S.L.L.

I've always had a soft spot for Finlay coming out of the crowd on Saturday Night and bum rushing Regal. Finlay: "Do you know who I am?" Tony and Dusty: "No!"

What's that? Post about it again in excessive detail? Why sure! From this thread.... From this board.... On DVDVR.... That's a quick, surface-level search of your back catalogue. And no, the fact that you quietly dropped your "Move over, Joe Babinsack" sig in the middle of all of this doesn't make your claim any more convincing or any less bizarre. To what? Certainly not the original topic. You took offense to it, and sent us all down this odd avenue. Where are we supposed to steer the ship now, captain?

Childish I would allow, expect he's not really doing anything that the rest of us aren't. Yet you home in on Dylan and Dylan alone. Why? Unfair and hardly based on anything substantive? Even Beast agrees that Bryan goofed on this one. Do you have reason to believe he didn't? If so what is it? If you can provide an actual defense of Bryan, why won't you provide it? LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! That reads an awful lot like someone who associates that sort of behavior from Dylan. Did I misread that comment? How did I do so? Other people meaning Beast, who actually agreed with the specific point in question but didn't care for Dylan's tone? And absolutely no one else? LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! Neither am I. I was interested in untying the knots you are making, yet every time I ask you to help me, you just tie more knots. And at this point, it's pretty clear that's all you're going to do, so I'm less interested in untying your knots than in feeding you enough rope to tie yourself up in them.

On top of everything else that Dylan, Loss, John, and Vic pointed out, why are we barring "talking points" and "strawmen" - the latter of which hasn't even been used in this thread - as acceptable phrases in an argument? They're perfectly valid terms describing things that do exist, that are used, and that don't have other, better terms to describe them ("sloganeering" is related to the use of talking points, but doesn't mean "talking point" itself, nor does "slogan", and "tilting at windmills" describes a concept similar to strawmen, but is not quite the same thing). Furthermore, talking points and strawmen are things that are actually used in arguments. Is it acceptable to use them, but not to identify them by name? This isn't 1984, and you're not Big Brother. You don't get to shrink my vocabulary at your convenience. And since when does no good come of using these terms? I can't recall any great developments stemming from them, I grant you. Don't know anyone who used the "they're calling Mark Henry a superworker" strawman in '06 realizing the error of their ways when it was pointed out to them. Still, I don't see how not pointing that out makes things better than doing so. And you're still ducking my question: If I have to ask a question three times, it's usually because the person I'm asking has no answer. In the interest of accuracy and intellectual honesty, I have to ask you to either answer it, or apologize for dragging this thread off topic in order to further lash out a poster you've been arbitrarily targeting for some time.

X-7 was the first time it got brought up as something of note. It got a lot bigger as the years went on, but that's definitely where it started as a thing.

The topic is "Johnny Mantel is scamming people, and Dave and Bryan are stupid for buying into it". You seemed to take issue with that. Strictly speaking, we never went off-topic. I wrote.... There were obvious shots fired at you in there. I don't deny it. But as I said, I can work around you. I can keep the heart of the discussion where it belongs - Mantel running a scam and Dave and Bryan falling for it - while acknowledging you in passing. But if you insist on inserting yourself into the discussion, I expect you to actually bring something to it. You said: I said: I'm still waiting for an answer. I want to know what my on-topic counterargument is going to be against before I make it. I don't think that's unreasonable. Instead, I get some jive about taking threads down odd avenues. Don't get me wrong, I know what you're talking about. You're talking about how somebody will say something stupid, will refuse to back down on their claim when called on it, and then I'll swoop in and basically hound them into submission, ruthlessly picking apart every flaw in their argument, exposing the new ones they hastily create as the old ones fall to the wayside, typically uncovering further levels of stupidity from the OP. You obviously don't think of it in those terms, but where you see "odd avenues", I see "logical conclusions of illogical arguments", "pulling the threads", or possibly "death by analysis" in extreme cases. But now we're actually getting off-topic. So...what are those three fronts?

