Parties

It was weird that Christian's career ended on "You're the ugliest guy in this company! You have a weird face!" from seemingly out of nowhere, then devastating head injury after career of insane matches, then some PPV pre-show stuff, then silent undiscussed non-retirement. I guess I'm mainly curious as to why he seemed so buried at the end, as he made it seem like he has a good rapport with Vince. Only thing that made immediate sense was that their new approach to anything concussion-related is "Government Denies Knowledge".

The most admirable part of this so far is the consistency of putting it out every week. So many promising podcasts start off with erratic scheduling and end up losing their footing, while the best find their audience and momentum by delivering on a routine day/time. Keep it up dudes!

@vivacurley, but 98% of the pro wrestling engagement is just me favoriting Bix/Kris/Dylan.

Not sure where to put this as no one's talking about it in the Network thread: did anyone watch the Edge and Christian live taping of Austin's podcast? I'm not a huge fan of either guy - Christian in ring much more than Edge of course - but they both came off tremendous on this show. They were joking about lobbying for their own show on the Network, but they might as well after this. Edge seems happily retired, but Christian could start as an announcer on any of their TV shows now and seemingly be better than everyone they have. In short, this was the millionth example of guys coming off as way cooler and more interesting than their pro wrestling writing teams would have you believe.

Raven would be one who offers really perceptive insights into how to work a match during shoots, in particular on the mechanics of how to sell and garner heat/sympathy. He then goes out and does the exact opposite in almost all of his matches. Contrast that with Sabu, who was a great worker and one of the most articulate and fascinating guys of his era when it comes to hearing his take on business. Yet his gimmick has people thinking he's silent and crazy. Really a lot of the ECW guys come off as not only smarter than you'd think, but more eloquent and savvy with regard to the business. Some would likely credit some of that to Heyman, but it's always interesting to me that he surrounded himself with people who seemed practical, yet still worked that style for little to no pay. That pop from the crowd must have been something to keep them there for as long as they were.

Does anyone have a sense of who makes up the current set of voters? How many ballots does he usually receive? I know Bix and Zellner have ballots, and that there a few other historians in the mix. I know guys like Cornette and Matisyk get them, as does Ross most likely. Is it mostly workers/people who've worked in wrestling? Or does it skew more towards Meltzer's peers? Like, do people who currently work for companies like WWE/NJ/ROH actually vote? That just seems like a really backwards system if someone like Gedo is voting for Nakamura. And yeah, I agree with Boriqua's note that there are almost certainly people voting in regions for which they lack proper knowledge. If you haven't seen a decent amount of work from all of the candidates in said region, you shouldn't be there. Part of voting anyone in should be weighing them against the other options in their era/nation.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. He says some variation on that phrase a dozen times in the course of a one hour interview. Flair's love of Lawrence Taylor is creepy as hell at this point. It was weird enough that Flair is a football fan who knows nothing about football, but to continue to champion Taylor after the last ten years or so is just kind of clueless/unsettling. L.T. isn't a "Nature Boy" lifestyle at work: dude's messed up.

2009 was worse than this. Orton-HHH/McMahons and DX/Legacy feuds dominating the whole year, haphazard tag teams, a roster of bad young workers and over the hill Attitude stars, newly heel Punk getting jobbed out to Undertaker, the Bragging Rights PPV, and the year ending with DX beating Jericho/Show for the tag belts in a PPV main event. Plus it was the spiritual beginning of RAW as we know it in its most formulaic, by-the-numbers, senselessly booked state.

Now I'm actually hoping for the Paige heel turn next week, as a Charlotte title run at this moment sounds brutal. Hoping Los Matadores get a new mini to give Torito another pre-show feud for PPVs. Pequeno Damien 666 as a bullfighter is crazy enough to work. Summer Rae was the highlight of the show. "Ru-Ru", now and forever.

“Summertime Sadness” recap video was been the highlight of hour one. Paige/Sasha was decent until the horrid finish. Can’t tell if Naomi botched something or was actually scripted to distract the ref by climbing into the ring, throwing her hands in the air, and scrambling to leave seconds later. Charlotte's condescending reactions are fast making her one of the least likable faces they've got. The two guys who hold all three singles titles are in what I assume is their first ever match - booked with zero stakes - to kick off the second hour.

