EricR

WCW definitely piped it in on the lower syndicated shows, to a distracting degree. Most of the time it wasn't even timed to cheer when something big happened, they would just turn on a white noise machine that only vaguely sounded like humans cheering. It sounded like a Tony Conrad or Rhys Chatham composition being played over the matches.

I've thought EY was one of the few worthwhile TNA guys for awhile now, but he looked really great in the Abyss brawl. All his shots we landing really stiff. He's always shown his bumping side in TNA, but this was the first time I've ever seen him really lay in shots.

Eric Young and Abyss had a brawl to start Impact tonight that was maybe my favorite thing I've ever seen in TNA. May have been Abyss' best performance (whatever that means as the worst national worker of the last decade), and EY takes some nasty spills and gets the life choked out of him with a chain. TNA cuts away right at the end of it but this was a fine 7 minutes of wrestling.

Epico and Primo won the tag titles from Kofi and Evan Bourne on a house show in Jan. 2012. I was actually there live for this and recorded it. I don't think I ever posted it online though... In a great moment of being a know it all that knows absolutely nothing, my friend Sean asked at the beginning of the match who I thought would win and CLEARLY it was going to be Air Bourne since how often do title changes happen at a house show, dummy?

I always watch wrestling whenever I fly anywhere, and literally every time somebody has started watching over my shoulder and asked me about it. The best was when I was watching one of the Hansen/Funk matches from All Japan and some dad mentioned his kids loved wrestling. After watching a couple minutes from across the aisle, he just out of nowhere goes "Jesus, this is a bit different from John Cena."

Has anyone kicked out of Bryan's running knee yet? Orton kicked out of the knee in the Chamber match

I cannot think of one wrestler who he *would* be compared to favorably. He's the most unnatural wrestler I've ever seen.

Angle's arms are completely atrophied, he wouldn't pass even the most lenient wellness test, and his body has turned some sort of odd purple color. He looks like he's constantly being asphyxiated. None of his movements look human. I think there's plenty of chance Undertaker is in better shape.

You just wrote an entire paragraph of vague buzzwords and generic character cliches. "Tanahashi would succeed due to his synergy".

Even with the context explained, if anybody - Meltzer, Austin, whomever - thinks that a guy with Ryback's size and charisma wouldn't have immediately had a rocket strapped to their ass, they're fucking morons. Ryback would have been Lex Luger in JCP.

Wow that is dumb. There were a lot of weaker performers on that card, but is he honestly so clueless that he thinks Mark Henry wouldn't have been colossally over in the 80s, in ANY fed?

Orton is like 6'3". Do you know how tiny he would be if he were 200 lb.?

Ryback vs. Sheamus was a great short monster match. Ryback leaned into elbows and brogue kick, crazy powerbomb spot with Ryback catching Sheamus midair. Sheamus has looked incredible since coming back. Ryback is way underrated. Bryan vs. Cesaro was a great 6 minute match that was like the most perfect Worldwide match possible. Cool Cesaro strength spots, insane Yes Lock out of a Cesaro running tilt-a-whirl, Bryan blasted Swagger with the knee off the apron. Awesome. But Orton vs. Bryan was the best match this week. Excellent main event that would be considered even better if it had been on a high profile PPV.

Seems like Bob Carter wants to keep his daughter busy and away from the actual family business.

Doesn't bother me for the guys, as it worked wonders for guys like Goldberg or even Batista. I agree about the women though. Pretty misogynic infact. The misandry against Fernando, Diego, Christian and Kane is abhorrent as well.

Some have mentioned the "throw to the floor" = commercial break thing, and that doesn't really bother me. What bothers me is the Michael Cole "x is ROLLING" or "x is REELING!" every fucking time. Michael Cole announces like the worst version of an early 2000s video game soundbite.

I genuinely hate it when we go to break with say Sheamus getting knocked to the floor, and then we come back from break and he's in the ring giving somebody a backbreaker. Michael Cole isn't exactly going to tie together the momentum shift. Although that's not nearly as bad as a San Jose Smackdown taping we attended, with the good-on-paper main event of Eddy vs. Booker T. Problem was without the constraint of being live, they inserted 4 commercial breaks into the match (on TV they only ended up using three, but must have filmed an extra depending on how the time of the edited show was running). We could tell every time it was on a commercial because the ref would lean in to Booker, and Booker would grab a 3 minute chin lock. Then the ref would lean in and they'd go back to working the match. This happened FOUR TIMES. The match was interminable. TV version was better and cut to about 16 minutes (still maybe Eddy's weakest TV main event of that whole run) but live it was over 30 and just horrendous.

