MoS

How much do Meet and Greets with superstars like Triple H, Roman Reigns and others high on the totem pole cost generally? The 535 USD I outlined includes that as well as front row seats.

The highest tickets cost 35,000 Indian Rupees. That amounts to about 535 USD, in straight currency conversion. It includes WWE merchandise as well as Meet & Greet with them. Thise will pretty much be comped seats given to dignitaries and the VIPS I think (India has a massive VIP culture); there isn't even an option to purchase them at the online ticketing site. Normal ringside seats will cost 18000 Indian Rupees, which is around 275 USD in straight conversion. The cheapest seats cost 3200 INR, which is the equivalent of 50 dollars; however, in terms of real purchasing power, 3200 is a lot more for us than 50 dollars is for Americans. Same with 275 and 535 USD. The seats are definitely much more expensive than they are for even PPVs in America. There were supposed to be 2 shows but tickets are available for only one, so they either cancelled one show due to poor sales or that sold out. The latter is unlikely; advanced booking in India still means that you purchase tickets mostly 1-3 days before the event. Before December 09, there will probably be a great surge of tickets being sold for this event as well. However, these tickets are no joke. 3200 INR is like, 1/12th or so the monthly salary of a lot of the youngsters they are targeting - the kids will probably convince their parents to take them out as a family trip - so a ticket for the bleachers will also cost a bomb as well, relatively speaking. A layout and pricing for those who care- https://in.bookmyshow.com/sports/wwe-live-india-tickets/seat-layout/ET00062558/10014

The promos here are advertising him defending his WWE title against Owens. It is possible they are old ads though which are still running.

In the previous brand split era, there used to be a rivalry leading up to the Royal Rumble as well, and stemming partially from that, there would be interpromotional matches at WrestleMania, which would be pushed as a big deal. Plus, their video game series was called Smackdown v. Raw and the GM mode was excellent and I was really disappointed when they discontinued that in their games. I always enjoyed that and I hope they start doing all of this again.

Yeah I think this was definitely a major checkpoint in the Death of WCW road. As mentioned before, he match drew a good buyrate during WM season against a molten-hot Austin-McMahon match, only for this shit to happen. I think most fans realised after this that WCW would keep pissing on them and were really not worth the money or the loyalty.

I can see an argument for 97 Hart Foundation for the promos alone. Plus they had way better rivals. Even DX had better feuds and were a better stable than The Shield. I hate DX except for late 1997 and early 1998 when Shawn was a heat magnet, so we will have to disagree on that one. DX was at best a fun midcard act after Shawn retired the first time, and it was never anything that shook up the company the way The Shield did. I think Shield was objectively an exponentially better stable than DX ever was, but they have not had the WWE machine telling everyone for 20 years that they were a revolutionary act that turned the tide of the Monday Night Wars and changed the industry forever.

I can see an argument for 97 Hart Foundation for the promos alone. Plus they had way better rivals. Not to mention the booking of the whole feud was actually compelling and interesting. The Shield, ironically enough, is completely a "workraty"-style unit. People remember matches with snowflakes and that's it. And it's kinda funny after now years of hearing how much Ambrose and Rollins actively suck, how magically the Shield is awesome again and the greatest thing ever. It also shows how desperate they are with Reigns at this point. Because there has never ever been any tag team/stable which was great but whose wrestlers went on to have mediocre careers after they disbanded? I know one of your favourite things on the board apart from shitting on most wrestling is to constantly complain about how irrational everyone else who watches/posts is, but come on. You do not follow the product and have not for some time; do you have any idea how and what they would do every week on TV, ranging from heel beatdowns to cool babyface badassery to fun to great 6-man tags? What their booking arc was? They were a stable that was so over that it was one of the very few times a "This is Awesome" chant was justified; when they faced off with the Wyatts at the beginning of Elimination Chamber and people were just going crazy for them cuz they were over as fuck. None of that had to do with "workraty"-style unit, whatever that is. The Hart Foundation were a great stable and I agree about their promos being more compelling, but I do not think they touch the week-to-week awesomeness that The Shield was, although to be fair, it was a different era with different expectations and requirements.

Having an extended babyface Shield run will also get Roman some significant goodwill. The Shield is arguably the best stable in WWE history (I do not even think it is that arguable to be honest) and looking back Roman was the best worker of the three. Him being portrayed as a cool badass leader of a highly popular stable is nothing but a good idea.

I'll echo the other comments here. Memphis is some of my favourite wrestling to watch, and Lance Russell was a huge part of that. Undoubtedly one of the absolute best ever. RIP.

