funkdoc

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!

Never understood the appeal of Big E.. To me he's Ice Train 2.0.. And I kinda enjoyed Ice Train, but it's not like he was setting the world on fire. And yeah, since he's in the New Day, he's gone straight to failure anyway. he's a victim of their robotic style/presentation. the guy is hilarious but you wouldn't know that just from watching WWE - he absolutely kills it on social media. they just can't or won't try to translate that to TV.

this is far from just a wrestling thing look at basically any labor dispute in sports - the general public sides with the owners over the players, almost without fail. at least in the US, there's a tendency not to view performers as having agency or being complex human beings.

I wonder what he specifically regrets about that, the fact Owen died? The fact he was the one who made the decision to book the stunt, in spite of some reservations people had about it? Or the fact that he chose to continue with the show in spite of the death of one his performers and everybody in the building bearing witness to it? i would say it's more so the fact that the WWF outright ignored safety concerns with that. i think they had a hollywood stunt company look at the harness - they said it wouldn't pass their own safety tests, and the WWF blew them off. at least, that's the story i heard way back when!

Main evented Battlebowl '93. Which didn't really draw money thatsthejoke.jpg

yeah, seconding the bushwhackers for matt d's top 10 there. as i've said before on here, they were *strongly* rumored to be getting a tag title run in the WON, i think in 1990.

ehrm, i was responding specifically to the skepticism that his injuries would affect their usage of him. he's still working a lot and working a higher-risk style than he should - that's all. high volume without too much meaning, essentially. and i used that analogy because murray is very much a replaceable part of that team, what with that offensive line of theirs.

it's also worth mentioning to loss that roller derby really isn't "forgotten" these days, with my generation & younger folks anyway. it had a revival over the past decade+ or so that started out as an "ironic nostalgia" thing, but developed into a real sport that's been one of the faster-growing ones out there. it's an instructive case on why i think the whole "wrestling has to be less goofy to be cool again" idea is wrong - modern roller derby still has a lot of the silliness from its worked days (e.g. fishnets, gimmick names), and that's helped it garner more cultural buzz than say the WNBA. that hasn't hurt its standing as a serious sport, either, it's just that the players are able to be themselves a little more than in the major pro leagues.

not really. get the most you can out of a guy while making sure he remains a replaceable part! you see this in the NFL a lot, most obviously with running backs. they tend to have short careers, so teams will just run them into the ground once they near 30 and/or are heading for free agency. see demarco murray with the cowboys this past season.

i take issue with a lot of your stuff on this topic but this is reasonable i would add choshu into the mix, however. he was new japan's lead booker during that early-mid 90s period when they were (IIRC) more profitable than the WWF. i also give him a ton of bonus points for being their top regular star yet not abusing the book - he only had short IWGP reigns as booker and he put over young and old stars alike. if anything his biggest fault may have been booking too many upsets!

i put "hipsters" in this category as well. that word seems to have become the bitter-nerd version of "millenials" anymore.

yeah surprised it took this long for her to come up. i think if you looked at who is given the most universally negative treatment in shoot interviews, she'd be up there with buzz sawyer. those two would probably finish ahead of russo & warrior from what i know.

eh, even on reddit you're starting to see more people calling bullshit on that narrative. HHH was apparently a fan of demott's as well, and that seems to have opened some eyes. i think the recent treatment of bryan has increased people's skepticism, too. also surprised this thread never mentioned the strength & conditioning coach being accused of sexual harassment as well. at the very least, he got caught posting pics of WWE women's asses on facebook. actually, i think that may have been in the linked washington post article...

i think parv mentioned elsewhere that he's looking to watch 5-10 matches for specific workers who intrigue him, and wants the best possible 5-10 matches for the purposes of this project

funny, sek, i made a lot of those same points when bringing up demott as one of my least favorite wrestling people in that other thread. it's interesting to see how even in the NFL, the whole "screaming megalomaniac" coaching style is losing ground. tony dungy seemed to play a big part in getting that going, and now we see pete carroll using what he learned in california (positive thinking, meditation, etc.) with great success. i used greg schiano & josh mcdaniels as the analogy for demott...schiano is obviously the better fit in terms of blatant asshole behavior, but mcdaniels ran off better players and drafted a worse QB.

