Parties

Only in wrestling is a dude mocked for not shaving his chest.

To be fair, I was half-asleep during their first match, but I think I enjoyed this one more. Battleground is two weeks after Owens-Balor in Japan. You can have Owens lose his belt and win Cena's if people feel like he needs that rub. Ambrose gets in the most subtle Dusty tribute of the night, calling Rollins an "errand boy." Lawler referencing the dancing go-go bears was awesome too.

It's become so second nature that I never even notice how goofy the annual "Mahney Money Mon-nay" song for this show is. Is it recycled from Vince's Million Dollar Phone Tag game? It combines his love of cash-themed music with his love of all things faux-soul.

That finish was really cheesy, but half the crowd bought the fake title change, so sure, why not.

Johnny trying to sneak glances of New Day-Prime Time while performing "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat" wins spot of the night.

My predictions are off to a roaring start. Match was better than expected. It's a spotfest, but what else would it be? Bray-Reigns feels like a two month stall to give Reigns something until Summerslam. As good a Neville performance as I've seen: he rose to the occasion. Paige promo was kind of odd snark, with the line about the Bellas holding more power backstage than in-ring, but I can't imagine her dedicating the match to Dusty and then losing.

The Dusty tributes have been awesome and I love Renee, so I'm really not trying to make light of it in saying this, but there was something about seeing Torito rhymically clapping to "American Dream" in full costume that made me laugh. A moment of levity amidst the sad, poignant stuff. MITB opening the show seems to suggest a Reigns heel turn. Blargh. (Or just spreading out the ladder matches, as I didn't even realize Ambrose-Rollins was one until the opening hype video.)

MITB in its inception was an interesting-if-flawed way of making a midcarder into a main eventer, which is something they almost never do. You'd now have to go back to the Miz in 2010 to see it used it that way. They've killed the concept by making it a ladder match of main eventers who don't know how to work ladder matches. Part of it is that they now only have one world champion and are doing longer title runs, which means that the inherent hotshotting of most MITB title wins doesn't really work anymore. Remember when it came out a couple weeks ago that the writers really like the biweekly PPVs because it means they don't have to think longterm or build anything? Wonder if they still feel that way now. Who's coming out of this show stronger than they were? Maybe New Day, by stacking up another win on a team they just beat two weeks ago? Leaving them with... zero viable challengers? You could argue Reigns, but as others have said, it's a lame way to start his climb back to the title. Cena gains nothing from beating Owens. I don't even think Owens gains much from beating Cena again this early, even if it's a clean pin. Current heel Sheamus would actually be a pretty awesome MITB briefcase holder, but it's not gonna happen. The only big news coming out of this would be a legit Ambrose title win (which won't happen), or a Reigns heel turn (which shouldn't happen). I hope I'm wrong, but this whole card feels like a mess.

6/13: Decade/War Machine segment was OK. Whitmer's believable in the role, and I've never liked him more. Two weeks ago I compared him to closeted banker luring Colby into his S&M basement. This week it came off more as closeted cop antagonizing bearded Occupy Wall Street anarchists for whom he quietly yearns. Hansen and Rowe are badass, but the match was too repetitive to Moose's squash two weeks ago. A storyline like this is tough in that you only have a few mins every other week. It's cool to be able to stretch it out for months and earn the big payoff of the Corinos fighting back. But you need to make the segments count and add something new each time, rather than repeat the same routine. Feud needs a pre-taped segment of Colby getting mauled in a tavern brawl that starts after Adam Page unsuccessfully roofies the barkeep's wife. You know, to cleanse the palette. Moose-Alexander started mediocre, but got very good at the end. Initially I thought Moose was kind of exposed: when working even, competitive stuff, it seemed like he hadn't yet figured out selling, working as a base, or even really taking much of an opponent's offense. Would like him to work more as a giant than as a guy trying to imitate everyone else's aerial moveset. But the finish really improved it, and the story they told accomplished several different things in one moment. Smart booking. Naito is one of the ugliest guys in the business. Louie Anderson's face with Carol Burnett's hair. I liked his flurry of leg sweeps in the corner, but his other offense sucked, and doing that “eye-popping” mannerism a hundred times was terrible. Corino saying the same was amusing. I never buy Naito as a star on any level, and this was no different. Tanahashi was OK, but you can tell that injuries are catching up to him. Weird dynamic in that they were trying to be heels and it wasn't working. Sydal botching ridiculous spots and putting zero force into his strikes suggests that tripping balls in Fitzcarraldo country hasn't helped his work. “Regressed” Matt Sydal is more like it. ACH looked good, and there were times where he the glue holding it together by getting guys back into position and controlling the pacing of spots – young guy keeping three veterans in check. Crowd chanting got tedious, but that's almost to be expected in a match like this. This badly exposed the NJ duo outside of their bubble. Dean Ambrose does a pretty funny Nigel impression, and during the whole contract signing I found myself wishing there was some way for Ambrose to portray the role of Nigel on ROH TV. They're about the same size nowadays. McGuinness is often mocked online lately, but he really did come off as a goon with no mic skills here, or at least no clue of what to say. Also: couldn't quite tell, but was that a mechanical pencil? Who signs a contract in mechanical pencil? Are they gonna run a Dusty finish where Truth Martini has subtly erased Lethal's name from the contract to render it null and void? If this is the biggest match in company history, they should be signing with a bald eagle feather dipped into a giant inkwell. Still, they did a good job and it came off better than most signings on the strength of Lethal's promo.

