Ryan Faulconer

They had a second one in 2003 as well. I have seen the first one on tape in robably 2000...maybe 2001. I am an MPro completist until mid2004ish in their history. The second one Is a match I have never read or heard a single word about one way or another. I have no good reason to explain away keeping it unwatched and on the shelf. I am going to guess that it wasn’t as good as the first one. If excited fans can be disappointed in a surprise then I think I can make an educated gamble and downplay the expectations for the second (maybe the last...maybe) Sasuke/Onita singles death match.

Who claimed the surprise would be a top 5 Attitude Era worker? It wasn’t going to be Austin or The Rock. That was not a particularly strong in-ring time. Top 5 would possibly be filled by Benoit, Guerrero, Mysterio (although he wasn’t in WWE during), X-PAC,, etc. Christian fits the mold. It obviously couldn’t be some of those names. Sean Walkman probably can’t work on a large stage since he has Hep C...I think that’s the one. It was Christian or Angle..and anything else using that criteria doesn’t make sense. We were pretty much told by Dave Meltzer that it made sense for it to be Christian. It really could have been only Punk, Christian or Angle. If you thought it would be someone bigger then that you didn’t listen to the criteria. People knew a few days ago that Christian was one of Tony K’s all time faves. Just because the result is not what you wanted it to be doesn’t mean it should be someone else that you think would be a better surprise...even if it wouldn’t be physically possible. Christian fit the stipulations both Paul Wight and Tony K put forward.

Hopefully he will wear one of those lovely swimsuits for women in the Middle East (or maybe France mostly). His body has to look more banged up than poor present-day Kazuhiro Sakuraba looks.

It helps with remembering particular weeks a little easier. As the wrestling obsessed, that I can safely say most of us are, we can call up certain dates. Named shows just makes notes, typing, ritual sacrifices or however else others may keep track of things a lot simpler. It also goes a long way towards making 52 Wednesdays a year not melting in our memories.

Spears! With a much better look!

IIRC, the tag team was the setup for their feud. They had this incredible promo together and probably many others during the feud.

If Shaq was just a big project then this match overdelivered. It is Shaq though so any star power he brought was minimal at best. It just wasn’t as big a deal as they probably envisioned for Cody and Brandi and Jade. I would rather see that cyborg character if all they wanted was a Miss Hoss they had a few to choose from on Dark. Jade did pretty well for her first match. Send her to Dark for a few months.

I thought the first three matches made for the best start to a Dark episode since the show began. AEW needs to hurry up and sign Nick Comoroto before WWE remembers that the guy is over 175 lb. According to wrestlingdata The FreakBeast worked a bunch for NXT in the not too distant past. Hopefully Danny Limelight, TNT (the junior Dudleys - not o.g. Savio), Bear Country, Shawn Dean and maybe Fuego del Sol, Aaron Solow and Mike Verna are next to get contracts before WWE just signs everyone and stashes them in India or some other prospective territory that they are considering. For the women I think KiLynn King, Heather Monroe, Alex Gracia, Lady Frost, Dreamgirl Ellie, Skyler Moore, Lindsay Snow, Dani Jordyn, Vipress and Tesha Price should be signed. It would be worth it just to developer them in a different environment than NXT/PC for a change. They already missed the boat on Elayna Black when WWE gobbled her up last week. I might even roll the dice ( RENO~!) on projects like Megabyte Ronnie and Jennacide. Ronnie was awkward and clumsy but he could be a foil for lower card heels. I just see dudes like Ryzin, Louie Vaille, D3, M’Badu and Faboo Andre as too goofy or even geeky - as in uncool not a slight against eccentric wrestlers. Vaille looked much more impressive in Chikara all gimmicky with face paint and a characterf...of sorts.

Don’t forget the bigger curling tournaments. Back in the very distant past I recall Stampede wrestling on TSN getting bumped all the time. While it was never presented as live I specifically remember some show interrupted by the announcement that Ben Johnson had tested positive for steroids and stripped of the world record and the Olympic gold medal. This was the first time he was caught...and there is at least two more times this would happen.

I’m sure he appreciates the steady cheque from the PC but wouldn’t Chris Hero - credible world champ - be perfect for AEW?

