The Man in Blak

Sincere, non-snarky question - would you say this has been a worse in-ring show than most of the other WWE PPVs this year? I feel like most of what I've seen from WWE in 2015 (and, really, 2014 too) can be described in this way.

Oh, hey, here are the reasons for my schadenfreude that I figured I shouldn't mention in the other thread.

It's not moot; if she was going to appear at the event at all, even as a token celebrity appearance, then whatever value she would be adding to the event is less than what it was before the fight with Holm. That doesn't really seem like a controversial observation unless, of course, you think that her reputation isn't impacted at all by the loss here.

Wow, you weren't kidding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdZmtXMBWn4

Which is great for Rousey and her potential shot at redemption, but not so great for WWE's ability to leverage her as an untouchable bad-ass megastar at Wrestlemania, since UFC 200 is in July. The point here isn't so much that her career is over -- and I don't recall that ever being said here in the first place -- as much as it's a significant blow to whatever plans WWE had for her at their biggest event of the year.

They could pair her with Bo Dallas, then? From your lips to Vince McMahon's ears. EDIT: Maybe I should concede, if it's not already apparent, that I was happy to see Rousey lose, for reasons that are fairly safely outside of being Pro Wrestling Only and leave it at that.

It's not just that she lost; what's really damaging is the way that she lost. Rousey refused the glove pound, like she was above the fight, and then Holm ended up popping her in the face a half-dozen times before taking her head off of her shoulders with that final kick. Brutal. Almost Tyson/Douglas-esque.

I don't know that I'd go as far as Bill, but I would say that the uniqueness of Grantland's content has (unsurprisingly) been overblown in memoriam. Yes, Zach Lowe, Brian Phillips, and Rembert Browne were exemplary writers in their respective fields, but virtually everything else was mostly on-par with anything else you could find on the internet. Bill Barnwell was decent, but he wasn't writing anything that you couldn't find at Football Outsiders (where he was poached from). Jonah Keri was decent, but he wasn't writing anything that you couldn't find at Fangraphs or Baseball Prospectus. Molly Lambert was decent, but she wasn't writing anything that you couldn't find on a dozen other pop culture criticism sites. Steven Hyden was...well, he was mostly writing the exact same stuff at Grantland that he penned at Rolling Stone and Slate. And so on and so forth. Oddly enough, Grantland's most distinctive content might have been their games writing at one point -- Tom Bissell and Tevis Thompson both wrote some provocative stuff there before the former left media to work in the games industry and the latter left the site over the Dr. V debacle (which has also mysteriously vanished from all of these glowing post-mortems of the site). However you may feel about the writing that was there, I think Grantland and Simmons both exemplify the shift in modern media consumption. People don't follow mastheads anymore - if they follow anything at all, they follow people and Simmons, as mediocre as he may be as a writer, has built up enough cultural cachet to fuel an audience that is willing to follow him wherever he goes. ESPN tried to capitalize on that audience with Grantland (and, to a lesser extent, Page 2 before that), but they did it in a distinctly "old media" way and ended up with an empty husk of a site that stopped moving the needle the moment that Simmons was gone. EDIT: Also, I hope it goes without saying that I feel like their wrestling content could be charitably described as "the drizzling shits."

Hall/Goldberg feels like an unfair example to me. The whole layout of that match is a disaster and the little bit of legwork is probably the only part that's actually coherent from a storytelling standpoint. (Naturally, Hall abandons it pretty quickly to transition into stock ladder spots to try and pop the crowd.) SS '95 should be a shining example of how it can work but, as Bill mentioned, Shawn basically blows it off for most of the second half of the match.

The big Charlotte/Natalya NXT match from 2014 completely fudged the figure four sequence near the finish as well, with Charlotte and Natalya rolling through it multiple times as "reversals," so maybe a trip back to the vault to study Tito and the Hammer would be wise (since the last thing Charlotte needs to see is any more of Ric's work). I can buy it based on Nikki having banged up her knee during the match. I know when I've had a banged up knee the last thing i want to do is have it supporting my weight (let alone someone else's) by lying on it and having the ground press up against it. In the moment? Sure, fair point. In the match as a whole, especially when she rolls out of the ring immediately after that sequence, lands on the floor with a bounce on that knee, picks up Charlotte and slings her against the apron? I don't know. She does tap out shortly after that, I guess, but I can see where that moment takes away from the finish.

The big Charlotte/Natalya NXT match from 2014 completely fudged the figure four sequence near the finish as well, with Charlotte and Natalya rolling through it multiple times as "reversals," so maybe a trip back to the vault to study Tito and the Hammer would be wise (since the last thing Charlotte needs to see is any more of Ric's work).

