Afro Steel

That finish felt really out of nowhere. You've got this seemingly critical moment where you can hear Roman telling Paul his shoulder is "gone" and 10 seconds later, he does a spear no problem and that's it? I'm OK with flash finishes, but this almost felt like the type of finish you do when someone's legit hurt and you've got to send it home early.

I watched this one for the first time in years the other night. Outside of the early Austin stuff, the first half of the match had the same vibes tonight's Rumble had: a lot of junk, minimal spots, and just a real sense of how hollow the roster was at the time. Of course, that changes from the Bret entrance on and you end the match with a pretty insane load of talent: Austin, Bret, Vader, Undertaker, Foley, Terry Funk, and Bluechipper Rocky... and fake Diesel, future Kane. Tonight, that just never materialized, both because the backend of the Rumble wasn't a lot better talent-wise than the front. But beyond that, it just illustrated once again how this company has managed to cycle through some of the best talent around over the last six or seven years and still have nothing else to fall back on than more Brock.

2014 and 2015 were all-time bad with the context of the Daniel Bryan storyline. This was just 1995 all-time boring/bad. I'll ding it even further for being creatively bankrupt, where as at least Shawn was a fresh main event player in 1995.

I thought the more telling (and damning) portion of this article is where they gave Prinz a utility closet to host his "promo school" in. It would sound absurd if it were not so on-brand for the sort of pettiness the WWE has mastered.

It didn't help that the crew of the original documentary were varying shades of sleazy/out there themselves. Her manager comes off as especially exploitative. Spiritual advisors as a whole usually comes off as snake oil salesmen, and that guy was no different. The director seemed to be an addict himself and only helped enable Chyna's substance abuse. The producer seems like he meant well enough, but was a bit of an oddball, too. As a whole, her story felt a lot more deflating than many of the DSotR subjects we've gotten. She made her own choices, but her upbringing made her vulnerable to poor decisions. Coupled with her unceremonious boot from WWF in 2001 and the subsequent erasure of her from programming, even during the boom of the nostalgia era, and it almost felt like her fate was sealed 15 years before she finally passed. What a hopeless and dark road to travel for such an extended period of time.

I thought the pull quotes from his blog paired with some of the sound bites from his speaking engagements was plenty to get across that he held some dogshit beliefs.

I was expecting way worse based on the "smut" disclaimer. Basically, Warrior had a girl in a lot of towns, was difficult to work with, and had some extremely distasteful views post-career. The ex-wife seems to have a refreshingly mature view of her relationship with marriage. It's clear she was hurt by things he did, but those things haven't left her bitter. She's able to acknowledge the good things he did and recall the more humane side of him. Ross and Cornette are the only ones who come out looking really bad in this. I do wish we'd drop this dated notion that Warrior was an all-time bad worker. He was sloppy, careless, and selfish, absolutely. He still rose to the occasion more times than not when he needed to. His WWF PPV track record during his first run is about as solid as anyone's from that era. You can attribute that to who he worked with, but just about all of those guys had their share of mediocre or bad PPV matches themselves. If Warrior was all-time bad, it doesn't stand to figure that he would've been capable of even being carried by these guys.

It's amusing, because watching the A&E piece, you wouldn't even know she necessarily shared the same views as Warrior. On the subject of Warrior's bigoted comments, she chalked it up to his voracious consumption of conservative talk radio. She framed it in a way where she almost sounds like the loyal wife who was reluctantly along for the ride. Heck, that would've been my takeaway had I not read on here about that she helped shape his conservative views.

I've been skipping the Piper/Brown match for decades. I didn't even like the match when I was a kid and gladly watched Skinner squash matches. Still, I'm torn on the precedent this sets. I do think it's a slippery slope when it comes to deeming what is and isn't acceptable for consumption, especially in an era where it seems like some people are looking to find fault in almost anything. But, I agree with those who are saying that the Network then and now (and maybe forever?) wasn't intended to be a permanent historical archive. Hell, content leaves other streaming platforms every month. In that sense, we got spoiled that relatively little content left the network over seven years. Moreover, NBC shelled out the bucks for the rights to the content, so it's their call on how they want to handle it.