There may be more “upside” in Owens over the next few years, if you see him as a more broadly usable character. He can more easily turn face/heel, he'll suffer less from losses, and his whole persona is simple. That said, Rusev is the better investment longterm if he can stay healthy. Has many more years in the tank, and I enjoy him more than Owens, both as a character and a worker. Maybe even as a promo, and I'm someone who thinks Rusev shouldn't have said one word in English for at least another year. He's not some Boris and Natasha caricature. He can easily transfer into a character who is a monster first and a foreigner second. To answer the poll question more specifically: Rusev should have beaten Cena in that feud. I like the Cena Open Challenge a lot, but Rusev should have been the one to take the title back. Maybe he will in time, but it shouldn't have come after so many losses. He needed the win much more than Owens did. No one expected Owens to randomly show up and beat Cena. It's cool that he did, but the two aren't mutually exclusive. Strong heel Rusev could have taken the US title off Cena this summer, with Owens coming in and beating Cena with a decisive win at a later date. Or have Owens come in and beat a different main eventer (though I do think Cena's the best for the job, and the most natural fit to work against Owens). Or as Skinner said, have Reigns be the guy to beat Rusev. Regardless, Rusev losing 3 straight to Cena was really thoughtless booking, and you can see right now that for whatever reason they have him in their minds as a midcarder. Which is quite dumb as they spent a year straight booking him really strong, only to job him out to the last guy in the company who needed that rub.

To the three people of thirty-one who prefer Tenta to Williams: what do I need to watch to feel the same way? I'll give this dismissal of Great Matches in favor of “the little things” that Tenta does so well a shot. “It's the notes he's not playing, man.” OK, fair enough. What are the great performances? Or great moments? Or great anything that surpasses Williams? Point me in the right direction. There was a Tenta appreciation thread on DVDVR as well. I remember honestly Youtubing a ton of Tenta from various different points in his career. Reading career overviews to see if I'd missed something. Really trying to give him a fair shake. Everything I watched made me think even less of him than I already did. His singles matches in WAR against Haku, Arashi, and Kitao are horrible, and those are the closest parallel he has to Williams-in-AJ that I know of. You'd be hard pressed to find a giant who looks less imposing than Tenta. He doesn't come off as a killer. He comes off as the most depressed video store clerk I've ever seen. Maybe he has great stuff there that I've yet to find. Maybe there are two minute squashes from mid-90s WCW that would change everything. Just rewatched Summerslam with Hogan, and if there's ever been a match in which Hogan carried someone, that is it. Hogan's awesome in that match. Jimmy Hart is great. Bossman as cornerman is really fun. Even 1990 Dino Bravo looks better stooging than Tenta did as the focal point of the match. (Does that mean we missed out on 1990 Dino Bravo's tour-de-force hypothetical run in Japan? If Bravo had been given the opportunity to be booked as a star by Maeda in UWF, would Dino Bravo would have looked as good or better than Fujiwara? We'll never know.) Everyone in that Summerslam match works so hard to make Tenta look great. They booked him as strong as possible, such better treatment than WWF typically gave heels at the time: he was presented like a total beast who Hogan and Bossman double-teaming could barely keep at bay. I don't see him there as a victim of bad booking. Yet bell to bell, Tenta remains plodding, slow, and utterly without any fire behind his work. To turn the hypotheticals around, I have zero doubt that Hogan and Williams having a 20 minute PPV main event would have been much, much better.