So what are his best performances/matches? I kind of jumped into watching a bunch of '93 SMW where him and Smothers are feuding. It's entertaining stuff, largely for the promos (feeling that way about a lot of SMW), but if anyone made my list from that feud, it would be Smothers for his insane bumping and strong babyface work. Anthony comes off as a great talker who knew how to work that character. Between his stuff here and with Pritchard, he's one of wrestling's great scumbags. But in-ring I'm still waiting for more matches where he looks like a top 100 contender. Bell to bell his best stuff that I've seen are the two Mid-South matches from '85 that made the DVDVR set: ranked them very high on that set and thought the DWBs were fantastic in them. Watched the '87 Mr. Olympia/Anthony street fight from Continental and thought it was solid but disappointing. At first it looks like it's gonna be southern fried MS1-Chicana, and the mask ripping was good, but the match never gets off the ground. Anthony was more entertaining when he was bumping and stooging than he was when he was in control. If you're gonna be a kick/punch/stomp heel, for me you need to have like, Hansen/Dundee level strikes, which I don't always think is the case with Anthony. I get that to really get over as a heel you have to get heat and put a hurting on the faces, but I often feel like I want the singles Anthony matches I've seen to have more comeuppance? Clearly he's doing something right if I'm invested in his matches and want to see the faces get him. He's such a creep that you want the faces to take vengeance, but I don't know if I've found the match where it happens yet.

I'm not someone who would vote based on crowd reactions, but I actually came in here to talk about how incredibly over he is in that live 70s Mid-Atlantic footage. I would be hard pressed to name a louder babyface response in-ring: whether that's the way the audio works may be part of it, but it's undeniably an incredible response. Some of that is that the crowd was rabid for Flair too, and that the whole territory seems to have been getting incredible reactions from the fans, but Steamboat's pops are the rare exception where the degree to which he was over actually makes his matches that much better for me. I've heard the "overacting" critique on him before. With selling, I say better too much than too little. The times when I find people sell too much are when they're selling in a way that seems incorrect/unrealistic to the nature of actual fighting. Guys who sell a chop to the chest and a punch in the nose with equal measure. Steamboat's approach is definitely pretty theatrical, but I can appreciate it as "playing to the last row" as others have said. What looks like overacting to some (something like Nic Cage in "Vampire's Kiss" or Pacino in lots of stuff) is viewed as aptly passionate by others.

Yeah, after watching a few later matches of Pillman and Ross on commentary it seemed a recurring show of some kind, and I do recall seeing clips of younger Russo on commentary.

Flipping around YouTube and caught Flash Funk vs. Rocky Maivia (8/23/97) on an event seemingly called "WWF New York"? Ross and Cornette are on commentary doing some pretty surprising calls. Aside from JR's usual mention of Maivia as a "dominating defensive lineman" at Miami, his response to the Rock escaping a leglock was to deem it "shades of Tony Charles", to which Cornette yells "Tony Charles!" Ross then calls the finish of the match - the Rock Bottom - by simply yelling "Hase!", then explaining, "that move, the Uranage, or whatever you wanna call it, made famous by Japanese wrestler Hiroshi Hase." Somewhere in between Cornette heels on the New Jersey crowd by calling them "bean eaters", claiming that most of the citizens of the state are in jail. This all seemed like the sort of stuff that would have gotten them both chewed out by Vince backstage, but it was all so loose that one wonders if Vince even watched this show. Solid five minute match too: Scorpio was visibly moving Rock through it, but it was well put together.

Thought one interesting thing coming out of the Exile episode w/ Naylor was the credit he gave to Joey Mercury, calling Banks a pet project of his and putting him over as having the best wrestling mind of anyone down there. HHH gets all the credit, but he clearly has some really good lieutenants handling the day-to-day nuances.

Plus it doesn't solve the problem they had in late 2014/early 2015 of what you do with Rowan as a babyface singles worker who doesn't talk and has mediocre matches that he always loses. I don't think he's a bad worker at all, but they haven't given him anything to work with. It's not like he had the chance to cut some fiery face promo about why he wanted to face Big Show in a "Stairs Match", and they've kept him in a tenuous sometimes friend/sometimes foe relationship with Harper and Wyatt the whole time, for lack of any real push or gameplan.