JYD seems like a sure-fire Hall of Famer to me, but clearly I am in a minority cuz he actually fell off the ballot. He turned a dead city into a wrestling hotbed, made tons of money for Watts, and was arguably the 3rd biggest draw of the 1980s. I guess for many voters it is hard to look past all the Junkfood digs Dave took at him in the late 80s.

Iactually agree that Vince McMahon is both the greatest booker and the greatest promoter of all time by a comfortable distance. Vince at his best is untouchable. The booking of Hogan-Andre for WM 3 was genius. I dunno how much Vince Sr. booked - he certainly was not the micromanager that Jr is - but he deserves credit for running a mega-territory that made massive money for decades. The Sammartino-Zybszko angle was tremendous booking, and from what I have read, Sammartino-Monsoon was excellent as well.

I do not know how Kreski made it really special, but top to bottom the WWF in 2000 was the most well-booked in company history in my opinion. He was also reportedly the brains behind the excellent HHH-Steph-Angle ...angle, which was tremendously well booked and had brilliant foreshadowing and treatment. It was also a time when almost all storylines meshed into each other seamlessly and smoothly and everyone interacted with everyone in a way that made logical sense, and as a result everyone was over to a great extent. I remember reading that he disagreed with some twist or sommething saying it made no logical sense and pointed to his storyboard/notes to show how and he got heat for it and was shortly gone. Bruce Prichard is also a sort-of Vince Russo apologise if I remember correctly, so I will probably never see eye to eye with him on booking and good bookers.

Great Khali. Now and always. He was so bad that Shawn Michaels had to poke his head up and audibly (and visibly) tell him what the right position was at the 2007 Royal Rumble, and I still love him.

WWE booked Hogan to near-perfection in 2002 I thought. Of course that's one stretch of time when he did not have any "creative control" clause in his contract.

A good friend of mine actually once started a wrestling-thened GoT series but did not finish it. I am curious as to who Jon Snow will be in WWE's version.

Warrior didn't like him and said he was a trouble maker. I know someone's gonna say "but it's the Ultimate Warrior", but I think the Warrior is a lot smarter than what people give him credit for. He got in, got big, stood up to Vince, got out of wrestling and got Vince to praise him in the end. Ah, fuck Ultimate Warrior. Like anyone should care about what a Fucking homophobic dummy has to say. So because he has views you don't agree with he doesn't deserve the right to his freedom of speech? What a ridiculous strawman. No one said he had no right to his freedom of speech. Just that others have a right to not give a fuck about him and his opinions because of his views.

Braun Strowman has to be the most compelling wrestling character in WWE since Daniel Bryan in the first quarter of 2014. I really hope they pull the trigger and give him the title. Roman-Strowman is a more interesting feud anyway and apparently the two are also doing excellent house show numbers.

Haven't watched this yet but I came across this - http://m.hindustantimes.com/other-sports/kavita-devi-impresses-wwe-fans-with-unique-in-ring-attire-at-mae-young-classic/story-U2zS2ni1KGRWTdAMvs6XMK_amp.html She is one of Khali's trainees and mentees - credits him with getting her introduced to wrestling and teaching her the basics. What it says about her wrestling ability I do not know (probably not good) but it intrigued me and I hope to catch the first round soon.

Of course, while fans know it is fake, often pro wrestling is treated by the sensationalistic news channels as real. They script segments where they act as if wrestling is real. Here is a subtitled segment of Khali acting like a proper good old-fashioned carny. "Whatever you see on TV is real. If someone is getting hit they are getting hit for real."

Dara Singh is an absolute legend and deserves to be in the Hall of Fame (so does Great Gama and I am actually surprised he is not in) and I am not advocating for Khali to enter the HOF at all, but Dara Singh is NOT considered a "professional" wrestler here. At least, he has not been for decades now. In the sense that no one associates him with professional wrestling; people associate him (and used to associate him) far more with amateur wrestling and kushti, as absurd as it sounds. Khali is considered massive and gigantic, but Dara was considered a legitimately tough strongman/badass shoot wrestler, if that makes sense. Pro wrestling as we know it did not really have a presence here (or at least in the last few generations) until the 90s when wrestling first appeared on TV, and Khali did make that market much bigger. Most Indians did not have a TV until the 80s so no one watched Dara Singh. By the 90s, he had transitioned from ex-wrestler to famous character actor in movies who was famous for legends like "He had beaten wrestlers from all over the world" "He had once embarrassed a cocky Pakistani wrestler" etc.

