EricR

Well that MITB ladder match was fucking horrible. 3 minutes in and everybody was already selling death around the ring. Kofi was out for 7 minutes after his powerbomb! Ziggler disappeared for maybe even longer! The whole match was two people slowly climbing while 5 others lied on the floor. Just completely terrible.

There is no way Cheeseburger is 160. I'm 5'10" 165 and there's just no chance he's close to my weight. I'd guess 130. I will agree that people selling for his offense is ridiculous since his offense looks mostly bad. I liked the spot and thought it worked as I didn't see it coming, but it was a sideslam through a table. That's a big difference.

Yeah I would say there are probably only 30-40 Cassandro matches on tape, with the bulk of them being from 2007-2009. There's a couple early 90s ones, and some scattered handheld ones, two of those because of me. And Phil is correct, I sat with the woman who started LLV at one of their SF shows (as a guest of Cassandro), and she was talking about how she has boxes and boxes of all the previous shows just sitting at her house, and how they record "everything". I told her I would love to see the footage, had ZERO interest in selling it or anything like that, even going so far as saying I would pay for the privilege of seeing it, even offering to catalog it for future "best of" releases (think Dave Lemieux, but for burlesque based hipster lucha), and she seemed genuinely excited (not just shining on some bothersome dork). I spoke to her over email after that night, said I would be in LA a few weeks later, and when I was in LA (for other reasons, thankfully) suddenly she would not answer her phone or return her emails. She never returned any correspondence after that, and at the next LLV show when I tried to meet with her I was clearly given the runaround. To this day I have no idea what happened, what made her suddenly cut off contact, anything. It was very strange.

This assumes that Brock is 100% interested though. If Brock were only 80% interested in working that match, then Austin would have to express interest to JR 9 out of 20 times. We can safely assume that WWE is 100% interested as that would be a big $$ match. But maybe Brock has reasons of his own for not wanting to work it. Maybe he won't want the pressure of potentially injuring Austin in his return. Maybe he doesn't think he could work a good match with a 50 year old. Shoot, maybe Brock is only 2/3 interested in that specific match. That means that Austin would have to express interest 11 out of 20 times to JR.

From my personal experience: Several of my female friends who had NEVER watched wrestling before (outside of being trapped at parties where we would throw wrestling tapes on the TV) got hooked on WWE during the Angle/HHH/Stephanie ordeal and then almost immediately stopped watching not long after. My sister got hooked on wrestling during the period when London/Kendrick were getting pushed. She was about 19 or 20, they were probably 25 or 26 so this adds a tiny bit to the early theory that "younger girls swoon over slightly older guys". My girlfriend loves Total Divas and while she is a saint and has watched wrestling with me (including a couple dozen live shows) countless times, Total Divas is the only wrestling related thing she's ever watched when I'm not around.

Russo does seem like the kind of guy who thinks the real expression is "worth our wild"

I had to look at this TNA Mecca page, and this quote was in a main page post today: "Firstly, I'd like to address the rumor that Destination America is planning to cancel Impact in September. I think it's important to understand that this is a rumor until someone within TNA or Discovery confirms it. As for the rumor, there has been no evidence presented by the original source that indicates to me that this is true, because let me be clear, the onus is on the source of this story to report the facts and present his evidence." Holy shit. These people are just sitting there in a corner rocking back and forth going "Krusty is coming, Krusty is coming".

Horace Grant was an inaugural inductee into the eyewear HOF though.

While on the announcers topic, it was bizarre hearing Michael Cole call a Koji Clutch and Blue Thunder Bomb during the Zayn/Cena match.

This was my first time paying attention to commentary in awhile, and while I know the commentary has ranged from all-time worst to woeful over the last several years, Byron Saxton working unassuming heel is fucking terrible.

My friend Sean had a Producers theory about TNA, but that was a decade ago. It's far surpassed being so bad it becomes a cult hit.

When Bryan was working APW some 13 years ago he told me that he thought he had suffered 8 or 9 concussions. This was in 2002.

