joeg

Canis Lupus vs Trauma was the best match this year by a snowy country mile. This wasn't just match of the year, I'd say it was easily one of my favorite matches from the past 10-15 years.

Personally I think puroresu is just easier to get into. I think the psychology and the rules of lucha make it hard to get into for people who grew up watching WWF/E or WCW. A two hour television broadcast featuring 4 matches that are each a half hour long. Each match is a 6 man tag, captain's fall, two out of three falls. There are a different set of rules for each team. The rules for lucha libre (CMLL in particular) are so convoluted it makes it hard to follow for first time watchers. Then you combine that with that there are no angles and fueds develop slowly and the number of matches on a card that don't mean anything. It just makes lucha libre very difficult for some people to get into. Its the same thing with shoot style or WOS. It is just so different it can be a challenge adjusting. With puroresu, you can start watching puroresu not understanding the deep psychology or the fueds or the angles. At 15 I didn't. I got into it loving the stiff strikes, head drops, athletic spots, and clean finishes. So just from an entry point, the violence of Japanese wrestling can make it more appealing, then once somebody has become engrossed with it, its easier to follow the more substanitive aspects of puroresu than it is lucha libre. I can articulate why my favorite Japanese matches and fueds are worth watching to a friend who only watches ROH and Lucha Underground. I struggled to explain the signifigance of Atlantis vs Ultimo Guerrero and Atlanits vs Sombra to that same guy.

It doesn't assume all of that. It assumes that Bret was leaving and they were willing to let him leave rather than match the WCW offer. It also assumes that they needed some really big angle to make up for him leaving. Nope. In the Owen Hart wrongful death lawsuit, WWE, I guess because of how strong the family's case was and a lack of options, decided to base their defense on the idea that Bret was masterminding the lawsuit as revenge for Montreal (yes, it's as ridiculous as it sounds). This was addressed under oath in depositions, where Bret refuted the idea and, if the whole thing was a work, could have just admitted it and blown WWE's stupid idea to pieces. But he didn't. because it wasn't a work. Yeah, I don't know about that. How many wrestlers have maintained kayfabe under oath? We've all seen the video of Hogan trying to split hairs and stay in character while talking about the size of his penis while under oath.

I'm of the opinion that Montreal was a work. And have been for a long time. It just makes more sense than anything else. For it to be a work, only 5 or 6 people would need to be in on it. If it were a shoot, why would there have been a documentary film crew there? Two wrestling documentaries came out in a 3 year span that made Vince McMahon look like the sleaziest human being alive. And both had full access to the WWF. That wasn't an accident. Both Wrestling With Shadows and the WWF and many segments in Beyond the Mat are complete works IMO. If it were a shoot, wouldn't it make more sense to put Ken Shamrock in there? Then have Shamrock drop the belt to Michaels the next PPV. Michaels doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would do well if things went south in a shoot. Also if it were a shoot, how did Owen Hart stay for the next two years? Davey Boy and Neidhart left, but Owen stayed. Also WWF came out of Montreal way ahead than if Bret had simply dropped the title. There was nuclear level heat, white heat, fan jump a gaurd rail and stab somebody heat on Michaels, Vince McMahon, and the company in general. No ordinary title change could have created that. Plus the way they have been talking about it for the past 20 years non stop is so self congradulitory. To me, it has to be a work.

Taue/Shiozaki vs Kenta/Shibata is one of my favorites. NOAH had so many guys who were great as firey promising young guys early In their career but never really had the same success in their prime years as they did in their late teens/early 20s. Shiozaki, Kenta, Marafuji, Riko, Nakajima, Morishima, etc. It boggles my mind.

It's not new. I saw it on youtube a long time ago. There was a video of that incident that got uploaded on youtube way back in 2006 that still shows up when doing a Bing video search (although it seems to have been removed from youtube now) It was definitely a work. I remember reading somewhere that to pull it off Invader 3 drank a bunch of pig's blood before the match so it'd look good when he did the "internal injury" blood spitting deal. Gif of incident is in the spoiler (it's pretty gross) I had always heard it was a shoot... That Fernandez threw all his weight into Invader and broke his sternum and punctured his lung. The gif makes it look more like a work though.

