Johnny Sorrow

I would have loved to have done mushrooms with Steve Williams in Japan.

Yeah, I did. (It's a great show btw, for those who haven't heard it yet.) I have to laugh at the "no bumping" in Memphis deal. And as far as Luger goes, one thing I noted from the Horsemen set is that his initial face turn made him look like a dick. It's a Bunkhouse Stampede match, the final four guys are Luger, Ar, Tully, and JJ Dillon. JJ tells the ref that it's over and they'll split the money. The ref says there must be a winner, so JJ asks the guys for a favor. Can he have this one? Arn and Tully are all, "You got it, Man." and jump over the top rope. Luger doesn't and tosses JJ. I hadn't seen this since it happened and I was thinking, "What a dick Luger is." Then they went back and taped an interview where Luger tells JJ he doesn't want anymore outside interference in his matches and showed it as a "lost" interview or some such thing, and they had Luger cut the babyface turn promo of all time on TBS.

I thought of this the other night as I was continuing to watch Will's Horsemen set while drinking heavily. Most of the set is stuff I remember watching but when it get's to Ronnie Garvin winning the belt from Flair, it's in the era of my life where I wasn't really watching wrestling regularly anymore. Me and my pals would occasionally catch a show in Philly, but overall, I had stopped watching. I remember finding out that Garvin won the belt, and we actually did go to see Starrcade 87 on closed circuit TV at the Philly Civic Center where the Philly crowd was cheering like mad for Flair like we always did, and booing Garvin. Looking back, everyone seems to go on about how Garvin winning the belt came out of nowhere. But they actually had been having Garvin fueding with Flair off and on for years. Especially on TBS, as opposed to Worldwide where Ronnie Garvin was non existant around 85 except as Miss Atlanta Lively. Even the Flair/ Jimmy Garvin fued now looks like just a build up to another Ronnie/ Flair program. And after finally seeing the match where Garvin wins the belt, holy shit the crowd was HOT for Garvin. And he DID defend the belt during his reign instead of the "history" of him not defending it to get ready for Starrcade. Anyway the thing was, that Chicago crowd was all about Flair, just like the Philly crowd was, and everyone still goes on about how Garvin was a terrible choice at the time, when he actually was perfect, considering that there was no one else at the time. They were just setting up Luger for the turn and eventual program with Flair. I guess Windham would have worked, but they really did have a long history of Garvin being a thorn in Flair's side. I'm not saying that the Ron Garvin Title reign was some great deal, but "history" seems to say "They picked a guy randomly to beat Flair and lose it back at Starrcade" when the fact is they had been building Ron Garvin to beat Flair for years. Any other stuff that is considered "common knowledge" that maybe just isn't on the mark?

Oh, Todd Oh, his burden. I'll just say this. TONIGHT Wade Barrett said that they all had agreed backstage before NXT started that they'd stick together in the end, and would "have fun" doing the show. As far as his bewilderment re: Bret Hart and Vince and the NXT guys...Vince was using the NXT chaos as an excuse to fire Bret Hart for bullshit reasons, as mentioned by Tyson Kidd. Also, Vince never said he was behind anything. It came off to me that he played up to them trying to kiss their asses by being "one of the guys" hoping they'd realize that it'd be smart to accept his BS cause he's the boss. OR Vince was fooled into thinking he was in charge of this but he was outplayed. As far as IF Vince was behind it , "why would he let them attack two weeks in a row"..chalk it up to Vince wanting to see "ruthless aggression". OR The NXT guys USED Vince to get what they wanted and as soon as they did, they laid him out, too. This isn't that hard.

Just to plant a seed in SLL's mind for the future. "Cheers" was the best booked promotion ever on television.

