brockobama

The thing is, as much as an agent can be instrumental in laying out a framework or giving advice on certain ideas or whatever, you still need two or more people in the ring clicking and doing that stuff correctly to make a good match. In the same way that your special teams coach can run you through all manner of drills and prepare you for the play and set you in the right direction, you still have to be the one out there on the field catching the punt and running it down. For the most part good training or good production or good agenting can't cover up a total lack of skill/instinct/confidence/etc., or at least not to the same degree that a good wrestler in the ring with someone lacking those things can, I think. There's also the problem that we don't really know who's agenting what most of the time. That sheet for Backlash or whatever it was got out and that was a neat peek behind the curtains, but beyond just having a general list of names we don't know who's covering what matches in WWE, right? TNA has agents from what I understand but I'm even more in the dark there. The way certain office guys are mentioned in New Japan it sounds like the same position is being filled there, but I don't know for a fact. This isn't as easy as going on IMDb and looking up who the cinematographer was on a certain flick; there's a bigger barrier to praising good agenting in wrestling. It's not like this shouldn't be considered when evaluating wrestling to some degree. One of the most common excuses you'll hear about people failing in WWE for any period of time is bad agenting. That's as much a part of booking as who wins and who loses, if not more so. I just don't know how we, in this current state, can evaluate this influence thoroughly.

OSW (guess what the acronym is) Reviews

CZW. I have a genuine love for deathmatches and while the promotion truly does do and has done so much more than that, everything they do is covered in this veneer of grime and vulgarity that appeals to some deep layer of my dumb white boy lizard brain. It was so rarely ever good--and I wouldn't argue if you'd say it never was--but that in itself is almost part of the draw. Between the slew of charismatic trash monsters in the locker room over the years or the dozens of dumb, instantly recognizable highspots, it's very much a promotion for the wrestling music video generation and that community was a big part of my early fandom.

Does this make David Otunga objectively the most attractive man in wrestling for landing Jennifer Hudson?

I have zero real knowledge about his career before IWRG but Black Terry immediately came to mind when pulling this thread up.

Long before I realized I swung both ways I thought it was weird that I found just about no female wrestlers attractive. That didn't change until the crop of ladies popping up in the 2010s and I branched out into older stuff. There's probably a good chunk of 15-20ish years after the early/mid 90s where I only really dig one or two women active at the time. Guess I'll touch on some of the male wrestlers mentioned here too. Rollins' rattiness, while it does nothing for me, is 100% a big draw for a certain demographic. Ditto the sort of sleazy vibe you get from Ambrose, Dunne, etc. It's not all that far removed from the Hardys' alt-white trash hunk status that bled directly into other off kilter people over the years like Edge, Punk, to some degree Balor. Never occurred to me before but Parv's totally right about Ted. Charming, good hair, good laugh, natural body type. Could really develop a thing for the guy if I saw more stuff from his younger days. Bret's definitely overrated but there's something about the guy. Rustic, plain spoken handyman sort of handsomeness. A guy you can trust to take care of the pipes in winter. Famously had no hog but you make do with what you got. Tanahashi's got a similar vibe but he's obviously more of a pretty boy than a day laborer. Basically hated his hair forever and his barrel chest is too much for me but sometimes you catch him in the right light and the dude's gorgeous. Ibushi's strictly attractive but there's nothing there for me. Too plastic and cold. Dead behind the eyes. Fairly certain he skins cats in his spare time. Young Minoru Suzuki is probably the most attractive wrestler there's ever been, for me. Sharp features, great hair, tons of personality, just the right size. Certified hunk. Kinda surprised no one's mentioned Cena. He looks sort of less... human with every passing year, but Marine era Cena has a real charm. Obviously a guy with a ton of charisma and winning smile. In the same vein as Bret and Suzuki, Regal's got a huge appeal. Most daddyish wrestler behind Jushin Liger. Current guys who do it for me are the likes of Shibata, David Starr, and Dash Wilder. Guess I like hairy chests.

I think his WWE run so far is a little more layered. I'd definitely agree that it's been the weakest in-ring stretch of his career, though I'd point to a few high end matches other people might not. The Lesnar match is better to me than all but one or two of his NJPW bouts and I know there are people who would say the same of his Roman and Cena matches. More than that, though, I'm surprised by how well he's fit into the general format of WWE production and storytelling. It's not like he didn't spend a decade on TV with TNA but for a straightlaced southern boy who I've never considered a particularly good talker he's handled the transition to doing 15-20 minutes of promos most every week surprisingly well, especially considering that he's given material like the whole "beat up John Cena" shtick. As KawadaSmile mentioned, that Owens/Zayn feud should have been way worse and wasn't because of him. I loved the Ellsworth feud to death and I don't think it works nearly so well if anyone else in the company is doing that story. Despite being a guy who probably always would have been perceived as an awesome in-ring worker and little else, the dude's held his own in the "makin' movies" promotion.

Just that it's rather bland. Doesn't impress or intrigue me in any real way unless he's doing a special sort of match like the Tier 1 bout with Garrini last year.

I really like MJF but only in settings where he's not wrestling. During (or maybe more specifically before, in pre-match promos) his own matches his heel work degrades into the same old bullshit in my eyes and while it's not strictly bad it's just boring. Even more boring are his actual matches. Absolutely love the guy as a corner man or a commentator but I'd rather not see him in the ring until he gets a few more years of experience under his belt. EDIT: I don't know if there was an actual story behind it, but the name change is hilarious to me too. Did he not know about Feinstein or what that name might mean in indie wrestling, especially in the northeast? Too funny.