in fairness, billy gunn seems to be one of the most respected trainers and he's not a heck of a lot more accomplished. worse in the ring, too. much more important than demott's wrestling career are his abuse of trainees and apparent failure to develop raw talent.

tbh brock's promos last year were some of the best in WWE. just simple sitdown-interview type stuff you would expect in UFC - he nails that and i wish we'd see more of it. oh i just remembered who 13-year-old me would have picked for this: konnan in WCW. i bought into the internet myth that he was really a white guy from new jersey, so that made the whole Arriba La Raza thing extra obnoxious to me. in retrospect, it's quite impressive that a promotion like WCW was willing to push that sort of character as a babyface...though he was still complete dogshit and waaaaayyyyy overpushed. as for somebody else not mentioned, joey styles would be up there for me now as well. leeching off counterculture cred to gain an undeserved rep as a great commentator, then revealing himself to be a far right shill. he hits a lot of the notes for me that cabana does for dylan, apparently. EDIT: pantherwagner, it's interesting that those are the people you think of considering how often i see that charge levied at the likes of vince & hogan. nostalgia for early-mid 90s wrestling tends to be overlooked - usually you see fans of the territory days or hulkamania or the attitude era doing the complaining there.

yea, add me as another one who didn't get the point of posting her pictures. is that supposed to make us go "haha look at that HIPSTER with her GLASSES trying to talk wrestling" or what? anyway, bill demott is pretty high up there for me, even before the recent stuff. the megalomaniac coach who's never accomplished much and sucks at his job is one of my least favorite phenomena in sports, and demott certainly strikes me as wrestling's equivalent to greg schiano or josh mcdaniels. furthermore, that whole style of coaching is gradually dying out even in a league as macho as the NFL, so i'm not exactly optimistic for the future if HHH is still in love with it. put it to you this way: the most successful NFL team over the past two years has not only a psychologist but a goddamn meditation guru on the team payroll, and their coach strongly encourages his players to go to them with any mental/emotional issues. he also believes that the "building up" part of coaching is much more important than the "breaking down" part which has been traditionally emphasized. i'm not saying this is why his team wins, mind you - i'm saying it's obviously not turning them into soft millenials who can't win!

steamboat is one of the trainers in developmental, and people generally rave about him there. see also: billy gunn, terry taylor, norman smiley, et al. demott keeps his job because he knows how to kiss ass and he embodies vince & HHH's fantasies of the drill sargeant toughening up THOSE DAMN MILLENIALS EDIT: a really good point brought up in the reddit thread is how many career-ending injuries have happened in NXT. corey graves, richie steamboat, brett dibiase...that's some of the most damning evidence of a broken system in my view, considering this is supposed to be a developmental promotion.

the problem is, even if you transition cena into the "early 80s bruno" role, that's still not a role where you can afford to job much. you need to come off like you can still kick anyone's ass, or else you risk veering more into chief jay strongbow territory. it's hard to imagine WWE not getting cold feet at the thought of cena losing that many big matches in a row, since that would force them to think of something different to do with him. really this company needs to get away from some of those vince sr. concepts that have stuck around forever, but who knows if that happens

that seems to be an accidental holdover from the previous week, referring to jericho's father

EDIT: alright

yeah i would say it's pretty damn important. one thing that really stands out if you watch a bunch of wrestling from '95 or early '96 is how much more with the times ECW is than anyone else, and a lot of that comes from their choices in music for entrances and video packages.

apparently in 89-90 they were heavily rumored to be getting a tag title run because of how over they were with the kids. it came up a good bit in the WON while they were feuding with the rougeaus. i guess they eventually decided they didn't need the belts to stay over, so they became the tag-team equivalent to jim duggan.