Cox

I have three racks of ribs on the smoker, baked beans in the crock pot, and a 1.75 L bottle of Jack Daniel's. Let's do this.

Larry was high as a fucking kite during his speech.

So I proposed to my girlfriend a few weekends ago, and we started trying to figure out dates for our wedding, which we planned for next year. The date we have settled on was June 25, 2016, which I didn't realize until today was the date of discovery of the Benoit murders. How bad of a sign is this for our impending marriage?

I was thinking about it today, but have they done a better job building the Andre the Giant battle royal than anything short of Cena/Rusev? The Miz/Mizdow breakup will likely take place in there, which has been a focal point of recent WWE TV. They gave it two segments with celebrities on Raw last night, first with Miz and Mizdow interviewing Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart (two legit stars!) for Get Hard, and then put Bill Simmons on commentary for their match last night. They had a very entertaining online video of Jon Gruden breaking down the battle royal. And Curtis Axel has put himself into a fun cult-like role with the Axelmania stuff, which should get some focus in the battle royal as well. The WrestleMania battle royal is usually a throw away excuse to get everybody on the show, but this year it looks like they've put a modicum of thought into it, and now I'm kind of looking forward to it.

Has it been pointed out that Dean Ambrose and Luke Harper have the same exact gear? White-turned-gray wifebeater and jeans is not a look that two people on the same roster should have. They need to have a "Loser Has To Get Real Gear" match on Raw sometime soon to get this sorted out.

I enjoy smoking delicious meats in my back yard (this year's choice: ribs), drinking bourbon, having my friends over, and watching Wrestlemania, roughly in that order. No matter how shitty the card looks, I like the hang more than anything, so regardless of the fact that I've watched very little WWE TV the past several months, I will be watching Wrestlemania.

I was at WrestleMania 15 and will vouch for it being one of the worst ever. It's also the night that poor Bart Gunn was mercilessly fed to Butterbean, which pretty much ruined my night.

The one difference is that Lawler probably would have put over Bret rather than doing a countout, as they did with Shawn.

One of my regrets in life is that I never got to go to SMW Fan Week. If SMW had lasted into 1996, I very likely would have figured out a way to go that year, but I was a bit too young in 1995 to pull it off. I once called into WOL to ask Cornette if he'd ever do a Fan Week in OVW, and they just didn't run enough shows to make it worthwhile.

Muta and Liger also worked for ROH and would have to be in the conversation as well.

He deserves some bashing by wrestling fans given his loud and frequent criticisms of Rock, Brock, Taker and other part-timers "who won't be there on Monday" given he hasn't done anything to earn a spot in UFC. Personally, I don't give a damn. I watched Brock in UFC because of his amateur credentials, freak athleticism and most of all because I was a wrestling fan and wanted to see what he could do. I'll probably watch Punk in UFC because I'm a wrestling fan and want to see what this former wrestling headliner does. Just makes all of his promotional efforts over the last couple weeks and, unfortunately, some of his legit issues with WWE seem like nothing but promotional tactics when he's playing the same game to sell himself here. Yeah I wont say what I personally think of the guy but what he said was completely uncalled for with Colt. The biggest thing that irritated me about him was that promo on Raw where he slagged off Sammartino & Hogan about there run on top and their supposed easy scheduele. Well for one thing it was alot tougher back then to get people to leave their spot and he obviously forgets what while you never had PPVs or weekly Raws you did have the champion defending all around the country at House Shows which is what Raw would have been like then so its not as if they had a easy scheduel. Wrestling is a work.

I wonder if popping one or two buyrates is worth the credibility damage that bringing in Punk will cause. Dana always talks about how he wants UFC to become the biggest sport in the world, but doing things like putting untrained, untested guys in UFC with no prior fights ensure that it will always be seen as a carny sideshow to the general public.

The best part about that is that Bix will assuredly change the rules to keep Murdoch on the ballot until he gets voted in.

I really don't get AJ Styles returning to the ballot next year. I know he just had a really good year in New Japan, but we are a year removed from Styles being on the ballot and having one of the worst voting percentages in the history of this project (and I think Dave might have said he had the lowest voting percentage ever, but I'm not 100% sure on that). Even after a really good year, shouldn't a guy who had such a poor showing in his first time on the ballot have to wait about 5 years, minimum, before he can sniff the ballot again? At a minimum, I think more context for his past year in New Japan is required just to see if it was a one-year aberration or the start of an actual sustained run. And clearly, nothing Styles had done up until this point resonated with voters enough to where they believed it was positive towards his Hall of Fame candidacy. I can't imagine that this past year, as good as it might have been, was enough to get Styles to go from less than 10% of the vote (and a historic low voting percentage) to the 60% required to make the HOF. Part of the reason Dave just instituted this 15 year rule was to eliminate some of the dead weight from the ballot, so what's the rush? Just because a few people said they would vote for him? I don't get the way Dave goes about this sometimes.

