MoS

So are the NXT guys who are drafted going to start wrestling immediately or is this just where they land when they get eventually called up? Cuz otherwise it means Gable Steveson is skipping developmental, which is the most confidence they have shown in a rookie in forever. I don't know how that will work for him, but the Performance Centre certainly isn't making these rookies good wrestlers and Steveson is a generational wrestling talent, so might as well learn on the road on the main roster

Not getting a big title run and yet always being in main events wrestling for the world title was part of the reason he felt so pushed down the throat. Bad booking enhances the feeling of being pushed down the throat, it is not a substitute. He would always be in the main event, nothing the WWE did with anyone else would ever matter no matter how hard their initial push was because come WrestleMania season, you knew Roman was going to be in the main event. Yet, it would feel unearned even in kayfabe cuz he was not booked to win like the guy who should be in the main event every year. It was the worst possible combination of overpushing yet undercutting someone, and if they had just delayed Bryan's return by a month and then just pulled the trigger at WrestleMania and let him have a long reign, none of this would have happened. If he had been John Cena, he could have overcome bad booking, but there is only one John Cena. And even Cena got lucky cuz he was supposed to lose the title to HHH at WM 23, but Hunter got injured so they finally went all in on Cena that year, and that really was the making of him.

I clearly see glimpses of Shawn in Tanahashi. He has the same flashiness, charisma, flamboyant personality, and a lot of his old-man work is like late 00s Shawn in its psychology, although YMMV on who does it better.

I think the top end matches of the 90s were better, but the 80s had a lot more depth. Actually, that wouldn't be exactly correct, since they ran a ton more cards, but the bigger roster, more cards, and the influx of Crockett and Calgary talent means there are so many fun, good matches sprinkled throughout the cards in the 80s, on the home videos, in the arena footage from MSG, Spectrum, Boston and Maple Gardens, etc. What helps is that angles and wrestlers were hotter in the 80s than most of the 90s and therefore you have much hotter crowds, which makes for a better viewing experience than some of the awful crowds I have sat through while watching 90s WWF. In the 90s they still had their Calgary guys and kept getting good talent throughout, but they didn't have as many good workers as they did in the 80s, and thus they didn't have the volume of good matches that they did in the 80s. I would argue that didn't happen until 2000.

Probably the famous This is Your Life segments, yeah. Or The heel Hollywood Rock concerts. He also had a promo on the first WWE draft ever after he got drafted to Smackdown where he got the crowd to chant like ten different things at Vince. Yeah the more I think of it, Rock was probably the king of 20 minute promos, and given everything we know about HHH's feelings about Rock - and Rock is no longer shy about publicly discussing old wrestling politics, although he avoids naming names - I absolutely think one reason HHH has done so many interminably long promos in his career is cuz he wants to show he can do them better than Rock and his catchphrases. Remember how hard he tried to make "And I AM. THAT... DAAAMN...... GOOOOOODDDDD!!!!" a thing.

I don't doubt they both wanted to have the best match and steal the show. I think their idea and conceptualization of having the best match and stealing the show were wildly different though, and not just in terms of movesets. I don't doubt that a lot of the younger wrestlers on top today patterned their wrestling on Shawn's style - the Bucks are massive Shawn fans after all - but I think Bret's stuff has translated better to the younger generation of hardcore fans. That's just my guess from reading stuff on Twitter and sometimes on reddit though. Of course it doesn't help that a lot of the wrestlers who tried to follow in Shawn's footsteps did not have an ounce of his talent and pro wrestling IQ, and Shawn's style when done bad is a lot more awful than a boring/bad Bret style match.

McMemphis was great too. Vince was also, at the age of 70, able to get Roman universally cheered after his entire post-WM knee-cutting run in 2015, and get Roman on track to being the top beloved babyface ace until he feuded with..you know. And while I get the point about him being competitive against Hogan, I love that match as an amazing spectacle. I thought him gaining the upper hand on Hogan was okay cuz it was an accident in the uncontrolled chaos unfolding. His facial expression before and after he jumped off a ladder on Hogan was incredible. Vince the character should have been blown off mid-1999 after Austin won some stipulation match - I think against Taker - and basically not have come back at all for at least a couple of years. He couldn't resist though I guess. Wrestlemania in 2000 was so underwhelming for the hottest year in company history, and one reason was the naturally hot HHH v. Rock main event being diluted just because they wanted "A McMahon In Every Corner!!!"

That's a valid point. Also @Jimmy Redman if you wanted to see Bryan Danielson work a nasty style involving matwork and moves against a modern indy wrestler, this is a good 15 min match to check out.