I watched a live IWAMS event from Powerbomb.tv last night. I had a nice little writeup about a few of the matches but I seem to have lost it in the hellish vacuum that is cyberspace. I haven't seen a PPV as it happened since 2001. I subscribed to Highspots and Powerbomb.tv recently to watch a lot of indy groups that my favourite wrestlers work almost interchangeably on. The live IWAMS show reminded more of being a fan as a kid. Watching it live as it happens made me feel like I was in the crowd. The women's death match and to a lesser extent both the 3 way and the tag title matches could be worth a look if you have way too much time to view random matches from random shows. The women's match was more brutal than any women's match I'd seen since I stopped getting LCO-era ARSION or other joshi in the mid 2000s. I hope they didn't get hurt seriously and were paid extra as both a consequence and a reward. I didn't know Ian Rotten still owned IWAMS. I guess it is naive of me to believe that anyone else would book too many young wrestlers to work that many shows for what is no doubt too little money in return. Let's just hope nobody was paid in drugs. I'm currently on a Beyond "Americanrana" 2016. Lots of quality wrestling so far and Joey Ryan too! I have also been trying to watch as much 2016 indy wrestling as I can find online. That seems like a pretty good year to hold as the standard. Initially I picked 2016 as my cutoff point because Chris Hero left for better compensation. I'm watching AAW/AIW/CZW/Beyond as well as the British groups online. I already had the entire PWG and Evolve schedules from that year that I stupidly spent actual money on to have in physical copies. If only I had waited until the Gabe promotions were all exposed for viewing by spiteful FloSlam...I'm just now starting to tire of the Ricochet/Ospreay matchup after loving and seeking out every single interaction they had that found its way online over the past two years . I'm new to shoot interviews but I think I missed their boat of relevance years ago. I think I own four shoot interviews from SMV among the hundreds of other shows that take up too much space. In the early 2000s DVDVR and PWO forums shoots seemed to be important and entertaining supplementary wrestling entertainment. Now that I have access to Highspots and the few on Powerbomb listed I can't really say that they hold my interest at all. I think the overexposure of wrestling podcasts and books has completely demystified the wrestling legends and wrestling urban legends. Younger wrestlers' shoot interviews have very little information and perspective. Older wrestler shoots have far too many lies or faded memories that amount to dead time or substance-less time wasting. I think it also goes without saying that the former ROH owner's brand of shoot interviews are mostly horrible to sit through. How can someone who has interviewed so many wrestlers be so terrible at it? They probably cornered the market on the genre for more than twenty years yet he/they still sound like someone doing their first interview on their first wrestling podcast.

Jimmy Jacobs was fired by WWE for appearing in a picture on instagram with the Bullet Club. I know there is some legal-ish stuff going on between the Bucks and WWE but it was a picture...online. Do WWE fans even know who Jacobs is? Was he on camera in the back doing a pull apart or heinous coffee throwing vignette? I hope this firing doesn't convince Jacobs to do any more barbed wire matches...or any matches in places like IWA-MS. Wasn't he a teacher years ago? A classroom of students will outdraw most IWA-MS five times a week.

I don't know anyone personally who has the WWE network in Canada. I'm not paying $11.99/month for a channel. If we don't get the back catalogue they will never see a single loonie from me (or twoonie if I have six of them). Without the Netflix-style library of choices I'll stick to the Japanese and Mexican stuff available...ten year old ROH/seven year old Chikara and PWG and Evolve also take up too much shelf space to not warrant a rewatch. My computer is getting too slow to watch some streaming stuff anyway. I got a month of PROGRESS in July for ninety-nine cents (IIRC) and I had problems with the picture slowing down too often not to notice it. I'm currently stuck on PS3-technology so I can't watch the various other promotions subscription services either. My wife would probably just tell me to watch any of the older DVDs/blu-rays that I have. I really don't have any need to keep up with the current splintered lucha and puro scenes so it isn't really essential to keep up with current promotions anyway...I do pine for the missing 1997 and 2003-2004 CMLL or the early Toryumon and/or the odd MPro show that I no longer have thanks to the inferior VHS format catching up with Father Time. Long story short...wives are usually right when it comes to trivial subjects like this