Cassandro is tiny. I'm just 5' 10" and my eyeballs were above the top of his head. Has he been wrestling again?

I actually like Ziggler way more than most. I've been a fan of his since he started getting TV time really (loved the early Batista matches). He bumps big and that's mostly what people talk about (usually in a negative way), but I also really like his offense. I like the Zig Zag even though I usually am not a fan of "I pull your head onto the mat" moves, but he always does it with such force and snap that it works for me. I love the Fameasser because of the height he gets on it, loved the sleeper he was using for awhile, I think he has great elbow drops including his jumping one, and I think he has good standing punches. He is way better than Zach Ryder (and I really wish Ryder didn't use the legdrop lariat as I think Ziggler would make that look amazing).

I remember speaking to Danielson when he was in APW (so that had to have been 10+ years ago) and he said he'd had 8 or 9 concussions. The number seemed shockingly high, but even if he was exaggerating or wrong, let's cut that in half and think of how much else has likely happened since.

Hold Phil to his ideas for the Segunda Caida revamp. Also call Phil and Will more. That isn't as much wrestling related as it is "being a good friend".

When I was 16 Stone Cold was my favorite wrestler in the world, and my mom got me a life-size Steve Austin cardboard stand-up. I didn't ask for it, and I didn't know it existed, and I didn't really need it, but the idea of my mom carrying a 6'+ cardboard Stone Cold through the mall (especially knowing how much she absolutely cannot stand pro wrestling) always makes me smile. I still can't believe she even considered buying it. It's still upstairs at my parents house, just lingering in a corner. Every member of the family has been scared half to fucking death by that thing. You go a couple years without seeing it and suddenly you come around the corner and turn on the lights, and some giant bald dude is just waiting in the shadows to beat the shit out of you.

You could put the best comedy writers in the world in a room and I don't think they'd come up with something as fucking hysterical as a wrestler being from "Parks Unknown".

Jerry Lawler vs. Jackie Fargo, CWA 7/2/74 - GREAT PAS: This is a Southern Championship match with the ring surrounded by a mesh barbed wire fence with the ringposts wrapped in barbed wire. I am pretty sure we get the vast majority of this and it is a true treat. Lawler is full on heel champ with Sam Bass at ringside passing in a foreign object and choking Fargo against the wire when the ref was distracted. This was a match of pretty much nothing but punches, wire shots and chokes, but man these are a pair of guys who can work a chokes, wire shots and punches match. Fargo may be the only wrestler in the world who can out perform Lawler in a punch off, and he was awesome here, the finish run is pretty much a wild exciting boxing match with both guys using combos, feints and head movement, just electric stuff. I didn't love the end as it felt like we were building to a classic crescendo and we didn't really get it, but man I am happy this surfaced. ER: Is there any other wrestler other than Lawler who can boast really great matches 38 years apart? I guess probably Funk, but we don't really have a fair amount of mid 1960s Funk to judge. This is a barbed wire match worked in a way I prefer these type of matches worked: No time wasted on "I'm struggling to push your face into the wire while you're struggling to avoid having your face pushed into the wire". This is just two guys fighting and punching each other hard while leaving the barbed wire to the seconds or to gravity. Lawler punches Fargo and he falls into the wire ropes? Awesome. Gives more of a focus to actual face punching with the wire as more of a stimulus to get back out there and fight. Lawler looks like such a rough ass here, with his shaggy hair, sideburns and mustache. He looks like a guy who kicked the shit out of the drummer from Molly Hatchet at a backyard barbeque. People in attendance still talk about that BBQ! Lawler's punches are so perfect here that it made me wonder if there was ever any stage where he had weaker strikes and had to refine them. I wish I knew what they looked like on his first day of training. A great thing about Lawler is how he sells a punch the way he'd expect a punch to be sold for him. His falls for some of Jackie's blows were tremendous. At one point toward the end when he's just hammering Fargo with jabs, Jackie swings wild and connects, and Lawler goes down like Nate Quarry. I didn't actually see Jackie's punch coming at that point, and the way Lawler sold it made it look so great and genuine. *I* didn't see it coming, but Lawler was flawless in conveying that *he* didn't see it coming either. This match was such a treat.

Yeah I've rarely heard other wrestlers praise him for the same stuff other "legendary" workers get praised for. You never hear peers talking about his pacing or match layouts or ability to draw in a crowd. You hear them talk about how quickly he adapted to the sport or how hard he worked. It's not like they're reaching for any sort of compliment to give him, but a lot of compliments they give him would sound like backhanded compliments when applied to other workers.