Hobbes

I think one of the biggest criticisms of spotfests are that they don't "hold up" over time. A lot of matches built around cutting edge spots and not much else age poorly once said spots become old hat. I used to make that complaint myself all the time, but as I've grown older I realize that it doesn't matter to me if a match is timeless or not. Most wrestling, like most entertainment, is not made with the future in mind, it's made with entertaining people in the present in mind, and spotfests can be really good at that. Also, it's good to note that even if a lot of spotfests are devoid of psychology, selling and storytelling, there is still skill and craft involved in building the best ones. I've seen great spotfests, ones where the pace is fast, but they give enough time between the big moves for the crowd to breathe and react, ones where they end at the perfect moment with the most impressive move of the match. Then I've also seen spotfests with no flow, full of people standing around for 20 seconds at a time waiting for someone else to set up their next overly complicated move, matches where they peak with their biggest spot ten minutes in and then proceed to burn the crowd out by going another twelve.

I feel while ROH may have been deeper and more great matches in the year or two that came after, it's 2004 that was really my favorite year. The first shows post RF all the way through to Final Battle just had the feeling of a company on the rise, going hand in hand with the feeling that Joe was becoming king of the indies. Styles and Daniels being forced out helped freshen things up and the shows were still infrequent enough that pretty much every one felt like an event.

He's a guy that sometimes does things mechanically that a first year wrestling student would do better, but I think that blinds some people to how many of the little things he does right, and to me personally, the intangibles will almost always trump how smooth a guy is in the ring. To some his selling and facial expressions may be over the top, but when you consider that a large portion of his fanbase are children, I would say they're usually pretty appropriate. You could make a case that no "Ace" of WWF/WWE (Bruno/Hogan/Austin) has been involved in more good to great matches than Cena. It is true that Austin's career was shortened by injuries and Bruno and Hogan's primes happened in eras where top guys weren't getting the opportunity to wrestle two non-squash TV matches a week and a PPV every month, but I would say that kind of generational difference could work in Cena's favor as well. I'd argue that Cena's schedule has been as demanding, if not more so, than any of those other guys, with the modern standards for how much you have to do physically in a match being so much higher, along with the fact that by all accounts Cena is an absolute workhorse away from the ring, with all the charity work, promotional activities and side projects he does. To me, it's admirable and amazing that this guy has continued to put in an honest effort week in and week out, when he probably reached the point years ago where he could've gotten by doing less. The first match he had with Brock, post Lesnar's return, stands out to me as a guy taking a level of abuse in the ring that a lot of guys of his stature wouldn't be willing to do. It's also worth noting that CM Punk and Daniel Bryan's best WWE matches might have been against Cena, even though some people like to say that the former two guys carried the latter.

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.