PeteF3

Next week, a heel burns a cross in Keith Lee's locker room while Smart Mark Sterling tries to legally block Nyla Rose from wrestling other women.

Alvarez also has the excuse of not proposing his angle the same week that hundreds of Israelis were massacred in an act of war.

Good overall show with one unbelievably horrifyingly bad decision with that roll of quarters with "FRIEDMAN" written on it. They actually took a fucking idea from Bryan Alvarez.

From what I've read, it doesn't sound like Rose was particularly interested in leaving Portland except for the best of offers--i.e., the WWF and New York.

Vince says something in that match I've never heard any commentator say before or since for a main event, right as Buddy takes over: "Many people thought this would be an easy title defense for Backlund--it may not be so easy after all." I think Rose is an all-time great but it's striking how little seemingly anyone thought of his chances to actually win the title in a major territory.

I don't pay attention to rovert either, but a few retweets and discussion on the Observer Board brought it to my attention. That discussion also saw an embed of rovert asking if this story was going to come to light again, and SRS replied, "Probably very soon." So he's heard the same thing.

That story was circulating around the time of Brawl Out from the likes of rovert. It doesn't really smell like bullshit to me at all. I'm not saying I automatically believe every word of it, but I don't know what's particularly hard to believe about Punk having beef with...uh, anybody.

Punk lost me with his stupid Hangman merchandise spiel. Yeah, yeah, the cameras were off so it "doesn't count," it was still fucking stupid as both a thing to do in general and as a wrestling promo.

Nailz throttled him and he's been persona non grata with the company ever since, though it wasn't like he was making money for them to begin with.

I think in the perceived American-wrestling-as-morality-play universe it generally occupied/occupies, the referee is seen as more of the bureaucratic chief of police who's admonishing Dirty Harry, Charles Bronson, or McBain to "play it by the book" and getting in the way of the actual work in the process.

Beating up the refs is obviously taboo, but even in Britain it seemed like Joe D'Orazio or Max Ward would get booed by the audience on their introduction more often than not. Thinking that the referees hate and are out to get "your" favorites seems to be a belief that crosses all cultures in all sports. Ref abuse by the babyfaces seems to be more common in Germany/Austria than elsewhere though probably not as common as in France. But I've definitely seen German/Austrian tag teams do the spot where the babyfaces tie up one villain in the ropes, pick up the other to use as a battering ram on him, and then when the ref tries to intervene they pick *him* up and use him.

My issue with Graham isn't that he didn't bump or sell, it's that it was pretty much all he did. I know I'll get told "that's what the fans wanted to see" and I get it, but that doesn't mean I'm obliged to go with them.

Is there any info on Teddy Boy, like a real name or something? He doesn't appear to be the same guy as the guy in the Blouson Noirs/Teddy Boys tag team. Or is he?

Apparently Punk went off on Page again in an off-air promo. If it's a work leading to an actual payoff, fine, but if he just went off unhinged again...

Let's be real: despite my rationalization, it was still pretty nuts. If Malenko and Benoit were the two best wrestlers then why weren't they World Champions, you know?

1997 was a weird year where there was no definitive #1 star in wrestling especially when you take kayfabe into account. Hogan was the top guy in WCW but barely active. Bret and Shawn were injured for large chunks of the year. Undertaker couldn't break away despite being WWF Champion, nor could Sid. Austin wasn't Austin yet. Plus the rise of the Internet was making a pure kayfabe magazine less and less viable, hence the addition of a Ratings Comparison column where they didn't quite destroy kayfabe but more or less legitimately analyzed the business aspects of the Monday Night Wars. I can't remember where I read this, but I recently saw where one of the writers apparently said that they were seriously kicking around the idea of giving the #1 spot to Mitsuharu Misawa, but it was decided that in 1997 they couldn't sell a magazine with a Japan-based wrestler on the cover, so they went with another smark favorite in Malenko.

But that's my point. Grado, for whatever reason, got over and crossed over.