It's not explicitly stated, but in fairness to Vince, the fruit has been envisioned as an apple by so many people for so long that it may as well have been. It's a bit like Humpty Dumpty being an egg - never said anywhere in the original text, but the original text doesn't say otherwise, and it's so common in pop cultural depictions that you can just kinda roll with it. As for everything else...well...umm...yeah. This in particular jumps out at me: Aside from being a relatively religious Jew, I've developed an interest over the years in Zoroastrianism, which is sort of the missing link between your old school polytheistic religions and the Abrahamic monotheistic religions of today. It took the multiple gods of previous religions and neatly boiled them down into two different guys: Ahura Mazda, the "uncreated God" who was 100% good, and Angra Mainyu, who I don't think is ever explicitly called a god, but who was an "uncreated spirit" of 100% evil, and who is arguably the jump-off point for the modern day concept of the Devil. This simplified dualist "good vs. evil" notion is one of the major influences on later monotheistic religions, but one of the big differences is that Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu were separate creations (uncreations?), and Angra Mainyu - while ultimately destined to fall to Ahura Mazda - could be something of a real competitor to him. By contrast, the Abrahamic God is the sole "uncreated" being in his religions. He created everything else, and no other entity poses any kind of true threat to him. Satan may have his origins in Angra Mainyu, but he's considerably less powerful, poses no threat to God, and could only rule the Earth if God let him. And well, God doesn't really do that. Offhand, the closest he came was God letting him get his kicks in on Job, for the sole purpose of showing Satan that even when given carte blanche to wreck a guy's shit, he was still basically powerless. For the most part, his M.O. is testing people's faith in the hopes that he can expose how flawed God's prize creation is, and by proxy, how flawed God is. World domination isn't really his bag. He's more interested in watching it all burn and rubbing God's face in it. But he can't really do that, because God is a bajillion times more powerful than he is, so he's basically stuck doing small-scale cons. Russo fucked up Christianity so bad that he actually became a really confused Zoroastrian. Also, take a look at this: Well, you conveniently glossed over it, Vince, but what he was going to do was sacrifice every single sinner on the fucking planet except for Noah, his family, and a shit ton of animals in a global flood. Seriously, how do you just miss one of the most famous stories of the Bible like that? I mean, I guess Noah and his family still carried the "sin gene", but it's pretty clear that God's big plan was "kill these sinful motherfuckers, and spare these guys because they're not so bad". "Sin gene" or no, he seemed to be putting an awful lot of faith in a "heel" like Noah to restore decency to the world after 40 days and 40 nights of hardcore sinner sacrificing. And if everyone was killed in the flood and only Noah and his family were left to repopulate the Earth, Russo can claim that "incest angles" have been around forever.

So, Nielson won't take any action and there are no precedents to go by? By precedents do you mean a network asking the audience to help "kill" a show by watching their show on in the same time slot? Because that's been happening in TV for as long as there's been TV. I remember some show on NBC with Jim Varney as the head of a clan of hillbillies who fight crime or some such thing that had promos where they told people to tune in and "Kill the Love Boat", ABC's Juggernaut. (Which worked about as well as what Dixie here is trying I know that those promos didn't specifically say the words "Ratings or Nielson" but the jist was the same, and that was before cable meant anything. And I seriously doubt Nielson gives two shits about some Wrestling owner saying something dopey on Facebook. Not taking away from how dumb it is that Dixie Carter thinks that DVR recordings are magical things that somehow send "ratings" to a magical land. That's a hoot. (She is awful pretty though. Shouldn't that take the edge off? Poor thing.)

The 5/11 WO Show has Dave and Bryan saying that the both feel that the Maryse segment on RAW was a "Fuck You" at MMA. And that it was a lame "fuck you." Problem is, it was obviously a response video to the one shown earlier hyping new champ and Maryse's rival Eve doing all her "martial arts/ submission" training. Maryse is then shown training with a judo teacher, trying to learn a martial art to compete with her rival, and not being able to grasp it. The teacher tells her "We've been doing this all day, you should know this. Pay attention." And Maryse kicks him and slaps him and walks away disgusted. Yes, it's a "Fuck You" at MMA. Oy vey.

"Suck it, weirdo."

Ah, that's right. Thanks, Bix.

I forgot about this until I just saw it. Who was "The War Machine" masked guy who replaced JJ in the WarGames rematch?

The Alliance did have a great mouthpeice in Heyman for all of two weeks. The week after the RAW where ECW joined WCW, they did this great promo with the Alliance in the ring with Stephanie, Heyman, and Shane standing in front of them where Heyman revealed that the whole Invasion was his idea and ECW was his child that Vince stole from him, so he now has stolen Vince's children who look to him as their Father now. (That was the gist of it. It was awesome.) And a few weeks later Heyman was the heel announcer and they didn't touch on the previous angle at all until the Heyman promo before Survivor Series.

Next on "The View", Wrestling Journalist Dave Meltzer. Remember, don't be "that guy" who encourages your hot girlfriend to go into showbiz. "Star 80" does wrestling better than wrestling. Eric Roberts was a great heel, though.

That'd be great actually because last year people at the F4W boards were saying how Pratt was being a great TV Heel and Alverez was furious about the comparison.

I agree with that completely. RAW was a show full of motivated, for the most part, guys who seemed to have an attitude of "We're gonna show them" re: the former WWF Big Stars who were in WCW. There were two cliques back then, and Taker's clique stuck around for the big win. Austin vs McMahon was totally what finalized the WWF being back on top, but "Mr. McMahon" didn't start because of Montreal. They had been toying with the character since they debuted it in Memphis. It would have happened without Bret Hart, I'd guess. (Although the fact that Bret was part of the Memphis Mr. McMahon" deal is kinda cool.

