Hobbes

I've always found wrestler's distaste for heavily scripted matches to be silly. Wrestling has always been a business where weaknesses are covered up. Don't have a great look? Here's a mask. Can't cut a promo? Here's a manager who can. Yet those kind of fixes never receive the derision that scripting a match does. There are wrestlers out there who have a lot of good tools, are mechanically sound, but can't think on their feet to call a good match as it happens. To me, pre-planning their matches is just another smart way to patch up a hole in someone's talent. DDP is often derided for being a guy who loved to plot everything out, yet his match with Bill Goldberg at Halloween Havoc is considered by a lot of people to be one of the best Goldberg ever had. Hulk Hogan vs. Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VI surprised a lot of people in it's day for it's quality, and if I remember correctly, that whole match was rehearsed before the show. I like stand up comedy. I've seen great comedians who could just work the crowd for an hour, all off the top of their head, and I've also seen great comedians who have clearly crafted every single joke they're saying down to the word over a period of months or years. I might be a little in awe of the people who can just improvise, but at the end of the day I don't look down on the comedians who have made me laugh just us much with much more deliberate work. It's the end result that indicates quality, not the difficulty of the process that made it. Regal and Austin enjoying Savage/Steamboat until they found out it was scripted out move for move is like someone eating a piece of cake, finding it delicious, only to change their mind when they find out it was made from a pre-packaged mix instead of from scratch. Maybe instead of that making you think less of the final product that you enjoyed, it should make you more open to the way it was made.

That in terms of severity, the last bump was only a 7 out of 10. The point being that the spot that killed Misawa wasn't so much some extra brutal fuck up, but just the final straw for a body that had taken so much abuse over the years.

Meltzer has mentioned how Tanahashi has been very banged up for quite awhile now, and that working the G-1 made it worse. I think he said or wrote something recently to the effect of "Working with these neck injuries is likely going to make Tanahashi very limited in a few years". I'm not sure if I'm remembering this correctly but I think he might have even went to the hospital between matches at one point during the tournament.

Bret had creative control in his contract, it's just that simple. No matter what else you think about the situation, Bret was within his contractual rights to do what he did. Did it potentially make things more complicated for Vince? Sure, but it's his fault for giving Bret that control in his contract. It's been funny to watch Meltzer every two to three months have to respond to someone who says Vince had no choice but to screw Bret. I think a lot of people still believe that there was a very real danger of Bret showing up on Nitro with the WWF Championship, or that Bret refused to lose the title at all, period. Both those points have been debunked countless times, which makes Vince's case for doing it even flimsier.