S.L.L.

I've been enjoying him a lot more than I expected I would, but "future Wrestlemania headliner" seems a little premature. It's going to happen. What did Orton have that DiBiase doesn't at the same age? He's already showing creepy amounts of potential. He looked natural against Cena and Batista. Orton is only three years older than DiBiase, so this might not be the best question to ask. Comparing Orton's first year in WWE to DiBiase's first year in WWE favors DiBiase. That said, there are lots of guys who look good in their first year in a major company, and they don't automatically go on to headline their biggest annual show. He has potential, to be sure. "Creepy amounts of potential"? That seems like a stretch. Not sure that he has anything more going for him than his tag partner. Fuck, neither of them have as much going for them as Chuck Palumbo, and Palumbo's in booking limbo right now. Why is it a guarantee that DiBiase makes it when the guy who brings all the same things to the table and does them all better is on the cusp of being wished well in his future endeavors?

Yeah, he's got some serious Chuck & Larry shit going on. Dude is really desperate for attention, and if he uses this as a vehicle for that, he's going to sabotage what might be the best shot at real change in the wrestling industry in forever.

Realistically, McDevitt isn't a particularly gifted lawyer (to put it mildly), he just happens to have the good fortune of working in a profession where a lot of the people he's defending against are untrustworthy, unlikable, or just plain crazy enough that courts won't side with them. Unless it's a case where he can drag things out a while before settling out of court, his success seems to rely primarily on whether or not the opposition fucks up. He seems to bring about as much to the table as a bag of flour. The guy to keep your eye on here is Chris Kanyon. If anyone has the chance to fuck up what should be a slam dunk win and hand it to McDevitt, it's Kanyon and his comically transparent "Look at me, I'm gay!" routine.

Wouldn't it be something if this ends up being how Raven finally backs up all the talk about him being one of the sharpest minds in wrestling?

I've been enjoying him a lot more than I expected I would, but "future Wrestlemania headliner" seems a little premature.

It ensures that the WWE is investing it's time and money into people worth having on the roster and who are committed to the WWE. Do you think that Vince would have invested so much into Brock Lesnar if he knew that he'd be gone after less than two years? The same thing with Krissy Vaine and whatever her boyfriend's name was. Aside from what Slasher and Loss already said, I'd point out that Batista initially tried to get into wrestling through the WCW Power Plant, which was much closer in style to Japanese dojos and had more of an emphasis on "weeding out" people. Batista was one of the guys weeded out. Batista eventually came up through WWE developmental instead, and has become an effective and consistently over main event player, a good hand in the ring, and some degree of a drawing card. Explain to me how weeding out a guy like Batista in favor of wrestlers "worth having on the roster" like Sonny Siaki and Reno is a sign that that kind of mentality would "ensure that the WWE is investing it's time and money into people worth having on the roster".

Yeah, I kinda blanked on the Raw match for some reason. You're right about that one. It certainly helped that Shawn was way more on-point than usual in that match, too. Again, I think it's a role he can play, just not the one he's best suited for. 2003 heel Cena never did much for me work-wise. Overall, he's a lot better now than he was then, so he'd probably be able to work that role better now, but there's no real reason for him to do so, and it goes against his biggest strengths anyway.

HHH vs. Cena from Night of Champions was kind of a strange match formulaicly speaking, but in a way that actually lends itself very well to this thread. One of the big knocks against HHH is that he's a guy who idolizes Flair and the great NWA champions of the 70's, but is also an egomaniac who hates to look weak, so he tries to work NWA heel champion style, but without all the selling and bumping and other stuff where you make your opponent look superior, which is a bit like trying to make ice without liquid or the cold. Unsurprisingly, this is what happened at Night of Champions, so Cena, presented with an opponent who spends most of the match on offense, ended up spending most of the match selling. I watched the PPV with a friend of mine, and remember joking about how HHH works NWA champ style like an NWA Title challenger, so challenger Cena decided to work the match as the NWA champ. He was getting booed enough to get away with it, anyway. As far as other styles go, I think Cena can work as fiery babyface on offense, but it's more dependent on his opponent than when he's the underdog fighting the odds. Those are both pretty omnipresent roles in wrestling, so it's not like being limited to one or both of those things is really that limiting, especially if you can work that style against a wide variety of opponents. In theory, it should be pretty easy to be an effective underdog fighting the odds against a 7'3" freak of nature like Khali or a big, fat, crazy Samoan savage like Umaga. Playing an effective underdog babyface against 2007 Shawn Michaels...that's a feat. As a guy focused on offense, Cena doesn't seem to have the same range. Best Cena matches I've seen since his comeback are the Orton match from No Way Out and the Michaels match from the Raw Wrestlemania Rewind special. The first match works largely due to Orton being a great foil for an offense-focused Cena. The second was a match based on Cena selling. I thought the second match was better, even though I think Orton is way better than Michaels, so you can see the range and level of quality he can achieve in one role vs. the other.