Yeah this latter idea is sort of how I feel about it. If I had the choice I'd sort of rather not know who every masked wrestler is before they're unmasked but it's a useful bit of knowledge for our sorts of purposes when talking about wrestling and especially in regards to something like GWE. I'd think of Drew Gulak and Fire Ant highly just based on what they've each done under those names but considering the Soldier Ant and Orange Cassidy stuff too it's hard for me to not think of them as top 100 contenders.

Actually been thinking about this a lot recently because a few weeks back I happened to watch the two most famous film adaptations of the mutiny on the HMS Bounty, both the 1935 classic with Clark Gable and the fantastic Charles Laughton as well as the 1962 version with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard. The latter's a pretty famous box office bomb that was also panned critically for decades, being seen as this overlong, aimless, unrefined retread of what was already a well-regarded film. Though I recognize the '35 version as much tighter and more cohesive, generally a better film in just about every way, I enjoyed the '62 version much more for how it reveled in its characters and relayed the passage of time and let things build to a boil naturally as opposed to all at once. At the same time I've been reviewing 1996 WWF and have really enjoyed a lot of the RAWs despite their general lack of quality because they're so to the point. With most of these matches it's a real simple idea of "this guy is plain ol' better than this guy" or "this guy has a superior strategy" or "this guy can capitalize on the other guy's mistakes" or what have you and the quick, efficient telling of those stories is really enjoyable. It's been hard to go back and watch 2018 matches for the most part because I'll find similar ideas played out over two, three, four times as much time but done more lazily or aimlessly or just in a less interesting way. Not to say that Crush squash matches are better than the New Japan Cup stuff I've been trying to get through but Crush has the benefit of brevity and even if he's boring he's only boring for four minutes at most. So I dunno. I think it's sort of an inverted bell curve where I tend to like the smaller stuff where there's little wasted time/space but I also tend to like the drawn out matches that go in a lot of directions. It's not always perfect on either end of the curve but I'd take a lot of those matches over the 20-40 minute matches that dominate most of industry.

Llave

I do think Zack's character does smooth out some of his rougher edges and I've come around on him a lot but man, the dude's still one of the most frustrating wrestlers today and his technical work is a huge part of that.

Watched this again recently for the first time in a long time since I'm reviewing Austin era stuff for my blog. Classic match, best thing in either man's career up to this point, huge highlight in a bad time for the company, huge spots still hold up, etc etc. You've heard it all before. The thing that stood out to me this time around was how believably you could buy Shawn as an actual heel in this match, depending on your frame of view. After all the shit he pulls at SummerSlam and how Vader is treated in general, Shawn coming into this match hot and applying some notably aggressive knee work (including a figure four that I've worked myself into believing was a dig at Foley by way of Flair) and eventually going as far as just whacking the dude in the knee with a steel chair, it really reads to me like he's supposed to be the bad guy. But at the same time you can see it as a mere human being backed into the corner after weeks of psychological warfare by a pair of real freaks and trying to survive by any means he can. Fun twist in a match that I already thought very highly of. By the by, where's this "worked botch" talk come from, Foley's book? With the way it segues almost directly into the Mandible Claw tease it's easy to see it as a work, I guess, but I sort of don't buy Shawn as that convincing of an actor.

I think the big question is who exactly these 'current wrestlers' are. That's easily the group of votes I know least about. Is Dave handing out ballots to guys who worked with Bryan extensively or is it just his pals like Jericho who may or may not be in love with the guy?

I, for one, would love to see Cena try and write a puppet-based Dracula musical.

What are you talking about, brother, he had the Million Dollar Dream. re: the Bret/Austin talk, though, to what degree does this overrated talk stem from people thinking the Survivor Series match is better? Did that mindset exist immediately from the time of WM13 or did that only build and build in the years afterward? As for my own answers a few spring to mind. Most of the lesser AJPW fivers, basically anything that has anybody but the core four and Jumbo/Fuchi before them feels overplayed to me. Joe/Kobashi is probably the only ROH match that holds up to that level for me, though I might go high on a few Dave didn't. The big one(s) for me, though, are WarGames. I recognize that a huge part of my disconnect is merely an unfamiliarity, as I know just about nothing about the build and every attempt I make at doing a deep dive into WCW ends with frustration about TV, but even aside from that they're just sort of above average cage matches to me. I also think that the man advantage/strategy of them never hits quite where I'd like it to. Were I a star-rating man I'd still have them around or above four flakes, since it's a whole bunch of mega-talented dudes going all out, but none of the ones I've seen have ever struck me on a "this is one of the best matches of all time" level.

I guess you could say that that's the problem, but yeah, I'm mostly indifferent to it all past the "well that's dumb" phase.

So much more incest and watersports discussion on this episode than I ever would have imagined.

Makes sense. I've seen them called that elsewhere, but it was from people who I know are big PWO lurkers.

Ditto regarding Okabayashi and Hama. Delightful matchup.

Been meaning to ask this for a long time and this seems as good a place as any to do it: where did the El Clasico and El Super Clasico titles for 6/3/1994 and 6/9/1995 come from? Obviously it seems like they're ripped right from football/soccer, but it seems like an odd thing to me, using a pair of Spanish sports titles to refer to a pair of Japanese matches. Who coined these terms? How long have they been around?

One that makes a lot of sense but was very frustrating and over-emphasized in my experience was vets grilling guys on how to properly feed for their opponent when getting up. Stuff like making sure to always use one specific hand to sell with and one specific side of your body to rise off the mat with, which sometimes differed between vets.

The Deford article led me to read The Boxer and The Blonde for the first time in a number of years, so thanks for that, I guess.

What was Bret's take on Angle? I could easily be wrong, but I can't imagine he had anything but glowing things to say about the guy. I wonder if Angle's trajectory changes at all with direct Bret influence.