funkdoc

funny one to me from around that same time is WWF jim duggan. i swear that guy never got pinned clean, at least on TV. though you do have some non-clean ones like the WM4 dibiase match and the savage one, and i don't know about house show results. bad news brown was also way more protected than you would expect, though i would imagine he had plenty of house show jobs to hogan & savage.

more like what's the deal with terry gordy being in all japan am i right more seriously, it may have been that jumbo couldn't have the belt for the big misawa match (though allegedly baba called an audible that night re: the booking?) and then yea what you said. though i think it may not have been "giving away" jumbo/hansen so much as not rehashing an old matchup.

i think what was worse than vader losing that match was how he kept falling on the totem pole from there. you're telling me a properly booked vader would have made the WM13 main event any more of a shitshow than sid did??? well, i guess this depends on the kuwait thing... also, speaking of the booking on this show, mero totally should have won with the shooting star press. first time almost anyone in that crowd had seen it, i'm sure! dunno why but that one still bugs me, haha

part of me wonders whether andre deserves more credit for doing what he did with acromegaly, while paul wight had surgery to fix that before he ever got into wrestling. but then, you could argue that it was a choice andre made and etc. etc. 70s andre *is* even more amazing to watch when you realize that his condition actually makes you much weaker than normal for your size, i will say... EDIT: shining wiz, i would bring up billy gunn as the 90s-early 00s equivalent to brutus beefcake. don't think there's anyone quite like that today, granted, though maybe you could argue for kane sorta?

i guess using arab epithets on indians really is this generation's "all orientals look the same"... to keep this about wrestling, the usos had a 3-way vs. rybaxel & sheamus/RVD. obviously they retained.

honestly, W2BTD's arguments here remind me quite a bit of the OSW Review guys when they said "Christian vs. Orton at Over the Limit[?] was 10 times the match [savage-Steamboat] was" and if you look at great wrestling as athletic and fast-paced with cool moves and lots of them, that opinion makes sense. i lean toward the notion that great wrestling is made by certain universal, timeless qualities...and that is also an opinion shared by much of this board. what stands out to me in particular is that emotion seems to be the main quality valued much more highly with this community than with Meltzer & his ilk, and that may be a relevant dividing line in this whole argument. not sure, just throwing ideas out there! EDIT: OJ's post right above has some interesting points that tie into this as well. i'm speaking strictly in terms of those of us who go back to watch old wrestling, reappraise workers, and so on. this whole argument takes a much different tone with this audience vs. the fanbases at the time, obviously...

i think intergender stuff could work in theory - i know some women who are stronger than various male athletes out there. women also tend to have greater muscular endurance than men (due to lack of testosterone i think), which is something that would fit very well with pro wrestling and could be played up by a good commentator. that said, a lot of intergender matches exist to appeal to fetishes and/or misogynistic fantasies more than anything else. it's been called out as one of the worst modern indie trends, and i am inclined to agree with that statement. this type of angle would require very careful writing & booking to work properly, and i wouldn't trust promotions whose fanbases are 90+% male...

yea this, though actually keith has softened on the rhodeses a lot in recent years! i think as more of flair's life got exposed, it became harder to maintain the narrative of him as a victim of that egomaniac dusty, so there's been some historical reappraisal there. plus, dustin being one of the best workers in WWE over the past couple years makes it far easier to see him as underrated in his early days. kinda like how a lot of internet fans changed their opinions on bret vs. shawn after shawn's comeback.

eduardo, i think there's value in keeping the issues "out there" so to speak. change tends to come awfully slowly on these matters. example: i did a little bit of work for an organization that specializes in LGBT stuff, and part of their work is going into public places and asking for donations to help keep a new law helping transgender people in place. they told me that even more than the money, they see mentioning the word "transgender" in public as the most important aspect - it's not something most people are exposed to in their daily lives, and this kind of work could make the whole idea seem less alien to people in the long run. anything like this is going to involve a lot of banging one's head against a wall over and over...

dang loss, if you mean what i figure you mean then yep. sucks because i always wanted to like him, as i tend to respect people who piss off those who are deepest in their community bubble. ah well...

