PeteF3

I wonder if Suzuki just opted out this year. Dude's 51, can't take back bumps, and the G-1 is a grind he may just not want to be a part of anymore. The rest of the turnover is cool, though--all the new faces are welcome ones (even Taichi, who got the biggest crowd pop of any announced participant).

It doesn't, but there is another domed stadium in Atlanta in its place. Still...there's a difference between getting fly-in business to tourist-friendly cities and running weekly TV without necessarily all the big stars wrestling (which they shouldn't be--you can't have Omega doing his 25-minute Strong Style main event match every week). I'd try to stick to arenas under 10,000 for the most part and maybe some Manhattan Center-esque venues with hot crowds. They've proven they can sell out supercards, but for a weekly show that's not necessarily in Chicago or Vegas or New York? Could they sell arenas full of tickets for a standard episode of TV in Cleveland, or Houston, or Seattle, or Des Moines?

Dick Pound is also a real-life bigwig for WADA who was a rather infamous name in Canada for awhile, going back to the Ben Johnson doping scandal. Though supposedly the Principal gimmick was based on a teacher that Bruce didn't like. Other great Bruce Hart names: K.Y. Wakamatsu, Sodamn Insane, Frank Einstein (Carl Leduc doing a Frankenstein *and* grandson/great-grandson of Albert gimmick, seriously), Drago Zhivago, Ronald Trump, Ben Doon MacDonald, and dressing up then-young boy Junji Hirata as First Nation star Sonny Two Rivers. This has nothing to do with Stampede, I don't think, but while I was kicking around wrestlingdata looking at the careers of some of these Stampede lifers, I came across a result for High Impact Wrestling (2000s indy based I think in Saskatchewan) for someone wrestling as "Gordon Solie, Jr.," which made me laugh out loud.

Live and on the road is the plan.

Spitting at someone is legally classified as assault, so yeah, he could conceivably have grounds for something, even if it's just a nice settlement.

https://twitter.com/xiamhollywoodx/status/1135413375138009089?s=21 There's the story from the fan's perspective. He said some things that were slightly off-color, I guess, but nothing profane and a.) he was spat at first, and b.) Velvet Sky brought the sex stuff into it first by calling him a virgin. Basically it seems that she and Bully Ray were upset that she got clapped back on. And he was doing this to the heels!

Tony (and not Shad) also owns his own sports-analytics business.

A gimmick can still be a gimmick even if it's "real life." Punk's straight-edginess, Bryan's righteous liberalism, Boss Man's past as a prison guard, Paul Bearer's past as a mortician, Ricki Starr's ballet-dancing...these were all both gimmicks and "real."

Ricky Starr was one of the biggest babyfaces of his era, and that was in the 1960s. Adrian Street was a heel in the US more often than he was a babyface, but he was credibly pushed as a lead babyface in Alabama. Of course, having Linda with him probably changed the dynamic a bit, even for someone who looked and acted like Street. I get Cornette's criticism that Sonny Kiss wasn't properly explained by the announcers, but I absolutely think that Kiss can get over today.

The weirdest criticism of all wasn't any of the above...it was the idea of a woman officiating a match somehow ruins the "danger." I could see where he was coming from on almost everything else he said, but that was just plain bizarre. Wonder how he'd process Kim Winslow officiating UFC heavyweight fights, or Sarah Thomas officiating NFL games.

And some more Valentine just showed up in the JWA retrospectives that aired recently. There are some '70s Wahoo matches that are known to be out there in the hands of a few collectors but not really circulating (mostly revolving around Steve Yohe's long-in-limbo Destroyer comp).

Double or Nothing just got an in-game plug on TNT during the NBA playoffs. Aside from Marv Albert mispronouncing "Jericho," that was cool.

And this doesn't? Visa issues could very easily and reasonably be blamed on the Trump Administration.

Jon Snowden, rovert, and Sean Sapp on Twitter are all saying this is a cover for a visa issue. Pretty fuckin' stupid cover if (extra emphasis on if) that's the case.

Satin "lying"...well, he Tweeted out something somewhat vague about Bayley and Sasha lying on the floor in apparent protest of their WM tag title loss, then played the "I never said that" card when people made the assumptions he clearly wanted people to make. Original tweet Later: "Never said it was a protest." I don't think all that highly of Satin as a person, think he's broken some things as a reporter, and think he's reported or played up bullshit for attention as well, as was the case here. (Note that I could not give two shits one way or the other what Sasha and/or Bayley's behavior was at WM or what they thought of losing the belts, so the actual facts of whether they were lying on the floor literally don't matter to me, I'm just talking about how Satin framed the apparent story and then his subsequent backtrack).

Meltzer said he couldn't confirm either way what Flair's condition was, and when someone on The Board called the TMZ story "carny," he said he wouldn't classify it that way. So...yeah. I'm not sure Conrad's to be 100% believed either.

Geeks just helped make Avengers Endgame one of the highest-grossing movies in history, so I'm not sure that's a bad demographic to go after. And speaking as a geek and wannabe wrestling historian, I couldn't much give a shit how many or how few other people care about this as much as me. I care, which is all that really matters to me.

Apparently they're getting no rights fees, but the networks are covering the costs of production.

Sam Houston vs. Black Bart for the MA title was an underrated little low midcard feud.

Bill Watts was (and still is?) a big-time stoner, so it's not as much of a stretch as you might think.

I find it quite strange to think that a scruffy disheveled-looking guy with a beard *must* have a Southern accent. There are no scruffy disheveled-looking guys in Western New York where Harper is from? Or anywhere else? This is doubly confusing considering Vince and his producers' seeming hatred of any accent that's not American Standard.

Dave apparently mentioned that on Observer Radio and said it was tried a decade ago.

At least his readership tore Scott apart in the comments section for that. Scott attempted rather unsucessfully to explain himself by saying that "But Sonya's on-air character isn't gay that we know of." For whatever that has to do with anything.