S.L.L.

An easy guy to like as a starter puro fan, and he's always held up well for me. Eegah mentioned his positivity, and he really did sound like an optimist considering the cards he was dealt, which I admire. I'm glad he was at least able to get out of the chair before he passed on. RIP

I get what you're aiming at here, but a mic worker as shitty as HHH should never be considered the new Dusty regardless of the reason for comparison, He's the Buddy Landell to Dusty's Flair. Totally uncalled for slam on Buddy Landell. I don't remember what kind of promo "Black Nature Boy" Scoot Andrews was, but I feel like he was overall a pretty lateral performer to HHH who didn't have HHH's spotlight.

I get what you're aiming at here, but a mic worker as shitty as HHH should never be considered the new Dusty regardless of the reason for comparison,

I absolutely stand by Garvin's World Class run as being a marvel of schtick, with a deceptive ability to hang in brawls and on the mat, which is remarkable for a guy who had no memorable offense to speak of. That said...it's one year. He has some good stuff in AWA and Crockett, but the magic is basically gone, and by the time you get the Freebird years, he's terrible. I do feel a certain connection to '83-'84 Garvin, but there are a ton of wrestlers with equivalent runs who aren't gonna make my ballot, so neither is he.

Wait, so is this Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez, noted long-time wrestling insiders, or just two guys who happened to be named Dave and Bryan, genuinely baffled at the possibility that someone in the wrestling business might have questionable motives for making shitty booking decisions?

In that case, I take back everything I said. Rudo Sombra is awesome.

Yeah, but that would've required hiring a guy with "new Rey" potential, like Dragon Lee or Aerostar. Instead, they made the same stupid mistake they made when hiring Sin Cara: this guy's strengths are much different than Rey's strengths, but instead of finding a guy who actually fits the Rey role, they just hired the pushed masked lucha flyer because surely they're all alike. If this really the plan, I think it's a massive testament to my theory that HHH's brilliant vision of WWE's future as demonstrated on NXT is really just Ryan Ward's vision, and HHH is no more of wrestling visionary than he was when he made his very first mistake in this role...which he is apparently about to repeat.

I've talked a lot about how I think it's more important for a promo to across as sincere than as verbally coherent. The example I always cited was Owen Hart's "I kicked your leg out of your leg" heel turn promo - infamously malformed, but I stand by it to this day as a great promo because the emotion was so palpable. Kerry and Kevin are pretty good examples of this, too. They were usually too high to form complete sentences, but you generally got what they were trying to say, and usually believed what they were saying.

I preface what I'm about to say by noting this whole thing looks really fun and exciting, so I don't want to be too much of a Negative Nelly. Also, I was a big fan of Sombra as a cocky dickhead shitkicker in the Ingobernables. That said, high-flyer spot machine Sombra - which I'm guessing is what Manny is gonna be if this is their plan - was basically a higher floor/lower ceiling Mistico. Not sure it's a good booking move to showcase him by putting in a tournament with a bunch of more interesting wrestlers. But again, want to clarify that this tournament sounds absolutely awesome.

Also also, big part of HHH's douchebag rep is that he's a guy who won't do it to your face. Guy who talks you up to your face and buries you when you aren't looking. Hence the whole thing with Booker T wanting to sit in on booking meetings - he knew HHH said different things to his face than he did behind his back. This story doesn't fit that.

Take a good long look in the mirror, realize that this day was always going to come in some form or another, and that - bad luck with injuries aside - they have no one to blame for their problems but themselves. It's a new day.

And to think, if he had waited one day longer, Heath Slater could've passed on those "Social Outcasts" and brought back motherfuckin' FESTUS as his new partner! We could've brought back one of the best wasted WWE acts of the last 15 years, but with a better Ray Gordy. BISCUITS 'N' GRAVYYYYYYY!

They have the best themed ring attire in WWE. I hope they keep this gimmick up long enough to do a Breakfast Club ripoff. I do appreciate that someone in the company paid tribute to Tommy Gilbert.

Hang in there, man. I wish you all the best.