No, Dylan is bemused about Bryan having the WRONG FACTS about wrestling. You are angry about Dylan having the WRONG OPINIONS about wrestling reporting. I am mildly annoyed about you having NEEDLESSLY DEFENSIVE OPINIONS about Meltzer and Alvarez, and bizarrely specifically defending against Dylan even though he's hardly the only person here who thinks that way, but I can work around that. What on earth are you even talking about here? Wow wrong on three fronts. What are those three fronts? I want you to tell me now so we're all 100% clear about what we're talking about. As a talking point, how do you extend "Bryan Alverez has the worst taste in Wrestling in the world" outside of wrestling? Isn't that, by definition, a wrestling-specific talking point? And again, Dylan is hardly the only person saying that about Alvarez. I'm not sure he's even the most vocal. He's certainly not the most prominent. If you were going after all those who shit on Alvarez, and Dylan was one of the many targets, that'd be one thing. But specifically latching onto Dylan makes no sense to me.

No, Dylan is bemused about Bryan having the WRONG FACTS about wrestling. You are angry about Dylan having the WRONG OPINIONS about wrestling reporting. I am mildly annoyed about you having NEEDLESSLY DEFENSIVE OPINIONS about Meltzer and Alvarez, and bizarrely specifically defending against Dylan even though he's hardly the only person here who thinks that way, but I can work around that.

Hasn't Nick Bockwinkel (who's listed as a judge for this thing) been talking about wanting to do precisely this for years? Except, you know, not an obvious con? Very disappointed in The Pride of Montague County. Or proud, depending on how you look at it. It is wrestling after all.

I always heard that guys were booking their own stuff in ROH, and yet everyone lost that ability for some reason when Pearce took over. Maybe because Pearce wanted to book like ROH was a 70s NWA territory? Pearce said on Colt's podcast that he has no idea what 70's wrestling is and has no idea where that rumour came from. And if he did, he'd have known it looked nothing like what he was actually booking in ROH. As for everyone losing the ability to book their own stuff in ROH when Pearce took over, perhaps Pearce wasn't as amenable to that as Gabe was. Or maybe the roster's creative well was starting to run dry. The last 6-9 months of Gabe's tenure was pretty dull booking-wise.

The first one I recall seeing was on a Saturday morning show, and it was him in full makeup and wig with a fake Hollywood sign and setting behind him and he was quoting movies while introducing himself. I think that was the second vignette. For a few weeks, I remember they just had his logo with Howard Finkel doing his ring introduction, and then this was the big "who is Goldust?" reveal.

So...Alan4L is working with F4Wonline now, too? Are they deliberately trying to cultivate the shittiest roster of employees for an internet wrestling website ever?

I remember when I first got big into tape trading and what have you, and I was kinda naturally driven to show off all my cool foreign stuff to my casual friends. Brought one over to my house and showed him the "These Days" 10-man, as he was a big mark for Kaientai's "EVIL!/INDEED!" shtick at the time, and I thought he'd appreciate seeing what they could do when they could really cut loose in the ring. His exact words to me were "If wrestling were like this in America, the ratings would be so high." Bear in mind, this is late 2000/early 2001, when the ratings for WWF programming were about the highest they'd ever been. Obviously, that's a very different type of match than Bryan/Regal (I assume...haven't seen Bryan/Regal yet, but guessing they didn't do a '96 MPro style match), but part of what makes the guys we think of as great workers great workers is their ability to tell a compelling story in the ring, to get across their characters through their work, to establish a meaningful conflict with their opponents that - backed by the aforementioned character establishment - gives you a reason to care about what you're seeing, and to just plain do cool shit that makes people stand up and take notice. That's stuff any fan, including the casual ones, should be reacting to. I've heard the crowd reaction to Bryan's matches described as being similar to the crowd reaction to the London/Kendrick tags of some years ago - the crowd doesn't exactly explode for them when they first show up for one reason or another, but by the time the match is over, they're rabid. Good workers make you care about their matches, even if you weren't predisposed to going into them, and I think that goes for casual fans as much as it goes for any of us.

"How many Lees are in this equation?"

This, both paragraphs. Though, to further clarify the latter paragraph, the pro-Henry side did start out saying "Henry is NOT a superworker. NOT A SUPERWORKER," - a direct TomK quote that I've had to pull before- but several years of consistent, high quality matches have made him more than just a guy who was in a few good matches, culminating in his awesome 2008 run where he cracked the top 25 of the Segunda Caida 100. But in 2006, when the arguments were actually happening, nobody had anything like that to point to.

