Cox

Pam Clark = the former Pam Hildebrand, wife of Brian, correct?

Keep this coming, Bix. I have a partial copy of this around here somewhere that I received several years ago, mostly the look back at the Matwatch years section. I remember thinking at the time that he had a really good grasp of the television aspect of wrestling down pretty well (I believe he had worked in TV before or maybe even while writing Matwatch) but that other areas were lacking, and that he seemed to get morally outraged over some relatively tame items. Still, I love looking back at this sort of thing and look forward to future installments!

Apparently you have never heard of Jimmy Rave.

Well, whose fault is it that they didn't get the crowd involved? Isn't that what their job is? Plus the crowd seemed amped for other stuff all night, it just happened to be that Hardy/Orton didn't vibe for them for whatever reason. Myself, I thought while the RKO out of nowhere was great, that they didn't do enough to establish Hardy as a real threat to win the belt throughout the match, and I don't think anybody bought Hardy as a challenger in that spot, even with the big wins he had pulled off. I enjoyed the match, but it's as much Orton and Hardy's fault that the crowd wasn't hot for their match as anything else.

If Britney showing up on WWE TV means the return of K-Fed, I am all for it. I was disappointed when they stopped using K-Fed last year, he showed a lot of great heel ability and would have been fun as a part-time heel presence on WWE TV.

Reading through the Backlund stuff, he reminds me a lot of a Bert Blyleven/Tim Raines-type Hall of Fame candidate, who has his supporters who point to facts (great draw at MSG, above average or better worker during most of his title reign with great matches against this, that, or the other opponent, etc) and his detractors use generalities that don't mean anything (like "I was there for Backlund's title reign and he never felt like a Hall of Famer") to make the case against him. As a Blyleven/Raines supporter for the Baseball Hall of Fame, I hope their voters are as progressive as WON Hall of Fame voters would eventually prove to be and put them in the Hall of Fame eventually. I guess that makes Superstar Graham the Jim Rice of the WON Hall of Fame (assuming Rice is voted in next year, which is almost a stone cold lock)?

According to a posting on his website, Bobby Lashley has been released. So I guess this is the second time in as many years that a previous year's Wrestlemania headliner was fired before the next year's Wrestlemania.

It also helped that Fritz had sold off World Class in '88, so he didn't get a full year in. If he hadn't gotten out of the business, I'm sure Fritz would have found a way to win the award a few more times.

It's strange, because Tenay was CLEARLY worse than the four guys ahead of him this year, especially since Coach and Grisham didn't do any announcing of note in 2007, but because Meltzer and Tenay are tight, Meltzer won't criticize Tenay the way he would a Cole or a Styles. Since a good portion of these votes are at least influenced by Meltzer (how else do you explain Kane vs. Big Daddy V winning Worst Feud, other than Meltzer stumping for it every week) and with no other alternatives, you have guys like Cole getting votes when they are, at worst, inoffensive these days.

The other knock on him is that he didn't have a single good match in 2007, which would seem to make his winning "Most Underrated" quite silly. Actually, I guess that's not true, he had the ladder match with Matt and Jeff Hardy, but I mean, if you can't have a good ladder match with Matt and Jeff Hardy, two of the top five WWE in-ring wrestlers of 2007, in a match where it is almost impossible to have a bad match, then it's time to quit the business. Other than that, where is this great Shelton Benjamin work that should warrant a push?

How the hell did Samoa Joe place 10th for best technical wrestler? Is that supposed to be a rib or something? Also, I echo the sentiments about how ridiculous it is that Benjamin won Most Underrated (has anybody actually watched him work the last three years?) and Sapolsky winning Best Booker (I went to almost every NY/NJ/Philly ROH show this year and I've never been more bored with ROH). I'll throw in that Tenay not winning Worst Announcer is amazing, I mean, did Grisham or Coach even announce anything during the awards period? Are they really worthy of Worst Announcer votes over their performance on Internet Heat? Don West is the bright spot on the Impact announce team, not the worst announcer of 2007.

Also, Barbarian's wife.