This requires more thought, but the only Cena matches I've liked less on rewatch are the two WM mains with Rock, which sucked even live at the time. Hip-Hop Cena in particular is a great comedic character that became a believable character who people got behind, which is kind of the ideal WWE model: start off bombastic and crazy, get over because crowds buy into your status (Savage, Bret, Austin, Eddy). Cena's matches would also benefit from being viewed independent of the dull, repetitive booking that he's had to overcome. The Cena backlash is less a reaction to his wrestling and more to his character. I should rewatch the two big Cena-Michaels matches, as that era of HBK is second only to the Angle match for divisive "Michaels is the best/worst" reactions. Not even sure if Cena would make my list, but he's borderline and all the admiration of Dusty this week gives me acute respect for guys booked in the main event. You can say that's biased and that others would have excelled given the same opportunities, but no worker - or match for that matter, which is to say, work of art - exists in a bubble. Cena is judged by obscenely high expectations of what he is or could have been, and he's someone who shined in the spotlight and rose to the opportunity he was given, particularly in spite of bad booking and a lack of career variety.

This has become my favorite podcast on Earth. Please keep making it so that we can keep enjoying it. That promo that opens the show where he's saying that "Elvis is on the line", talking about how they're gonna meet up is so haunting today. Seventeen dancing go-go bears, now and forever.

1982 Memphis is in the running. Lawler and Dundee still tagging a bunch. An incredible episode of TV built around Lawler-Flair. Two of the best American feuds ever in Lawler-Dutch and Lawler-Bockwinkel, the latter of which led to one of the greatest promos of all time. Bobby Eaton and Koko Ware tagging. The emergence of the Fabulous Ones, Adrian Street, and Jimmy Hart, who at his peak was one of the most gifted TV performers in wrestling history. The show was innovative and massively popular, with Lance Russell, Jerry Jarrett, and Lawler all at the top of their game. Memphis was awesomely built for studio TV, but at no point did it better exemplify the "Muppet Show" world-building concepts that TomK and others have described in defining why it was so special.

For some reason, the thing that first came to mind was Naylor's beautiful story of sitting in Florida at a picnic table at lunch one day, just him and Dusty. And there being this pause where they're sitting in the sun, unwrapping their food, and Dusty starts cutting this "living on the end of a lightning bolt" style promo about eating lunch with Rob Naylor. Just for the two of them. Just to amuse themselves. I always remembered that story. Those are the great, intimate moments in any life, when people are kinder than they need to be.

I realize this is a thread about fantasy booking 1999/2000. But the thing about "saving" the company is that the reason Kellner and Siegel publicly gave for dropping wrestling wasn't that WCW was bleeding money. It was that their hugely popular networks lacked brand identity. They wanted TNT and TBS to be viewed as upscale, and wrestling was the opposite of that. They candidly said so in the New York Times, with more forthright honesty than you typically get from executives. If you take them at their world, it had less to do with ratings or money and more to do with the new boss disliking wrestling. To save the company from that philosophy, you would have had to either: * get someone above Kellner - the guy who'd been made new head of TBS two weeks earlier - to overrule his first order of business, * dramatically change the show's presentation into something as reputable as, say, the NBA, or present-day UFC at minimum, * or find a new network fast, which they tried and couldn't do. Even if the ship had been steered back into place in '99, I'm not convinced that great creative and better ratings would have even saved them in '01. The landscape was so against them at that moment. In the same way that Bischoff was "in the Hogan business", the media was never "into" wrestling. They were into the Rock and Austin. Keep in mind that at this same moment of truth for WCW, the XFL was bombing on a colossal level, starting the month before WCW went under. As weird as it sounds, that absolutely had a hand in networks wanting nothing to do with anything that smelled like wrestling.

Punk would have you believe that in another era he would have been Stone Cold meets Randy Savage. I tend to think he would have been Jesse Barr meets Eddie Gilbert. He was a creation of his time, not a victim of it.

Meltzer is dropping a cryptic rumor - said to be explained in full in the next Observer - that has people speculating that WWE is either trying to buy WWNLive, or is working with Sapolsky in some fashion. I have no idea what that means and am not making any assumptions, but there's some kind of partnership/interest afoot that smells vaguely like DGUSA/Evolve becoming an official farm system. Nothing more than Meltzer speaking in the vaguest of terms on his god-forsaken message board, but a curious situation nonetheless.

It's as if everyone involved in their radio shows read my apologist praise and in turn decided to be as loathsome as possible this week. Great stuff.

