Parties

I wanna say that I love, love, love Jimmy Hart in Memphis. Really I love all Jimmy Hart up until roughly Rhythm and Blues. Like them in the pink Cadillac at Mania 6 is pretty much the death of Hart for me. But I can't quite decide if being the second or third (depending on whether you like him more than Cornette) best manager of the 80s is enough to get you in. Feels like it should be (otherwise I'm saying that Heenan and Cornette are the only two managers who should ever get in, which seems too harsh), but I'm not sure. He was definitely a draw in Memphis. Not sure you can say the same in WWF. Definitely can't say so in WCW. Hard to see him as a lasting influence, as to the extent that managers exist after the mid-90s, it's a bunch of guys emulating Heenan, Cornette, and Robert Fuller much more than Hart. Someone like Truth Martini seems more of a Grand Wizard than any of those four. What can you point to in Hart's career that made money due to his involvement? For a few years there he was the lynchpin who kept Lawler vs. Monster-of-the-Week viable, but is that enough? One that I might point to is his involvement in some of the early WWF theme music. He really set the soundtrack of the company to a degree that is remarkable in hindsight.

FWIW, across all categories as of now I'd go with: Red Bastien (I admit to not knowing enough about him, but he seems to have been a viable draw and massively influential. All of his performances online are brilliant and clearly innovative.) Bryan Danielson (I'm opposed to him being on the ballot this early, but as the best indie worker of the last 20 years - maybe the best worker period? - and a guy who completely changed WWE for the better, all-time best ROH worker, and international journeyman, he's the blueprint of a first ballot pick, especially in his era. He's not an Angle situation where people will say he went on too early without proper time/analysis.) Kiyoshi Tamura (Not sure he has the drawing power outside of smaller promotions in which he definitely did, but he's extremely influential and in pure skill truly one of the 2-3 best candidates. More of a phenom than anyone on the ballot.) Akira Taue (Might not have had him on prior to the Exile on Badstreet conversation, which I didn't agree entirely with, but ultimately convinced me from a genuinely great talent, can't leave Ringo out of the Rock and Roll HOF perspective. Rewatching 12/6/96 doesn't hurt.) Brazo de Oro & Brazo de Plata & El Brazo (They have it in all three categories.) Cien Caras (Not someone I would have picked two years ago, but his case has been made online.) Villano III (Maybe my favorite guy on the ballot. Deserves to stay on and I worry he'd be knocked off due to Meltzer calling his Triplemania outing one of the worse ever when it shouldn't factor in at all.) Jim Breaks (Best worker on the ballot? Can't speak to how influential he was, but he really should be. Would say all subsequent British/Euro heels owe a lot to him. Nuclear heat, which I would hope led to drawing power.) Carlos Colon (Case has been made here and elsewhere. I don't think he's a tremendous worker in terms of in-ring ability, but he got so much out of what he could do that he easily deserves it. PR only, but the crowds speak for themselves and analogously in his country he's like if Vince McMahon happened to also be Hulk Hogan. Would compare him to Verne for same reasons.) Jerry Jarrett (Memphis is the most influential territory of all time. You don't have modern WWE, TNA, or much of indie wrestling without it.) Gene Okerlund (Wasn't someone I would have voted for a year ago, but watching the Network you can see what a massive secret weapon he was for AWA/WWE/WCW. The MVP on-air personality of 1980-1995 not named Lance Russell? Stanley Weston (I can't really speak to whether it was him or Apter who set the tone for the magazines, but if he was in charge, I'll give it to him. This one feels a little weird in that while what he did is singular within the business, I don't think I value the mags' contributions as much as I do guys like Akiyama, JYD, or the Andersons who I don't have listed here.)

Wow: timely redesign. Aesthetically it's both an improvement and containing some weird choices, but they have segmented reader contributions into their own section.

Surprises to me in that it wasn't the top face/heel of the moment. I still maintain that Del Rio was a novel choice given that he was a Smackdown guy who had only been in the company for five months in a year where you had Cena, Orton, Sheamus, Barrett and the like there at the end. Surprises in that they made someone new or in the case of Vince went for a very crash TV idea. But yes, it speaks volumes that they only go with an interesting choice once every five years or so, and even they aren't surprises to some. The end of the brand extension has made it even less compelling, as the winner has to be one of the guys who could believably main event a Mania, which is all of about five dudes on the roster right now.