Something to Wrestle has become almost intolerable to slog through. It was already losing its appeal to me when Bruce went back to WWE, mainly because the show's rigid structure didn't allow for a more compelling discussion to take place. It fell into a formula of Conrad reading through match results, Bruce shitting on Meltzer, overused bits ("What might that sound like..."), and of course, lots of ads sprinkled in there. But since Bruce's role with the company has expanded, the show has just completely run out of steam for me. It sounds like they record the show practically in the middle of the night because it's the only time Bruce is available. This leads to an even less inspired Bruce, who seems downright grouchy these days. There's also technical issues, including them having to basically due the Backlund episode a few weeks over the phone where Bruce sounded like he was on a 1997 car phone. Conrad has also been long exposed as an abysmal interviewer. On the few occasions Bruce comes up with an interesting story, Conrad almost never has any sort of follow-up questions. Sometime he doesn't even say anything and immediately moves on to the next match result. This is my long-winded way of saying that I wish Conrad would stop trying to expand his dominance over the wrestling podcast world. It's befuddling how popular his network of shows is when there's some real quality ones that just slip under the radar. Must be the lack of Blue Chew ads.

I've been amused how some people elsewhere are criticizing the wrestlers who have spoken out against the tweet because a week ago they were speaking out against bullying and now they themselves are bullying a colleague. Never mind that the tweet in "best of times" was defending a man so void of human compassion and a true bully himself.

Probably my biggest issue with Conrad is he's just not that inquisitive of a person, which often hampers his ability to guide a compelling interview/discussion. There have been so many times on the Prichard podcast where Bruce tells an intriguing story and Conrad practically no-sells it and promptly moves on to his next talking point. It's like if there's not a dick joke or a Vince/Pat/Cornette impression to be made, Conrad can't or won't capitalize on it. I compare that to someone like Marc Maron, who is so good at fleshing out a discussion with a guest that I find myself listening to and enjoying episodes where I don't even really have an interest in the guest. The Meltzer bashing is also beyond tired. Don't like the guy? Fine. Then stop basing almost all of your "research" on what he and Keller wrote. I would be OK hearing legitimate gripes about them, but at least in Prichard's case, he almost never veers from the "Fuck Meltzer" shtick. Hell, there have been many instances where Prichard pushes back on something Dave wrote and in explaining why Dave was wrong, Prichard basically ends up agreeing with him.

My favorite part of that episode was him pulling no punches about the Red Rooster gimmick and other similarly awful gimmicks being a rib for "an audience of one." A refreshing contrast to Prichard's continued insistence that it didn't get over because Taylor didn't embrace the gimmick. I'l admit it's a bit of an adjustment to get used to Arn's soft-spoken approach to the podcast after we've been conditioned through Conrad's other podcasts to expect the opposite. And unlike Bruce, Arn seems believable when he says he doesn't know or wasn't aware of something, rather than it being an attempt to avoid addressing certain subjects.

Not tough to do. I swear you could hack off 15-20 minutes per episode if Bix would have the awareness to stop searching for something that only sounded marginally important or relevant to begin with.

It sounded like Conrad was going to call an audible after the HH watch-along and scrap the plans for The Wrestling Classic watch-along. I love the era, so I was disappointed to hear that, but holy god, they should've. Just an absolute chore to get through. The format has never worked well for Conrad and Bruce, but this might be the best example of that yet. I don't actually watch the show they're watching when I listen to these, so there were several instances where I had no idea what was going on because they weren't talking about anything related to the show. Plenty of talk about Blue Chew, Manscape, bidets, and Conrad's house, though. Probably the only interesting bit I took from the show was how Paul Boesch felt Ivan Putski ruined his charm with the Houston audience when he returned from New York having all but abandoned the look and promo style of pre-shredded Putski. Just an absolutely brutal show.

Cheated on his long-time girlfriend to do so, too.

I don't know who Moose is, but this latest Bix Twitter beef has some real charming looking people taking shots at Bix in the ultimate "those in glass houses..." situations.

The IYH 3 episode was pretty good, but I'm biased because 1995 is a relatively overlooked year in the show's history. I was at the show, so I was a bit miffed that Conrad, who seems fixated on gate numbers and match results never even mentioned the location of the show. Relatively few tangents this week, too, which helped. I got a legit kick out of Bruce justifying the Jean Pierre/Bret Hart jacket angle because it had gotten over in Houston in the 70s. But it's back to 1997 AGAIN next week, though it sounds like it'll be the last bit they can mine from that year.

It just comes down to a lack of curiosity, I would imagine. Conrad is one of those fans who has his favorite era and isn't too interested in delving any deeper into other eras or territories. The Houston episode was one of the stronger shows they did, but I recall Conrad not hiding at all how much he didn't want to do that topic, both when it came to polling and when the show finally got done as some sort of a bonus episode deal. Just seems ridiculous when you consider that Bruce was around for that stuff, so why not, as a wrestling fan would you be so against covering it? Especially when a lot of the characters from Houston aren't alien to the scope of anyone who watched WWF/NWA in the 80s and early 90s.

