Cox

I am admittedly an unabashed Vince mark, but I loved tonight's main event. I'm sure there's something to be said against a man with liver spots going 50/50 with the World champion, but I thought the whole thing was fun from start to finish. I wonder if Paul is still selling Vince's slap on the floor...

Do you really need to go to this much trouble to prove Scott Keith wrong? All you would have to do to convince me that Scott Keith said something wrong would be to say, "Scott Keith said something."

Seriously. There are three different ways to misuse that word (they're, their, there) and "thear" is not one of them.

Well to be fair, D'Lo's push probably had more to do with the match with Droz than anything else.

Konnan actually co-wrote his own bio, probably because Dave was so behind on these, and it was as hilarious as you'd expect when a man writes his own Hall of Fame bio. The first paragraph:

I really enjoyed the top two matches at the Bluegrass Brawl. The Dirty White Boy/Tracy Smothers chain match is one of my favorite matches of all time. I don't think they reinvented the wheel or anything with their chain match, but it was executed so well, with DWB the evilest, vilest man that ever lived beating the snot out of Smothers for a solid 10-15 minutes and Tracy doing a great job selling everything and firing back for his comeback. The finish is utterly predictable for anybody who's seen that type of match, but still made total sense and kept the issue open for rematches around the horn, which makes sense as this was a feud that was only getting started.

I still can't figure out how Lesnar got on the ballot after two years wrestling full-time and wrestling part time in three other years. Shouldn't a guy have more than five years (2 years full time) in the business before we're debating his HOF merits? When you can't make a case for a guy being in a wrestling Hall of Fame based on any of his pro wrestling merits, it's time to seriously evaluate the process for which candidates are selected for the ballot.

Man, this was like every great Jerry Lawler match where he takes a beating for a long time, sells his ass off, and then when you think it's all over, he pulls down the strap and here comes the big comeback. I just hope we aren't moving towards a Memphis screwjob finish.

Question: is this like the Baseball Hall of Fame, where if a wrestler is on the ballot for 15 years and doesn't make it, they fall off? I think this is the 15th year of voting, and I don't think anybody has ever hung around that long so there probably isn't a litmus test (though I guess Owen has been on almost every year, as has Murdoch), but it seems that at some point, some of these guys who hover between 10-40% without ever making it in should probably be removed so the ballot doesn't get overstuffed.

My completely uneducated guess is that it would be somewhere between "highest merch mover in WCW from 1990 through 1994" and "not nearly enough to make WCW financially solvent," so I'd guess that his merchandise numbers, while not terrible, probably aren't anything to hold in high regard either.

From this week's Observer: I don't think anything has ever better illustrated why Dave's "15 years in the business/35 years or older" threshold is far too soon to properly judge HOF candidates. Time and perspective are very important to evaluating the career of a Hall of Famer, and trying to make calls on guys who are still in the prime of their career is asinine. When Funaki and Sakuraba were elected, the MMA fad was still very prominent in Japan, and without any distance from it, Funaki and Sakuraba made the HOF when they probably wouldn't if on the ballot with more perspective. It's a shame, because I do think the WON Hall of Fame is the closest thing there is to an actual Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame, which is why silly things like this drive me up a wall, because I want to expect more out of it, but know that I shouldn't. All of this is to say, I'm going to be very upset when Brock makes the HOF next month.

I think WWF's ability to not only buy the library, but a lot of the contracts WCW had on the books made them a more attractive selling partner. I don't think Turner wanted to piece out the assets of WCW, they wanted one sale that got rid of everything, and only WWF could reasonably do that in March 2001. Plus, I suspect most folks didn't realize the value of the JCP/WCW library at that point. Now, if TNA or ROH were to go bankrupt, both companies might get a good offer from somebody for the tape libraries alone, but that simply wasn't happening in 2001.

I think Meltzer had said in various Observers around that period was that Bischoff planned to bring back all the stars that he had taken off TV around the same time, and bring in RVD, Steve Corino, and Joey Styles from ECW, and give a big push to Jason Jett/EZ Money.

The Midnight Express (Condrey/Eaton/Lane) were also a group pick, and realistically should have been inducted with Cornette (who was a fiat pick who made it in largely based on his work with the Midnights). So the idea of a group being on the ballot and getting voted in is not entirely unprecedented, though inducting London Publishing as a group would still seem rather unusual on the surface. It's not like a booking team or a booking committee has ever been nominated.

I don't think you can blame that on running SummerSlam at the Staples Center every year, so much as WWE just ran an unexciting show on paper that was just as unexciting as advertised. There is a huge difference between running two TV tapings a month and 8 PPVs a year in the same building and running one PPV a year in the same building.

Anybody else catch this tonight? I thought the three way was good, Lesnar vs HHH was not good, and everything else was varying shades of okay. Not a show I regret purchasing, but not a show I'll remember in three weeks, either.

I am the biggest Paul Heyman apologist in the world (that didn't work for ECW or PWInsider, anyway) and even I can't defend him in that segment, or really any of the segments he's had with HHH since his return. I like to think it's working with HHH, Shawn, and Stephanie that's bringing out the worst in him.

He took a good bump off the F5, which is one more bump than I thought he would take tonight. That's something. Everything else sucked.

Roddy Piper definitely seems like the kind of guy who it would be fun to get drunk with. Man, the SummerSlam match with HHH and Lesnar is going to be full of melodramatic bullshit in the "Modern WWE Epic" style, isn't it?

Why would they give a lifetime achievement award to Foley when he had been there for two and a half years? Granted, he probably took more bumps in two and a half years there than some people did in ten, but still.

I cannot wait. I decided I wanted to buy all of the yearbooks in sequential order so I've been waiting for the 1990 yearbook to come out for some time as my first foray into this, and the Memphis stuff that you've described alone makes me really want this. The minute it's released, I will be ordering my copy!

In all seriousness, working for the clowns might not make a top 20 list of depressing Flair stories from the past 3 years. What will be depressing are the stories that will come out afterwards where the clowns will have to pay his meth tab on the Drug Bridge.

It became tougher for them to use Freebird as entrance music once WCW went from popular music to the more generic stuff. I just don't think a redone version of Freebird would have been as effective as the redone version of the MX theme, so I think using Badstreet USA worked considering the circumstances. I have no defense of "I'm A Freebird, What's Your Excuse," though.

Is it wrong that in my head, I read this with you saying this in your pirate voice?