gingears

Bob Backlund is the only one I have heard of.

I think that Cena would have sooner gone into acting than independent wrestling. Without the WWE exposure, I don't think he would have gotten the kind of roles that he is getting now though. Nathan Jones' career is sort of comparable to what I am imagining, though perhaps with more CollegeHumor type skits to his credit. On the WWE side, I think it was so important for them to prove, mostly to themselves, that the OVW experiment could yield a top star that they would have forged ahead with that so I agree that Batista or Orton would have been cast into top babyface roles. I also think that a lot of the call-ups that followed would have gotten more main event consideration, at least as far as gimmicks go. If they had worked as hard as they worked to build both Lesnar and Cena and ended up with nothing to show for either, I have a hard time picturing them wasting those same resources on something like The Dicks. Once they had taken Cena from nothing to the top, I think that gave them the attitude that that is a thing that they can do and since they had already done it, they did not necessarily need to do it again right away. I don't believe there would have been nearly as many Shelton Benjamin or Dolph Ziggler types that are kept around long past the point they could realistically be expected to be in main events. If they had cut bait with Cena, they would have cut bait with a lot of others too. I could imagine a lot more short-term character types populating the midcard ranks with guys being brought in with a specific program in mind and then drummed out once that program was over. At every level on the card, it would have been a lot tougher to get and stay over if the attitude was that pre-rap Cena was not worth repackaging. That is an incredibly high set of standards.

Do you mean Long Island?

Looking at cagematch.net, it says Orton had 59 matches in 2016 compared to (exactly double that) 118 for Rollins, 204 for Ambrose, 159 for Roman and 185 for A.J. Styles. I assume that would account for his lower earning total. He is already at 32 matches for 2017 as compared to "workhorse" Ambrose's 47. Forbes' list may have just caught him on a bad year.

He did not really delve into specifics on that front but used variations of the phrase "Mauro is not a saint in this" which I believe was in reference to Mauro citing the Observer Award results that he won. The implication seemed to be that a WWE personality should know that mentioning the Observer, at least positively, would cause some problems for them in the company. Dave was clear to note that WWE is the only wrestling company that operates that way though.

I think it being an all-day thing is part of the appeal. For a fair amount of viewers, it is their one night of wrestling for the year. I do not keep up with football but I watch the Superbowl every year. I do not think I would attend both days of a two-day Superbowl party though.

I don't know how the timeline works in relation to his contract but I think Daniel Bryan would make sense given that it is in New Orleans again.

I had a lot more fun with the satellite shows than with the WWE ones so anything that would negatively impact the viability there is a bad idea to me. I think a lot of what works about WrestleMania is that it is the grand sum of all of WWE distilled down into one night. If the idea is to have two WrestleManias per year I think beefing up the "mania" aspects of something like SummerSlam would be a better way to go.

Oh, I agree. That tournament made for a lot of fun, off-the-wall matches I never knew I wanted to see. I wish it had been more successful and more influential on CMLL.

The program you watched was from the Lucha Libre Elite group. It is affiliated with CMLL and uses their talent and their buildings but it is a separate entity. I would not really consider it an accurate representation of the actual CMLL product.

That's not really what he said. What he said was WWE can't fire Paige for performing in a sex tape and then bring back Hulk Hogan who also performed in a sex tape.

Kurt Angle hits three of them rapid-fire at 5:40 of this video:

I believe that that is this article. http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/dish/201303/how-politics-correlate-sports-interests

Of course not. This was the statement I was referring to. You speak of Americans as "a culture", apparently made up of Japanophiles (for lack of a better term) and Trump supporters. It is my belief that those are two different cultures and, frankly, I'm not sure that either one of them really plays much of a role in the topic at hand. I don't think either one accurately represents what I would consider American culture.

I am not sure there is a large cross-section between fans of Japanese wrestling and Donald Trump supporters. That certainly has not reflected my experience in exchanges with puro fans. I think it is also worth noting that Donald Trump did not win the popular vote and his statements about Mexico don't represent the majority of Americans. I am open to the idea that racism, or really more perceived racism, plays a role in American lucha coverage but using the election results as evidence of this is really unfair.