Jerry Lawler threw the best working punch ever, and the only people he ever hurt with it (Paul Heyman, Sal Corrente) he did so intentionally.

They're still cutting off attendance by as much as a third in some arenas, which is why they've actually done better attendance-wise on house shows instead of TV tapings and PPVs, because they are selling out the entire arena, instead of just a large portion of it (although they draw more money at the gate with higher ticket prices at TV and PPV).

They gladly give up plenty of seating room to build their elaborate sets at PPV and TV tapings, so I'm not sure that's completely it.

Somebody with more free time on their hands than me should count who appears on this list the most, to get a feel for who the average WON subscriber felt were the better workers of the 80's. What sticks out to me is that DiBiase only appears on here three times, yet he was put in the WON Hall of Fame for work. Shouldn't a WON Hall of Famer, particularly one who was placed in for work, appear on the list more than three times? I mean, like Steamboat or not, he's on the list seven times, including two matches in the top five, but DiBiase only places as high as 17th. Just something I thought of while skimming through the list.

I think somebody at some point compiled all of these matches into one set, because I remember about 12 years ago, a friend of mine told me that he kept trying to watch this set, but would always fall asleep during the Choshu/Khan match. Not sure if the matches on the set are complete or just clip jobs, though.

Smothers is kind of sad, because on one hand, he has no business being in the ring at this point, but what's he going to do? Hasn't he been wrestling since his mid-teens? He's not exactly prepared for a job in the regular work-force, and with indy promoters willing to pay him pretty much whatever he wants, he would probably have trouble making even the meager living he makes through making indy shots in the "real world." It's kind of a sad situation, but what can you do?

You could say that, other than the ROH vs CZW feud, that the best period in ROH history was when Steamboat was there regularly working as a de facto road agent in '04, helping the younger guys construct matches more effectively. Hell, Cornette was at a lot of the shows for the ROH/CZW feud and basically working as a road agent then as well. But yeah, Bix is right, their live shows can be hard to sit through since so many guys are repeating the same spots. I mean, I went to both Misawa shows last month, and practically every match on both undercards featured forearm exchanges. On the same shows with friggin' MISAWA in the main event.

One more thing - don't you think that spots such as two head-first shots to the guardrail could be avoided if ROH actually had, you know, road agents? You know, the same dreaded road agents Gabe confessed to "not believing in" on the ECW booking DVD he did a few months back? Somebody to tell these psychopaths "Whoa wait a minute - you're going to do WHAT?"

WO.com E-Mail bringing up some of the same points In the end, I'm not sure this guy goes far enough - he seems content to mostly blame McGuinness for what happened, and while that's true, Gabe told Dave two months ago that the wrestlers were working a less high impact style, and saving the dangerous stuff for big matches. While I guess the Aries/McGuinness match was big in scope, NOBODY should be taking full force head shots to the ring post knowing that the end result is going to be a concussion, particularly when said wrestler is scheduled to wrestle again the next night. For all of Gabe's posturing about how the ROH locker room has learned from Benoit, it's clear that they haven't, and they're doing stuff even Benoit would have turned down. It will be interesting to see if the promotion has any sort of reaction to what happened Saturday night, or if it will just continue to be business as usual, and Gabe will just spin away to Dave in next week's Observer, saying that this was just a one-time thing again.

Also worth noting - James Andrews is also one of the more popular baseball surgeons around, and lord knows we've found over the past several weeks that baseball players are far from a bastion of purity.

www.prowrestlinghistory.com recently put up a huge list of MSC cards dating back to the 70's. It's not complete, but I would assume most of the major Lawler/Dundee match listings would be on their lists.

Rick Rubin bankrolls Smoky Mountain Wrestling Seriously, what was this all about? A successful record producer pours finances into allowing Jim Cornette to resurrect every Memphis and Mid South angle he could in Appalachian backwater towns? Granted, I loved Smoky Mountain, I just can't figure out how THE Rick Rubin wound up funding this.

Using the gimmick name that he used for a handful (or less) of shows in Japan is either a rib or the weirdest bit of research ever. Maybe it was an attempt to put her in the most unflattering light possible?