Counter-Point: Nassau Colisseum

Well, the thing is that training Asai is hardly the only influence that Hamada has on the proliferation of lucharesu. Starting the UWF, training the first generation of lucharesu guys - of whom Asai was only one, and arguably not even the most prominent depending on how you feel about Sasuke - which ultimately led to the formation of both Toryumon/Dragon's Gate and Michinoku Pro and various lesser indies, plus maintaining a name for himself on that scene into his 50's and being long recognized as an innovator in that field. Made enough of a name for himself that his daughters could use their parentage as a selling point. I don't know if that all adds up to a HOF career, especially if he was never much of a draw, but it's not a simple case of "Ultimo had HOF-level influence, and Hamada trained him, therefore Hamada had HOF-level influence". Frankly, even if Hamada hadn't trained Asai, and their careers had otherwise been the same, I'd still argue that Hamada was more influential than Asai. I don't really think either belongs in the Hall, though, so that's kinda beside the point for me.

You mean currently? Like most of your better wrestlers, Cena works different formulas in different roles, so 2008 secondary face Cena is working differently than 2007 babyface champion Cena, main difference being that there's more of a focus on fiery babyface Cena on offense than on valiant babyface Cena selling heel beatdown. It's kinda telling that the big matches from the last two Raws were six-man tags where JTG worked face-in-peril and Cena got the hot tag. I would assume the logic is that the face champion would have to put a greater premium on selling to get over the threat of losing the title, whereas a non-champion would have to put a greater premium on offense to establish him as a threat to the title. In any case, Cena's selling has always been a bigger positive for him than his offense, so I don't really like him quite as much as babyface challenger/potential challenger than as champion. He's still pretty great, because his offense looks pretty good in general now (save for the Throwback, which actually looks a lot worse now than it did a year ago, but I digress), and if they pair him with heels who can sell well enough, it shouldn't be an issue. Still, hot tag guy isn't really a role that I think he's well-suited for long term. If he's not going to be champion, I'd probably rather see him in a program where he's not poised to challenge for the title, so that there wouldn't be as big a need for him to be "built up", and he could focus more on selling. It might be worth noting that whatever my grievances are, since the draft, the crowd has been 100% behind Cena for the first time since he was feuding with Khali. I'm inclined to think that that's more because of JBL than anything Cena himself is doing, as his heat seems to be tied more to his opponents than to himself, but I might as well bring it up anyway.

You're not nuts. A number of the Mid-South matches on this list didn't make the set.

Depends on the degree of drawing power and influence. If Onita's strength was inspiring a short-term death match boom, and didn't have the drawing power on his side, I'd be inclined to think it's not enough. With Hamada, I think the question one must ask is whether or not his influence in and of itself merits his induction. If we agree that he's not much of a draw, than that question also answers whether or not he belongs in, unless, of course, you think that his body of work is strong enough to provide a significant boost to his candidacy.

Well, I think that should go without saying.

For all my talk about the importance of structure and formula, it should be noted that this is the flipside of that issue, and is pretty important to keep in mind. Structure needs to be present, but structure by itself is just structure. Using a proven formula doesn't mean it will do all the work for you. Using structure and formula doesn't produce compelling art if you're just going to go through the motions with it. And, of course, the more structure you apply, the more limitations you put on your work, although for individual works, that's not necessarily a bad thing, and some artists with limited talents might be well-advised to hold themselves to a structure that will highlight their strengths and hide their weaknesses.

Should also be noted that AAA comeback Waltman in 2007 was really, really fun, so in his most recent run of any significance, he could still go.

When you're nine years old and you've never seen "Scarface", it's easy to miss that Razor Ramon was originally supposed to be a drug dealer. When you're 21, and you still need someone on the internet to point it out to you, you feel kinda silly for missing the obvious. The age at which you're supposed to realize that the razor-shaped object in his logo is not, in fact, a movie ticket is a matter of some debate.

Bobby Lashley and Finlay got into that brawl in the parking lot when they were feuding that ended in Lashley trying to turn over a car onto a prone Finlay, if that counts.

Eh. There aren't too many slam dunk picks left, but there are definitely guys who you could make decent arguments for. The bulk of the really strong picks at this point are your old-timey Yohe candidates, so I guess if Dave has to fiddle with the rules to get more people in, this is at least fiddling in the right direction. Only other group with real significant candidates not in at this point is "luchadors from recent eras who Dave didn't think were great workers". Not sure how you would rig the process to fix that. Of course, this is all besides the point, as the WON HOF is really a joke now, anyway.