I wonder if magazine culture does not also factor into this. I know for me that was my first glimpse into wrestling beyond weekend TV shows. It probably sounds stupid to a lot of people, especially to those that grew up online, but stuff like the PWI 500 certainly informed some of my opinions as I was starting to dip my toes in waters like these. Every year, it would break down where there was one Japanese guy in the top ten, maybe two, and then the stars of lucha wouldn't start to surface until much, much later. Granted, that's just going from memory and not actually researching the stats, but there was definitely an attitude of "top puro stars need representation for us to give this list credibility" whereas lucha stars did not. That probably speaks to a preexisting bias, but for somebody looking for an A > B comparison between the two in that era, I think that that's where one would look and the conclusion one would draw. If it didn't start it, it may have reinforced it and exposed it to a wider audience.

I'm not sure if people missed it because this board can be not very good at showing links as actual links but this IS a link to where Tanahashi talked about why New Japan needed to move away from Strong Style and I thought it was really interesting. Sorry, I could not get the link to post on its own for some reason.

https://twitter.com/StrongStyleWres That is the twitter page for an American independent group using the term. Their image features Rikishi, Teddy Long, Little Guido & Tracey Smothers, Joey Ryan, Brian Christopher and Mascarita Sagrada. I think if you can lump all of those performers under one banner and call it "strong style" then the term pretty much can mean anything you want it to mean. Hiroshi Tanahashi made the case for why NJPW had to do away with the concept in his book.

All fixed.

Punk charged in, was taken down immediately and beaten on until Mickey locked in a choke and forced him to tap out. The fight lasted 2:14. The crowd was pro-Punk at all points. There were some light boos for Mickey during his entrance but it was hard for anyone to boo him past that since he was the only one in the fight that actually did anything. Also his entrance music was Hey Mickey which had been previously rejected by Dana White for unstated reasons so that was a nice surprise. The commentators pretty much had to call it as they saw it, it was a slaughter. They gave Punk credit for not quitting through the punches and essentially said this is what happens when an experienced fighter fights an inexperienced fighter. After the fight, Mickey challenged Sage Northcutt and that seemed to turn the crowd around on him. Punk also spoke and encouraged children to follow their dreams and believe in themselves and the announcers agreed that that was a good thing for them to do. He also said he would fight again. His entrance music was Cult Of Personality by Living Colour.

http://articles.courant.com/1998-04-12/sports/9804120196_1_elijah-tillery-usa-tuesday-night-fights-troy-dorsey This article dates the decision to cancel TNF as early as April. IIRC, the Raw ratings resurgence started in April with the Austin/McMahon non-match. There's also the always present issue of viewer demographics that figures into these decisions.

I am stuck between two. #1 is Hulk Hogan. I sometimes wonder how much of Hogan's WWF success was based on Vince's own infatuation with him and how much of it was about destroying Verne with his own weapon. I find the fact that the AWA's death and Vince's decision trade to Hogan in for The Ultimate Warrior, someone who I think is more in the spirit of Vince's super-vascular cartoon image of wrestling, to be a really weird coincidence. I think WWE's version of history is that Hulkamania was a phenomenon that Vince McMahon created and controlled and once it was out of his grasp, it collapsed under its own weight but I would be really interested to know just how much control Vince really thought he had in the situation. #2 is Shawn Michaels. He's just such an "un-Vince", for lack of a better term, choice to be a top star. He really stands out as an anomaly when compared to others that Vince put the full power of the WWF machine behind. He wasn't big, he wasn't muscley, he wasn't exceptionally over, he didn't really have a track record and it's not as though he was a problem-free and easy-going model citizen outside of the ring, yet even today he's regarded in the WWE canon as the all-time greatest. I wonder what it was about him that allowed Vince to overlook his faults, a lot of which were the same faults that doomed others that came both before and after. I don't think it can be as simple as great matches.

It feels like he is trying to directly appeal to Vince McMahon for his old job.

He was asked who was the highest merch seller that loses all the time.

I don't think any more so than Edge and Lita "live sex celebration" would mark the beginning of a new era in 2006. If WWE had committed to promoting C.M. Punk as the top star afterwards, I could see a case. That is not what happened though. Perhaps it is what should have happened but, for me, it was just a promo designed to build up the next month's pay-per-view that took on a life of its own. It doesn't really represent any sort of change of philosophy. I definitely see the argument for it though. I think that this is right on the money but I still feel like I need to see more of a commitment to the change in philosophy. Trading pay-per-view for over-the-top internet and reducing the price point absolutely fits that bill but the NXT expansion doesn't feel like it has crossed a point of no return yet for me. I also think that some of these sorts of classifications are only really able to be made with the benefit of hindsight though. In time, I think the network's impact on the product is going to become a lot more obvious historically.