Cox

Is there any real case for Bullet Bob? I desperately want to believe somehow, someway he can at least stay on the ballot, but I don't think it looks too good for him since nobody seems to be talking about him.

The Dudleys were once on the ballot. They have to be in contention too.

My first reaction to that is that there's no way it's been that long since the last Lawler/Jarrett match, but then when I thought about it, realized it's been about 14 years since Jarrett was in WWE (and even then, it's not like Lawler was wrestling very frequently there) and Jarrett's relative lack of involvement with all of the modern-day Memphis promotions, I realized it's probably been more like 16-17 years since they wrestled. Hope this winds up making the internet somehow.

Wait, what?

What about Raw moving to FX? I think FX is probably a little too prestige at this point to take on Raw, but if Fox made an offer to put Raw on FX and Smackdown on FS1, I could see that enticing Vince.

Watching the end of Raw tonight, where Daniel Bryan looks stupid for hitting the ring with HHH having the Shield at ringside and at a 2-1 disadvantage in the ring (assuming Stephanie and Vince aren't really threats to lay out Vince), I couldn't help but think that if this had been booked as an Austin storyline in 1998, there's no way Austin would have allowed himself to be booked to be stupid enough to walk into a situation down that much in numbers without some sort of wacky plan in place to get the better of Vince in the end. And it also reminded me of how WWE has like 50 years of generally good booking based around babyface aces like Bruno, Backlund, Hogan, Bret, Austin, Rock, and Cena, but somehow every time HHH winds up as the top heel, all of WWE's top faces suddenly become Sting-level stupid and look foolish at every turn. The crowd was hot for HHH's mic work, and I will say he did a great job setting up something where Bryan should have gotten some sort of small revenge tonight, but that small revenge never really happened and in the end, the crowd didn't care about Bryan because it's hard to get people behind a stupid person, and Daniel Bryan was booked to be pretty goddamned stupid tonight.

I am thinking this is more along the lines of, any heel group in WCW post-1996 that has Kevin Nash and Scott Hall almost has to be called the nWo.

This show was basically in the town I went to college in, how did I not go to this show? EDIT: Not only did this take place in the same town I went to college, but it actually happened on campus. I know it wasn't school season, but still.

I thought Lane and Cornette worked a few tapings? I remember them being in the TV tourney, the tag tourney (teaming with Steve Cox) and the North American tourney.

So according to Dave in this week's Observer, ROH put the tag team titles on the American Wolves even though they aren't under contract and are not committed to any shows past the next New York show this coming weekend. They never learn from their mistakes, do they? This is what happens when you give the book to a guy who speaks in tongues.

I think this is an interesting topic, because I agree in there being differences between WWF fans and WCW fans, and I think that's the reason we will never see a second strong wrestling company ever again. WCW (with help from various other territories for sure, like Crockett, GCW, Mid South, etc) had years of training their fans to accept wrestling as the most important part of a wrestling TV show, it was ingrained in the southern wrestling culture over decades, and at this point, so much time has passed since WCW died that I don't think another wrestling company would have the patience from their highers up to train their audience to accept a strong wrestling-based product. Not that TNA has really ever tried to present a strong wrestling-based product during the Impact era, but it would only be a matter of time before Dixie or whomever was the corporate head was asking why their wrestling show didn't look like Raw before the wrestling time was cut back and more 20 minute promos or goofy backstage skits were added to the program to be a WWE-lite show. ROH's attempts at making waves on television have failed miserably, and granted part of that has been their terrible TV deals and bad booking, but it's also because the audience that grew up on a wrestling-based product has long since moved on, and at this point they aren't coming back. I think that's a real shame as a real alternative would have been great for wrestling fans, but unfortunately Russo was booking the first real alternative to WWE that popped up post-WCW, and that killed the chance of a true wrestling-based television show ever coming back.

What does Jim Neidhart have to do with any of this?

I find that to be pretty amazing, actually. When Global started, it was on daily on ESPN, a channel many people had access to, and featured a lot of tape trading favorites (Cactus Jack, Eddie Gilbert, Stan Lane with Jim Cornette, Buddy Landell, Terry Gordy, etc). I figured somebody had to have a lot of this stuff somewhere, or that a ton of it would have wound up on YouTube.