Part of it too is that I'm just completely uninterested in hearing any more about the Monday Night Wars. Think of it this way: College classes started up again recently. A lot of the incoming class of freshmen weren't even alive while the MNW was going on. I enjoy history, so my point isn't that we should stop examining things just because they've been done with for a while. It's just that we've been poring over the MNW in earnest since probably 2004 and I just don't see much compelling discussion left for those of us who both lived through it and have stayed in tune with the dialogue about it since it ended. I know feeling that way makes me a bit of an outlier among the podcast's fan base, so I get why Conrad and Bruce keep revisiting it. I just don't think we need a two-to-three hour podcast surrounding every PPV from that era, especially when the show has become so formulaic and tired. I could probably be open to coverage of these shows if Bruce could give the Meltzer shit a rest, Conrad could stop focusing on the same handful of talking points (i.e. I don't ever want to hear about attendance and buy rates year over year again). I'm not sure what I even really expect at this point. I guess it's just that I preferred the more unstructured format of the earlier episodes before the template became reading from the supposedly awful dirt sheets and match results of a superstar's entire WWF run.

Tapped out before they even got to the PPV portion. More Meltzer bashing, more talking about attendance/ratings in late summer 1997 (spoiler: not tremendously different than when they covered it in the Summerslam 97 and Canadian Stampede episodes), and a pretty tasteless Kamala "impression" during the Blue Chew spot. Too much to handle, especially when we're getting such a sanitized version of Bruce these days. Just boring.

Do people actually enjoy Prichard's constant shitting on the dirt sheets? I don't necessarily have an issue with him pushing back on reports and commentary from those publications, but Bruce seems incapable of straying from the same few responses to pretty much anything that came from Meltzer or Keller: 1) "If it'd happened in the Tokyo Dome..." 2) "Rumor and innuendo" 3) "Yeah, because they were there." 4) "Says the guy who has never promoted/booked a company/match in his life." It's such lazy and uninspired nonsense. And if it's so horrific, then maybe Conrad should quit lifting 90 percent of his "research" from those two sources. It's one thing to pick a news item from one of them and ask Bruce about it, though we can't expect a good-faith response from Bruce anyway. But there's no need to cite Dave or Wade's thoughts on matches from the show Bruce and Conrad are covering. It's just more lazy setups from Conrad to get Bruce riled up. And not that Bruce has a lot of credibility to me when it comes to pushing back on the dirt sheets for the reasons stated above, but he really loses me when he can't even concede on actual facts reported from those guys. In the Summerslam 89 watch-along, Conrad talks about how Wade reports that the Bobby Heenan show on PTW is doing lousy ratings and Bruce hems and haws about that, even though the poor ratings cannot be disputed. It's even more tiring now that Conrad has all but given up on challenging Bruce in these instances. I dunno, it's just really tiring and can really affect me enjoyment of any given episode. I don't care for the watch-along episodes anyway, but I love SS 89, so I went in really wanting to enjoy this week's episode. But all that really stuck with me is how fixated Bruce is on Meltzer and Keller. Elsewhere, the show was pretty bland, as it seems like we've heard most of the stories told during it in previous episodes. Looks like they're heading back to 1997 and 1999 in the coming weeks, which is going to feel like more retread since it seems like they've covered 97-99 from virtually every angle through both the PPV-centric episodes and the superstar profile shows.

In the latest episode, Conrad alludes to JR not being happy with Bruce's claim that the Dr. Heiney was done "out of love." Bruce gets prickly and Conrad quickly moves on. That was probably the most interest bit in the episode. I just do not care at all about the Attitude Era at this point. I get that their main demographic is dudes who think the AE is the best thing to ever happen, but we've covered pretty much every angle of this era since the show's inception. Looking forward to the Summerslam 89 episode, though I don't know why every episode about that era has to be a watch-along.

Jericho episode was like a stew of the elements that make the podcast dreadful at times: - Multiple anti-Meltzer rants - Subject matter that tackles a ton of stuff that's already been covered on the podcast - Bruce unwilling to concede that something wasn't any good, usually using the nonsensical "we were trying to tell a story" excuse - Bruce turning into a pompous jackass when pressed about questionable decisions (i.e. Jericho losing pretty much every PPV match early in his run) - Conrad not pushing back at all on flimsy reasoning by Bruce - Ad reads done in the voice of deceased wrestlers

About 45 minutes into the Jericho episode and I've almost turned it off twice because Bruce seems incapable sometimes of conceding that the WWE doesn't always utilize its talents. Not only that, but in these defenses, he often comes off as snarky and heavy-handed as the newsletter-reading fan he loathes so much.