BillThompson

Watching NXT from last week and the main event of Sami Zayn vs. Tyler Breeze vs. Tyson Kidd got me thinking about the concept of the Triple Threat match. It's become possibly the most popular gimmick match in pro wrestling, or at least in North America it seems to be most widely used gimmick match. It's a match that can, and often does, offer up neat and interesting spots, but all the same I find it to be a very problematic match. I'm not a fan of the gimmick, and while I know it's not going anywhere, I really wish it would go away, or at the least be used way less than it is. I find that the Triple Threat match doesn't connect with me on a basic structural level. In general a lot of the elements I favor, such as limb work, are eschewed in a Triple Threat match. There's no point in working over someone's arm when the goal of the match is a flash victory, or a victory earned through hard fought attrition. When a Triple Threat match tries for a submission nearfall or finish, it rings hollow to me because 99% of the time there's been nothing done in the match to indicate working towards the submission. There's the issue of one competitor having to lay around for a while. This is probably what gets me the most about Triple Threat matches. The idea of guys hitting big moves on one another and then having one person lay around so that two of the wrestlers can go at it only to have one of those guys get taken out by a big move and then that person lays around while the person previously laying around jumps into the fray is tiresome to me. It really takes me out of the match as it's not something I can buy into or believe. The previously mentioned cool spots are indeed cool, but too often they evoke cool at the sake of believability. In the Breeze/Zayn/Kidd match there was a spot where Zayn locked up Breeze for an Exploder Suplex while at the same time Kidd locked up Zayn for a German Suplex. Of course the spot ends up being that Zayn and Kidd go for their moves at the same time and the end result is all three guys being out of it for a while. It's a cool spot in principle, but when it played out I found I didn't find myself invested in the spot. It's too fake to state my point more bluntly, as I'm not willing to accept that Zayn would hold onto the Exploder Suplex when he knows that Kidd has hold of him. There's also the timing aspect of Zayn and Kidd having to lift at the same exact time which comes across as far too choreographed. The visual popped the crowd huge, so I'm clearly in the minority on this. There are examples of Triple Threat matches that do work. I remember being quite fond of the initial Hardys/Dudleys/E&C Triple Threat matches as those were geared to be big bomb spotfests worked at a rather breakneck speed. I also remember quite liking some of the initial RoH Triple Threat matches, but I haven't seen those matches in years. In the end though, I think the Triple Threat does more harm to a feud/angle than it does good and it's not a match that I look forward to seeing 99% of the time.

At this point in my life I much prefer soccer to football, which continues to operate as pretty much a reprehensible sport at every level full of terrible people. I still watch sometimes, but my fandom for football has waned incredibly. On the concussion front though, Nowinski's group has actually been looking into soccer as it is nowhere near as safe of an alternative as its proponents suggest. And yes, there have been studies popping up that do highlight heading of the ball as attributing to concussions or concussion like syndromes.

Am I supposed to feel bad for someone making 30 grand a year now? I know it's not being rich , but it's not exactly being poor. You factor in bills, debt, family and such, and 30 a year is being poor, the fact that most government officials don't recognize this continues to be a major problem for the economy.

Little late to the party, but what arena is Atlantis/El Satanico taking place in? I want to say Arena Mexico but I'm not good at recognizing arenas. Also, for someone like Ohtani, this takes place after the famous Talisman match right, so probably sometime around October?

I've seen a lot of people expressing this sentiment, but I think more time off will only be a bad thing for him. Circumstances do suck, but all the time off he's had to take recently has really hurt his momentum, and more time off will only hurt him even more. I think he can come back and still be one of their top guys, but his chance at being thee top guy has come and gone already.

My money is on this, it's one of the main reasons I've given up on reading reviews from other websites. I was just looking for some reviews for Halloween Havoc 1996 to gauge where my reaction to that event sat next to others, and pretty much all the online writing I could find was of the snarky smart mark variety. Ten years ago I probably would have dug such snark, but now that I'm older and more mature I don't have much time for paragraphs about why a guy sucks because of who he's sleeping with, guesses about the politics of backstage, stupid nicknames for the wrestlers one doesn't like, wishing for wrestlers one doesn't like to die, and the propensity to talk about anything but the action taking place in the ring.