Shane has always been my least favourite McMahon. It has something to do with one of my vivid memories of watching wrestling as a kid being him going toe to toe with The Rock in some post-match brawl on Raw and me just being turned off by this little geek not getting massacred by the WWF champ and top guy in wrestling in 5 seconds. I never really believed wrestling was real as a kid, cuz word on the street (that is to say, playgrounds, school buses, and wherever else kids would assemble) was that it was fake and I had enough sense to understand that a sledgehammer shot to the head would kill a man and not get a long 2 count, but I didn't fully understand what parts were real and what were fake, and Shane-o-Mac with his dumbass jerseys being in the ring with these amazing wrestlers and not having to be buried later that night was something that always stood out as clear fake bullshit to me. I have said this before, but if you take out the post WM 30 Authority Era Steph, then Steph was 10 times the heel and performer that Shane was. I guess there were some fans on the internet who liked him more cuz he took crazy bumps once every couple of months, and I know the wrestlers liked him a lot cuz he would party with them (but Dave reported when Shane first left that even they thought that Steph and Hunter would be better successors than Shane) but he has nearly always been a turnoff on my TV. And even with the Authority Era Steph, I had stopped watching weekly by the time Shane became a full time character in his comeback, but was she really more obnoxious than the Boy Wonder being in weekly programs with Daniel Bryan and Kevin Owens, and winning dumbass giant trophies? That said, I agree with Matt about his return popping the fans cuz it was a genuine surprise in a time when no such thing exists. And apparently his HitC match announcement with Taker really moved tickets for WrestleMania, believe it or not.

Voices of Wrestling on Twitter said it would be a good idea to capitalise on the goodwill Roman has earned from this run to do a double turn with Brock and finally fulfill Roman's potential as a face. That is something I have been thinking is a good idea since the second Lesnar showed up and Heyman was the centre of a wrestling love triangle. My idea came from Brock's own original face turn from 2002, when Heyman betrayed Brock to align himself with a bigger monster in Big Show (and then turned on Big Show in a month to align himself with Angle, but let's ignore that.) A double turn with Heyman aligning himself with Brock versus Roman seems a great way to accomplish this. Now, that turn arguably failed but that was because it was too soon to turn Brock. I don't think it's too soon to turn Roman. He has been heel and champ for a year now. He has done some great work, but I firmly believe that long term, the top person in your promotion should be a face. It was WWE's tried and tested philosophy for decades, a philosophy that has made it a billion dollar juggernaut. I think fans are now perfectly fine with cheering Roman unreservedly, and he deserves a run as the undisputed top face. The main reason I would have liked his heel run to continue would have been if he eventually put over Big E huge, but I don't think that is in WWE's plans anytime soon, so might as well do the double turn.

I am so happy Danielson isn't working from underneath like he did his entire WWE run. If I never see him work underdog ever again, I will be so happy

Danielson v. Nick Jackson should be great. Someone mentioned in the Dynamite thread that Nick Jackson is the best worker in the Elite and I think at least in 2021, I agree.

Sorry, I meant Nyla

I mean he pretty much did that with Pillman

That might be true, but until recently, WWE had a dominant monopoly over the scene, and it's difficult to not see the big WWE matches over the last decade, and correspondingly pretty much all major North American wrestlers of the same time period since most wrestled there, and not see Shawn more than Bret. That said, I agree about the tide turning, so to speak, so I'm in agreement with the general point.

I thought the feud was fine until the end of the year, yeah. It was really amongst the first few Nitros of 1997 that it started feeling really overdone and crappy to me.

Nia in particular has been on a roll on Twitter since he said that line

This is purely anecdotal, but more and more wrestlers seem to come out these days and say Bret was the best, they learn so much from watching his matches, etc. Punk said recently that he used to be a Shawn guy but now he thinks Bret's stuff has aged better. So yeah while the current wrestling scene owes more to Shawn, Bret is the one whose wrestling is aging better and is being looked at as the American ideal more and more. The tide is definitely turning. As you said, it's probably because the excesses of Shawn's style are revealing themselves. Bret has seemingly gone from that legend who took the biz too seriously to the guy wrestlers are now studying tapes of. His work definitely seems to be aging better than Flair's and Shawn's imo.

It adds a layer of aura and intrigue to his matches, it represents how we are all in Fiend's world right now, it is actually the fans' fault if they can't see clearly due to the lighting and they should stop whining, the issue with Fiend was that he was not booked dominantly enough, etc etc

I don't know how much money Fulham earns him, but he can probably step back a bit from that. God knows Fulham fans absolutely despise him as it is. The Jags are a different matter. He might be a wrestling mark but he is also a billionaire businessman, and he knows that being an NFL team owner is far more prestigious than being a wrestling promoter. Hell, if he had a choice, I am not entirely sure Vince would not choose to trade positions with TK. This true mainstream shit is what he has always wanted.

Did 90s Shawn Michaels ever really sell for Undertaker's supernatural shtick?

LMAO Nick Khan quietly removing all the McMahon kids while he gets Vince all the billion dollar deals

The Casino Ladder Match with the winner receiving a title shot is next week. Very very intrigued to see who wins that. Bryan is already booked for a tag next week so he can't win it. Is this where Hangman returns? Cuz man, again, it's too soon for Omega to lose, he has to finish his Danielson program for starters, but Hangman losing again to Omega just a couple of months after he lost, it just doesn't seem like a good idea. Who else can win that ladder match? I don't see anybody else who can work Omega at Full Gear.

God was busy having to salvage the Crown Jewel Reigns-Lesnar match from THE DEMON playing spoilsport, and now this happens. Poor Miro just can't catch a break

Arn, as long as it is made clear that murder confessions on TV are not the best idea