Coincidentally I just saw a video on youtube titled "The best Lawler-Dundee angle ever" with the Lawler/Dundee tag team promo and everything that resulted from what was said in that promo. I grew up watching whatever territories they aired on TV in the mid to late 80s. I've seen Memphis before but that was mostly later in the 80s so to say that I was blown away by Dundee's promos would be an understatement. I had never seen a Dundee-Lawler match or promo before finding that video a couple of days ago Lawler was great while the Fabs were the right compliment for somewhat of a nuanced anglel. Dundee just wound up and off he went doing a couple of great promos in what I am assuming is the same hour of television. It just had EVERYTHING that is missing on Mondays and Tuesdays in this era Some things from thirty or more years ago can look dated to something similar in the present. This made WWE promos look fake in comparison. RAW and Smackdown looked like the minor leagues or cosplaying wrestling when compared to great 80s promos.

Do any other Canadians here subscribe to the Fight Network? I randomly caught a free week of it sometime last year...or was it this year? ANyway...flipping through the channels I saw CMLL airing with English commentary. It was really more like Italian-French Canadians doing commentary in English but that was part of the charm. Soon they would add NJPW on AXS and suddenly I'm following ten or more promotions in a week if I was in the mood. They even ran the first night of the G1 USA show live but I forgot to watch it. Thankfully they reran it like ten times that same week. For an extra $3 I subscribed to the channel on our cable package and was immediately impressed with TFN's wrestling coverage. At that time they aired CMLL/AAA/TNA/Paragon Pro/ICW/NGW/ROH/Wrestlecentre and for a brief time memphis classics with Adams vs Austin feuding. Both CMLL and AAA had English announcing...with AAA actually having English broadcasters like Alex Shane. Usually Shane was a very annoying heel commentator much like Matt Striker tries too hard to be an annoying babyface announcer. Every now and then Shane would have the entire block of AAA to himself and that was actually a solid improvement over his over the top heel work on the rest of the episodes. TFN also had this annoying Groundhog Day-like habit of rerunning parts of the same spring Rey de Reyes shows in random order and configuratin. It felt like it was stretched out over several months and that was BEFORE they started just running repeats. Flash forward to August 2017 and TFN's wrestling contributions consist of ROH/NJPW on AXS/SMASH/GPW-TNA .For a couple of months they ran a goofy Canadian promotion called Wrestlecentre based out of Halifax. They turned out to be a medium-sized indy with a lot of the best North American indy talent cycling in and out while local guys made up the rest of the roster. To say they tried to emulate themselves on Monday Night Raw would be an understatement. Picture your trusty WWE flagship show only with probalby maybe 2% of the budget to pull it off every week. Every show looked like it came out of the same hockey rink. That in itself is nothing that bothered me. It was the use of all of the same production cliches and camera work excluding the filming of the matches. The matches were usually really hard to watch with a fixed camera that didn't zoom into the ring all that often. They stopped airing the show after a couple months. Nearly every week they had good looking matchups with guys like Matt Sydal or Colt Cabana or Daniels & Kazarian and so on but I couldn't focus on the ring because the camera was so distracting. It probably goes without saying that they used a heel authority figure as well. Now they have a weekly SMASH show. They have a lot of the better guys who work places like EVOLVE/PWG/ROH but the production (specifically lighting and cameras) persuade me to skip most weeks. I'll check out the card and watch some of the matches as long as they don't use too many locals like Suave or TARIK. If things don't change for TFN in September I'm dropping the channel. I started out with a robust if not random ten or so different promotions each week to watch. Now - especially after the purchase of TNA they have cut waaayyyy back on the promotions they run. At least half if not more of the hours devoted to wrestling is some form of TNA-GPW. Its not the watchable recent stuff either. How did TNA end up with so many different weekly shows? Besides Impact they have Xplosion/TNA Epics/TNA in 60/TNA Greatest Matches/One NIght Only PPVs (occasionally). Ugh...so much Abyss. edit: I didn't realize how long this post was. Maybe it should have its own thread.