I can only speak to the Rumble match with Foley, but I thought that held up tremendously when I watched it a couple of months back.

The match between Alicia Fox and Alexa Bliss, and a conversation about it on the LAW podcast What's NXT? got me thinking about sloppiness in matches. For those who don't know, Bliss attempted a Standing Moonsault, but she came up short and ended up dropping her knee right into Fox's midsection. It's sloppy on Bliss' part, no doubt, but it's the sort of sloppiness that I think is perfectly fine. A big part of the mystique of wrestling is that it's two people going at it in a rough sport, and a botch that still connects in a meaningful way reinforces that rough mystique. Blown spots that look horrendous, like the ref bump in TNA a week or so ago, aren't what I'm talking about. Blown spots that still connect in some way, that still look like they hurt are perfectly acceptable and add to the entire package of a wrestling match. If nothing else, it helps to strip away some of the heavily manufactured feel that can creep into a match from time to time when every move is hit just a little too perfectly. Either way, thoughts on this topic? Are there occasional blown spots and bits of sloppiness that are acceptable, or do you need every move to be hit crisp and clean?

I'd be down for that. I'm pretty much down for them buying all the libraries they can and making the Network into as much of a one stop shop for pro wrestling as it can be. Variety will be the key to the Network's success after all.

I know I take flack for it, but I can't wait for them to buy the TNA library, and the RoH library. I believe both will happen someday, probably sooner rather than later.

This is something I've been trying to get down in my limited interactions with Dave online. He's like a bull in a china shop sometimes when it comes to his opinions, but he's a lot more receptive when you give him his space and don't attempt to butt heads with him I've found.

Most times I find it uncomfortable because Bryan can't keep up with Dave in any way. Even when Dave is making an argument I don't agree with he manages to usually destroy Bryan simply due to Bryan not knowing what he's talking about.

I download straight from iTunes to my iPod and I've had issues with every episode randomly stopping at various points. I look at my iPod and I'm back at the main menu and when I click on the podcast it doesn't go back to where it was, but starts over from the beginning.

I don't know if I agree with all that. Outside of maybe Bray, I feel like everyone coming up from NXT is cutting the same promos. It's not really their fault as WWE clearly wants the promos to be homogenized and fell like they are coming from the company as opposed to the company. As for the work in the ring, I think Kalisto is an outlier, and maybe Cesaro as well. They are so inherently unique that their strengths have to be played too. Meanwhile I feel like a lot of the other guys are working the crowds in the same ways, hitting a lot of the same spots, and producing matches that rely on the same basic structure. It's not a problem right now, but in the future I can definitely see it being a big problem.

I make it a point to regularly watch NXT and Main Event, because both shows are streamlined and still put out quality matches most weeks. I spend most of my time watching older stuff though, it's easier. I'll eventually catch the newer stuff, but it's too time consuming to keep up with the present as it happens, so I save that for much later,

This, I used to love in a Chicago suburb, and my family still visits semi-regularly for the zoo, museums, and Cubs games. I've seen plenty of celeb sports players, TV stars, movie stars, and there almost universally left alone. They'll get the occasional request for an autograph, but I've never seen one be bombarded like Punk is apparently dealing with.

It's kind of where I'm at. I find Alvarez almost insufferable at this point. I'm not one for hyperbolic name calling, but he really is an idiot plain and simple who seems to have absolutely no idea about how wrestling works, why people watch, or the basic history of the sport. Personally I think it blemishes the good name of Meltzer to even be associated with him.

Not to jump on the bandwagon, but this Bryan/Brie/Kane/Stephanie angle is absolutely horrid. I don't really blame any of the workers because they are doing the best they can with absolute garbage to work with. What they're doing in this angle is the sort of ridiculously stupid nonsense that makes me shake my head as a wrestling fan.