Benoit didn't skate on his recall vote. In fact, a majority voted for him to come out. But he didn't receive the required 60% of the vote to get yanked, so he remains in.

Man, I would have loved to have been in the room when somebody from WWE explained to Vince what "Grumpy Cat" is.

This truly does not deserve its own thread, but the other night, I had a dream that The Fresh Prince of Bel Air was based on a Japanese sitcom starring Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart in the Will Smith role.

There goes my #1 source of WWE comps.

There was a period from late 2003 to around 2007 where I couldn't even imagine missing a major ROH show. I hit all of the New Jersey shows, most of the Philly and New York shows, and they were almost always a good time. And even when things did fall flat during the Gabe era, like shit like the NO REMORSE CORPSE, you could at least make fun of it, and there was still decent wrestling somewhere on the undercard. Nowadays, I can't even remember the last ROH show I went to...I think maybe the first HDnet TV tapings, whenever they were? ROH could run a show down the street from where I live now and I don't think I'd go. I have less than no interest in them as they currently exist.

Nice job, Chris. It looks like I won't need to be tracking these after all, since you had every ballot that I had, plus others, and can probably obtain more anonymous ballots than I could, so I'll drop out of the ballot collection and wish you well with this. Someone suggested the project to me on Twitter. I started hunting ballots. Half-way through I came across your post and I felt bad because it seemed like I just swooped in unannounced and stole your thunder! I did want to apologize for that because that wasn't my intention. It was really just two people doing the same thing at the same time. Glad you confirmed that I haven't missed any ballots (yet) that you saw. I really had no clue if I missed any. No worries - I'm just glad somebody is doing the project. I think it's a worthwhile idea for sure. I do think that the results will be skewed a bit since there are more likely to be reporter and historian ballots made public than wrestler ballots, but I was always curious to see how good of an indicator the ballots made public are to who will be inducted. Thank you for doing this!

Nice job, Chris. It looks like I won't need to be tracking these after all, since you had every ballot that I had, plus others, and can probably obtain more anonymous ballots than I could, so I'll drop out of the ballot collection and wish you well with this.

His entire ballot from the Wrestlers category. I'll need to take a rain check on the Non-Wrestlers. Fair enough. Thank you for posting this!

So far, I have 10 full ballots, and would obviously love to have more. That only breaks down to 10 Modern US/Canada ballots, 7 Historic US/Canada ballots, 6 Japanese ballots, 5 Mexican ballots, 2 European ballots, 7 Australia/Pacific Islands/Caribbean/African/Antarctican/Martian/Galaxian ballots, and 10 non-wrestler ballots. From this (still admittedly very, very small) sample, I'm currently tracking Ivan Koloff, the Rock 'n' Roll express, Gran Hamada, Cien Caras, Signo/Texano/Navarro, Carlos Colon (who has been named on all 7 ballots that I've been able to find so far for this region), and Jerry Jarrett to make this year's Hall of Fame, although I expect the numbers for a lot of these guys to fall as I (hopefully) get a larger cross-section of ballots over the next week or so. One thing I've found interesting so far: through ten ballots, I've seen votes for everybody nominated for the non-wrestler category...except Larry Matysik.

Bruce Mitchell's ballot or what he disclosed in the Torch this week: Thanks for this. Is this Mitchell's entire ballot, or only what he discussed in the Torch? I would rather not count partial ballots if at all possible, but would if his whole ballot is not released elsewhere. Are there any other ballots posted on THE BOARD? I'm not currently a WON subscriber since they started blocking the WON site at work, but would reup if people are posting their full ballots over there.

Does anybody here have links to other ballots that have been made public? I've decided I'm going to try to track ballots this year to see who tracks to get elected, and to see if the ballots that are made public can provide us with any significant sample to determine the electees prior to the vote. For an idea of what I'm trying to do, see the link below. I'm looking for as large of a sample as possible, so please share whatever ballots that are made public in this thread so I can track them. FYI, based on the (admittedly) very, very small PWO sample size, currently tracking to make the WON HOF are Mr. Wrestling II, Junkyard Dog, Ivan Koloff, Ken Patera, the Rock 'n' Roll Express, Gran Hamada, Cien Caras, Los Misionarios, Jackie Pallo, Carlos Colon, Jimmy Hart, Jerry Jarrett, and Gene Okerlund. Granted...this is a tiny sample size, and in the case of Jackie Pallo, it's a sample size of one ballot, but I think it would be interesting to track the PWO ballots compared to the rest of the ballot just to see how it compares to the rest of the WON ballot once voting is announced. http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/newsstand/discussion/the_2013_hof_ballot_collecting_gizmo