Because he wasn't actually bragging. He was justifying his decision not to include more info about his first marriage, which was a matter someone was inevitably going to bring up when critiquing the book. He may have been right or wrong, but it's pretty clear the main goal of including that bit was to head critics off at the pass. The self-congratulatory aspect of it is really only there if you want it/need it to be. Also, Randazzo's negative tone is pretty obvious evidence of an agenda. He thinks the wrestling business stinks and wants to see it change. I think that's kind of apparent. He's said as much himself. I'm not sure who amongst us is consciously disagreeing with him. Not sure what's being hidden there. And it's not like a book being polemic is a criticism in and of itself. To quote Kevin Cook, it's not like Upton Sinclair included a sympathetic factory manager character in "The Jungle". But then, I post at CKC, and am therefore an e-buddy of Matt's, and part of the vast internet conspiracy to make wrestling look slightly worse than we all already seem to agree it is, so YMMV.

That's... nonsense. This is supposed to be a factual, nonfiction book. Hence, inaccuracies are bad. Telling stories which didn't happen that way or never happened at all don't illustrate a damn thing. Except then, you could never write a true "non-fiction" book about wrestling (or politics, crime, or any other secretive or dishonest organization), thus rendering the point moot. If nothing else, Randazzo is honest about the fact that he couldn't possibly get/confirm all the honest facts about what he wrote about, because it's wrestling, and the truth that people tell him one day might be a lie the next depending on a litany of factors. This isn't the be all, end all tale of what happened. It can't be. You'd have to be God or at least have access to Wonder Woman's Golden Lasso of Truth to know with 100% certainty what was really going on. What we have in "Ring of Hell" is Randazzo's best interpretation of the truth, based on his studies and his sources, with his acknowledgment that much of it may or may not be true, and that it's ultimately up to the reader to decide what they'll believe. And while you could argue that without all the facts, he maybe shouldn't have written this book at all, you would then have to argue that no book about Benoit, or wrestling in general, or secretive/dishonest societies in general should ever be written, and that seems silly. Really, one of the many things that the Benoit murders illustrated to me is that most of the anti-WWE/anti-McMahon people out there are all show and no go. They talk tough when HHH and other 'roid monsters get pushed too hard, or when someone like Eddie Guerrero croaks in a hotel room because of McMahon's policies, and they whine and complain about why things are the way they are, and how things need to change. But the second one of the all-time great workers kills his family and himself, and there's any kind of real outside scrutiny of wrestling's problems, they all rally around their fearless leader to defend the biz, because deep down, they'd rather see Daniel Benoit die than see WWE die. This is essentially how Meltzer comes off here. With him, the mark element is compounded by a "boys in the back" element, since he was tight with Pillman and Benoit and other guys in the business, so I'm sure bad things being said about those guys strikes him on a personal level. Still, he's a reporter. He's kinda expected to look at this with some degree of objectivity, especially when he had previously been bitching about all the things wrong with wrestling. He really seems to be exposing his true colors here, and it's pretty embarrassing.

Those who are complaining about how it happened think it made Punk look weak because he cashed in moments after Batista beat down Edge. Eh. They're not totally wrong, but the circumstances here were almost identical to how Edge cashed in MITB last year, and wrestling has long allowed "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" as an acceptable justification for actions.

Alright, internet. Explain to me how CM Punk is getting buried now. One interesting thing about last night's show that I wanted to mention was that we had Rey Mysterio and John Cena cutting promos in which they both made a big deal out of congratulating CM Punk on his win. Reminded me a little of when Bret won his first title, and in the weeks that followed, you had a number of top babyfaces cutting promos congratulating him. Not something I've recalled them doing since then, and I don't know if it's really indicative of anything, but Punk getting the seal of approval from other top faces was kind of a neat touch and left me thinking they were serious about running with him on top. I don't know if they are, but that's the vibe it gave me.

I know TomK has said in the past that Cole was a writer for The Simpsons at one point. I don't know where he got that from, though.

Lest we forget, Cole and Lawler were the original announce team for Smackdown, and before that, they had been the announce team for Raw after JR had his Bell's palsy relapse and Russo and Ferrera tried to get him turfed out before Austin pushed for Ross to come back. It was...not pretty. Cole has gotten better since then, and Lawler has gotten worse. I imagine the result will be pretty much the same. Also, the HHH thing seems especially weird in that I recall reading that it was the brainchild of Michael Hayes, but it was something that no one was else was really seriously considering, and that was before Hayes got into trouble. Now, Hayes' standing in the company is even lower, and it actually ends up happening. Go figure.