funkdoc

and frankly, anything involving the rock and ronda rousey WOULD be that "never before seen dream match" even with HHH in there. she has serious donald trump potential. but yes, i am fully expecting next year's mania to be full of old people and celebrities. if they could swing that mixed tag, taker-sting, hogan-cena, and an austin match... not that i expect all of that, but it's going to be much more of an "old over new" show than this one was.

show was better than i expected, especially the main event obv. so not into rollins as champ but yea, not many options there. only thing i could see is rollins cashing in and getting pinned by brock, but that would kill him off instead of reigns which they clearly wouldn't want. really reigns needed not to be booked into a world title match until summerslam, but o well~

i'm not all that mad at that result tbh nobody in this battle royal felt as hot as cesaro did last year. ryback was the closest thing but eh. he feels like the sort of guy you could heat up whenever. mizdow is not going to have much of a shelf life so i think they used him just fine there.

fair point steve, total brainfart on my part. thought marino was in more than one, and didn't want to use peyton as the analogy even though i guess that might be the best one... also meltzer absolutely had a hold on the consensus, especially at that time. this is something i've wanted to make a thread about, but i don't think you can put a lot of stock in critical rep when the most respected reporter, historian, and critic in this community are *all* the same person... heck even today, if you go onto reddit or somethingawful or 420chan's wrestling boards, the fans who care about wrestling outside WWE mostly just parrot dave. and that's with a more fragmented and informed core community compared to the 90s-2000s! and this is where we go in two completely different directions. i think pro wrestling is supposed to be a fictional sport where the athletes and commentators treat it as sport, and that's why the shawn hype seems so silly to me. i think the guy they hype up as Mr. Wrestlemania should be the one who, you know, WINS the most at WM. you do have guys in sports who are "pushed" for reasons other than their play, but they tend to be fads that die down sooner or later (e.g. gilbert arenas, tim tebow). that said, your post is really good and something i can definitely get behind. best articulation i've seen for that point of view!

If somebody made this claim to describe John Cena's legacy, it would be jumped upon. i think a key difference is that Cena deserves the hype in kayfabe terms. calling HBK "Mr. Wrestlemania" is like calling Dan Marino "Mr. Super Bowl", and it's one of the definitive examples of how wins and losses aren't treated as important anymore. Cena is also more of a draw than HBK ever was, going by available evidence, so that feeds into the "manufactured" narrative as well.

also i think sheik's inflated role in history is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time hulk hogan vs. the iron sheik fits people's perception of pro wrestling as a vehicle for simplistic and jingoistic narratives, and that gives it an iconic quality - there's a reason the big match in the wrestler was based on that. i would compare it to the undertaker and the ultimate warrior being two of the most widely recognizable wrestlers even though they weren't often "draws" in any meaningful sense. warrior fit the stereotype of what wrestlers look and act like, and undertaker fit the perception of wrestling as a cartoon. oh, another thing with sheik is that his biggest match happened in NYC. i cannot stress enough how much the US media treats new york as the center of the universe. put it to you this way: in the last 40+ years the new york knicks have won one championship, and there's been like 10 books (maybe an exaggeration but only slightly) written about that one team in that one season.

at least at the time it most certainly was, given how fresh Losing My Smile was in people's minds. there's actually a similar amount of suspicion toward rick rude's career-ending injury since he was collecting lloyd's of london money and was training for a comeback when he died

yeah it feels like that has to be either sheik or tony atlas

neat to see the ratings, really surprises me that jesse rates that high in so many regions. always had the impression he wasn't exactly a major player as an actual wrestler... i also second the above post re: tito. from his ratings, he really jumps out at me as someone who could be used more. i guess regions outside the east coast are irrelevant atm though?

yep, what mike said. back then, your pay seemed to be based on your spot on the card and how much your opponents were making. for instance, honky tonk man said that he was making as much money jobbing to jimmy snuka on the C-show tour as he did when he was IC champ. reason being, when snuka initially came back in '89, vince was paying him main-eventer money for whatever reason.

alright, those are fair points. i'm obviously nowhere near as well-versed on that era, so thanks for the post! backlund as Fake Brisco and/or Fake Dory is an interesting thought...that's exactly the sort of perception i could see meltzer types subscribing to back in the day. i just don't mind champions working on top even if they're babyfaces. i've been a fan of sports and involved with competitive games for most of my life, and typically when the champion loses it's in a game where they had the advantage most of the way and "slipped on a banana peel" (as we would put it here) or the opponent just made a huge gamble that paid off. the amount of time spent in control can actually be a more reliable indicator of skill than who wins, so i like to see champions who reflect that. as an aside, this is also why i don't mind "my turn-your turn" layouts as much as most people here do. that's a common game flow when the players/teams are at the same level, and many of the consensus all-time greatest games fit that mold. very much appreciate all of the discussion here, this is giving me some other thread ideas...

maybe not completely undefeated teams, but i'd throw arguably the greatest football team of all time into the "babyface" category. the fridge & the super bowl shuffle & da coach, anyone? that was a team that came close to "steamrolling every team they faced" and people ate them up. i think it depends on how likeable said team's most prominent media personalities area. the seahawks weren't exactly "heels" (thanks to russell wilson) or "faces" (thanks to richard sherman). basically if i were a longtime fan during backlund's reign, i would view him as a welcome subversion of the standard babyface tropes.