But the biggest night-in, night-out money-drawing feud of the Warrior's career was with the Undertaker--the one feud where Warrior truly looked overmatched. Even the matches he won decisively end with Undertaker sitting up in the bodybag like the end of a horror movie, clearly temporarily inconvenienced hardly vaniqushed. There's a saying popular with American football coaches that, "There is no great victory without adversity." It's a quote that's more recent than the time period we're talking about but doubtless others have said the same principle. Hogan, Warrior, even Andre...they were all booked to overcome the odds to beat a monster heel, not beat them without selling a move. The "Hulk-Up" routine goes back to Jackie Fargo who got it from Popeye cartoons. Popeye cartoons were predictable, which is appealing to kids as they learn about how stories "work," but he still "sold" for 3/4 of the cartoon before grabbing that spinach can. Bugs Bunny was put-upon at first before declaring, "Of course you realize, this means war." Daddy was more like the Roadrunner--but those cartoons were really about Wile E. Coyote the whole time. The closer analogue in the U.S. to Big Daddy as far as wrestlers and not cartoons go was Boogie Woogie Man-era Jimmy Valiant, but he was having setbacks and betrayals and beard/head-shavings and beatdowns happening to him all the time. When it was time for the Bushwhackers to have a proper feud, even they got a heavy heat angle to go with it. For Daddy to get over, he'd have to be willing to get involved in a blood feud and be willing to overcome adversity--even the kiddies in the U.S. wanted at least a semblance of drama. And even then, there was an undercard ceiling that I don't think he was going to accept over main event roles in his family's company.

But that's true of any promotion anywhere. There's a select few stars to whom the standard rules don't apply and the rest, as great as they may be individually, are interchangeable and fungible as far as consistently drawing goes--pretty much by definition there's going to be more of them than the stars. Even in a different model like Joint's. But are they more *important* than the stars? I'd rather watch Keith Haward than Big Daddy all day every day. And the classic WoS style still exists, but who was the biggest star on the British indy scene when it was hot, who appears to be getting the token homegrown wrestler's spot at Wembley in a few weeks? Grado isn't much of a traditional wrestler from what I've seen and sure wasn't over because of it.

For me the Cole well was poisoned so long ago that it literally doesn't matter how technically good he is now. He's always going to be an insincere fake-laughing ninny.

The thing is, I don't know where the result came from. The '97 Observers make no note of it, just that Ace's team beat Misawa's team in the Results section. Ace did pin Doc a few shows later in another 6-man tag, a result that Dave made specific and detailed note of as the sign of an Ace push. Patriot was also getting an extra push as part of GET with Kobashi and Ace on that tour, though.

I would add that the bar for something as or more compelling than the endless Undertaker-Kane CAHOOTS angle is not as high as people like to think.

Where was it originally reported that Patriot pinned Mitsuharu Misawa in a 6-man tag on 5/24/97? That's been accepted as a result for awhile now and footage of that match is a mini-Holy Grail for '90s AJPW, but in discussing the match elsewhere I looked up the result on a pretty seemingly definitive AJPW results site and they list Johnny Ace as the guy pinning Misawa in that match. Still an upset, to be sure, and maybe one that never happened anywhere else. But Ace was definitely higher on the foreigner totem pole than Patriot, having World Tag Titles and at least one Triple Crown title shot to his name. The reason I looked it up is because were debating what the "cobra clutch drop" was that was listed as the winning maneuver--that wasn't a Patriot move, but the cobra clutch suplex was an Ace move. Does this site have it wrong, or have we had it wrong the whole time? It's such an incongruous result for '90s AJPW booking that I almost wonder if it was a misreporting to begin with this whole time.

Rowan had two matches in AEW (plus a run-in on the Brodie Lee tribute show). Other AEW one-offs of note or at least semi-note: Dragon Lee, DDP, Deonna Purrazzo, Holidead, Fallah Bahh, Tully Blanchard, LuFisto, and Kalisto/Samuray del Sol.

Verne wrestled at MSG several times. Guys who I think only made one shot for the WW(W)F do include Tommy Rich, Jumbo Tsuruta, Jay Youngblood, and Billy Robinson.