Other than the UWC shows I attend and record for the YouTube show I produce, the last indy show I went to was about 2/3 of the Chikara WrestleCon show in April. Also caught the PWS show that Thursday with the illustrious Bix, which was cool because it had the Rock 'n' Roll on it.

I'd bet almost any amount of money that Dave still uses a flip phone. Assuming, of course, that he's not using a Zach Morris-era cell phone.

Would anybody who wasn't a "smart" fan understand the term "shoot" to mean a legitimate fight? Other than the UWFi PPVs promoting "shootwrestling," I don't think using the term shoot was ever really used much, and I doubt it would register much to the common fan.

With Hero being pulled from NXT due to conditioning issues, Samoa Joe probably would have been fucked if he had gone to WWE, so no matter what career path he chose, he always would have been "that poor fucker." I guess in retrospect, his ROH run will go down as easily the best run of his career.

Paige was apparently involved in some Facebook drama with Corey Graves (I only know about this because one of my friends is friends with her on Facebook).

As bad as TNA is, and as little interest as I may have in actually watching TNA, I hope it doesn't die, if only because it's a place for guys who aren't in WWE to make money in the US. It's easy to assume somebody more competent will fill the void of TNA, but it took years for TNA to get on national TV and become a viable place for other guys to work. If TNA dies, unless Viacom is really hard up to have wrestling on Spike, I think it's very possible that will be the last time a second wrestling promotion lands a national cable TV deal.

Whenever I think of back body drops, I always think of Marty Jannetty at the 1990 Survivor Series. He got so much air on that one, he still hasn't come back down yet.

So how long before Sinclair realizes that WWE might actually give them a decent payday for the ROH library to have the rights to old Punk and Danielson matches for future DVD releases, and shuts down the company and sells the tape library? Also, serious question: which tape library is worth more to Vince, TNA's or WWE's? None of their current stars have TNA runs of note, and while the production values of TNA blow ROH's out of the water so badly it's not even funny, most of those are matches that would not be of any consequence to a WWE DVD release. I mean, does anybody really want to watch well past their prime matches from Sting, Flair, Hogan, Foley, Nash, Booker, etc? The only value the TNA library would have to Vince is if he ever mended fences with Angle.

I wonder if Cornette's ability to speak well and cut promos has helped mask a lot of his deficiencies as a booker. The fact that he usually targets unpopular targets (Jim Herd, Vince Russo) has also traditionally helped him earn the support of the hardcore fan community, but after failing so badly with ROH, it's hard to ignore at this point that he is kind of a hack as a booker.

The Observer is saying that The Shield is wrestling Undertaker and Kane at SummerSlam if Taker wants to wrestle, which would be a pretty high spot on the card for them. This feels like a placeholder feud, and with the WWE's tag scene the way it is, the Usos were probably the best team for that spot.

Do people really subscribe to the Observer site for the podcasts, though? I've been an Observer site subscriber pretty much since the merger, and I don't think I've listened to more than ten podcasts in the time I've been a subscriber, and rarely in full. I understand the idea of making the podcasts seem like a value add vs. ordering the print subscription, but I don't think they are pushing subscriber numbers for the site THAT much, whereas being on iTunes would lead to more exposure for the site and might get them a bigger listenership.

Going off topic a bit, I think most of us who have posted in this thread pretty much agree that Samoa Joe would have failed in WWE. But is there possibly a window where he might have had some success? The only thing I can think of is if Joe had signed at the same time as Punk. Then, he would have wound up in OVW at the same time as Punk and worked under Heyman, who I assume would have given him the Taz push in OVW, then brought him to ECW with Punk as the new Taz and had him run through guys for a few months. I don't know if it would have lasted past December to Dismember, and I assume there are many who would have taken even more glee in beating the shine off of Joe than they did beating the shine off of Punk, but for six months on the WWE's C-Brand, I think Joe would have been a star. If he had gotten himself over during this period, he MIGHT have had a chance to sustain it long-term, as Punk eventually did. More likely, I think after Heyman leaves, they beat him until he's a nobody and that's pretty much the end of Samoa Joe in WWE, but there's a chance I'm wrong. Is there any other period where he might have had a chance?