JustYourAvgBozo

Andre book was great, as others have said. I'd have more wrestling books if my darn obsession with dead sports teams & leagues didn't beg for attention.

I just find names that I recognize and find matches they're in. It may not necessarily be the ones you want (not available or what-not results in you substituting), but it still gives you an idea about their ability. The cool thing is how it branches out to discovering others. I started 3-4 years ago getting acquainted with Kana/Asuka. From watching (and rewatching for context), you go from her to Io Shirai, Kairi Hojo. Which in turn takes you to pretty much the entire Stardom roster. Go the "Jeff Johnson" route from The Distinguished Gentleman: the name(s) you know.

I cracked up months ago when one of my YouTube suggestions was for Stardom's "No People Gate" from 3/8, right when everything was shutting down. So I had to watch it. And it was fun! I've made it a habit to watch at least 2 hours a night of this promotion when I can. Still figuring out who is who as far as the women I'm not too familiar with (last night was the first time I could say "Utemi Hayashishita" without having to look it up), but this is a cool look at something different. I dig TCS (Jungle Kyoto is my girl, plus I love misfit groups/stables), DDM's Giulia is a star in the making, and I can get behind Tam Nakano.

I honestly didn't think this is such a new idea; PWTees offered the shirts for a few months now. (And free tote bag, because women dig those. My wife isn't paying $50 for a shirt she won't wear for wrestling she won't watch if I'm not there...but the bag...she'd hedge.)

Good on the Eddie signing. Saw him at an IWA Mid-South show in 2004 with Marciano as the Wild Cards. Some dude next to me was razzing them, so they marched up the bleachers to give him the what-for. I laughed as they went back and forth. Then I just blurted out, "Hey! These guys didn't pay for their seats!" And Eddie yelled at me to shut up, biting his lip afterward.

To be fair, you can credit them for finally finding something that clicked with Angelo Dawkins. Dude was around since the FCW days but he was always just kinda "there". He was touted as a guy that had the talent, but something about him just didn't click. But you'd see him reinvent or try something new every few months, trying different things or looks. He stuck with it, while some just gave up. True, he's become the Big Cass to Montez' Enzo now, but it works for them. And I find them entertaining.

This is where they lost me. I recall Triple H talking in an interview about how NXT was like getting new action figures to play with, and all the dream matches you can think of to put together. And thats all you saw. The NXT title bouncing around among all these guys, to the point you or I could write how these shows were gonna go. -Kick-ass tag match featuring 2 of: American Alpha/The Revival/#DIY -Pan to some legend sitting ringside, loving the action. -Asuka beats some woman up and makes her tap out. -Tyler Breeze (or someone on his level) loses to some new indy sign-ee. -Pan to some big independent name -sitting in same seat legend earlier sat in- who just signed on to NXT (and will be in the main event in 2-3 Takeovers). -Main event where new up-and-coming independent star (flavor of the month/Takeover) beats the champion, who is about to get the call-up. (Bonus points if Finn Balor dons Demon make-up and does BDSM entrance.) Although the Adam Cole signing was when I threw in the towel. I was never crazy about him.

Yes, I've put a lot of time into career mode and I'm at just at "Young Lion" stage after ripping through the Dojo and overseas trip. Thanks for the new DLC tip!