I enjoy Funk and Lawler in roughly equal measure, and have Hansen just behind them, but I think Funk clearly stands above them in terms of career variety and versatility. No one has ever had the longterm influence and relevancy of Funk, while also being an incredible worker in-ring. He's my number one and I think we'd have to unearth tape of someone like Lawler or Hansen playing very different characters and working a wider range of styles before they could surpass him. (Which is to take nothing away from them, as they're currently my #2 and #3.)

The only guys who’ve felt like surprises in the last fifteen years or so were Vince in ’99 (which I think a lot of people actually predicted at the time), Benoit in ’04, and Del Rio in ’11. By that five year standard, they’re due for a fun one, and it’s really time to elevate someone. Moreso than even the last couple years, they now need someone new in the main event. It’s a weird situation in that it seems like they’re building to giving it to Reigns again. On one hand: he's less over than he was a year ago, winning it two years in a row at his age/status feels like overkill, and his push has been badly mismanaged. Yet they’re in a weird bind where he looks like a failure who they've given up on if he doesn’t win it again. If it's not him, then he needs a Rock/HHH/Brock-level opponent to put him over at WM32. If it’s someone new, Cesaro is the best choice. Ambrose could be fun, but unless he does some great heel turn or becomes the Stone Cold people want him to be, he feels like a mismatch main eventing Mania. Kind of in the same way that I can’t picture Jake or Bossman or post-85 Piper main eventing Mania. You don’t put your resident eccentric in that spot. I also think fans too closely associate Ambrose and Reigns. Doing some goofy “their feet touched simultaneously!” junk results in both of them getting half a push. Let one of them win it now and the other win it later. Just pick someone and go with them full tilt. Also worth noting that Del Rio had only been in the company for five months when he won it. The idea of Owens winning it sounds crazy to me right now, but maybe he gets really hot with the IC title and they just say, “Screw it”? If this was 1995 I’d bet the farm on Braun Strowman. It all depends on who the champ is going into Mania. Reigns is the safe bet, but I so want to believe that their October-January booking will have higher stakes than it has in recent years. I actually even like Rollins as champion: we’re now at a point where I really want to see the heel lose. The money is in a face systematically destroying the Authority to get to a title win, and as of now they’re not giving that level of push to anyone but Reigns.

Sheamus has had two botched cash-ins in the last month. Maybe a third that I'm not remembering? Having him look that dumb each time cheapens what's already a really cheap banana peel gimmick. Cesaro as the mystery partner would have been great, but every 45 year old Attitude Era worker in North America would need to be trapped in a mine shaft before Vince booked him in that spot. I haven't watched the show yet, so I can't judge it fairly, but looking at these matches the roster feels threadbare when it really isn't. Barrett, Kidd, Bryan, Rowan, Goldust, Christian, and the Usos are all inactive/injured/presumably retired. Dallas, Slater, Swagger, Fandango, Henry, Sandow, Lynch, Banks, and the PTPs: not booked. Strowman, the Ascension, the Dudleys, Charlotte, Jericho, and the Demon Kane: booked.

I would even extend that into different platform packages within the Network itself. "For 14.99 a month, we'll give you a feed of Territories TV that we're hiding behind a Firewall." "For $17.99, you get it all, plus we'll turn on a single cam at our house shows and let you watch 1-2 of them a week, with or without commentary". Part of tapping into your hardcore audience is understanding that you have a lot of cafeteria viewers who are interested in different things, but that many of them will pay more to get more. As of now the Network has been good if somewhat underwhelming because 90% feels like the same old/same old. The 7/4 show from Japan was exactly what I want not only the company to be, but the Network in particular. I'm a lapsed customer who cancelled my membership because I didn't have time to watch it very often and really only made time for the PPVs. Even as someone who says "I never have time to watch this thing," I would happily re-up and pay a premium rate if there was more novelty/experimentation/variety in the content.

Jericho would have had a much better resume of matches if he'd remained a journeyman ECW/lucha guy through the 90s. He could have been a really satisfying ace in ECW, almost like a babyface Shane Douglas. It never would have happened: like so many other talents who could have contributed, he got tired of Paul's scumbaggery and inability to pay him. I would have loved Jericho as babyface bleeding a ton in American indy brawls while sporadically working hair matches with Hector Garza, Shocker, etc. He still could have been hired by WWE, though he probably would have ended up a Christian-level star in that case. So much of his fame seemed to come from the Y2J stuff of immediately working with the Rock and being presented as a huge talent that WCW blew it on. "What if" aside, he's not nearly good enough in-ring for a top 100, and I say that as a viewer who likes him more than many here. His best strength right now is that experience and veteran status allows him to put WWE matches together in a way that I suspect most of that roster either isn't allowed, or lacks the knowledge of how to execute. He can go to MSG or Japan and have the type of match that a lot of us think should be happening more often: slower-paced, awareness of the crowd, building to a crescendo of callbacks and variety rather than a series of 2.9 finisher kickouts. He's still too indulgent at times, but his capacity is there and I disagree with the idea being expressed in this thread that he doesn't "get it". He's akin to someone like Raven, Bubba Ray, Bret, Douglas, HHH, etc: he gets it, he just doesn't always practice what he preaches. His finest hour is the Mysterio feud in '08. On PPV and Smackdown they had some of the best matches of the year. But "looked better than he ever had when working Rey Mysterio" is something you can say about a lot of dudes, and says more about Rey being a legit top 10 all-time guy than it does about Jericho.