@SLLCoolJ

I think - as I've tried to apply thought to my wrestling watching over the years - that wrestling, at it's best, is storytelling in perhaps it's most simplistic, primal, and fun forms. Broadly-defined characters with simple motivations having straightforward conflicts settled with that most basic of negotiating tools: violence. That's entertainment.

https://vimeo.com/51785900 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hvhwe Wish I could find her 2013 Carlos Amano match, but a quick search isn't turning that up. As donsem43 pointed out elsewhere, Kana is someone I said would be a really cool get for NXT, and while I was kinda being flippant when I said it, I meant it all the same. The main hang-up I imagined would be her BatlleArts-inspired style maybe being too out there for some of the other girls, but I figure she's talented enough that they could figure out how to adjust that to the house style without losing her own before putting her on TV. Beyond that, she's got a hell of a distinct personality and character, she's very creative, she'd have the distinction of being the only Asian female on the roster, and, penchant for clown makeup aside, is quite attractive. I don't know how good her English is, and ideally, you'd hope she'd work on that, but she was pretty clearly the best female hire on the market unless Rousey decided to go into wrestling full-time.

Of course they did, just like they hated John Cena getting pushed as company ace. Looking at the real problems of why the company was broken makes certain corners of wrestling fandom uncomfortable, so the brand split became an easy scapegoat. That things have gotten vastly worse since the split ended, and that, in retrospect, the split was an unambiguous good (and seemed like an unambiguous good to me at the time) is besides the point. OK, but why was it a scapegoat? Like, what was the IWC talking point that was being used back then that made people think unification would solve problems? I guess I can picture folks thinking that the SD/ECW guys were getting hosed on PPV time, but my memory of it is that even back then most people recognized that it was a net positive to get Vince's eyes off SD and keep like, Mysterio as far from HHH as possible. You're giving the general public of the internet way more credit than they deserve. Wish I could find the arguments I had on DVDVR at the time, but the substance of the argument against the brand split - and I swear to God I'm not making this up - was that the brand split was artificial, and didn't represent any kind of real division of power in WWE. Their primary complaint was that it was obviously fake. I'm gonna say that again for people who are new to the party...they didn't like the brand split because it was something artificial, not real, and obviously fake. In professional wrestling. I swear to God that this argument was commonplace, and, in some corners, conventional wisdom. Because we're not talking about rational people. We're talking about people who need scapegoats to justify why a wrestling promotion sucks because looking at the real reasons is too scary for them. Those kind of people will say anything.

Of course they did, just like they hated John Cena getting pushed as company ace. Looking at the real problems of why the company was broken makes certain corners of wrestling fandom uncomfortable, so the brand split became an easy scapegoat. That things have gotten vastly worse since the split ended, and that, in retrospect, the split was an unambiguous good (and seemed like an unambiguous good to me at the time) is besides the point.

You think you're doing it poorly, at least you still get columns up at Segunda Caida at a nice clip. Poor time management has always been my biggest achilles heel, and that applies to things I do for fun as much as it does everything else in my life. I've made a concentrated effort to fix that, but the usual result is that fun stuff like wrestling often gets pushed way into the back in favor of work and physical fitness goals. Someday, I'll make sense of it all, and I still have big dreams of updating the Complete and Accurate Meiko and Pirata projects more regularly and spearheading an 80's Joshi project. I've called it quits on All-Request Friday Night (Random Match Generator is doing basically the same thing on a more regular schedule, so if you liked All-Request, you should check that out). I also have long-standing aspirations of getting into the podcasting game that everyone seems to be doing these days. But when you're at the dawn of your 30's, and the big things in your life aren't going the way you need them to, it's a little harder to justify focusing on smaller pleasures the way I used to be able to. Was that too dark? That felt a little too dark. Here's Shameless.

I had a dream last night in which I was the latest in a string of relatives to spend the night in the same hotel room. Each one who stayed there left behind a short note of some kind, usually a political joke of some kind. I don't remember much about those, but I vividly remember the one that was an exception to the rule - a very elderly female relative from the old country (who does not exist in real life, FWIW), left a note that was entirely in Russian...except for the last line, in which she proclaimed her love for Memphis wrestling. I appreciate my unconscious mind's attempt at connecting the dots between my Jewish Ukrainian heritage and my love of Jerry Lawler, but I'm not sure I can do it consciously.