I haven't seen any of the CWC (I don't have the network up here) but I wanted to pop in and say that there is a fair bit of ZSJ and Jack Gallagher (Will Ospreay too if he were relevant to the conversation) on youtube and dailymotion - perhaps "other" places as well . As a fan of ZSJ I can't relate to the apathy towards him in this thread at all. His matches with Chris Hero have compliment his style and Hero's quite well. It was a clash of styles for sure...but more like a Clash of the Titans-style clashing than awkward mishmash clash. I can't say I'm much of a Noam Dar fan either but some searches online probably give you a handful of good matches as well. Those matches may be against ZSJ/Ospreay/Scurll/etc but a good match is a good match is a good match...or so they say. There must be ten or more UK promotions with footage freely available online. Fans like what they like but I just had to add my two cents in defense of some of the subjects discussed.

Joe Rogan talked about his feelings about the Punk signing and pro wrestling on his podcast in all the ways that makes fans like us cringe. Two minutes of google searches would have educated him about both Punk and wrestling a great deal. It looks like it is from December 2014 so his personal opinions may have changed. His public opinion had to change as someone who works for and promotes (not in the literal sense) UFC because his job depends on verbally promoting or shilling. Punk said on one of those "Evolution of Punk" episodes that if UFC had existed when he was a kid he probably would have chosen that over pro wrestling. The sincerity in that statement flies in the face of everything we know about him over the fifteen or so years we may have known about it him. As a wrestling fan that a little galling when a guy who has made his money on being sincere and straight forward hides his supposedly real motivations while simultaneously hurting his credibility. His character and his supposedly "real" personality as witnessed either in person or on TV are perhaps tied together more than any other pro wrestling character in recent history. When Punk left WWE I was burned out on him as a character. It was weirdly coincidental that I made a comment along those lines on this forum - only for him to "up and quit" WWE the very next day. My next wish is for all lucha to replace WWE on mainstream media! Stay tuned...

Not my posts, of course. But don't worry, I'm pretty sure the OP posts to several boards and picks and chooses which responses to use. Posters should have these opinions next to their name in their forum profile. It would save people a lot of time and energy whenever threads get gridlocked with opinions that are never going to change. Most of these reactions were a lot more relevant back in the early 2000s than they are now. The size of the pwo/dvdvr/WKO/VOW/PWP/etc type of fan is so varied now. Any consensus opinion isn't anywhere near the influence that it would have held back when all we had was RSPW/tOA/DVDVR or the small groups that grew out of them.

On the most recent Impact Matt Hardy's goofy act got what sounded like legitimate laughs out of the audience. They weren't the usual go-along-with-the-catchphrases type of reaction either. I even laughed during the EC3/Matt exchange. I can't remember the last genuine laugh I had while watching WWE. Broken Matt Hardy is a fabulous mess of an idea. It shouldn't work but it does. Any wrestlers or characters coming within the orbit of this angle seems to get it as well. They have such a thin roster now so the rest of the show feels pretty repetitive with the exact same wrestlers on every single show I've seen during the last five weeks. They can't shuffle anyone in or out of angles while they basically play musical chairs when one feud ends and another begins. Lashley actually cuts a decent promo now. I never thought that would happen. In the ring he used to remind me more of Gronda than Brock Lesnar or Mark Henry. I'd say he is at least at Big Show's level now - which I think we can all agree that is a major improvement from what he once was. Big Show is so overexposed and mishandled that any championship run for him has limited credibility while Lashley is the definition of underexposed. After leaving WWE he dropped off the wrestling map for most fans before showing up in TNA and relocating to what can at least be called discovered land but also land that nobody can see or care about. The announcers really should stop trying to copy WWE's style of broadcasting. As it is they come off like an episode of Jakked/Metal/random weekend c show. They show the same uninspired enthusiasm that most WWE announcers have given us until the brand split hopefully changes that at least a little bit. Josh Matthews throws to commercials and the production gives us the same format and angles that WWE has abused over the years.

TNA runs several hours a week on the Fight Network in Canada. I haven't seen Angle regularly since TNA left Spike. When I saw Angle in some of those "best of" programs I couldn't believe how bad he was. He looks like his body can withstand any bumping and one of his primary strengths - athleticism- is completely gone. He still wrestled the same way he did during his best years and any cosmetic or gimmicky credibility he had is completely gone. With his withered body he should just switch to becoming a Flair-like wily veteran. He probably shouldn't be wrestling at all at this point.

