MoS

Meltzer This is interesting. Can you elaborate? I know a lot of people who post here were active on the internet during the Monday Night Wars. In other news, Meltzer repeated about 5 times how Shane McMahon failed "utterly, miserablycompletely" when he ran his business in China, while actually defending some stupid storyline decision to get an MBA. He genuinely had me howling with laughter.

If Miz is an unselfish top guy, then so is Christian, Big Show, Mark Henry, Edge, and about a dozen others. I believe that including them dilutes the discussion to become almost meaningless. I am talking about the absolute top-tier wrestlers, who had a sustained main event run, instead of career midcarders with occasional runs at the top.

As I said, Gorilla Monsoon was a weekly attraction, appearing on local TV and wrestling on local cards all over the territory on a weekly/monthly basis. Didn't he have a theory that the business should always be simmering, but never too hot because the latter wouldn't last forever, and the fans, having experienced it, would no longer be satisfied with the normal levels and would just leave in droves. As you said, it is a very conservative idea, but when trying to book a stable long-term entertainment product, that's not a totally bad thing. Plus he would peak the product at times, and especially in the last few years of his career, he started filling out the cards and having a lot of hot matches and angles on his shows, instead of "Bruno and everyone else."

Expect that shithead Ryan to whine even more about cancel culture, right as he tries to use lawsuits to silence victims

Vince Sr. was better at booking giants, and I don't think this is limited to Andre either. Gorilla Monsoon became a huge drawing heel for him, and this was despite appearing weekly inmost towns and monthly at MSG

I have been thinking about this for a while. I am not sure how exactly to articulate this, but I will try my best. Fans just naturally assume that Vince Jr. is a better promoter/booker than Vince Jr., but...is that true? Vince Jr. obviously has made a lot more money, and completely changed the nature of pro wrestling and made WWF the only game in town, which is by far the biggest argument in his favour. However, Vince Jr. has also presided over a product that has led to more and more fans giving up on his product for god knows how many years now. Yes, they make more money now than they have ever had, but a lot of that is due to alternative revenue streams that simply were not an option in Vince Sr.'s day. It definitely shows that Jr. is a better businessman than Jr., but that is not exactly what I am trying to explore. Money does not equal popularity. Vince Sr. ran the WWWF/WWF for 20 years, and Capitol wrestling for 10 years before that, and except for a brief period during the late 60s when he lost TV, he never saw a decline. In fact, his product grew in popularity. Yes, to an extent, he was benefited by having Bruno as the guy, who is perhaps the only major box office draw in wrestling history whose drawing power consistently increased over the course of time. But he still made a lot of money when Morales was champ, he got more sellouts per capita than ever when Graham and Backlund were world champs. Another argument can be that he had no competition while Jr. did, but I don't find that very persuasive. For one, during WWF's worst period in the mid-90s, WCW was doing crap as well. WCW's rise in popularity actually led to wrestling getting more popular, and that benefited WWF too, including in 1997 and 1998, when WCW was at its peak. Further, WWE has been the only game in town since 2001, and, with the exception of a brief period when John Cena brought on board an entire unique fanbase of women and kids, WWE has been on steadfast (and drastic) decline for 20 years. This is not even about 'choosing' between one of the two. But I find the topic interesting, and I would like to unpack their relative strengths and weaknesses, and analyse where one was better than the other and where they were worse in comparison. Honestly, I think Vince Sr. should be mentioned more when it comes to the all-time great bookers/promoters in wrestling history.

Oh yeah, the reason people prefer Twitter to PWO is cuz no one at PWO properly responds to blueminister's ridiculous and stunningly stupid arguments. Yeah, you got me there

One of the best things about Tony is that he might be a DVDVR shitposter and a PWO lurker, he might be extremely anoying due to his online presence like a lot of superonline wrestling fans are...but he doesn't bullshit us. He is not a bullshit artist. Maybe he knows that all of us wrestling nerds wouldn't buy into his hypothetical bullshitting, but that makes it even better, cuz he just never insults our intelligence. He really is one of us

Sorry, my man, but you are arguing and debating in good faith too fucking hard against someone who only seems to have entered the conversation to get 'gotcha' points and pretend he owned us internet smarks

What the everloving fuck are you saying? Do you even have a point anymore?