yea, if the wrestling is great, the smart fans will complain about the booking and/or business (89/92 WCW). if business & booking are gangbusters, they'll complain about the lack of great matches (attitude era). i mean, modern WWE would sound like a fucking dream promotion if you went back in time and described it to the 90s crowd... hardcore fans of anything believe that you can always improve, and tend to think the ways to do so are obvious. they also generally want their hobby to be cool, which partially explains the fixation on the business side of things. i do think wrestling fandom is more business-obsessed than virtually any other i know of, though.

see, i think the comeback is about the most overdone corny shit in wrestling. knowing how much rarer they are in real sports makes it real hard for me to get into a form of entertainment where they're part of the standard formula. you know how people say that sometimes it feels like memphis heels cheat just because they're memphis heels and they have to? that's how i feel about most wrestling comebacks. i loved watching the seattle seahawks steamroll last year's super bowl, and i can appreciate backlund. i'm an anti-formula guy, which probably explains why i'm not as into actually watching wrestling as yall are...

there's a big thread for this on this very forum!

you might as well have just said "i hate the internet"

lemme take a guess...the gran cochisse one?

re: WM10, i think there's a bit more to it than just the two famous matches. really nice feel-good moment with bret getting his revenge on yokozuna from the previous year, and i also think savage-crush is quite the fun little midcard brawl. that show would probably make my top 10, fwiw

AKA the classic non-pology. see it all the time from people getting called out on racism or transphobia or what have you

omg this i don't really listen to podcasts so this would definitely be appreciated

it was sheer unabashed silliness on a show full of boring serious gymbros. context was relevant here, like how goldberg not talking made him seem that much cooler given the rest of '98 WCW. and most of the fans i'm referring to wouldn't have remembered ernest miller. also, i notice that the majority of people here criticizing my viewpoint tend to be outside the US. not sure if things are different in france or the UK...but in american pop culture right now there is a pretty strong backlash against taking anything seriously. fun and "ironic" enjoyment rule the day with a lot of younger folks here, and that is absolutely something wrestling could play to if they understood this or cared.

political casualty of the HHH-kevin dunn feuding. same with bo, emma, the ascension (even if they would've gotten buried on their own merits), et al. i'm also with goodear here. the fact that WWE won't find a use for adam rose or the vaudevillains is an indictment of them, not of those gimmicks. i will repeat what i have said on here multiple times: WWE needs to be *more* lighthearted than it currently is if it wants to generate more buzz. i know plenty of "millenials" or "hipsters" or whatever equally meaningless term you want to use, and you know which gimmick got some of them interested in wrestling again? The Funkasaurus. of course, they eventually got bored once they realized he was just doing the same shit every week, and the rest of the show didn't appeal to them. tl;dr - a lot of the NXT gimmicks should be helping a forward-thinking promotion to draw in new fans from this generation, but that's not going to happen in WWE proper because of the awful creative and general presentation. oh and cena doesn't help, either - he is the antithesis of cool to 20/30-somethings.

pol talked about this with me before - how most wrestling is honestly bad at telling long-term stories entirely in the ring, and how 90s AJPW stands out because of that. i would say it's very similar to video games in terms of struggling to use the unique strengths of the medium...i guess the AJPW equivalent there would be out of this world/another world. EDIT: parv, i would say your point #2 became a negative toward the end of the decade. AJPW had a hard time recruiting fresh native talent once people realized that you'd have to wait like 5+ years to get a real push. baba was only willing to strap the rocket to gaijin, so your only major new guys coming in were the likes of gary albright and vader.

bingo. i resemble all of those remarks (aside from the podcasts anyway)! forums are a dying breed, really. even one as huge as something awful is barely relevant to wider internet culture anymore. pretty much the only ones that are still a big deal are reddit and the various *chan boards, and those tend to be for negative reasons as much as positive ones...

a major reason people care so much is wasted potential, i think. it's reaching WCW levels in that regard now, which you probably don't fully appreciate since you're not a regular viewer. for instance, i go back to your previous vince discussion where you were basically assuming cesaro was like zack ryder (i.e. flavor of the month). if you were watching every week, you would realize that he's a tremendous performer who has plenty of cool shit to organically get the crowd into the match. in terms of long-term potential value to the promotion, i'd put him somewhere in between eddy & benoit (to use fellow "superworker" examples). squandering that kind of asset is very much a WCW thing to do, and it frustrates the hell out us. dean ambrose is an even worse case given his unique charisma/presence, and of course i don't need to go over bryan. you also have to remember that just a few years ago, people like jack swagger were winning world titles, and the smart fans were trying to talk themselves into the miz & damien sandow as main-event stars of the future. the roster now is *astoundingly* more talented than it was in those days, and that is absolutely a factor in what you're complaining about. guys like punk/bryan/the shield brought back the "lapsed smart fan" crowd, and that audience is becoming more vocal now that so much of that talent is being misused or not used at all. anyway, i also wanted to say that i am one of those people who reads all of your 70s wrestling posts. i have nothing to say about that era myself, but definitely enjoy and appreciate the work you put in there!