I am so glad that you captured "she has a lot of bendular" on the podcast because that may be the first recorded use of 'bendular' in the history of language. Also, show was great. EDIT: Okay, the side discussion that followed this probably went off the rails a bit, but the remaining match discussion was good.

It doesn't get much more contrived than Ambrose escaping a pumphandle slam, then walking back to fall into the ropes so he can do his rebound clothesline spot. Other than the big dive at the end by Reigns, the finishing stretch to that main event tag was dreadful.

How many shows do you want to do on Triple H's run in 2002? I feel like all of Kevin Nash's world title runs could be good candidates here. His 1995 WWF run is especially cringe-worthy, but his WCW hot-potato reigns aren't too far off from that, even if they weren't nearly as long.

This is incredibly tough. I'm inclined to side with El Dandy because I love what I've seen of his vintage footage, but Jim Breaks is amazing. Also, if anyone cares: the poll allows you to cast a vote with both guys being selected. It's obviously not a big issue or anything, but maybe something to keep in mind when creating the next poll.

Sean Waltman mentioned on the latest Austin podcast that he felt Flair was the greatest champion of all time, but he also felt that being the greatest champion was still a different category from being the greatest performer; I feel like that concept really plays into the discussion of Flair's idiosyncrasies in the first episode (and discussions about Flair's career as a whole). I don't know that I buy Sleaze's "perpetual motion" argument as a satisfying explanation to some of these familiar spots, especially when you expand the parameters of the discussion to analyze his work within a larger context of his entire career. (How many times did those tactics still lead to Flair losing the match? Why did he continue to incorporate these spots later on in his career when he didn't have the same cardiovascular advantage over his opponents?) That said, I think the discussion helped illuminate both why Flair was an incredibly effective champion (particularly in the territory days where those idiosyncrasies might not be so easily over-exposed) and why his capabilities as champion didn't necessarily guarantee a great match, even if it raised the baseline of most of his defenses to being "merely" good.

I don't think there's anything wrong with having a podcast episode or mini-series dedicated to a single wrestler; I'd like to see more of it, actually, and it's not like people aren't fawning over the Carlos Colon episode of Exile just a couple of threads over. (And deservedly so, because it's excellent!) That said, I haven't been around on the board for very long and even I knew exactly who was going to be hosting this, just by the title of the thread/show. I don't know that there's a lot of rhetorical space left for Flair arguments and counter-arguments at this point, but I'll listen anyway.

Thanks for the recommendations, jdw and El-P. I do like the '88 Takada match, so I'll be checking out 11/91. I'm not optimistic about the Michaels matches -- Backlund selling ("selling?") for 1993 Shawn Michaels doesn't seem like an appealing situation-- but I'll give them a shot.

What are considered to be Backlund's best matches from the 90's that don't involve Bret Hart in one way or another?

Yeah, count me in as someone who is interested in hearing more Exile episodes on Puerto Rico. This was fantastic.

I think I'm going to need a full night's sleep to even begin to process the finish for the last match. That has to go down as an worst-of-all-time candidate for PPV finishes, doesn't it? If Hulk wasn't banned, he could be cutting a promo in the locker room in hysterics right now, asking Mean Gene how much money it cost for the plastic surgery.

There's too much to cover, though I'm looking forward to Loss's post. You could dedicate an episode on the Monday Night War series and The Kliq Rules special/DVD that just came out and struggle to cover everything in under four hours. Everything that this company has done since the purchase of WCW has been to re-frame the history of professional wrestling in its own image, from the marketing and booking of its Superstars ™ to the way that it playfully toys with the Universe ™. Is it really an accident that so much of their product, from John Cena to Daniel Bryan, is consumed (driven?) by fan resistance and revolt to their messaging?

The Kliq hagiography is...well, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise if you watched the Monday Night War series. But it is something else.

Maybe this is worth spinning off into a separate topic, but as a follow-up question: who do you feel is good at selling in the current-day WWE? In general, I find that Ambrose (and others) succeed to varying degrees at selling the impact of a move in the moment, either through facial expressions or mannerisms or whatever, but almost nobody is capable or willing to sell any long-term damage. Whether that's a byproduct of the house style or just part of the general flavor of modern wrestling, I don't know. But it's something that I have noticed after coming back to wrestling from a long absence. I do think Ambrose is better than most at selling within that structure, but I would also agree with some of the other comments in this thread that the rest of his work, in and out of the ring, has fallen into schtick. There was a moment last summer where he looked like he could grow into a disruptive, almost Austin-esque type of character, but WWE has played him into a tired prankster-esque role that hasn't really given him a lot to work with.