On top of which, how many years of that decade are actually considered good business years? 2000 seems like the only clear-cut one where Trips was actually around the whole time. For the rest of the decade, does he get credit for keeping business afloat during lean years? Does he get knocked for not being strong enough of a draw to keep business hot? Does he get knocked for being arguably one of the reasons business stopped being hot in the first place? I'm not entirely sure how you would do this list right. How you would accurately measure how much is drawn against the standards required for a given promotion to be successful. How you would measure the value of how big one draws within a set time frame vs. consistently drawing over a long period of time. How you weigh the value of someone in a position to draw vs. the damage they may have done in that position. How to differentiate a guy who keeps the company afloat during a down period from a guy who is putting the company in a down period. I don't know how you do all of that in a clean, mathematical fashion, even if you cut out pre-TV and foreign figures. But pretty clear that those very real concerns aren't being taken into account here.

??? What set are you talking about? The WWE-made one? I think he means the DVDVR one.

So, for clarification's sake, you're saying Coughlin is a quality analyst on his podcasts, but one whose analysis is so completely unremarkable that you can't actually remember any specifics about anything he's ever said without writing it out immediately after he says it for future reference? I mean, I guess it's possible to analyze a fight well without actually being able to deliver that analysis in a compelling manner, but is he really so unmemorable that you literally can remember nothing about anything he's ever said on his podcasts without taking notes as it happens? Seriously why are you being such an utter cunt here? Because I'm trying to pin down what's so great about Coughlin, and his lone defender on this board is dancing around the issue. If that comes off as cuntish, you only have yourself to blame for making what should be a very simple issue very difficult. But with each post, we are painting a clearer picture of the matter. No, I'm not. Instead I'm going to claim that Coughlin is being defended as a great analyst by someone who - by his own admission - doesn't read his written pieces, and hasn't listened to his podcasts (the core of his defense) in a year. Officially, the defense is "Coughlin does quality fight analysis in his podcasts", but as we dig deeper, we now see the defense is "I remember the podcasts Coughlin was doing a year ago featured quality fight analysis - though it's been a while, and I can't remember any specifics - so I'm quite certain that he's maintained that level of quality in 2010". It's not a very strong argument, and it's buried under a very misleading one. I don't want to assume my mental processes are the same as everyone else's, so folks can feel free to correct me on this, but I'm pretty sure that one doesn't necessarily have to set their minds to "archival mode" in order to remember something after the fact, nor is it impossible for someone who is in "short term entertainment mode" to remember details after the fact. TomK has not done TNA Impact Workrate Reports in years, but I can remember details about them very easily, and I was not reading them in "archival mode". Still, if you were listening to them while doing other things, I can understand why it doesn't stick out in your memory that much. When you're trying to do two things at once - regardless of what mode your mind is in - it's hard to deliver your full attention to both things. Or if you're using a podcast as background entertainment. I've been there. You're not going to latch on to everything that's said. That's fine. But the official defense of Coughlin is "Coughlin does quality fight analysis in his podcasts". Now the defense is "I remember the podcasts Coughlin was doing a year ago featured quality fight analysis, though it's been a while, I can't remember any specifics since even when I was listening to it regularly, I was mostly doing so as background noise to keep me entertained while I did other things, so I wasn't really listening to what he was saying that closely, and I have a hard time remembering things when I don't actively set my brain to "archival mode", which I was not doing here. But I do have vague recollections of him being a good fight analyst, so I'm quite certain that he's maintained a high level of quality in 2010." 1. Actually, I couldn't, because I don't subscribe to WO/F4W, and I have no real desire to. 2. Even if I did, I'd rather not dig into a podcast by someone whose available (written) work suggests he's clueless, just to roll the dice on the possibility he might be better based on vague recollections of half-listened shows from a year ago. 3. Even if they were any good, I'm really not a huge MMA fan, so the shows don't hold much interest for me. I'm in this argument for the "ridiculous WO.com columnist" aspect, not the "finding quality MMA podcasts" aspect. If Coughlin is not as ridiculous as his writing suggests, I might not be so quick to judge him harshly. That's really my whole stake in this. 4. Who outside of THE BOARD~ has listened to his podcasts more regularly or more intently than yourself that I could ask? 5. As someone who - by your own admission - hasn't been a WO/F4W subscriber for a year, and who mainly listened to Coughlin's podcasts as background entertainment when you did, telling me to listen to the shows for proof of Coughlin's quality when you yourself have not listened to them is a truly bizarre defense. Telling me I should do something that you yourself are not doing - essentially asking me to prove your point for you - is not going to fly with me. 6. When I was in college, I had a professor who taught me that the fundamental difference between religion and science was that science bases it's beliefs in observable evidence, whereas religion bases it's beliefs in faith. I'm a religious man, but I am not so quick to worship at the Church of Coughlin considering his faith-based defenses ("I vaguely recall his analysis being good", "I haven't followed directly for a year, but I believe his analysis is of high quality", "I never followed that closely, but there are others who believe", "I haven't listened in a year, but even without listening to them myself, I have faith that if you listen to these shows, you'll become a believer", etc.) could be easily trumped by scientific evidence to the contrary. He may also have scientific evidence to support him as a good analyst, but I don't know what it is, and you're pretty much saying here that you are incapable of providing any. And if you can't do that, you may as well just withdraw from the argument, because it's obvious that your presence here is becoming a needless distraction from the matter at hand.

