Cox

Why are all of these bad Wrestlemanias winning polls? I get that it's Wrestlemania season, but who gives a fuck about Wrestlemania IX or Wrestlemania XV? I was there for Wrestlemania XV and I don't give a shit about it, it's the peak of the Russo era and it was one of the most disappointing live wrestling experiences I've ever witnessed. I get that Bruce in the GWF isn't a sexy poll topic to the Wredditers, and that they get a kick out of Conrad's "who booked this shit" gimmick, but seriously, pick topics where Bruce's insight might be of some use, not a succession of the worst Wrestlemanias of all time.

I think I was high vote on Becky and Prazak (which, full disclosure, are two people I have known at various points of my life, though I haven't spoken to either in a number of years). I thought it was interesting that Gabe won the poll, presumably based on his booking, and Punk and Aries both received votes presumably for their training, yet Delirious, who has done both, and has been booking almost as long as Gabe at this point, didn't receive a single vote. I thought that was quite telling at how people view modern ROH.

I guess they could get Rod McMahon, the Houston steel magnate.

Apparently, Impact is teasing that somebody at their tapings will be the talk of wrestling, which already makes me highly skeptical that they are serious about trying to rebuild this disaster. They need to stop teasing stuff like this. Unless they somehow managed to snag either John Cena, Roman Reigns, Brock Lesnar, Undertaker, Goldberg, Randy Orton, AJ Styles, Miz, or a member of the McMahon family, they have not signed anybody that will make them the talk of wrestling, and I highly doubt they have managed to sign any of those people. Instead of trying to be the talk of wrestling, how about just creating a series of really good wrestling shows and get people buzzing about Impact again? Then when people are actually talking about Impact like it's not the worst wrestling promotion that has ever existed, then maybe try bringing in a few big names, or even medium sized names, to keep the buzz going and reach a bigger audience? Instead, they're just setting people who aren't burned out by TNA surprises (there has to be some people left out there, right) up to be disappointed when it turns out to be Jim Ross or Jack Swagger or even one of the Hardys, that ultimately would not matter very much.

Approximately 70% of all the awards went to Connor McGreggor. Is Dave ever going to change most over/underrated to most over/under pushed, since that's what readers clearly mean by their votes? That is actually exactly what Dave intended the awards to be when he created them in the 80's. He doesn't do as good a job at describing the criteria for each award as he used to in the 80's, but that's what this award has always meant to reward/punish, wrestlers who the WON readership felt was either overrated or underrated by the territories that they were working at the time.

This show was an example of how bad Conrad can be as a host. Most of the topics, he's fine, because most of the WWF's stuff from the late 80's into the 2000's is pretty well known, and for the stuff that isn't well known, Conrad has the Observer archives available as a backup to help fill in the gaps. For Houston wrestling, the heyday was before Meltzer's online archive starts, and it doesn't sound like Conrad bothered to read the Paul Boesch obituary from the Observer, which was readily available through Tributes and is probably online somewhere, and you'd think would be the bare minimum research he would do for something like this, since Meltzer was so close to Boesch. So without Conrad knowing anything, and with him openly proclaiming not to give a shit about the topic, he's relying on Bruce to steer the conversation, and with Bruce able to steer the conversation more than he normally would, it allows him to bullshit Conrad more than usual. Conrad tries to cover for this by trying to sound forceful on the issue of whether or not Boesch was Gino Hernandez's father, but obviously without a DNA test, Bruce isn't going to know one way or another. So Conrad gets to remain the hero to the Wreddit community, as goc has pointed out, without bothering to actually, you know, get any answers to any relevant questions, such as why promoting with Paul Boesch was so important and how that helped Vince win the war in Houston, since Vince wasn't successful running against him. Instead, it's mostly Bruce burying Peter Bircholtz over perceived slights from 30 years ago.

I wasn't going to submit a non-wrestler ballot, but decided to do so this afternoon. It was harder than I thought. ROH hasn't really used managers during their run, and haven't really had a ton of great announcers either, so while the ones who were great stand out (Nana and Sweeney on the manager side, Prazak on the announcing side), filling out a ballot of ten people can get tough quickly.