I enjoyed the match because Joe was heeling it up so much, the fans would rather cheer a Russian than him. Lol. Watching Joe made me think of my dad, who passed in 2005, so I have a Gypsy Joe story from him for everyone (Ferdinando Carmine Mucciolli is his birth name, later changed to Joe Dorsetti); it involves Billy Goelz as well. (Because "of course it does"; these two were each others' most-frequent opponent.) My dad was a pre-teen in early 1950s Kenosha, Wisconsin (right on Lake Michigan just above the Illinois state line) and he had a buddy who was not exactly the kind of guy you'd want your kid hanging around with. (Spoiler: Guy would grow up to end up in and out of jail a few times. Dad still kept in touch with letters.) One evening, they're walking around town (Dad lived over a tavern on 53rd Street with his mom & stepdad) and see a big commotion at the local Italian-American Club; which was about the size of your VFW or American Legion halls. They're having wrestling that night. His buddy found a way to sneak in through the back door and my dad went in with him. Nobody said a word about them sneaking in. They had a couple of matches, nothing he'd remember. (Most smaller shows only had 3 matches; main event was almost always 2-of-3 falls, especially if a title plays into it.) Then the main event, Gypsy Joe versus "The Mayor Of Fox Lake [Illinois]" Billy Goelz. (Yes, they would announce him as that. Don't think it's for real; he's just that synonymous with the town.) A title may have been involved; possibly the Midwest Jr. Heavyweight belt-they fought for it constantly. (Dad could never recall the town Billy was from until I found his info online in the early-2000s and asked "Fox Lake?" "THAT'S IT!") Joe was a staller. Like Gorgeous George, don't touch him until he's ready. Jaw at the fans who booed him. His valet would help him with his robes and sashes. (Also was his wife, something a future tag partner of his would use as part of his gimmick: The Sheik Of Araby. Joe and Sheik would win the first set of Midwestern Tag Titles later on.) Billy is getting steamed having to wait for this. He wants to wrestle. Joe holds off, then the bell rings to start. They lock up. Joe shoves him away. He flexes. (He's got a basic 1950s look: kinda flabby. Think Rusev.) Fans boo. My dad and his buddy join them. Joe sees my dad and his friend. He steps out of the ring and calls them over. "Hey kids," Joe bellows, "come here a minute!" They come down to ringside. Joe flexes an arm. "Check the muscle. Show these fans how strong I am!" Dad's buddy gives the bicep a squeeze, then stands back so my dad gets a chance. Joe laughs, "Haah ha! See! All muscle here! Tell them!" My dad and his friend walk back up the aisle. Get halfway up. Dad turns, sees Joe still gloating. Crowd gets kinda quiet, getting bored with this. Then my dad yells, "Ah, it's like a marshmallow!" Fans started laughing and pointing at Gypsy Joe. Joe takes a step like he's gonna go after them. My dad and his buddy run out the front door. Obviously he doesn't know who won, but he remembered that moment after all that time. I've heard the story a bunch of times, and I believe it 100%. (Honestly, if he was gonna lie, he could have said Buddy Rogers was involved, not Gypsy Joe & Billy Goelz; two guys I have never even heard of until I started doing title history research. It adds up, even if the card isn't listed. But they did wrestle in Kenosha every so often, and Dad would go. Even if he snuck in...lol.)

I have nothing to add about the show, but Braun and Bliss were together long enough to do a Ride Along, complete with a Team "LittleBig" license plate. Maybe the creep is word getting out Braun introduced Gallows to the "Places I've Pooped" app. (Another episode of Ride Along.)

I'm a lot like you with Fire Pro, I like setting tournaments and just let everybody fight it out. (FWIW, I have the Day 1 Special NJPW Release, which has a bunch of New Japan guys and belts included.) They do have a Mission mode, which gets you more experience with the gameplay, and a Career mode,where you work your way from the NJPW Dojo to an overseas excursion (they have an SWA with a bunch of game characters) to the NJPW main roster. Along the way, you befriend Super Strong Machine, Yuji Nagata & the G.B.H. Togi Makabe and Tomoaki Honma (who does nothing but cuss, lol). Be cautious about adding wrestlers; a lot have DLC items now which would make them useless if you don't own the expansion packs. (Which killed 3/4ths of my Women's roster when the first DLC was released.) I don't add wrestlers to the group, but two I had to create were The Crusher & Vivian Vachon. But yeah, almost anybody you could possibly think of is likely there. For the record, Bob Backlund is my IWGP US Champion. He defeated Nick Bockwinkel in the finals of a 64 wrestler tournament after Nick hit his piledriver, picked Bob up to slap on the Oriental sleeper, and Bob ducked away to hit HIS piledriver. An earlier match had Bob against Samoan Afa (with Lou Albano) and Sika ran in for a match ECW fans would dig. (Bob overcomes the odds!) Pampero Firpo is another titleholder. Thumbs way up.