The placement on the card of Owens-Cesaro at Summerslam felt like a "mea culpa" to those two guys, where it was this weird semi-acknowledgment of "these guys should be main eventers or close to it, but we're not doing anything with them so here they are having their blueprint ***1/4 star PPV match in the second to last spot on the show". Plus it kept the women out of that spot. I won't go into the good cop/bad cop Hunter-Vince conspiracy theories, but that felt like an instance of someone wanting to showcase Cesaro and Owens, but doing it in the usual half-assed way. To Grimmas' point: who on the roster right now is young and fresh enough to organically evolve in that Bret/Shawn kind of way? The guy I keep coming back to is Neville. I'm not even that high on his work, but at 29 he feels like the Bret Hart parallel right now. He's been on the main roster for less than six months. It's almost as if his upside is that they haven't completely ruined him yet. If you got him a good Neidhart, they could be the lead team for a year or two and suddenly Neville feels novel. (Cue "Novel Neville" chants rhythmically clashing with coinciding chants of "Gable Gamble" during their 2018 match at Mania.) Maybe pair him with Tye Dillinger? I actually think a good partner for Neville could be Bull Dempsey, as he wouldn't oversize him but would still work a fat guy bulldozer grappling style that counterbalances Neville's flying. Another option would be Apollo Crews: that's a massively over babyface team right there. Not sure Crews has the promo ability to make up for Neville's lack of it, but their matches and look would get over. There's something about both those guys that people want to cheer, even if I worry that Crews is more Bobby Lashley than Magnum T.A. The other one who still has huge upside as a heel is Slater. He's young, gets abnormally huge reactions for someone who's never pushed or on TV, and works hard in every role he's given. Meltzer and Alvarez have been dropping coy hints of late that the main roster tag division is getting renewed focus in the next few months, with the implication being that you're either gonna see top-of-card guys joining forces to go after the belts, or an influx of some of the bigger indie teams coming in.

Cue "Gamble on Gable" signs at next NXT taping. The destined Gable Gamble starts now.

After digging into the actual numbers, I'd say that Reigns is in some ways booked stronger than I'd initially thought, but that the problems in his presentation still remain. He's winning a lot, yet he isn't presented like a winner, which is a bad combination. If you look at the loaded nature of a win-loss record that includes house shows, he’s currently at 122 wins and 13 losses for 2015. Almost all of those wins are on un-televised live events: in fact, he wins his house show matches about 95% of the time, beating Wyatt, Show, and Kane dozens of times throughout the spring/summer. A win-loss record doesn’t speak to how bad his feuds/character presentation/promos have been, but it tells us a few things, as his TV and PPV run offer a different story: From Mania on, in TV matches, by my count he’s at 23 wins and 9 losses: so he’s hitting .750, almost exactly. You can read those numbers however you wanna read them: not sure how that record compares to Orton, Ambrose, Cena, a part-timer like Jericho, or your average jobber. The takeaways that I note here are that 1) When he loses, it’s in his most important matches on the biggest stages (PPVs, title opportunities, matches with big stars). 2) He’s been losing more often of late: defeated in five TV matches in a one month span between MITB and Battleground, which could give the impression that they’re tanking him for sympathy now to build him back up. 3) Four of his wins are flagrant DQs with run-ins from heel opponents. He didn’t get pins, even if he walks tall at segment’s end. 4) Thirteen of his 23 wins happened on Smackdown. The wins he does get are on the show that no one watches. With Ambrose, they’ve beaten New Day and Wyatt/Harper the last two weeks. They were on the winning team of the 8/18 eight-man tag on SD. Reigns beat Harper on SD. (8/11) Beat Rusev on SD. (8/4) Won the 6-man against Bray/Harper/Sheamus (RAW, 8/3) Beat Harper again (RAW, 7/20) Most recent loss came at Battleground to Wyatt (7/19). Which means he hasn’t lost a match in six weeks, but that loss came on PPV in high profile fashion. Him and Dean beat Sheamus/Show by DQ (SD, 7/14) Beat Big Show (SD, 7/7) Lost to Sheamus by count-out on RAW. Beats Rollins by DQ (SD, 6/30) Lost to Kane/Rollins in teaming with Ambrose. (6/29) No Contest with Sheamus on RAW (6/22) With Ambrose, lost to Kane/Sheamus on SD (6/16) Lost MITB via Wyatt run in to start their feud (6/14) Beat Kane/Kofi/Sheamus in six man tag. (SD, 6/9) Beat Kofi (RAW, 6/8). Beat Sheamus by DQ (SD, 6/2) Beat Wyatt, Barrett, and Henry [via count-out] in three straight matches (RAW, 6/1) w/ Ambrose, beat Kane/Rollins by DQ on RAW (5/25) and SD (5/26). Assume these were J&J run-ins. Loses the Fatal 4-Way at Payback to retaining champ Rollins in a PPV main event that I don’t even remember. (5/17) Beats Kane (SD, 5/12) No Contest w/ Orton (RAW, 5/4). Earlier in the show, Reigns and Orton lost a handicap tag to New Day. Beats Kane by count out (SD, 4/28) W/ Orton, beats Kane/Rollins (RAW, 4/27) Beats Big Show at Extreme Rules (4/26). Legit PPV win. w Ambrose, defeats Harper/Rollins (SD, 4/21) (Had a period here of two weeks off TV, or at least out of matches. Injured? Good booking!) Beats Barrett/Sheamus/Show in 6-man w/ Bryan/Ziggler (SD, 4/7) Only went 12 mins but still feels like something worth watching in hindsight. Beats Big Show (RAW, 4/6) #1 Contender Match: loses to Orton (w/Ryback) (RAW, 4/6) Man, they really should have done Ryback-Rollins around this time. With Orton and Ryback, wins 6-man against Kane/Rollins/Show. (RAW, 3/30) Loses to Rollins in main event of Mania.