6/6: Solid opening promo from the Addiction. ROH starting each week with a one minute pre-tape always seems much more effective than the molasses openings to RAW/SD. Match was lame. Heels' unrealistic stooging didn't work for me while they clunked heads and fumbled around in such an obvious mismatch. Another good O'Reilly performance, but too many absurd spots. Was going to ask why do no other faces come out to help or support O'Reilly in the corner while facing ludicrous odds, but at least they had ACH and bearded post-ayahuaska Sydal make the save. Liger-Dalton was the greatest thing ever. Even if this had just been an amusement, I'd have been happy. But they actually had a hell of a match. Strong strikes and dives from Liger, who with stuff like this improves his ranking on my top 100 all-time. Castle makes his case for being one of the more entertaining acts on the indies: strong hybrid of character and finesse in-ring. Like the best exoticos, he's got the chops to actually kick someone's ass while peacocking. Shades of Cassandro here. Castle saved this show, and he looks as NXT-ready as anyone in the company. Evans-Cheeseburger was so brief that they didn't get anything going, more angle than match. Evans is from the great tradition of in-house wrestling trainers who look less athletic than anyone they're training. I've never liked his work and this was no exception. Agree that neither of these guys should be on TV. Main event was OK, but again felt like a short tease for something more down the road. Taven/Bennett as IWGP champs is bizarre, even knowing how much NJ likes Maria. Karl Anderson's not very good, but at least he's figured out that in America he can get by on a decent Buzz Sawyer impersonation. I like Gallows and this was something of a return to form after some boring outings in NJ. Good clubbering from him, and this told a fine story of the Club as two wild and crazy guys. Cabana's podcast with them suggests they're pretty funny dudes, so they might as well add it to their act as dueling Stone Colds. Agree that having territorial rotating cast of characters really helps these shows. Contract signings always suck, but I'm actually curious to see Lethal and Briscoe face off next week. But Lethal needs better clothes if he's going to continue playing arrogant moneyed heel. He's dressing like 2015 Ric Flair, when he should be dressing like 1986 Flair. Off-the-rack sport coat and gray t-shirt are glaring when your manager is a bargain basement version of Don Callis.

I disagree with the idea that NXT’s booking is “smark” hardcore stuff that can't work on main roster TV. TNA is “smark” booking. NXT is a territory. Full Sail audience is a bunch of chanting online geeks. Fair enough. But applying Dusty Rhodes booking to RAW would still vastly improve RAW. NXT is built on concepts which drew casual fans in 1978, 1988, 1998. Some people think Russo killed those concepts and that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but NXT disproves that thinking. 8 hours a week of WWE is rough, but it’s not impossible to remain entertaining. Superstars and Main Event are RAW recaps + 2 short matches apiece. NXT solves itself. RAW and SD are the problems, largely because the McMahons have no faith in SD, which ended the brand extension. Repetitive booking post-unification suggests they were better off with unique stars on each show. Imagine if Cena/Rusev had happened exclusively on SD. Or SD was able to give guys like Slater, Samoa Joe, Titus, and Harper more purpose. No reason they couldn’t subtlety move back in that direction. You're starting to see less saturation of certain guys. Reigns is out of the spotlight and better for it. Orton skips the last PPV. Wyatt/Lesnar/Jericho come in and out as needed. The problem right now isn’t just overexposure (though guys like Ziggler and the Divas def. suffer from it) as much as its repeating the same matches over and over. Barrett-Neville being done to death for no reason before they even have a chance to get any heat. The pace of RAW, SD, and the PPVs still needs to be considerably slowed down, with more variance in the matches booked. Some say it's Vince constantly changing his mind and refusing to book longterm. There's no "two months from now" for anyone save the top 3-5 stars. The writers don't get to book things at a thoughtful pace, and it becomes easier to rehash decent matches to death. This ignores how bad most of their writers are, but that’s another story. For years, there have been almost no storylines or angles for anyone below the main event. Everyone else is thrown into random, meaningless matches. Has Barrett had a memorable feud since his very first as Nexus leader five years ago? Can you recall from memory what Kofi or Big Show were doing this time last year, or the year before that? Despite a huge roster and huge writing staff, none of these guys are ever given character development, storylines, genuine feuds, or any sense of finality to anything onscreen. They don’t even have personas to screw up, and on the rare occasions when they develop one (Barrett’s “bad news” as an example), it’s quickly watered-down and killed. We don't often discuss the degree to which the McMahons don't want individual workers to get over. They want the brand to be over. They want vague corporate concepts that mean nothing to get over. That Eisenhower fellowship that Steph did is infinitely more important to what they value than whether or not Cesaro draws crowds, or even who's holding the world title this time next year. All of that bland "WWE Universe" rhetoric is more engrained than we think when we have message board conversations about who should be pushed and what should be booked.

Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but I enjoy (or at least mindlessly listen to) most WON radio. It’s more “talk radio” than “podcast”. Like all talk radio, it’s to be taken with a grain of salt. Dave’s knowledge is the #1 reason to subscribe. His taste in what’s good is suspect, but him thinking Tanahashi and Edge are the greatest of a generation doesn’t really annoy me. Thinking Fujiwara shouldn’t be in a HOF because Fujiwara “held back” Suzuki and Funaki in PWFG is an example of Dave's odd, selective narrative of history, but his intentions are good. Alvarez is wrong most of the time and has a bad voice for radio, but he rarely irks me. He’s a blowhard, but he’s the one driving the bus. Seems to have matured some in recent months: screaming less, less off-base fantasy booking, handing his newsletter over to Bix, etc. SportsByline has a call screener/producer, though he may be useless as you have the same pathetic goons (Ed in San Antonio, John from Memphis, Ryan from Maryland, James from Kentucky) calling every day. I believe some annoyed listeners even offered to donate $2/day to Whitney's whale watch for every show where Ryan wasn't the first caller, and the dude still does it every day. They need to get those buffoons to ease up, but I’m not sure if it’s that those guys are the only ones calling, or if they’re just obsessively first in the queue and SB doesn’t care enough to skip them. As I understand it, Alvarez has actually contacted each of them and asked them to call less often, but they’re such creeps that they don’t abide. Still, Bryan should just pull a Howard Stern/Tom Scharpling and get them off the line ASAP. “Who is this and where are you calling from” doesn’t feel overly unprofessional to me and I’m never paying attention to who’s calling from where. These shows aren’t being done at a radio station with legit resources. They’re being done with zero overhead in a homemade studio at Bryan’s house. But sure, if there’s an easy tech fix that would solve it that Alvarez isn’t making, that’s stubborn foolishness. Sempervive is a good co-host, better than Bryan is most respects. Better voice, better humor, better off the cuff, more knowledgeable of wrestling, other sports, the media landscape, etc. Lance Storm is mediocre. When he’s presenting a veteran worker’s knowledge of the business he can be great. When he’s nitpicking RAW he’s a joke. Steve Sims can be boring/repetitive in his views, but he’s only on 1-2 times a month, and without him and Zellner the site would have zero lucha coverage. Todd Martin is a trifling nerd and they're better off without him, but I do miss his "Observor" recap segments. I've only listened to Coughlin's show once, and it was so awful that I never went back. Totally disagree with the prior dislike of Tom Lawlor. He's definitely not on 2-3 times a week. He's there once a week, and the day shifted from Mon. to Weds. this week to accommodate his schedule. Yesterday’s show with him was the best WON in weeks if not months: Dave and Bryan were much more upbeat than usual, and the MMA/wrestling split was well balanced. I find Lawlor to be witty, and it’s cool that a legit UFC fighter can offer both his experiences of Fertitta meetings and weekly analysis of stuff like Lucha Underground/WWE Superstars. Vinny has gotten pretty bad, and now sounds like he’s just there to collect a paycheck. Too negative/bored by everything: his apathy is a chore to listen to. But when he finds something he likes, like the rediscovery of early Nitro, he can be very enjoyable. And in general as a character he's someone I used to root for, as the put-upon but amiable target of Bryan's wrath. And I enjoy Craig a lot: comes off as a good dude, usually much more fair than B&V are, has some good one-liners. Granny is a complete embarrassment, but listeners like myself can easily just fast forward 20 mins to get past her segment. TL;DR: WON radio shows are a mixed bag (and the diehards who call in/frequent that cesspool message board tend to suck), but I enjoy listening and think most of the hosts’ hearts are in the right place.

I still like the Prime Time Players being one of the last two teams, but this is definitely a show that looks even worse in the light of day than it did live. It was a house show haphazardly made into a "Network Event", and in hindsight feels careless and slapdash, even with Cena-Owens and the title changes. But so it goes when their business model is "More More More".

Not sure if it's the way the ring is mic'ed or the volume I'm watching this at, but everyone seems to be loudly calling spots tonight. Cena, Dolph, Paige, Rollins, the ref in the main event, even Cesaro.

It was either genius or dumb luck that they had Bryan there to get this over. Feel good ending, and Ryback's a fun choice. But yes, lousy disjointed match that really needed Rusev.