I've went through the thread and saw a lot of books that I own and enjoy. But, for the heck of it, I'll toss in a couple I haven't seen listed that I feel others would enjoy. -"Professional Wrestling in the Pacific Northwest: A History, 1883 to the Present" by Steven Verrier There is a lot of information packed into 232 pages of small-type. -"The Four Horsemen: A Timeline" by Dick Bourne. My brother got this for me one Christmas. Resident of the Mid-Atlantic Gateway Bourne breaks down the different angles, shows and storylines on how the Horsemen became and thrived throughout JCP into WCW. -"WWE Book Of Rules". The cover is made to look like a Manila envelope complete with string tie, which means you can't just slide in back on your shelf without risk of ripping. It's basically what MAD Magazine would do if they had the idea; "official documents", "office circulars" and decrees (for example, they have a document stating that Bayley's "wacky inflatable tube men are not under contract", therefore that's why you see them at stores and auto dealers on their off time). It's 100% goofy but if you can get it on the cheap, it's harmless fun. (Best served as a library book. You'll read it once, have a few chuckles, then return it.)

Hi everybody! I figured I should introduce myself and give my story. Bear with me, it might be a bit long. I was first introduced to PWO through Titans Of Wrestling (which I discovered by chance) in 2017. (Great timing, I catch them at the end of their run. But I still listen to those shows to this day, I love the banter and interaction with the fellows. I'd watch the shows they describe and wish I could be one of the guys: and I'm just younger than Pete.) Finally saddled up and tried joining last summer, but after a while I've heard nothing about being invited so I just forgot all about lurking. Until a few months ago, when I got an email saying I'm "in". Yay! You can call me Bozo; the name derives from my thinking that "I don't think I'm better than anyone. I'm just your average bozo." (Kinda taken from the old Tommy Sledge P.I. bit on The Comedy Channel - yes, way back then - when he's praised for solving a case. He just shrugs, "That's my job. That's what I do.") I'm from Northwest Indiana, where it's still considered "AWA Country". Ask anybody from at least age 40 about wrestling here and you will get 3 names they remember: Da Crusher, Baron Von Raschke & Bobby Heenan. Sometimes Dick The Bruiser, though those are mainly the really older fans. (If you talk to a Hispanic fan about wrestling, Pepper Gomez was THE GUY. He was like their Superman.) Anyway, to my story. My wrestling fandom started as a complete fluke in the late summer/early fall of 1983. My best friend's mom called my mom one Sunday. She had just went shopping at Dominick's, a large grocery chain in the Chicagoland area, and they handed out these scratch-off tickets. They were linked to a harness racing show that aired that afternoon @ 5:30pm on a brand-new and hard to receive UHF station called WPWR Channel 60/"Power 60" - which would become Channel 50 a few years later, as it had the stronger signal. (You'd scratch off the 2 boxes: one was the race and the second was the number on the horse you want to win. Prize was "up to $100 in groceries!" $100 could last you almost a month in 1983.) "Can I send Brian down to your house to watch this show and see if we won? We only have cable and don't know how to find this station." (Back then, cable didn't require that all channels were available. So with smaller stations, you had to actively search for them. We didn't have rabbit ears; we had the "bowtie".) I'm determined to find this station. We had one of the early TVs that had "preset channels": 13 spots you can set your favorites, and a wireless (!!!) remote with 3 buttons. (Up the list, down the list and the volume button was 3 clicks. Loud, softer, still softer, and off.) All were already marked with the proper corresponding numbers. But Channel 60 wasn't one of them, we had to set the tuner from Channel 66 and tune the knob down until we got a grainy/fuzzy picture. There was what resembled a boxing ring, but there were only 3 ropes not 4. Two guys in the ring, but not wearing gloves...or any semblance of boxing ring gear, as they were possibly in just their underwear and boots. They threw each other into the ropes, tossed each other around. Talked smack to the fans. It was fascinating to me! What I had discovered was: World Class Championship Wrestling, from Dallas. Here on TV in the Chicago area! Out of all things! (Possible connection: Bill Mercer was the commentator. He had done some play-by-play for White Sox games here in the mid-70s. Also of note, in hindsight: one of the guys in the ring had white trunks