From a Jim Ross Interview from LAW re: "Not Signing The Big WCW Stars For Invasion"

I've been on a marathon of watching Will's Horsemen set and I'm right on "Pre-Starrcade 1986" and it's so great as this was when me and my buddy Joe were 16 and fully obesssed with wrestling. It was to the point where I convinced my Pop to take us to Greensboro from New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving in a hotel and at the Greensboro Colleseum, and I scored third row seats on the phone with TicketMaster. The Nikita Koloff face turn was so fucking awesome when it went down. I remember watching TBS or Worldwide and seeing that footage from the cage match and marking the fuck out once I realized that Nikita wasn't going to attack Dusty from behind and was instead kicking Ole Anderson's ass. All the follow up stuff with Nikita talking about learning to respect Magnum, etc was fucking gold. Granted, I always thought they were always waiting for an opportunity to turn Nikita into a good guy. Nikita was so super over as a heel that he had his own T-Shirt available at the merch table at cards. I had one that I thought was cool until my girlfriend asked me why I was wearing a T Shirt with a big Muscle man on it, "That's gay." They built Nikita's awesome turn to the Main Event at Starrcade...and they went with a double dq to end the show, (which was an awesome show), and the Omni crowd that got the Main Event were loudly booing Nikita, as they seemed like they weren't ready to cheer the "Russian". Nikita's face turn kinda fizzled after that. It should have been huge.

From the latest classic Observer: "Kevin Sullivan's line of the week was when he was saying all his violent acts of the past were accidents, mistakes and he was really a nice guy. He then said Bob Armstrong had a few accidents as well, four of them that show up every morning at the breakfast table."

That was awesome.

So, I have a question that has always bothered me, but I just remembered watching Will's Horseman set. During the mass exodus of wrestlers from UWF/ Crockett to WWF circa 1986-88, why did Vince take Sam Houston of all people? Was it a favor to Jake Roberts? Did Vince see something in him as the "Dancing" Young Cowboy? I love me some Sam Houston getting the shit kicked out of him as much as the next guy but I was always surprised that he ended up in the WWF at that time. That reminds me of a pretty funny story. When I was 15 I had just had my first serious girlfriend dump me and I was convinced the world had ended. My Dad and his best friend, who was like an Uncle to me, decided to take me out for a day of fun to cheer me up. This was a day in Philadelphia of going to the docks, checking out all the old boats and ships, cheesesteaks...and a NWA Crockett Show at the Civic Center. We bought our tickets in the Parking garage from a "scalper" as the show was sold out, (but still paid almost the regular price). So we were sitting in the upper level where the crowd always were drinking and smoking lots of weed. I had to turn down passed joints with a "I don't do that, but thanks." lie because my Dad was there, but we all got a contact high that left my Dad with a splitting headache. I left to buy a program and Dad told everyone around our seats about my "heartache", and I was totally embarresed. But everyone in our section were all really cool and sympathetic, especially the African American couple sitting behind us. Anyway, one of the undercard matches was Sam Houston vs. The Barbarian. Needless to say, Barbarian was killing Sam in many ways that did look insanely painful. This caused the lady sitting behind us to start screaming at the top of her lungs "STOP THIS! OH NO! THAT NIGGER'S GONNA KILL THAT WHITE BOY! AHHH!" Her boyfriend kept saying" Baby, calm down. It ain't real!" And then Sam would bump for something and look dead. She'd start screaming again, "STOP THAT NIGGER! THAT WHITE BOY IS DEAD!" The boyfriend tapped me on the shoulder saying, "Man, help me! Tell her it ain't real!" So I did but nothing helped. She was shaking and crying over the beating Sam Houston was taking from the Barbarian. After the match she made him take her home, as she had had enough of this.

I think that was a case where the debut and character pissed off the crowd so Afi was dead in the water.

Probably because Dynamite hadn't fully recovered from his back injury when they booked the match. And there was a storyline about Tito wanting to get Davis because he was the ref in the IC Match in Boston when Savage beat him. Granted, Davis wasn't "Heel Ref" yet, but the retro history gave Tito something to do at Mania while helping cover Dynamite's back. And Mr. Wonderful was awesome. I hated his guts at first when I was a kid but he won me over as maybe the first heel I liked. And his berating the poor fat girl cracked me up. That's almost as awesome as "At Home With Dr. D David Schultz", (which also made me start cheering him. Add in that Piper was their manager/ partner and it's easy to see how a 13/ 14 year old would start becoming a heel fan).

Unless the PPV is in New York or Philly I doubt it. And I'm sure that Dave would react to it in some sort of awesome way. He's been fantastic jaw jacking with the crowd this whole heel run. And Flair truly is his mentor, cause said jaw jacking is right out of "Ric Flair-1985-86".