We are NXT Kids, a million strong and growing! Sorry...I don't really have anything else of substance to add at the moment. I just had to get that out there. But yeah, this was pretty nifty.

SO WATCHU GONNA DO ABOUT IT!

I wrote about the "Three Very Real Problems That Face WWE" back in Late 2012 during the build to the Punk/Ryback match...and since literally nothing has changed since then, other than things probably getting worse, I guess I might as well just repost that: Later in same issue he pointed out that in recent PPV when they had Cena work a match on the lower part of the card, you could see people leave after the Cena match. Mcmahon has decided that no one should make a difference and yet Cena is the guy who makes a difference. I think the conclusion is that at this point (for better or worse) that Mcmahon has decided that it is a better business move to coast on the brand name and not put all the eggs in one basket, not have one person anchor his promotion. But that said Cena is the one guy on the roster who they could build around. Loss’ statement about Cena’s period being short is accurate. He’s the one guy who they could anchor the promotion around, but the promotion would rather sail without an anchor. Perhaps more importantly, he also wrote this: tomk, on Mar 22 2012, 02:40 PM, said: I might argue that he probably wasn't consciously working towards it, because Vince is too much of an unstable coke fiend to be much of a long-term planner. But his more likely conscious plan of "how can I most easily gain constant access to cocaine and loose women?" dovetails very nicely into "how can I make my wrestling promotion be all about me?" And by God, he found a way. And now, I'm going to roll out one of my most quoted pieces, which I wrote in the immediate aftermath of Mania 23, when I thought - and try not to laugh at this one - that wrestling was about to enter another boom period. Most of what I wrote in that post blew up in my face spectacularly, but this remains as true today as the day I wrote it: S.L.L. said Yet, five years later, it still hasn't happened, and at this point, I think I can safely say it never will. You can understand why I got everything else in that post wrong. WWE was handed a new boom period on a silver platter. I did not consider the possibility that they would turn it down. It's too bad. I probably would've really liked The Cena Show. I realize, of course, that not everyone feels that way, but whether you like Cena or not, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that throughout his run on top, he has been booked terribly, and personally, I read that as a desire by the company to not have a big star wrestler on their regular roster by any means possible. Part of me wants to take a conspiratorial bent with it. Part of me feels like when Triple H failed to become a Hogan/Austin/Rock-level star, he decided that "well, I'm clearly the best, so if I can't be a huge star, I guess nobody else should be, either". That's a childishly simplistic way of looking at things, obviously, but again, it dovetails nicely into the whole "it's the brand, not the wrestlers" thing, especially as he shifts towards a primarily backstage role. But like I said, the idea is obvious bullshit. There is no brand without the wrestlers. The fact that they've yet to run a wrestling-free PPV despite it being all about the brand should tell you something. The fact that they dig retirees and part-timers out of the mothballs to headline WrestleMania because they spent the rest of the year not caring about their roster should tell you even more. They've trained viewers to not care about the current crop of superstars, and people respond to that by tuning out. 3. IT DOESN'T MATTER! I love The Rock. Honestly, I do. But when he announced that he would challenge for the WWE Title at the Rumble, it really did hammer home how little anything in this company matters right now. I said my piece on that particular incident a while ago, but it really is emblematic of how WWE presents their shows nowadays. I'm reminded of a No DQ match between Rey Mysterio and Jack Swagger in 2010. That was my WWE MOTY that year, but if any of you have forgotten about it - or didn't realize it had happened in the first place - I wouldn't be surprised. As Phil Schneider noted: Quote Nothing is presented as important. Nothing that happens is worth remembering, even when it is. Don't invest emotionally in this wrestler. We'll forget about him in a few weeks. Don't get excited about this match or this angle. They won't lead anywhere. Don't think of titles as something important. The important thing is that The Rock is challenging for it, and he's important, because he was a big star when we were important. But we're not important anymore. Pay us no mind.

His match with Eddie Guerrero was epic.