So, for clarification's sake, you're saying Coughlin is a quality analyst on his podcasts, but one whose analysis is so completely unremarkable that you can't actually remember any specifics about anything he's ever said without writing it out immediately after he says it for future reference? I mean, I guess it's possible to analyze a fight well without actually being able to deliver that analysis in a compelling manner, but is he really so unmemorable that you literally can remember nothing about anything he's ever said on his podcasts without taking notes as it happens?

Lots of cool stuff here. The Pro Wrestling USA stuff is very interesting to me, as they may be the greatest "what if?" scenario in wrestling history to me. As really - and this becomes especially clear looking through all the other stuff that's been put up - it's obvious that the WWF could lose individual battles during their national expansion and it wouldn't really matter because Crockett, Gagne, et al just didn't have the resources to win a long term war with McMahon. I'd think if the territories had any chance of effectively fighting back against Vince's encroachment would be to band together, pool their resources, and present a united front. And 1985 was early enough in the game that they still had a some valuable resources to pool. Part of what made the WWF so successful was that they had created something of a superfed, bringing in some of the biggest talent out there from across the country for one star-studded roster. But they didn't have Flair (yet), or Dusty (yet), or Slaughter (anymore), or Magnum (ever), or the Roadies (yet), or The Freebirds (for long), or Lawler (yet), or Hansen (anymore), or the R'n'Rs (yet), or the MX (ever)....and that's just limiting myself to guys who were actually on these shows. Those are some pretty valuable players, and if they could really commit to the idea, they might have been able to make a go of it. But obviously, that was never going to happen for very long, if only because you're asking very big egos to share the pie they previously had to themselves, even if all their pies are going to get gobbled up by Vince anyway. If nothing else, it's telling to see how big that first number was, and how quickly it fell apart after the second show was just a glorified AWA card, and how they could never really recover from that. I agree. I am specifically interested in seeing during what year the drawing gap between Flair and Hogan widened the most. Flair's drawing power at his peak sometimes gets undersold because it wasn't at the level of Hogan's, although he is still in the top handful of all time draws in the U.S. I like mentioning that because some like to make the argument about how most of the biggest draws have been guys who weren't that good in the ring, when really, Hogan is the exception, not the rule. I say that acknowledging that Flair's persona is what made him a draw. But the longevity came because people knew they were getting a show when he headlined. I'm not even sure anymore that Hogan was necessarily an exception as much as it is that he was delivering the kind of matches that the traditional workrate crowd wasn't looking for. If nothing else Hogan at his least as a worker often (though not always) seems to coincide with Hogan at his least as a draw. But I get what you're saying, and I agree. When you talk about long-term popularity of a wrestler - or any performer or performance, for that matter - people don't keep coming back to watch them if they think they suck. You pretty much have to be doing something right as a worker to achieve any significant level of drawing power.

It's all about intent. The difference is that wrestling intentionally blurs the line between work and shoot, and historically, wrestling has tried to make audiences think it's real. TV dramas and cop shows don't have guys using their gimmick names in public and good guys not traveling with the bad guys. So, a gun confrontation doesn't come off as an entertainment segment to a naive audience, it comes across as a heated rivalry that has gone way too far. Even if an audience isn't fooled by it, it comes across as a desperate attempt to exploit real violence, and even those who aren't fooled by it see that the intent is to make viewers think this really happened, which is not at all the intent of a cop show. Yes, there are a million counters to that argument, and I can probably have a debate with myself on that topic, but I think that's the logic behind that type of complaint. The main argument against it, as far as I can tell, is that wrestling by this point was supposed to be more or less open about it all being a work. The main argument to that, of course, is that "more or less open" isn't good enough, and that the state of semi-kayfabe that wrestling has been in for over 20 years now is really a bigger hindrance than going all the way to one side or the other would be, but that's a much bigger argument.