I swear that the first twenty or more free wrestling matches listed on a youtube search are all intergender matches. More often than not Beyond Wrestling seems to be the promotion. I think that kind of match works in lucha really well. Michinoku Pro and Osaka Pro and Battlarts also seemed to make it work without it being uncomfortable to watch. It sometimes worked in Chikara when Sara Del Rey would wrestle guys besides Chris Hero or Claudio...errr Cesaro. Daizee Haze wrestling men of any size doesn't really work that well...oustide of the lucha mini tecnicos. She wouldn't be very credible against the mini rudos either. I'm really not sure about which audience the mostly American or Canadian promotions are aiming for with these matches. Are they trying to shoot for complete equality among wrestlers or is it something seedier and some kind of fetish. I think it is safe to say that everyone looking for wrestling matches on youtube stumble onto "other" types of wrestling as we scour the world for matches to watch online. These are matches inside of apartments or empty arenas. The "grapple fuck" style is pretty much literally the correct description instead of it being a euphemism whenever wrestlers like Timothy Thatcher and Drew Gulak are doing their thing in the wrestling ring.

Is there a backstory explaining Bubblegum's name? I don't think it has any other meanings here in Canada outside of the obvious. I'm not hip to the lingo that the young(er) people use anymore. I'm also behind on news and after weeks of watching iCW/NGW/RPW/Progress/IPWUK/etc I didn't know about Kris Travis passing away. Ugh. That is too young to lose someone. We have a free preview of the Fight Network on my cable system recently. I now get eight different wrestling promotions on the channel alone. Watching CMLL/AAA/NJPW with english commentary is a little jarring after fifteen or so years of tape and DVD buying and trading. I've also seen NGW and ICW episodes over the last few weeks. I'm getting used to the size of the rings now. I'm pretty sure they are recent episodes of Insane Championship Wrestling and British Wrestling Weekly. I would prefer Progress or RPW and I'll probably signup for their streaming channels once I can figure out which component I'll use to hook up to the TV. I don't think I can watch streaming channels on my PS3 web browser. I saw the preview for the WCPW group last week. After seeing the staff and shields that Progress used for belts I was really expecting WCPW to use the cardboard belt. If they end up PWGesque with actual storylines I'll probably add them to the list of watchable youtube wrestling each week.

They should just admit it was a failed drug test. Their writers should be able to make it a storyline that kids can understand. They can say that Roman made a mistake. He could have done it accidentally or on purpose - for the sake of the story at least. Then Reigns can come back with an angle of redemption. Maybe he conquers the odds at the next big show or maybe he doesn't and this is a learning moment for the character...and the audience. If WWE wants to cater to kids they should be able to write a basic Degrassi (O.G. Degrassi...not this new stuff) kind of story. Then again maybe they can't do anything like that at all. WWE wants to be bland and go the melba toast Bayside High route instead. In the 80s You Can't Do That On Television managed to do an episode about the dangers of drugs. It makes more sense than most of their storylines right now.

I found a video with Vince Russo talking with Will Ospreay today on youtube. Russo was blowing a lot of smoke up Ospreay's arse - as they say. Even though Ospreay is one of my favourites this year I had to cut the video after about a minute of Russo blabbing his favourite wrestling buzzwords towards Ospreay. If I have learned anything from the lukewarm controversy around the match it is that 99% of wrestling fans don't know what any of wrestling's language means. I saw several seemingly honest opinions on the match on youtube from people who are wrestling fans exposed to something different. I saw many more examples of the next Mark Madden in training spewing forth insider terms that they probably read on a copy of a copy of wherever Scott Keith collected the information for the RSPW pro wrestling FAQ...if that. The anger that some posters had about this topic was rather scary to see/hear/read online. If they really want to know what "killed" the wrestling business they should probably look in the mirror....or really just the Attitude Era. They had all those hardcore or ladder matches. They had all those broken necks and wrestler after wrestler dying. Not that I think the business is dying. So many wrestlers with undiagnosed or ignored head trauma. It just got concussion after concussion and should have changed up their style to preserve the business as it is. Oh yeah...I guess the lack of competition for WWE is probably the real culprit. D'oh! We should blame it on the flips and dives. It makes for a more generational scapegoat.