You have been weirdly aggressive and really annoying. First off, you are wrong about what Pedro meant. When he won the title for the first time, Bruno was burnt out and did not want to wrestle much, if at all. For the first year or so of Pedro's title reign, he only wrestled in his tiny hometown of Pittsburgh, and that was just cuz he was also a co-promoter there. Pedro was absolutely THE guy. His reign ended only cuz he did not draw as well outside of NYC as Bruno had, therefore Vince Sr. basically had to beg Bruno to come back and take the belt again. It is also weird that you claim that Pedro was not THE guy, and then say that WWE has been catering to POC audience by pushing....Mustafa Ali. Bobby Lashley, who was doing absolutely nothing until he lucked into MVP being a lifesaver. Like, Mustafa Ali is your go-to example to try and claim that WWE has tried to cater to PoCs? Also, FWIW, Joeg is not trying to target only WWE in his criticism, which is something you have claimed multiple times, in really aggressive ways as "annoying 10-year dated smark talking points" or whatever. He has frequently criticised AEW of the same thing, mentioning that all the tippy top guys there are skinny white guys in their 30s. You may not agree with it, but don't go ascribing bad faith motivations when there are none.

Completely agreed that MMA and wrestling should be split off for box office draw. Apart from the reason you correctly stated, the nature of the business of wrestling and MMA has become so different too. MMA is now a primarily PPV industry, while wrestling is a ratings business now

Hager revealed it recently on a podcast with Jericho. As I said, the reaction he got was the opposite of what he must have been expecting lol Triple H used to try his best lol. It just would never work on account of Rock being a million times more charismatic than Hunter could ever be

He also refused to put over Jack Swagger, and it was one of the few things that unified wrestling twitter, cuz literally everyone was like "He was right to do that, good decision by Cena." Also, while Cena is right up there, I would still put Rock over him. As I said in my OP, Cena had the more squashy, jobber-y losses, but he was also booked like a superman in some of his matches. Certainly his booking run had him feel like a Superman far more than Rock's run. Rock's run was much briefer (although obviously had much higher highs) and even during that run, he was jobbing clean to Big Bossman, E&C, and even tapping to a Chris Benoit crossface. I guess this might be due to the fact that Cena was the undisputed number one guy in his run, while Rock always felt like the 1A to Stone Cold's 1, even when Austin was off TV for most of the year. I still think Rock would be my pick for the most unselfish top guy.

I know Baba relegated himself to comedy 6-mans when he got older, but did he ever put over someone as conclusively and in an epoch-marking way as Jumbo put over Misawa or even Misawa did for Kobashi in 03?

I think Darby Allin and Private Party in particular are potential superstars on AEW's roster. Darby in particular I see REALLY appealing to teenagers and kids

jdw's puro reports were excellent too

Apropos of nothing, but Mox is literally the coolest motherfucker in pro wrestling since Austin/Rock

Thanks very much!

Watching a section of WWE apologists lose their minds about the Observer awards and bitching about AEW bias and anti-WWE bias is hilarious. A year with some of the worst booking in WWE history while they lost a record amount of viewers has led to WWE getting shafted in the awards, how shocking

What is the usual training routine for the Performance Center trainees? What are the drills and programs that they follow?

I dunno how many people agree with me on this, but I prefer face Flair to heel Flair, and I've always been disappointed that I didn't see more of face Flair when he was in his prime

Thanks a lot! You're a good brother and I really wanted some joke ready to own your ass, but I couldn't accomplish it. So I will just hope you keep sharing extremely insightful, productive wrestling discussions during our lives!, even though they are from another board like modern-day DVDVR EWWW

Thank you so much, good bubba @KawadaSmile!!! I just told my mom about this place where all of us just fight with each other about a niche topic no one cares about, and mom literally just said "Well, whatever, I hope you all are happy and hopeful about the coming life"

The only contribution I will have here is that the official starting and process happens as quick as we can process any new footage. Of course, we will always disagree on what the footage meant/means, but we need to get to and understand what that footage means, at the very least! Anyway, discussions and debates will be much more fruitful if we name and link them, just so the newer kids no what we are fighting about