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HHH seeing Darby hug his father, Sting, while HHH never got to hug his son, Adam Cole, before Adam left home for good

No. He looked and moved like an old guy and feels like he's from a completely different era all together, even though there are even older guys also there who feel more relevant to the current game. It was weird. Certainly some Bret in WCW vibes where yeah it was Bret and there were a lot of entertaining promos and some good matches, but it wasn't BRET HART.

He just didn't have the edge and grit to him, or the chip on his shoulder, which were the intangibles that made him a success in the first place. His thing was always fighting against the system that said he couldn't make it, but now he's rich and old and content and now in a system that treats him like a god, so he just seemed like old wrassler guy doing old wrassler guy things. Almost a Backlund in his WWF return before the turn, but Punk has done about every possible iteration of his character as can be done.

WWE hasn't felt like such an uncool place to be probably since the early days of Nitro where there were amped crowds, established guys like Sting/Flair/Hogan/Savage, but also younger guys like Pillman, fresh international stars like Benoit/Eddie/Malenko/Regal/Finlay, NJ guys like Liger and Norton, all the lucha guys that started popping up in early 1996, WWF guys jumping ship, older stars like LOD or Steiners returning, then of course Razor, Diesel, 123 Kid jumping in the span of a few months. Which of course is not to say there's not a lot of real trash going on during that period of Nitro as well, but WCW certainly felt like a way cooler place to be for a while there, and AEW absolutely seems like it has 70% of the WWE roster looking sad out the window wishing they could play with their friends.

Idk if I was just in a weird mood because I was tired or what, but something somehow felt flat about this show to me. Which is to say it was the best wrestling show I've seen in 2021, but it felt to me like the crowd was a bit tired from all the shows in Chicago in the past 2 weeks. Miro/Eddie was exactly what it should have been and was quite enjoyable. Mox/Kojima was good enough. Most amped up and enthused Mox has seemed probably since the first show back with fans. Certainly more excited for MiSu and also lol at how much of a complete poser Moxley comes off as when MiSu shows up. Baker/Statlander was better than expected, outside of a few real ugly patches. I was really expecting the whole match to be like that, but they held it together and recovered from rough patches well. Statlander is strong as fuck. Cage match was good but I was left kind of disappointed because I've seen both teams do way crazier things in regular matches, let alone other types of gimmick matches. Idk what I was expecting, though. A Canadian destroyer off the cage? Fenix doing some wild ass triple dipple ripple flipple off the cage? The avalanche destroyer was gnarly as is, both the head landing and Matt's knees smashing into the mat on the rebound. Between that and that dropkick to the hip, I'm sure he's in a bad way today. Big shout out to Nick finding a new way to look completely ridiculous every 2 ways with his facial hair. Skipped through the battle royal but Ruby is a great pick up for AEW's women's division. MJF vs Jericho I thought was dogshit. Both dudes suck and the match went on forever with Jericho somehow appearing to get fatter throughout the match. MJF does absolutely nothing for me and I find his whole schtick to be extremely one note and there's been no added dimension to it since the first time I saw him in MLW. I get it, he's real young and real confident on the mic but his shit is so ARRRG I'M A HEEL YOU HATE ME DO YOU HATE ME I BET YOU DO type shit that's in a way similar to the Young Bucks' current gimmick but without the irony. And Jericho....man he's been trash for so long now. Was really hoping this would be the end of Jericho and he'll just go away. But also lol at how he looked like he was going to cry during his entrance getting so fucked up. Punk vs Darby was...okay, I guess. Punk looked old, slow, tired, and flabby. So really not unlike he did when he left wrestling. He also seemed real nervous and seems to have lost that edge to his persona and really just felt like a guy named Phil. Certainly was getting some Bret in WCW vibes from that match. I don't really know what I was expecting out of that match, but I don't think many people were expecting Punk to be working half the match with chinlocks and abdominal stretches. He definitely did not feel or look like a guy that was going to be back on top of the wrestling world again. Trying to imagine this guy working with Omega or something and I'm just not seeing it. Maybe he just had nerves and ring rust, but Christian was off for the same amount of time and is older and has looked fantastic since returning. I suppose he was better to begin with, though. Show/QT lol hard pass. I get the show needed a cool down match but nah I'm not watching that shit. Christian/Kenny 2 was real good. For sure match of the night to me. Adam Cole should be a good addition to The Elite, as you'll probably get matches with him instead of The Good Brothers. Bryan coming out to a hip hop remix of Flight Of the Valkyries killed me. AEW definitely feels like they're entering a new phase of signings and guys getting pushes right now. Feeling Hogan/early Nitro era of WCW where a lot of established talent came in in a wave and the homegrown guys or company vets took a backseat for a while. Which is not really fair as most of those guys were also established before they had WWE runs. To be honest, Punk is actually the one that feels out of place. He somehow feels older and more out of touch than not only his contemporaries like Bryan, not only the indie guys that came after him like The Elite/Black/PAC/Mox, but somehow Sting and Christian, too. It really seems like wrestling has passed him by completely and he left it behind completely. I think overall I actually bought into hype for a wrestling show and it couldn't have possibly lived up to it although it was the best show I can think of that I've seen this year.