On one hand, he has some matches I really like vs. Mysterio and Cena. On the other, he has so many lackluster, sloppy matches that he feels like a victim of the modern TV era. We've already dissected why he was often bad in-ring in this thread, but the Jericho comparison seems really apt to me: he simply wasn't as good an athlete as he often attempted to be. Points for ambition. The whole Bret comparison of "he didn't work hard outside of the spotlight" reads as inaccurate to me when discussing Punk. I've seen him phone it in on ROH house shows for sure, but his failures were in doing too much rather than too little. His pre-WWE stuff is a mix of good and bad. Again, I think he gets way too much credit by virtue of being what a lot of fans picture themselves being if they were a wrestler. "I wouldn't take roids or pain meds. I would cut promos that tell it like it is and bring truth to power. I might not be the best wrestler, but I'll have the coolest matches by building heat and being a great talker. I don't need to be a babyface when I'm this good of a heel." Etc. As time passes, his "pipe bomb" stuff holds less and less appeal for me. Yes, WWE booking is incredibly stale and corporate. But cutting IWC troll promos was equally self-serving and lame. He didn't counterbalance or remedy what was happening via the McMahon direction the way people sometimes suggest: in some ways his legacy is having made it worse. As I get older I have less esteem for the guys like Punk, who I would put into a category with someone like Hunter or Nash as a promo: egotists who want to promote themselves as being above it all. I have far more respect for someone like Austin, Savage, or Jake as promos: guys who could separate from the pack and be unique without undermining the show at the expense of their company/peers.

Re: MMA coverage - hasn't their assertion been whenever criticized for it that they get tons of feedback from people who subscribe "just for MMA" and want more coverage of it? You can argue the veracity (my guess would be that like lots of business owners, Dave and Bryan most actively retain the feedback that confirms their biases) but they've been raked over the coals for it in the past and always insist that the MMA-focused audience is real. It's not the "Pro Wrestling Only" crowd, but they're allegedly out there (unless you think Dave/Bryan just cover it because they like covering it, and justify it to themselves in shoddy ways). For what it's worth, I do think it's interesting that at least 80% of the calls and mailbag questions they receive are about pro wrestling, with very little in the way of customer feedback on anything in MMA. What they do get is always about top stars like Ronda/Jones, or historical questions to the effect of "Was this thing from Japan in 1993 a work?" As for what else needs to be shaken up: there's a lot of clutter and useless content on their site, and it could likely use a redesign, but I'd be curious to hear what people here think would help their bottom line if added/subtracted. They're doing their second big reader survey as we speak. The last one they did 12-18 months ago, I basically told them that the F4W newsletter is completely redundant and that someone else should be writing it to allow Alvarez to produce more audio. That ended up happening. I think I also told them that my favorite thing they did was the mailbag and Dave interviewing old wrestlers and promoters, but I also think there's only so much history you can be mining and that they would do well to cover a more diverse selection of indies and international promotions. I'd rather hear Dave's take on Evolve or lucha than hear Alvarez fantasy book RAW on every show six days a week.

I don't know if you can call any of these premature, but they're viewed differently now by many online followers of Dave's HOF, and he takes more flack for them just a few years removed from their entry: Jericho (class of '10) would be an example of a guy who got in on Meltzer praising his then-present or very recent work (calling him the best worker in the business, calling his heel work with Michaels some of the best he'd ever seen, etc). Chono ('04) seems quite odd. Konnan ('09) is a weird one to me in that he was massively over in a crossover kind of way in Mexico, but was such a bad worker that I think people had to overlook his matches and highly value star power. In terms of fame in Mexico, who is Konnan equiv? Someone like Piper or Bret? I doubt he's an Austin/Rock level guy there? (I'm asking, not telling.) Kensuke Sasaki ('13) seemed a beneficiary of the YouTube era, but as others have said, most of the Japanese voters view the candidates differently than I would. Not sure if Dave or anyone outside of Japan lobbied for Ultimo Dragon, but he's been discussed ad nauseum as a bad choice.