I think they would run the Broken Hardys concept into the ground doing a weekly show, but I do wonder if there is money to be made doing a monthly or quarterly special from the Hardy compound. Because it wouldn't have an audience, it wouldn't need to be done live, so they would save money by being able to pretape everything. They may not even need to do an entire show, but they could fill the undercard with CWF and other North Carolina indie guys if they wanted to. But they could do vignettes on YouTube to sell it and build shows around the Hardys wrestling various tag teams at the compound, and distribute it themselves and keep all of the money. I'm not sure how much interest they would get from this, or if it would make enough money to be worth the work, but it's at least something I've thought about.

I swear, if I have to listen to "was that a rib?" or "who booked this shit?" one more time...Conrad just comes off as the biggest douchebag smark when he runs that gimmick and it can get infuriating.

Have you guys ever thought about breaking the shows up into a few smaller shows, rather than releasing one giant show at once? I think that might be easier for listeners to listen to 3-5 shows that are around an hour each, rather than one monster 5-6 hour podcast. I know for me, I fell behind last week because I had a busy week at work and did not have time for podcasts, so now I'm about 12 hours behind on Between the Sheets after two weeks, so it would be easier to catch up for sure if I could listen to smaller podcasts than to try to start one giant podcast while getting behind on other podcasts on my feed. The shows usually break off into nice, even segments anyway, and having smaller podcasts might be easier on you guys too. Just a thought.

I always thought Reckless Youth was a guy who came around just a little too early. If he had come around 5-10 years later, he would have been one of the top guys of early ROH and other, similar indies, and likely would have had a much better run with WWE and NXT today. Instead, he went to MCW at a time where the WWF had little interest in utilizing a guy as small as he was (he has said that the only gimmick that was pitched to him while under contract was a manager role for Low Down that eventually wound up going to Tiger Ali Singh) and he never made it. If he came along later, he at least goes to NXT or 205 Live, and his smaller size isn't quite the detriment it was in 2000.

Immediately after listening to Prazak tell the story on this week's show, I sent my sister a text message asking her, "May I speak to the Boy Gone Bad?"

One thing about Tammy's "suspension" is, besides her WWF tryouts as Tamara Murphy, she had also broken her wrist at Christmas Chaos when she accidentally took a bump off the apron to the floor, so she wasn't able to work. Knowing Cornette, he didn't want a heel with a cast at ringside that wasn't part of a storyline since it might make her somewhat sympathetic (though Tammy could have come out in a full body cast and that crowd wouldn't have felt sympathy for her). So they did the "Tammy is suspended for Chris legdropping the cat" deal to explain why Tammy was off of the house shows, even if logically it would have made sense for it to have been Chris.

I usually think that the default answer to this is Road Dogg. Road Dogg was certainly the biggest star out of the four, but I think he's also easily the worst worker, and that's coming from somebody who generally likes his work.

I watched this on AXS last night as well. I thought it was a pretty great big show main event style match, and as a guy who isn't that familiar with Kenny Omega, this felt to me like one of the great big match performances I've ever seen. That said, there were two things that bothered me. Omega's sub-Edge level facial expressions were as bad as advertised, and I really hated the top rope dragon suplex, especially when it was only used for a nearfall about halfway through the match. There are plenty of wrestlers out there with severe neck injuries who never took a spot half as dangerous as that, and for it to only be used to get a two count when they had another 20 minutes or so planned seemed stupid to me, and I'm worried that there will be indie wrestlers who will try to emulate that spot to disastrous results. Otherwise, I felt it was definitely worth watching, and I enjoyed this quite a bit more than Okada/Tanahashi on AXS the week before. I don't believe it to be the greatest wrestling match of all time, but I also don't know that I'd be arrogant enough to anoint any match as the greatest match of all time. It certainly wouldn't go anywhere near my list of favorite matches of all time, but I can also see why others would disagree. Maybe if I had more of a connection to Okada or Omega I'd feel different, but I still think the dragon suplex spot would piss me off enough to not look at it quite that fondly.

Chris Jericho was nice enough to fully fund his mother's GoFundMe request to pay for services, which was an awfully nice thing of Jericho to do.

Funny that he named the rule after somebody who will probably never be on the ballot.