and boots. I can only guess that may have been Jimmy Garvin, as he was the only guy who wore white boots - Kevin Von Erich had white trunks but went without shoes.) It was only on for 30 minutes at 5pm, then the Harness Racing show came on. (No, my friend's parents didn't win anything that day.) But I started making it a habit to watch this show. I was a "Kevin" guy out of the Von Erich clan (he was the older brother so I felt a kinship as I'm the oldest). I really dug Iceman Parsons with his unique look, talk and act. And then there was Chris Adams, who was my favorite. The dives to the outside, the different ring style he possessed compared to the others, the superkick. And the last few weeks of World Cast is right in the heart of my introduction as a fan, and it stuck with me all this time later. The first "angle" I recall is the David Von Erich-Jimmy Garvin "Valet For A Day". And in addition, while Johnny will repeat the "World Class chants" as "Go, ___, GO!" and "Go Home Freebirds!"; my nostalgic heart warms when I hear all the young girls and kids yelling-without provocation-during Jimmy Garvin matches: "We Want Sun-Shine!" on a seemingly endless loop. And Jimmy covering his ears, yelling "NO! No-no-no-no-NO!" So obviously this 9 year old was hooked. Which got my dad to flip around one Sunday morning (while waiting for football to come on) and find AWA All-Star Wrestling. 11am. "There, you like 'rasslin, there's the real 'rasslin!" (Crusher and the Baron may have been on the TV, guys he and my mom would go to the old International Amphitheater or Hammond Civic Center to see in person.) Then, afterwards, there would be this show called "Bruiser Bedlam" with Bob Luce. Bob in huckster-mode, his machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat delivery on selling these guys as the greatest athletes in the world. And the commercials, which I'm sure you've all seen online in some form. The guy never took a breath! "Ben's Auto Sales, come on down and get your tickets for the next great card from the Amphitheater this Saturday night! And while you're here..." then sell you on a great deal on a used car. (And, the match they'd show seemed like it was the same one every week: Verne Gagne vs. Nick Bockwinkel in a cage match from Soldier Field in 1972. Verne wins, Nick is bloodied. Heenan gets involved and Verne tosses him into the cage walls a few times. Heenan looks like a homicide victim covered in blood. And my parents would go nuts, because they loved the way Bobby would fly around that ring.) WWF wasn't on my radar until later in 1984. At Brian's house and his older brother had control of the remote, flipping channels. We saw Weird Als' "I Lost On Jeopardy" video on MTV. Then flip to WWF wrestling (had to have been after Black Saturday as this was on TBS); Andre the Giant vs. 3 guys. Brian's brother would yell "ANDRE!" and we had to watch. (Funny thing is later that night, HBO would air "All The Marbles". Talk about things that point to telling me "You're going to be a wrestling fan and like it!" I would watch almost everything available at that time. Around 1990 I would kinda fade as a regular watcher but still get the magazines. Come back in and out. 1993-95 is a period where I remember watching but don't know a lot about without looking it up. Let the magazine subscription run out when I started working retail; just read the magazines on my breaks, then put them back when I was done. And almost anything after 2006 is a blur: I'd watch but it would just be "there". I still get the PWI Awards Issue every year, but that's the last link to when I started as a big-time fan. My brother and I would have a WrestleMania tradition where he'd come over and we'd watch WM together, just like we're 12 and 10 again. (Our peak as fans: 1987.) But this year, he watched it all. I watched 4 matches from Night 1 because Becky Lynch was there. Fell asleep during that ladder match. And I haven't seen anything else. I'll stop here. Hope you're not asleep yet. Thanks for the invitation!

The show was a pretty quick 2 hours. The only time I even noticed my clock was at the Archer-Janela match, which sent me outside for a smoke break. Came back in to see Nyla had her match already. The added crowd noise helped the show, IMO. (I haven't watched the past couple of months because I am either at work or just didn't really care.)

I got "When It Was Big Time" about 2-3 years ago, and can honestly say it's one of the most fascinating books about wrestling I've ever read. Plenty of information, tons of photos. I don't know if Rock is still doing printings of it, but if you catch him offering, jump on it! (If I remember correctly, he's currently working on a similar book based on the LA territory. I can't wait for this!)