It's a trait true of select people in all walks of life. There are comedians, writers, visual artists, etc. who are unfamiliar with what's going on in their field, either because they're too immersed in their own work or simply feel they'd rather take part in other things. I think others worry that they don't want about becoming too influenced by others if they watch everyone else. Wrestlers have a lot of weird pride and herd mentality issues: it's not hard to imagine a stigma of "you only watch other workers if you yourself don't know how to work / watching the shows is for the marks / etc." Meltzer did recently say that select WWE guys (the ones you'd expect) were avidly watching New Japan. Sasha Banks is said to be someone who watches a lot of old matches (huge Eddy fan, etc). Danielson had that deal a couple years ago where he was on some WWE panel and was asked who his favorite Mexican wrestler was, with everyone expecting him to say Rey or Eddy. He picked Blue Panther. As for pre-web 80s/90s guys: I don't think tape trading was big amongst workers, so if you weren't in front of a TV during your competition's show, you probably weren't catching it, esp. with the insane road schedules of the day. When guys were home, I doubt many of them wanted to tell their wife/kids/mistresses, "Sorry boo, but I have to give due diligence to the work of my peers, and these W*ING comps aren't gonna watch themselves." Re: Funk - while he wasn't someone who was trying to watch a bunch of other people's TV shows, he seemed to have an eye for talent if he was working a locale. He's the guy who famously told Meltzer that he should start watching joshi in the early 80s, as Funk told him that AJW's workers were better talents than the men.

Russo is ridiculous and obviously shirks responsibility for a lot of things, but so does the whole cabal of people who are to blame for WCW's death. Bischoff buries Russo and Sullivan. Sullivan buries Bischoff, Nash and Russo. Russo buries Bischoff and Hogan. Hogan buries Russo. Nash buries whoever he's not working with this year. Then the moment any two of them are in the same room they hug and start burying the rest of their fellow Gestapo. They're all in denial and all have foggy memories about what they each booked. Thought Russo's show was a lot more interesting than Pritchard's. Your mileage may very if this was the same song-and-dance he trots out everywhere, but this was actually the first interview of his that I've bothered with. At least half of what Russo is saying here likely complete BS, but it was interesting BS and it felt like he had if nothing else a unique vantage point for two key moments in wrestling history. Thought it was particularly interesting to hear about his dynamic with Vince and Linda, the latter being his boss at the magazine. Even the lies are interesting: the way Russo talks about how much he loved David and adored working with Flair gives insight into why he kept getting hired: he's good at stroking the ego of whoever he's working with. The Pritchard interview was pretty bland in comparison (though to be fair, it feels unkind to call the part about his wife's cancer bland), and I don't recall hearing anything new or particularly insightful coming out of it. Austin was fantastic as always. Even when he's a guest, he's able to take the reins and act like a gracious host.

Man, this week might have been my own zenith as a young fan too. Three of the most etched wrestling memories I have are the snake in the wedding present, pastel jacket Vince getting KOed at that weird announcer podium, and the post-Jailhouse match segment of the Mountie being forcibly fingerprinted and belligerently yelling "You can't take my picture!" to a mugshot photographer. Same with Warrior being sealed into the casket - which I don't think was literally this week but did get a mention on the show. Good call on the idea that WWF got weirdly dark out of the blue here: whoever was booking during this time was doing a killer job at traumatizing children.