OH MY GOD! THE IRONYMETER IS REACHING CRITICAL MASS! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!

Being only semi-knowledgeable about MMA myself, I'd like to approach this from a different angle for a moment. Yeah, it's almost like the matches weren't pre-determined and both fighters were actually trying to win. You can throw around bonuses for entertaining fights all you want to, but realistically, who the hell is becoming an MMA fighter first and foremost for the money? A while back, my homeboy Victator interviewed Dan Severn, and in discussing the infamous Shamrock fight, Severn basically said that he regretted nothing because even if the fight bored people to tears, he was a competitor trying to win a competition, and this was his best attempt at doing so. And really, how am I supposed to fault him for that? Interviews and miscellaneous ballyhoo are one thing, but when you actually get in the octagon, is anyone really putting their body on the line like that just to cash a paycheck? If you're an MMA fighter, and your main goal is to make money, the first logical step to take is to stop being an MMA fighter, because there are way easier ways to do that. So if you don't just up and quit, I have to assume there's something else keeping you involved with the sport, and my best guess is that you love the game, love to play it, and want to be the best in the world at it. Here's the upshot to all of this: the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts bans - amongst many other things - "timidity, including, without limitation, avoiding contact with an opponent, intentionally or consistently dropping the mouthpiece or faking an injury". In other words, the kind of stuff that made Severn/Shamrock unbearable is now illegal, and that seems to me like a far more effective approach from a business standpoint than to just offer bonuses for entertaining fights and hope against hope that your roster decides to go for the bonus instead of going for the win. If an MMA fighter truly "got it" in the Meltzerian sense, and really cared about it on that level as much as Dave does, they'd stop being an MMA fighter. The reason they continue in the sport is because they're sportsmen. They're competitors in a game, and games are defined by their rules. If you really want competitors to change how they play the game, you change the rules. And if you can't think of a good way to do that, and you really believe entertaining the crowd is more important than wins and losses, at least have the common sense to make the entertainment bonuses bigger than the winner's purse. No one ever convinced a boxer to throw a fight by offering them less money than they'd get if they won.

More specifically, from the M-Pro website's mainpage....

The more I think about this - and yes, I do think about it, and no, I don't know why - I find my brain going to two places. 1. As you may or may not remember, WWE Magazine did a "Top 50 WWE Superstars of All Time" issue back in 2003. The list, which was unranked, looked like this: Bret Hart Hulk Hogan Andre The Giant Honky Tonk Man Ultimate Warrior Killer Kowalski Bob Backlund Sgt. Slaughter Roddy Piper Don Muraco Kurt Angle Chief Jay Strongbow Chris Jericho Bobo Brazil Bruno Sammartino Mick Foley Ivan Putski Superfly Snuka Razor Ramon Argentina Rocca Jake Roberts Pat Patterson George Steele Billy Graham Triple H Steve Austin Ted DiBiase Wendi Richter Yokozuna King Kong Bundy Buddy Rogers Undertaker Jesse Ventura Shawn Michaels Ricky Steamboat The Rock Fabulous Moolah Randy Savage Brock Lesnar Rick Rude Iron Sheik Ernie Ladd Pedro Morales Ken Patera Gorilla Monsoon Ric Flair Kane Junkyard Dog Paul Orndoff Haystacks Calhoun Again, some strange omissions there. Still no Nash, despite him actually being on the roster at that point (and despite Hall being on the list), still no Owen, and particularly germane to this discussion, no Hennig (especially strange since he had died earlier that year). And as Jingus notes, the inclusion of Undercarder X might make you wonder about the exclusion of Undercarder Y. But overall, considering that the list is going to be heavily influenced by who is and isn't in the good graces of the company, kayfabe accomplishments, promoting active guys who can make money for the company now, and what fits the WWE version of wrestling history, etc., it's a pretty sensible list. The fact that it's not ordered might help that, but either way, it doesn't have the obvious head-scratcher qualities that this DVD has. And as I'm inclined to think that's at least partially because it was a "Best WWE Superstars" list.... 2. I'm starting to think that they made a mistake by not making this a "Top 50 WWE Superstars of All Time" DVD, and then later releasing a separate "Top 50 WCW/NWA/Whatever Superstars of All Time" set, theoretically making twice the money while clearing up a jumbled list.