Jones also said once, almost verbatim, that he would be a good champion and face of the company because "You don't have to worry about a DUI or anything silly like that with me."

With his self-destructive ways and his penchant for always fucking up just when you think he has finally cleaned up his act, Jon will take to wrestling like a fish to water.

Hey I am probably the biggest Khali fan on the board, so I am not going to debate that one.

Sorry for the really long post above haha. Also, just found this cool article on a prominent Indian news channel website about the two Undertakers storyline. http://www.indiatvnews.com/entertainment/hollywood-the-story-of-two-the-undertakers-brian-lee-and-mark-callaway-375481

I have been to America, on exchange for a semester. It was in Alabama. It was overall a beautiful place and I had a lot of fun, and it was a great semester, although I certainly met a few people with..highly interesting views. I had also visited NYC and LA as a kid, but this was before 9/11 so it was a completely different place. India is a tough country to visit if you are American. Whenever American friends and colleagues I know come here, I advise them to pack as much snacks as possible and to eat nothing but plain sandwiches for the first couple of days to ease themselves here haha. C.S, Jinder does get coverage here; in fact, WWE gets coverage here probably because unlike the USA, wrestling is not taboo here (well, not as much) so PPVs get a mention and report in pretty "mainstream" papers, at least for their web edition. As far as Jinder is perceived, although I do not regularly follow the Hindi shows, from what I have seen, his very heelish actions are decried and considered unfortunate, but he is not treated as a full-blown heel. There is definitely some buzz about there being an Indian-origin WWE champion, but it's not nearly as much as you would expect, because Jinder was a jobber for like, a decade before this push. Stuff like him celebrating Independence day in the ring did get a lot of mentions, which helps because WWE's prime source of revenue here is TV rights. They earn a fuckload through rights here. I do not think he has a huge demand here, because the official WWE merchandising partner has just one t-shirt and no other gear listed for him, and very few other merchandise, mostly phone covers, so clearly there is not a lot of demand to watch the Maharaja. (For those interested, their website is - https://www.thesouledstore.com/wwe ) Also, while he speaks Punjabi, Hindi and Punjabi are close enough to understand what he says, unlike other Indian languages like Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, etc. If I had to make a guess, Khali is much, much more well-known and famous and popular than Jinder. He has appeared on so many news channels, and was even a part of the Indian version of Big Brother. This seems strange because Khali is probably a shittier wrestler than Jinder, but while I am now hoping the Jinder experiment dies quickly and quietly, I will always defend Khali getting a cup of coffee with SD's world title. It was covered on various news channels in a manner that was literally unprecedented. Fuck, I remember them even doing a profile on his potential opponents like "the HIGHLY dangerous Undertaker" It helped that he made his debut against Taker and went over, because for the previous generation of fans, Taker WAS WWE. Massively popular and well-known, "Undertaker" even appeared in a Bollywood movie where he was a pro wrestler and an evil henchman. Brian Lee played him, and he had a wrestling "match" with Crush, who was uncredited. (Wrestling trivia - Undertaker won the match by killing Crush and putting him in the casket) Debuting against him and then going over helped with his buzz tremendously, and I would say the massive increase in WWE rights fees (and demand for more WWE content) is linked to Khali getting over massively. 13 years ago, Raw and SD would air 2 weeks later, and would often be pre-empted by other programs. Now it airs live, including in Hindi on one channel, and has plenty of Indian talk shows and review episodes, which undoubtedly result in a lot of cash for WWE, and I really believe they have Khali to thank for that. With Jinder it is not the same because not only is he not the first (or even Indian), he is also, unlike Khali, not a giant or a freak of nature. He is just a normal looking dude who got an inexplicably big push after being a jobber for a decade. His promos are entertaining, particularly when he is trolling American fans, but he is more dull than bad, and that is worse. He has also not had a super-worker like 2007 Cena carry him to surprisingly great matches. Nothing about him jumps out apart from his ugly acne, so it is understandable why he has not taken the country by storm. Perhaps a more talented worker could have done the "ordinary Indian making his way to the top in America much to the hatred of some" gimmick, which could have made him a face here and a heel elsewhere, but Jinder is not that guy. And honestly, his constantly dull matches are now boring the fuck out of me. Having bad matches with Orton is one thing, but a bad match with Nakamura a couple of weeks after Nak tore down the house with Cena? Urgh. tl;dr - Not a fan, really, and I would wager if Cena was carrying the belt instead of Jinder, it would not have made a particularly significantly difference as far as business in India is concerned.