That was a rumor. Part of that rumor was that ECW would end up moving from MSG Network and TNN to ESPN 2. Another rumor was that due to the AOL Time Warner merger, WCW would get the plug pulled and ECW would get Thunder's slot. Another rumor was that some record executive was going to buy the company.

There was an interview with Punk awhile back where he was talking about working on the indies. Laying out the matches guys who were hacks would say stuff like "i hope its ok that I work strong style" and Punk always made the point that no they didn't work strong style because it wasn't 1982 and they weren't working for Inoki. What many indie guys perceive as strong style is just potatoeing the other guy, which is kind of being a dick. Strong style hasn't been a thing for a long time. In theory Strong Style is whatever style New Japan is working. But right now their style is a lot closer to the style the New Japan juniors were working 20 years ago than what Inoki marketed as Strong Style. The only guys working that style right now on the New Japan roster are the guys who were trained by Inoki or Choshu. And more importantly, its more than a style. Its an attitude and a belief that pro wrestlers should be able beat any shooter in a shoot. Its the belief that pro wrestling is the most superior form of martial arts. If anything killed strong style it was Cro Cop and Fedor beating all of the New Japan heavyweights pretty easily in Pride. I think the mixed style fights where Inoki defended the legitimacy of pro wrestling were really what strong style is all about. And I think Pride sort of killed that.

Paul Heymen is the greatest worker of all time.

I stopped watching as a kid because I figured out it was fake. I was like 7 or 8. Got back into it 4 or 5 years later.

I think any style that is so fake that it exposes the business can be be bad for business. I'll throw Chikara and DDT and those sorts of niche promotions in this pile. Also any promotion that has an in ring style that is excessively violent or excessively dangerous can be bad for business. It won't be initially, crazy head drops, barbed wire matches, and crazy bumbs will all initially be draws to the promotion. But over time fans become desenstized to the violence, wrestler's careers are cut short, and business begins to suffer. I'll throw 90s All Japan, NOAH, ECW, FMW, Attitude Era, etc into this pile. So anything over the top cartoony or anything excessively dangerous and career threating to the top wrestlers I see as bad for business. I just look at the Attitude Era and think if the in ring style was a little less violent, would we have gotten Austin and Foley wrestling into their late 30s or early 40s? Would Shawn Michaels not needed 4 years off?

I mean Starcade did something like 700k + buys, and then the next 3 PPVs did something like 400k + buys. Then it fell off a cliff once Sting dropped the title. Everybody's hyped over Goldberg's return right now, but long and short term doesn't losing in 30 seconds hurt Lesnar's marketability as the baddest man on the planet. Also does anybody see WWE getting over 2 million PPV buys worth of revenue out of this?

No really, being serious. I don't see what's wrong with the highest grossing American show of the decade. Yeah the main event was shitty (was there any chance it could have been good?) , but as a kid I was just glad Sting won.

I don't understand. What was wrong with Sting vs Hogan?

This. However I'm not always sure what draws money is what excites the crowd. There is a long history in wrestling of the exciting match on a card not being the match that was drawing the money. And usually those matches are usually completely different styles.

I wasn't just using Chappelle. Who hasn't heard a friend, coworker, family member tell them a Trump grab em by the pussy joke in the past 3 weeks? And the best SNL joke was a little girl saying "my daddy says President Trump wants to stop and frisk my black cat" which I thought was hilarious. Reasons for Styles to be fired- he broke kayfabe and he made a political (sortof) joke when he was instructed not to. Nobody should argue that the joke was offensive. Because it wasn't. It especially wasn't offensive compared to a lot of the shit I've seen booked on Gabe Sapolsky shows in the past. Things that have been listed earlier in this thread that would qualify as hate crimes or domestic violence outside of wrestling. You can't book the some shit Gabe has booked in the 5, 10, 15, years and then come back and fire somebody for a Trump grab em by the pussy joke on the grounds of it being offensive. Shit back when CM Punk was still in ROH I dragged some friends to one of his send off shows. They did an angle with Nana that was so fucking offensive, so masoginistic that I had to apologize for bringing them to the show. If I brought people to Evolve 72, I wouldn't have to apologize for Styles' joke.