i would imagine the kayfabe explanation would be the same one used for countouts & DQs: protection against biased/crooked officiating. perhaps that might also be a lingering effect of old "pure sport" ideals in pro wrestling. making someone bleed to the point of stopping the match wouldn't happen from Real Wrestling, you know!

not sure if there was a strong native american gimmick in that promotion prior to strongbow. if not, i could see all that "corny" stuff getting over since it may have felt fresh to that audience at that time. i particularly like the comment from loss (i think) on him working a territory that never had wahoo, and how that was probably a major reason he got over. also, we *did* have iron eyes cody around this same time period...i wonder if people just really wanted "Good Indians"

Rest Holds ... alright, i'll say something a bit more substantive as well. this kinda ties into something pol & i have talked about before: the majority of online "smart" fans are really just storyline marks at heart. look at the wrestling subforums on reddit or 420chan or somethingawful, and you'll see constant complaints about booking with hardly any discussion of in-ring work beyond "i like what i like". it's especially common to see people say that cena or sheamus matches are bad solely because they won, without any care for the bell-to-bell action. i think this is relevant because it seems like the thatcher/gulak/busick style would require more attention to detail to fully appreciate, compared to what you see in the national promotions. modern wrestling fans have largely been trained to think that "great match" simply means "cool highspots + throwing bombs + hot finishing sequence", so i wouldn't be surprised that any mat wrestling would bore a lot of them to tears!

yea i was just going to mention the usos as a neat example. it heartens me a lot more than it should to see samoans in wrestling presented as basically normal dudes, considering the headshrinkers were one of the first acts i grew up on. i think that was what was meant by the comment about gay wrestlers. you don't talk about it all the time, but show a guy having a short & serious conversation with his boyfriend before a title match or something like that. it would be a way of further humanizing wrestlers, which is usually a good thing!

man i loved ring of hell, no idea how it holds up though

reading older threads on here is real funny sometimes i mean, parv used to bang the drum for sting in the WON HOF and now he's solidly in the "luger was better in their primes" camp also interesting to note how much more respect, say, ivan koloff gets here now compared to a couple years ago

judging from that RSPW post, he didn't. he worked small california indies before & after his AWA run as "Armored Saint", but apparently he never learned from any of that! also there used to be some interesting youtube comments on his AWA matches, which have been lost ever since that account went private or got taken down or whatever. people mentioned his real name and talked about how he used to have a sense of humor about wrestling until after his time in the AWA, when he got deeper into steroids and became a lot nastier. one of these comments said that he died some time ago... actually i just found this little gem from 1994: the comments here mention his death as well, and apparently he was in a band which i never knew pretty strange what you can learn about some people and how you learn it!

yea this the other thing is that they had him stop doing the giant swing when he was with heyman, and he started using it again after he left him. i get not wanting him to use that as a heel but that's one of the main things that got him over in the first place, and he was always a heel anyway. i dunno

jim duggan vs. rocky mountain thunder from around this time is my personal holy grail of lost matches, or at least neck-and-neck with nailz vs. giant gonzalez in NJPW the duggan match was apparently so awful even WCW didn't air it! there's an old RSPW post about it...

yeah, i recall one of the regulars on here saying "indie wrestling is so mid-2000s" and that seems to be the standard meme these days

meltzer was wapanese decades before that term existed, nothing new there

the george steele stuff doesn't surprise me in the least. from what i had seen, he was definitely one of those guys who uses too many big words in awkward spots to try and sound smart, and so many of those types seem to fall on the tea party or libertarian side of things.

i think this was because he seriously injured the guy's neck in his debut match. wasn't that one of los boricuas? i am also surprised you didn't mention how much TV/PPV time DOA was getting that year. definitely my anti-MVPs of 1998 WWF!

yeah, anyone seen the "superman is a dick" website? hogan was pretty much on par with that haha i was much more of a classic mark the first time i watched wrestling, in 92-93. when i came back for the attitude era i definitely became much more of a heel fan, while my brother preferred to act the way a fan is "supposed" to. WCW jericho was a sore point of division with us, and i trolled the heck out of him by recording the raw when the millennium countdown ended and playing it for him when we got back home that night! i already knew it would be jericho because he basically gave that away on his own website, but my brother badly wanted to believe it was ANYTHING else...

as long as there are people on this board who unironically like davey richards, we will need "movez" or some sort of equivalent