I'm doing a live-ish blog at SC. I'm gonna be gone for like 90 minutes in the middle so it really isn't live. But it's an ongoing write-up while I watch the show so shrug. http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2015/03/wrestlemania-31-live-blog.html

So I didn't see where most of the UWFi stuff went, but I did see the Davey/Tony Kozina "Pancrase Rules" match that they aired on their old TV, and it was the only time I've liked a Davey Richards match. It seemed like a good way to neuter his dogshit tendencies in a match.

Boy this was a perfect example of why I'll never attend a TV taping. I still love house shows, but god tapings are just the most boring things. Paige was shown getting into the ring at 10:14. Then a commercial, then a long Sting history. Bellas didn't get into the ring until fucking 10:24!!! And then the match got 15 seconds of time. That is unreal. Literally 10 minutes of ring entrances and waiting around for a complete non match.

http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2015/02/wwe-fastlane-live-blog.html Phil and I are live blogging this at SC. I liked the work in the six man in a vacuum but damn I'm beyond sick of Kane on every show (and going over no less!)

AJ Styles felt like a guy who was still a good worker, being held back by a bad promotion with a bad in-ring style. Joe seems more like a guy who is just more broken and not as good as he used to be.

Toro Bill. We got a nice 10 match taste of his early 2010s Puebla stuff, but that guy had to be in his late 40s at least in that footage. How many cool early 30s brawls didn't make tape? Also wish more WWF and WCW house show stuff existed.

Vince would fucking love a flippy flying leprechaun character.

I DVR most episodes of Raw/Smackdown, but I breeze through those in 30-45 minutes. I rarely watch any of the talking segments, but watch most matches unless it's somebody like Kofi or Miz. But WWE has a lot of guys I like and a couple matches per show get an opportunity to be good. I would stop watching if they stopped having matches. That's probably about it.

I haven't actually watched the youtube version of the show yet, but I think Dylan's criticisms are good ones. It was somewhat difficult to "build" the matches on commentary as none of the wrestlers (we talked to all of them before the show) had any idea what was going to happen in their matches. Most of them didn't even know who was going over (we thought we knew at least that, but then two of the results ended up being different than what we were told). So it was tough pointing out something in the match and then it turns out it meant nothing to the match at all. I imagine that was part of Tim building matches with excitement, as we didn't know when a match was ending, or when they were building to a finish, etc. My favorite match on the show was probably Sir Samurai vs. CJ Kurz, but I also really enjoyed the Cobb tag. Corvus and Truex bumped around for Cobb and Kratos (with Corvus going out of his way to take a couple bumps on the stage), and Cobb is maybe my favorite guy to see live right now. He's an insane athlete but has a great live charisma, doesn't just mindlessly go through stuff without acknowledging the crowd. Also enjoyed the main with Virgil and Marcus, although I think there were parts that couldn't be filmed as both guys wrestled out to the lobby. Crowd loved that though. The show was incredibly fun live as we only charged $2 for kids tickets, meaning tons of parents showed up with their youngsters, and kids are really the best live wrestling fans possible. So that vibe was great. Also is FLIK Big Benjamin Johnson? If so I completely forgot that, even though I've gone out of my way to watch some of FLIK's matches that he's mentioned. I even talked to him before the show. Whoops.

http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2015/01/2015-wwe-royal-rumble-live-blog.html Doing a live blog over at Segunda Caida. Not sure if Phil is around, but who knows he may jump in later.

http://www.avclub.com/article/introduction-brutal-spectacle-new-japan-pro-wrestl-213017 My buddy emailed me this and I figured it made the most sense to post here. My favorite part was when the guy tries to highlight why Tanahashi is worth watching, and wows us with: " He does it all: slow but intricate submission-based wrestling; lightning-quick exchanges where kicks miss heads by inches." Oooooo slow matwork AND strikes that miss but almost hit?

I see that he gets a lot of criticism, but I don't think I've ever seen any criticism of him that seemed unfair.