I think the rule is, 35 years or older with at least 10 years of experience, or 15 years in the business.

Style Battle was last night. I think the show had much more good than bad, but is mostly skippable, outside of a fantastic match between Fred Yehi and Anthony Henry, and a couple of solid performances from AR Fox. The show was hurt by being outdoors in 40 degree weather in Florida, and I think the placement and the length of Yehi/Henry also hurt the show, as it was so good and so long that nothing could really follow it. Fred Yehi is a guy who really impressed me, and I hope he starts to break out outside the WWN family in 2017. He's really good and should be working more places.

Sorry for not responding sooner. I honestly don't remember much about the match years later. I certainly remember liking it at the time, but it was over 20 years ago and I was only 16 at the time, so my wrestling tastes weren't exactly refined at the time. I actually remember more about the ECW six man, with Public Enemy and Dreamer vs Scorpio and the Eliminators, but that's probably because one of my friends (who was working backstage at the show) managed to get me a piece of the table used in the match signed by all of the participants in the match, which to 16 year old me, was one of the coolest things ever. Luckily, it was 1995, because I can't imagine trying to get that through airport security these days, and still don't know how we got it through back then.

1. Get my podcast off the ground, which is mostly getting things coordinated with my cohost and getting my own ass into gear for that. Hopeful to be up and running within a month or two. 2. Travel to see some wrestling this year. I want to make it down south to see at least a show or two. I got married last year, which took up so much of my time, and with that now complete, it's time to have some fun and see some shows this year. Really hoping to make this happen.

I'm a little confused by this week's WCW results from Philadelphia. Kris says the show took place at Pennsylvania Hall, and not the Civic Center, but I think Pennsylvania Hall was part of the Civic Center, and Graham lists this show as taking place at the Civic Center, so I tend to think that Dave might have been mistaken and that this actually took place at the Civic Center. I only remember this because I went to one show at the Civic Center (I won free tickets through Philly 57 by being the 10th caller or whatever) and being confused because there were signs for both PA Hall and the Civic Center, which turned out to be the same building.

I think to me, the story of 2016 is easily AJ Styles. I think when you look at what he's accomplished this year, he's an easy Wrestler of the Year, because what he accomplished this year in WWE had such a high degree of difficulty. I can't remember the last time WWE brought in somebody from outside, and made that guy a top guy from the first day they were in the company, a true main event level star. I think you can make an argument that they haven't done this since Ric Flair in 1991. Steve Austin, Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, Kurt Angle, they spent significant time in the mid card before they got their first real main event runs, whereas Styles debuted in January, was headlining by April, and was carrying Smackdown as the top heel by August. When you look at how WWE is run in 2016, and how even a guy as clearly talented as Bryan Danielson starts in developmental, and to see somebody like Styles not only bypass developmental, but excel on the main roster having never worked WWE style before, that is remarkable to me. It was something I didn't think we'd ever see again in WWE, and something we may never see again, unless they ever get around to bringing in the Young Bucks. Even if WWE were to sign the Bucks, they would not be a top pushed act at the level that AJ Styles was in 2016. I've been cold on Styles as a WON Hall of Fame candidate before this year because he hasn't had anything he could really hang his candidacy on, beyond being a very good to great worker for a number of years, but what he accomplished in 2016 was really impressive and a real resume builder towards establishing a larger candidacy than anything he's done to date.

Tag Team Apocalypto was a pretty awesome spectacle, but for all the zaniness, I think my favorite part was the mini match between the Hardys and the Rock 'n' Rolls. I mean, I'm an unabashed Rock 'n' Roll mark, so that was to be expected, but still. But the match itself was pretty much near perfect, and honestly that would have been a perfect way to send off TNA as a wrestling promotion.

FYI, Patriot was in WCW during the 1994 Real World Tag League, which is why he wouldn't have teamed with Eagle - he was teaming with Marcus Bagwell as Stars and Stripes at this time, and in fact, they were still WCW tag team champions during this time, though they were about to drop them to Harlem Heat. And that's it for this week's "Cox Shares A Tidbit Of Little Consequence About This Week's Between The Sheets When He Should Be Doing Work."