Baron Scicluna, Tony Garea, and Nikolai Volkoff are high on my list

Will there ever be a Worst Wrestler Ever project and how many low card WWWF through early Hogan era guys can make the list

Darby should win with a crucifix after Punk hits the GTS but takes a half a second to bask in a successful return and makes too deep of a cover

The NXT X stuff was stupid to begin with because when WWE does European, Japanese, Mexico, Central/South America shows, those audiences want to see WWE shows, not shitty WWE versions of their local style, nor shitty local style of WWE shows.

NJPW sounds miserable right now

I'm 100% certain he'd get bookings as Chris Benoit Jr. in Mexico, Japan, and PR. Japan would probably insist on it, actually.

I've come to the first MSG show of 1984, the one where Hogan takes the title. Besides the absolute dogshit opener with Tony Garea, it's really night and day from 1983's MSG shows. The lighting is completely different, the mat color changed to the standard WWE canvas, camera work is about 50/50 between hard cam and handheld (I don't think hand helds were used at ALL in the past couple of MSG shows I had seen from 1981-83 despite there being camera men on the floor filming, they never cut to those shots". Not to mention the talent influx: Guys like Hogan, Orndorff, Tiger Chung Lee (aka "The Chunger"), Piper, Masked Superstar. Not to say there isn't a lot of hold overs: Tony Garea, Jose Luis Rivera, Sal Bellomo, Strongbow, Fuji, and what seems to be a never ending feud of Andre/Rocky Johnson + rotating partner vs The Samoans that had been going on for over a year at this point.

The period in 1996 between Uncensored and BATB had basically every other week where Giant would just chokeslam 3-6 guys in a row, laying out each time with them, and it was awesome every single time.

Dude seems like he's been sleepwalking since last summer to me. He seemed to start having fun when the team with Kingston first started but he's seemed pretty bored to me all year. Body going to shit, too

Counter counterpoint: Moxley has sucked in AEW just like he sucked the majority of his WWE run and the only time he's really seemed to give a shit since leaving WWE is when mixed up with NJPW stuff. Kingston is Kingston and I don't think he's had any particularly good matches in AEW either.

Were they really planning NXT Levant

Really gonna be interested in seeing how Punk fares in AEW as even their big "storytelling" matches are very athletic and full of high spots, and Punk wasn't even a good athlete in his 20s and 30s

I think HHH and Steph have both cashed out multiple millions in stock in the past 2 years. I don't see any circumstance where HHH leaves WWE without Stephanie also leaving, and I don't see any circumstance where Stephanie leaves the company ever.

Charlotte has had many examples of shit not going well and her getting mad and suddenly very stiff and aggressive or reckless with her opponent for the next couple of spots before calming down. Nia's default is reckless. This isn't even the first time these two specifically together have had an incident like this.

You know, I have no idea why AEW doesn't use Marko Stunt to get demolished by big names coming in. I'd like to see La Parka just punching Marko in the mouth and then dancing.

Lol at winning the name and then refusing to use it.

Seriously why the fuck does that guy get on TV at all? He offers absolutely ZERO on screen or in the ring. If he's a good trainer or agent then whatever, let that be his job, not also an on screen performer being a complete black hole of charisma anytime he's on screen. Big Show vs QT should at most be just Show hitting him with the KO punch and that's it. It can be an angle during an interview.

I dunno but there's a ton more Spectrum shows from this period than MSG and I wonder if its because they were basically the same shows but the Philly shows were superior so they just uploaded those.

Remember when Scorpio went solo, won the not MITB and became the "Face Of The Revolution" only to lose the match at the next show, immediately get put into a tag team and turned heel, didn't have a match on TV for 2 months, suddenly got a match with Sting/Darby, then went back to not having a match on TV for another 2 months?

Another couple thoughts on a 1983 Spectrum show 1. Gorilla being really perplexed at the concept of these fancy new compression sleeves young boi Curt Hennig was wearing. 2. The Big Green Belt is the most underrated WWE championship belt. 3. Big Jon Studd's bacne is fucking atrocious. Fuzzy ass early 80s footage and it's still just horrific looking and visible from all angles. 4. Spectrum production vs MSG is real interesting as the Spectrum show is much closer to the Hulkamania era with the gray mat and much more handheld work from the floor. 5. Lol at the early Dunnism of zooming in and out on a hold as Backlund was wrenching a hammerlock back and forth. 6. What a set of teams: Ray Stevens, Don Muraco, Buddy Rose, Billy Graham, Mr. Fuji vs Rocky Johnson, Jimmy Snuka, Andre, Pedro Morales, Sal Bellomo. Now a couple of outliers there but you know. This is a very fun match, especially considering some of the guys involved at this stage in their careers. This might be the first Survivor Series match in WWE history and it very much plays out like how the matches were booked in the first 2-3 years of the event. There's constant action and lots of great spots, crowd and commentary are popping huge constantly the whole match. 7. Honestly this show, which is a month earlier than the MSG show I just watched, feels like it is 4 years away from the MSG show. Even the crowd seems younger and hipper.