Bierschwale

The Aja-Shimoda confrontation after Mita spikes Ayako is incredible. The poke to the chest that's like Mima telling Aja to shut her mouth and not be a hypocrite is great as it is, and then she wipes Ayako's blood onto Aja's shirt. Ovaries of steel.

I have a lot of love for Owen Hart, but anybody who talks about him missing his opportunity for a world title run in the late 90's are deluded if you think of the climate at the time of his death and afterwards. Owen's peak as a star was 1994 / 1995 with a fine 1997 also. I only think that he would have gotten the world title if he had stayed on for much longer than after it's been said that he wanted to retire, and became the guy given the belt after Eddie asked to drop it in '04 (when he still would have only been 39) instead of Bradshaw, but feuds with Angle/Lesnar/'Taker in '02-'03? Totally possible. But Bill's response is why I, again, think that he'd have ended up doing essentially wasteful stuff as a midcard heel on RAW with Morley and Regal. Maybe even worse; is there anyone Vince would have thought would be a better fit in the fucking Un-Americans than Owen?

I just realized the insanity that is us talking about a Hart family member in the thread for "most disappointing wrestlers ever" and it not being Teddy.

If Owen survived and stayed at a high level into the brand split era, what's more likely: him being part of the SmackDown core and getting upper card runs, possibly with WWE title programs, or him having a slightly more dignified version of the Lance Storm role on RAW? The natural pessimist in me assumes the latter.

Exactly who I thought, especially when it's put in "What could have been..." terms. He was an excellent TV worker before he even turned 20.

I think that he's done very well in making himself the insufferable chickenshit heel outside of the ring, but he really doesn't work like a heel, or at least as someone who is as loathsome as his persona makes him. He's still too flashy and cute about things and throws out too much stuff that he should know are pure crowd-pleasers. He had to be told that doing the Three Amigos sequence was a bad idea, after all. Why is the guy who always considers himself the smartest person in the room diving off of a cage to help his heel partners?

Would they schedule a filming break for Orton so that he could be on SS?

So, this happened.... What kind of storyteller wants to give someone exactly what they expect? Consumers don't know what they want. They only think they do. I got what I expected to see. I wanted to see Ambrose win at MITB... and he didn't, because of a screwjob, one that has kind of been ignored in the larger story which has annoyed me since August. I then wanted to see Ambrose win at Battleground... he didn't, because they didn't even have a match. So then I wanted to see Ambrose win at SummerSlam... he didn't, and while it was kind of a cheap victory for Rollins, he didn't actually do anything that would have been illegal, which kind of made it a decisive result. He was kayfabe out for a month, a month that was really very dreary but the WWE didn't seem to mind his absence that much. He came back like a cannonball at NoC, which was great, and then slowly started to receive worse promo concepts that were designed to make Vince laugh, so good for the former billionaire. He's had about 2.5 meaningful wins on RAW since the Shield split up. I had no reason to believe that he would actually win; the fact that I had been told that an idea I found as monumentally stupid as a Wyatt feud today didn't help, but I didn't think that he was going to win yesterday, either. I sincerely now have no reason to care about the Ambrose-Rollins feud.

Yes, though technically it was a Judy Bagwell on a Forklift match.

That was so weird. The commentators were like, "we heard that Paul Heyman got fired, or quit, on WWE's recent tour of Japan" and then.....nothing. Never mentioned again. What the hell? Cesaro fired him? Heyman quit? Did they do an angle on one of the Japan shows, and if so, they didn't tape it? Why isn't Cesaro delivering this news? It was very odd. Then Cesaro loses to Kofi of all people, and the announcers didn't sell that Cesaro might have lost due to Heyman not being there (not that it matters because Cesaro was losing regularly with Heyman there)....so that isn't the angle I guess I don't know, it was really strange Heyman was on the show. He had a segment with HHH/Steph discussing "Plan C" for the title, obviously meaning Brock. And then he disappeared for Cesaro's match, and it was just bizarre. The weirdest, dumbest thing of all is that that should normally indicate the beginning of a face turn for AC, but he was then a bigger asshole than ever to Big E and Kofi.

