerve. This is probably compounded by the criticism of Russo's 10-swerves-a-show writing in the late 90s. But when I was a kid, there was nothing better than when something really shocking happened. One of my favorites will always be the 4 Horsemen turning on Sting at...Clash 10? Ole Anderson is just tremendous as the heavy in this scene. Ric nails Sting with a right hand out of nowhere and a good beatdown commences. It may not even be that special from an objective standpoint, but it hit me at the right age to make an indelible impact. So, what are your favorite surprises and twists from a lifetime of watching wrestling?

I don't know. HHH, Nash, Michaels, and Hall all developed a certain "it's better when we drop insider references into the show" mindset in their primes. Even back during a time when the number of fans who would have gotten it would be much smaller than today. I wouldn't be surprised if he's getting some of his cues from the smarks, or if you prefer, using the same issues that internet fans talk about but doing so independently of actually reading the internet. Of all the people in and out of the business that bash Russo, I don't really recall the Kliq doing it. I think they have a lot of the same mindset, actually.

Whoa. Last American match you have at five?

I think 3 1/2 stars for Bret-Piper at WM 8 is a little low. I always thought it was the match of the night and liked it much more than Savage-Flair.

I was thinking earlier that though I knew wrestling was predetermined when I was a kid, many of the more nuanced ideas around wrestling and, more specifically, discussing wrestling never occurred to me before reading Meltzer and online forums. For instance, it never really occurred to me that a headlock was a chance for the wrestlers to catch their breath and have a rest. I still don't love the term "rest hold", since I think it diminishes the importance of those holds to the psychology of the match, but I'm sure they are used for just that much of the time. It also never occurred to me that a certain type of win/loss meant more than any other. Yeah, DQs and countouts were the shits, but it's common to hear that so-and-so won with a flash pin or a small package, and thus it means less than if they had nailed their finisher. I really never saw finishes through that lens before reading Meltzer. To me, a small package or quick pin still got the 1-2-3 and was a valid measure of outwrestling the opponent. Anyway, what are some things that never occurred to you before 'smarkdom'.

A lot of VHS tapes were really expensive in the 80s. I think the movie studios priced them out of the market intentionally so they could make their money through the video rental stores.

Heh, I'm sure Meltzer was raging.

Why put Mayweather on there, for that matter? Why not Bryan Cranston or Robert Downey Jr.? Is boxing wrestling now?

I think I'd have to go for that very black robe as his best. That's pretty damn glorious.

I don't, however, like Bobby Heenan speculating that Hogan was the third man when he came down the aisle. It's defensible, I guess, in that it is probably what the Heenan character would have said under normal circumstances, but I do think it kinda degrades the shock a little bit. On the other hand, I didn't get back into wrestling until after all that had occurred, so I don't really know how much of a "shock" it was live, anyway. It's presented as the biggest surprise in the world in retrospectives and it was surprising to hear about as a lapsed fan, but sometimes history gets distorted.

Jim Ross is now most familiarly associated with the calling of Stone Cold Steve Austin matches, but I love his work on the Flair matches of 1989. The Steamboat trilogy, the Funk matches, oh and go back and grab Sting/Flair from the first Clash, too. I just couldn't imagine those matches without his commentary. I also have to admit I'm partial to Jim Ross, passionate sports commentator, over JR, cowboy in the booth.

Haha. I never thought about it at the time, but Ace does look like a 35 year old guy trying desperately to hang on to his youth. I think Shane looks babyish enough to fit, though. Well, inasmuch as anyone can "fit" into that look.

There needs to be a wrestling mockumentary with this kind of thing as the central storyline. There's something so deliciously absurd about changing all your friends, changing the way you wrestle, and even changing where you dress out, all because your manager turned on you or your tag team partner accidentally hit you with a foreign object.