This can also be spun off into commentating, and when they decide to ignore the crowd. I'm of two minds on that issue as well, because technically the commentary team is there to talk about the product, not the fans. However, it's a given that the commentators will bring the crowd up all the time. Should the commentators ignore when the crowd isn't reacting to a match like they had hoped? Or, should they comment on the crowd's displeasure and work off of that? I think the commentators should acknowledge the crowd, because nothing is more disingenuous to me than when a commentator tries to talk about the crowd loving a match when they are either sitting on their hands or actively shitting on the match. I do recognize though that the commentators are in a tough spot, because they can't really play up the product as crappy, even if it is, because that's just not good business. Back to the wrestlers, I'm not sure how to look at who they are working for, the live crowd or the TV audience. I'm leaning towards them needing to work towards the live audience, because just about everything in the match feeds off of that live audience. If they get a live audience into the match chances are they can get the TV audience as well. Or, if they can't get that TV audience, then at least they have the live audience rocking and in their favor.

As much as I generally dislike Ross, I thought he was pretty good in his appearance on the most recent LAW. His point about needing variety in the Performance Center is spot on. That is something that worries me going forward, if the WWE turns too much into a "everyone here wrestles the same exact style" sort of fed. The Performance Center is a great thing, don't get me wrong, but I wish they would maybe play into the strengths of the wrestlers more and try to produce different types of workers instead of ones that are simply conforming to the WWE style wholesale.

Benoit/Malenko from Hog Wild '96 is up next in my "watch every PPV on the Network" project I have going on. I remember liking the match a ton when it first happened. This time though, I'm wondering how I will react to it. The reason for this is that while the guys worked a match that a lot of workrate people liked, they pretty much ignored the reactions of the crowd. That approach never used to bother me, but now it has started to become a problem for me. My most recent example is Steamboat/Flair from Spring Stampede '94. I thought it's still a bottom level great match, but the first half of the match is hurt because both guys have decided they are working their specific match and the crowd will have to deal with that. Had both men worked to what the crowd wanted maybe the match could have been an all-time great. On the other end of the spectrum is Benoit/Angle from Royal Rumble '03. The crowd was dead coming into the match and they remained dead for the first half of the match. Both guys worked the match they wanted to and didn't appear to change anything they were doing based on the lack of crowd reaction. Eventually they brought the crowd into the match, and by the end the crowd was losing their shit and even gave Benoit a standing ovation after the match. I know a lot of people at PWO don't like Angle's style, but I love it and felt this match was great through and through. My question is, how much responsibility does a worker have to adapt to what the crowd wants? There are obvious cases where the workers do change things up to try and get the crowd going, and sometimes it works while other times the match still bombs. For me I think this is an issue that needs to be taken on a match by match basis. Benoit/Malenko is an example of two guys who needed to switch things up, and when they didn't match suffered terribly as a result. Benoit/Angle is an example of two guys working their match and dragging the fans into the match, and the end result produced a wonderful match. Sometimes the workers should change things up, other times they need to go with what they want to do. That may result in some dead matches, and I will most likely be critical of workers who produce a tone deaf match because of their refusal to change. At the same time I see how my last sentence is hypocritical, and that's why I think this is an interesting issue without an easy answer.

I can't ever engage in these discussions because, to be frank, drawing power doesn't matter one iota. I get that a lot of people do care about it, but I've never truly understood the urge to focus so heavily on the business side as opposed to the performance side of pro wrestling.

I have a hard time listening to Shawn Michaels because he's pretty much lying or full of shit 100% of the time, and a really boring storyteller to boot.

If memory serves me correctly, OMEGA in the late 90s says differently.

The fact that Bryan is using a rental car, and a rather normal one, only accentuates his character. He is an everyman, and in these hard economic times seeing the champion showing restraint should only further his connection with the majority of fans.