I encounter less of that on the MOR places and more of the idiot logic that seems to be based around the "illegitimacy" of him moving up to heavyweight status in the post-cruiser age. His WWE run was arguably hurt from the start because of how the cruiser division couldn't produce the same number of "classics" that were had in WCW as focus for that type of wrestling shifted to TNA and the indies. It just seems that there are a lot of marks against him that really don't carry any water under scrutiny but have become ingrained. That reminds me for underrated: Chavito. Was never considered a top-level cruiser in WCW, also fell victim to the WWE cruiser curse, was considered the weak link of the Smackdown Six and decidedly secondary during the Heyman run as a whole like it was his fault that he wasn't his uncle when Eddie was having one of the greatest runs in company history, was KERWIN WHITE, and his greatest success came in WWECW, which people will always find a way to shit on.

The answer is, of course, Sean Waltman.

SK has apparently reported that the Rollins injury was a work, to remove any idea that he'll cash in after the main at Battleground, which ostensibly explains the Ambrose beatdown and that their Battleground match will be canceled, so they can have their cake and eat it too and stretch out that feud. Never mind the knock-on effect that it has on the title, that is insane, can of worms booking with what is their hottest feud by a hundred miles.

There are people on this planet who still consider Kurt Angle a top five worker in the world, as evidenced by the period of time when there were rumors of him resigning with the WWE to work as an NXT trainer. To me, his cult of adoration outstrips all others, and it is mindnumbing.

The lack of an Ambrose comeback seemed like that it might have been legit.

Jericho is over to the point where he doesn't have to be interesting or good and will just absorb his opponent's heat, and I'm not sure that there's anything worse than that.

If we're thinking about guys who could have been "the Batista" while the actual Batista was closer to Cena than in real life, how about the future Muhammed Hassan in Mark Magnus? He was about the same size as Cena, and we really can't say how good he might have been with that absolute trainwreck gimmick, and he was only 23 when he debuted (meaning that he was OVW Champ at 21), and 24 when he retired, so who knows how he would have progressed as a worker? Was he placed under that gimmick because it was thought that he could somehow make it work, or just because they (meaning VINCE, VINCE, VINCENT KENNEDY MCMAHON) really wanted that character on TV and needed a warm body?

Yeah, that's why they pushed HHH-Reigns back to NoC with Orton-Reigns taking its place at SummerSlam.

Perhaps we'd have nine-time world champion Marco Corleone.

Booker got screwed by the Goldberg signing. He couldn't have gotten a "WrestleMania moment" win that lasts a solid period of time because he would have had to drop the title by May or June so that they could have gotten a transitional reign before giving the belt to Bill at SummerSlam (you know, if they had done things logically there). Unless they had put Goldberg on SD, which was already kind of congested up top, especially with big men.

It all must be Ambrose's fault.

The easiest way for a longer match to not seem too long is for it to have multiple falls. I know that booking a match to be a 2/3 or a 30-minute ironman is going to seem stupid if it's only a justification for the match to be that long (and it will take away the "surprise" of seeing a match that does go long), but I think that it's obvious that if the match can be explicitly segmented to some extent that it won't feel that long.

I always thought that Candy Okutsu gave an underrated performance in that match. Oh... you mean a different match from that day. Oh. That match.

I would figure, since that was the WHC.

You could definitely do a great, mutually beneficial two-PPV program with Rusev and Swagger. Battleground: Because Rusev HAS now lost a match in the WWE, as long as he doesn't tap out or get pinned, he doesn't really stop being "undefeated". So they have their match, and Swagger wins via DQ after Lana refuses to let Rusev drop the Accolade, with Swagger not tapping out and instead not being able to answer the three-count. Which leads to a submission match at SummerSlam. Just a complete hossoff, trying as many variations on their subs that they can (if they can pull it off, Rusev going for the single-leg dropkick and Swagger pulling him into the ankle lock would be a hell of a thing), with Rusev going over after getting Swagger to tap there. And obviously you can get as much out of Zeb as possible, because it's Dutch fuckin' Mantell. Have him assemble all of the midcard babyfaces that the Real Americans have feuded with and he just pleads his case that this isn't about him, it's not about HIS agenda, it's about this country and why you're here and why you care about America-- "What makes you a Real American?". Assemble a group that can really pull Rusev out of the self-contained "beats one jobber, then the next, then another" bubble that really makes him seem like a threat. You can even give Swagger just enough material in the simple "it was all about me, it was about my success, it was about winning titles. It isn't anymore." vein that just becomes so much more powerful in the context. It feels like something that really could write itself, with a master hand in Dutch driving the on-screen product. I have NO idea why this feud has me so engaged in what it could be, but it seems like an awesome opportunity to make a star out of a gimmick that everyone just called retrograde (because it is) and genuinely reinvigorate the midcarders by giving them an actual purpose and motivation.