Yeah, that was actually the most interesting part of the show: it seemed like in the mid-90s pre-NWO, Bischoff and Flair were actually pretty good friends (or at least good "work" friends) who shared a mutual love of work hard/play hard, and did so together often. Was particularly impressed by: The idea that Bischoff brought Flair to the decisive meetings with Hogan and Savage, to sweet talk them into jumping ship and entice them with the idea of working programs with Ric That they seemingly did a bunch of freaky-deaky shit together in various hotel rooms, implicitly involving women and "partying", such that each has unspoken blackmail material on the other

Thought part one of the long Bischoff episode was really good. Whether you buy what he's saying is one thing, but he's one of the only guys who was able to play the game at Turner and thus has insights into the goings-on at the CNN Center. He always comes off as a great talker, and you can at least understand how he got the opportunities that he was given.

I feel like some gentle-eyed New Japan undercarder could benefit from Arthur Russell's Calling Out of Context comp. And actually I think Missy Hyatt could have pulled off disco as well. I'd have liked the '92 Beach Blast bikini contest more if she'd come out to Chic's "I Want Your Love".

They found a worse option for Nikki-Charlotte than all of the terrible ones that the IWC came up with this week. Impressive. I liked seeing Cena and Sting walking tall, but that go-home segment was so flat. Cole (or rather, Vince speaking through Cole) actually said something to the effect of, "It shows you how far we've come" in regard to Sting one-on-one with fellow WCW alum The Big Show. We've come so far that we're gonna beg for a nostalgia pop by doing a main event that would have sucked 20 years ago when these guys worked for our extinct competitor. Plus Rollins tapping out immediately to the worst Sharpshooter you've ever seen. I really have no problem with Sting as a challenger and even kind of like it, but that was the sort of PPV build that HHH/Vince truly may have literally written in their sleep.

All of these trick scenarios that people online have been laying out all week are too complicated and unsatisfying to actually be good. Most of them feel predicated on the notion that this feud/movement has already been botched, so that what it needs now are a bunch of Russo swerves to reset the table and keep the crowd on their toes. The simplest option here seems the most likely: Charlotte has Nikki beat, but Paige interferes and costs her the match, thereby breaking up PCB and granting Nikki the record reign. Nikki gets mondo heel heat. Paige, who's better as a heel than a face, likewise gets heat and can become a lone wolf. A terrible babyface faction that never should have been put together is broken up. And you then have room to book Night of Champions in a variety of different ways. As for Charlotte being the wrong choice (and she is), all of this is made worse by the senseless pace of the booking. A match that shouldn't happen until Mania (her revenge) is likely to air for free on TV and "B" PPVs about 3-5 times in the next two months.

This. Bray's is fine. Seth's is terrible, but always was. Shield's was better, but a lot of that was the crowd entrance. Sure: alternation's the point. Only reason I brought this up is that Banks and Bayley seem helped by their apropos entrances. Which itself was something I only thought about after seeing Banks encouraging people to send cover versions of her theme on Twitter and seeing a bunch of fans actually do so. If I have to hear and see them do it the same way for the next ten years, it'll get old. There's a difference between someone like Hogan having an iconic theme that gets nostalgia pops and Kane's stupid theme. To paraphrase Court Bauer on a recent Stone Cold podcast: they've had the same set, TV format, and approach to music since 1997. If the NBA was still using 20 year old sets and playing nothing but Korn during their montages, people would notice.

Not having Rousey is a considerable loss. Bringing her into Cowboys Stadium - the site UFC wanted to run but elected not to in order to keep charging Vegas ticket prices - would have been a real draw. Yes, the Steph promos probably would have been self-indulgent garbage, but if she was gonna cower to anyone on Earth, it would be Ronda. Saying that they needn’t bother booking a massive star because they’d book it wrong is always a possibility, but wrestling almost never gets athletes in the prime of their career. Wrestlemania 24 with Mayweather - while a stacked card with other stuff going on - was the highest grossing show they'd ever had to that point, during a time when the company felt really dead. Fans of fight sports have grown weary of seeing Joe Frazier types in slow-motion referee roles. But that’s really different than having the credible babyface stars of an enormous movie like Furious 7 beating your top heels in a crowd-pleasing tag. Wyatt’s lackadaisical push hasn’t been his fault. When he’s allowed to go out and have a savage fight, he’s usually damn good. I go back to the terribly booked finishes of his stuff with Taker, Ambrose, Cena, and all the other lame feuds he had. People wonder why he's not over, and it's because his matches rarely end definitively, despite stuff like him and Bryan having an awesome finish at Rumble 2014. As much as anyone he’s a victim of the repetition/redundancy/idiocy of the TV writing team. He's scripted to do the SOS every week, almost identically in its presentation.