Huh. So if it were a funny joke about Donald Trump and his grab em by the pussy scandal, you would still be deeply offended?

Grimmas have you seen the bit or did you just read he made a Trump grab 'em by the pussy joke?

I hate this PC shit. Deplorable? Really? I'd go with not offensive but not funny either. Did anybody catch SNL this week? They made at least a half dozen grab 'em by the pussy jokes, all of which were funny. I probably hear at least two or three Trump jokes a week at work, all of which are worse than this. I just find the hypocracy to be mind boggling. 7 years ago, I was at a wrestling show booked by Gabe Sapolzski where a guy stabbed a women with a spike and that was his babyface turn. That is deplorable. If anything a Donald Trump grab em by the pussy joke is played out.

I thought the End match was fun, not great but fun. He has that it thing. He has a unique look. He looks like if one of the Dutch kickboxers from RINGS spent time in a Russian prison. He does cool shoot stuff in this modern era where UFC is all the rage. He has a shit load of personality. He's not vanilla, which 99% of the guys on the indies are. They are either small vanilla shooty guy or small vanilla flippy guy. Nothing about End is small and nothing about him is vanilla. He stands out in the crowd.

Tommy End and Matt Riddle are the two guys I see having some box office in them. You notice it so much more seeing them in person, how they just have that it, have that thing.

So went to Evolve 73. Had a lot of fun. The good- Tommy End vs some guy was fun. Riddle vs Hero was fucking awesome. Gulak vs ZSJ was pretty good too. The main event clusterfuck tag match was not bad. The bad- The crowd was fucking horrible. Absolutely horrible. Like the worst wrestling crowd ever. In a small crowd of two hundred some, there were at least a dozen guys in the crowd whose sole purpose for attending was to get themselves over. The rest of the crowd was pretty quiet which made them stand out even more. I can do quiet crowd that golf claps and pops for big moves by the babyface (the usual Washington DC crowd) , I can do rowdy drunk out of control crowd (the usual Philly crowd), I can't stand crowd with dudes that interrupt the flow of a match trying to get themselves over. Except for Hat Guy. The ugly- this was the weirdest venue I've ever been to. It was a warehouse in a strip mall, that shared a bathroom and concession stand with a flea market. Walking to the back of the sectioned off warehouse I wondered if there was dogfighting, bnb, or cockfight on nights there wasn't wrestling.

I'm probably going to Evolve tonight to see Riddle Hero 3.

I don't get the hype over the I'd like to talk to Tom angle... I don't mean to knit pick buuuut, Mystic comes out who obviously doesn't have a black eye, its shoe polish or paint, or something, its not even a good job with make up. It doesn't look anything like a black eye... I guess it would look like a black eye to somebody who has never seen a black eye before... But I'm a wrestling fan I can suspend my disbelief. Then Dirty White Boy attempts to lynch Tom Prichard. Which would be amazing except there are armed police officers working security 5 feet away who see Prichard struggling to breath but keep to their job of keeping an eye on the audience. I can't suspense my disbelief when 2 cops just walk by an attempted murder and are like "yeah, this is just part of the show, everybody in the front row settle down now"

Sasha. Not even close for me. I'm going to be contrarian here. Charlotte has always been pushed much, much stronger, so I don't know if that's influencing this at all. Here's things I don't like about Charlotte- like most young heels today, she really does a lot of babyface type big move. The biggest reaction in every one her matches is for her backflip or twisting backflip to the floor, heels doing cool shit is my biggest pet peeve. Bad guys are not supposed to do things that get cheers. She doesn't really draw heat on her own. The strongest heat she gets comes from one of the heaters they with her. Honestly, I'd like to see what sort of reaction she would get without Ric or Dana Brooke at ringside... my guess is people would oooh and aaah at ridiculous athleticism, but I don't know if she'd get the same, or any reaction. Sasha has gotten over on the main roster despite not having any main roster push until recently. She's always been more over than her push since she got pulled up. Plus when she worked heel in NXT she got legit heat, by herself.