Everyone talks about what a burden it is to book this much TV weekly, but on last night's RAW they only used about 1/3rd of their active, uninjured people on the main roster. Zero feuds or even appearances for most undercarders. Entire midcard spinning its wheels. Bringing in decrepit Attitude Era act because you've decided none of your tag teams matter. And the 10 or so guys who they consider stars (I say guys because honestly, they don't consider any of the women stars) are thus overexposed to death. It's as if they think people will forget that their stars exist if they don't each have a PPV-caliber match every week on RAW, SD, and every special event. The exception being Lesnar, the most over act in the company. Maybe if they actually used more of the folks they have, someone would accidentally get over, and you wouldn't have to book constant rematches of last week's PPV. TL;DR: I think Reigns and others would be more over (and less "shoved down throats" according to detractors) if they weren't booked live 2-3 times every week.

I feel like Braun is too close to Bray, name-wise. They change everyone's name, and NXT gimmicks come and go. If being paired with the Wyatts, just change it to Krang Fitzpatrick or Tig Notaro or any of the other fake inhuman syllables they mash together.

And the solution to push a guy the audience don't want to see pushed even harder isn't as horrible? Besides a heel turn, how does that help him? They aren't going to change their minds just because it takes him 5 minutes to beat Big Show instead of 15. Come on man. (Eventually) pushing someone hard is a necessity to getting anyone over. I'm sorry, but that's not a Reigns thing: that's an everyone thing. You need him to win matches in order for people to develop faith in him. Even when WWF had to drop back and punt on blue chipper Rocky Maivia after "Die Rocky Die", the Rock of the Nation of Domination was still a guy who won most of his matches and was presented as the upstart ace usurping power of a big stable from Simmons. From the way he was presented, you'd have thought that Rock never lost. Austin lost two straight to Bret, but those were brilliantly worked/booked matches that made him look like the better man, even in defeat. Which in some ways was the story of Mania this year: Reigns had Brock beat and got screwed. But they never really told that story properly. He needed to win a ton of matches before and after to justify the significance of that big loss, and have that big loss validate him. No one watches the NBA regular season, yet the Finals are always massive nationwide, because people want to watch winners win. And see the other winners lose. Because the key word there is winners: we know that both teams are elite. You need to be a character the crowd considers a contender. Which hasn't been the way he's been booked in the wake of Mania: quite the opposite. 50/50 booking gets you nowhere, especially toward the guy who's supposed to be the next ace. Austin took those losses from Bret and went on to years of dominance. It's not that you can never lose: it's that it needs to be thoughtfully executed when you do. A year straight of defeats doesn't work for me because that just hasn't been his character for the last several years. Nor is it in tune with the way the rest of the company is booked. He isn't Honma in the G1. He isn't rookie year Kobashi who went 0-98 or whatever. And incidentally: I'm a huge proponent of that type of All Japan youth-oriented caste system where certain young guys start off their careers with a lot of losses and gradually improve over time to start getting big wins. It's something I'd love to see them start doing with guys like Slater and Bo Dallas: beat them like a drum, watch them develop great selling techniques, garner sympathy, and genuinely celebrate them getting over when they finally do get the big win. My hope is that it's sort of what's happening with Neville right now, but I don't think they're consciously even putting that much thought into it. But we're way, way past that point with Reigns. He's main evented Mania. He's been booked as the toughest member of the most dominant WWE stable since Evolution. They've burned him out too fast, but that's the nature of their whole approach to TV nowadays. Everyone is burnt out and overexposed: we just notice it more in Reigns because we know that he's "the chosen one". If he went on a losing streak of any real length, that's a suicidal move that turns him into a cross between Ziggler, Ryback, and the Miz. At best it gets him the "he should be pushed more!" reaction that guys like Ziggler get online. But that's my point in saying that it's a huge mistake to try to book Reigns toward what IWC smarks think. He's not Danielson, he's never gonna be Danielson, and incidentally, not everyone should be Danielson. The booking of Reigns should be getting him to somewhere between Austin and Rock: a guy who comes off as genuinely tough, but who is also really good looking, popular with women, and able to cut great promos. Which, by all accounts, he can, when he's not being scripted by thirty clueless losers who got fired from Disney Channel melodramas. Hence my third bullet point: stop writing awful verbiage. If there's one adage that I would like to etch and bronze into the entrance of Titan's writers room, it would be: "DRIVE THE BEER TRUCK TO THE RING." That is the philosophy which guides wrestling and gets people over. "DRIVE THE BEER TRUCK," you limp-wristed dweebs!