One thing that's definitely getting NXT over as a show - and which helped a lot live - is that the entrance music isn't completely horrible and sounds like something that could have been recorded in this century. It helps establish the characters a lot with Banks and Bayley, but also Breeze and Balor. We forget that we've all seen hundreds upon hundreds of Randy Orton entrances.

This feels like nominating one of the inmates from Titicut Follies for an Academy Award. He has some entertaining performances, but I have a pretty big Von Erichs stigma that I barely got over by seeing how many great tags they had on the Texas set. I wouldn't have Kerry on a list, and he has much stuff like the Jumbo and Flair matches than are way better than anything Kevin has on his resume.

Is there a secret stockpile of Szacacs or Clay Thomson online or for sale? What is available on Youtube is amazing, but they only have a couple matches apiece. The Ray Steele performance with Roach looked a bit like Will Ferrell’s playbook, but I mean that as a compliment.

Asexual aces (Hogan. Bret, Austin, Cena, Reigns). Exception to the rule is Rock making out with Trish that one time, but even that was the exception to the rule. Nothing with time limits, or any illusion that this is an athletic competition that could possibly go more or less than exactly 3 hours and 5 minutes. Black guys with funk gimmicks (Brodus, Scorpio, Godfather to a degree). Tag teams don’t draw / Teams are a means toward getting 1-2 singles stars ASAP. Complete apathy toward Latin/Spanish speaking workers and audience. Love/hate relationship with Toronto: Tunney as fake prez, Skydome held up as legendary show, Hogan/Rock, but burgeoning resentment of crowd since ~2002. I would echo OJ’s note about finishers: guys almost never win a match with anything but their signature move, regardless of how elaborate said move is or how inappropriate it is to the moment. Those with deep southern drawls often given poverty/low-rent gimmicks (Hillbilly Jim, Freddy Joe Floyd, Godwinns, Brother Love, Jim Ross) in pathological resentment of his own upbringing. Madonnas forced into whore situations, and vice versa. Could be a sub-category of a larger category of “Women are liars and hypocrites”. Food issues/body dysmorphia: everything from Ryback to lots of vomit to presenting fat guys as vile pigs who are constantly eating. Distraction finishes are something we’ve noticed more of late, but they’ve really been a hallmark going back to the 80s. Guys who aren’t brothers are presented as brothers, while guys who are brothers are not acknowledged as such. “I don’t ask workers to do anything I wouldn’t do myself” = any and all bumps are fair game. Tons of situations where somebody gets locked in a room / helplessly tied to something / handcuffed. All foreigners (non-Americans) are weird subjects of ridicule. Constant acronyms (MNM, APA, DX, BAD, PCB, RKO). Grunting, snarling, animalistic screaming in an effort to pump one's self up.

Reigns is the guy who should bring down the Authority, but at this rate I don't know if we're ever gonna see it. But that's the right Mania main event for Cowboys Stadium, IMO: Reigns-Rollins for the title, with control of the company on the line. Right now it seems more likely that if they ran such an angle they'd put that stip on the Rock beating HHH, which strikes me as a waste, but so it goes. Current booking would suggest we're instead getting babyface HHH vs. Rollins - perhaps as soon as next month for Hell in a Cell - but it seems foolish to try to predict autumn/winter WWE booking at this point, as it has no basis in what's happened previously and largely seems a 4-5 month stalling tactic.

For anyone who hasn't given him a chance yet (or are just interested in seeing more of him): yesterday I watched the first two Breaks vs. Saint matches recommended in OJ's Euro thread (3/14/73 and 5/3/73). Saint in the past hasn't been my favorite WoS guy, but he is fantastic here as Breaks turns up the heat and this is worked like a real blood feud. There's a busted nose in this that's one of the most violent things I've ever seen in a worked match. But Breaks is the story there: just one of the most pure talents from a technical perspective as his pace and finesse in moving in and out of holds is unlike anyone I've ever seen. I'd loved the matches of his I had seen, but this was a reminder to watch anything and everything. A legit top 20-30 prospect depending on what I else I can see.