Robert S

I remember Cornette making jokes about how uncomfortable Caudle was with being on screen with The Gangstas (and using the Jesse Helms connection as a point-of-reference), so there was definitely something there.

Some stats: the biggest winners (in percent points, not actual percentage) Zack Sabre Jr. +33.4% Gran Hamada +32.7% Spyros Arion +31.6% Dorrell Dixon +19.6% Cody Rhodes +16.3% Otto Wanz 15.4% CM Punk +13.4% Samoa Joe +13.3% Matt & Jeff Hardy +12.4% Jay & Mark Briscoe +11.4% Biggest losers: Royal Brothers -15.0% Ole Anderson -13.5% Angel Blanco & Dr. Wagner -12.5% El Hijo del Santo & Octagon -12.3% Split of people who got in (not sure how Dave calculates the numbers w.r.t. voting categories): Spyros Arion (3rd among reporters, 1st among historians, 2nd among active professionals, 24th among retired professionals) Gran Hamada (1st, 2nd, 27th, 30th) Dorrell Dixon (2nd, 2nd, 21st, 17th) CM Punk (6th, 12th, 4th, 12th) Cody Rhodes (7th, 10th, 10th, 1st) Sabu (9th, 6th, 3rd, 13th) Bobby Bruns (13th, 9th, 13th, 18th) And of people who were close: Hayabusa (4th, 23rd, 16th, 16th) JYD (14th, 15th, 9th, 21st) June Byers (12th, 7th, 19th, 26th) Jesse Ventura (11th, 22nd, 5th, not in top 30) Jose Tarres (10th, 4th, not in top 30, 15th) Ted Turner (8th, 14th, 30th, not in top 30) Von Erichs (5th, 21st, 8th, not in top 30) Gorilla Monsoon (22nd, not in top 30, 1st, 4th) Some outliers among people who did not pass the 50%: Billy Joyce 5th among historians, 39.9% total Manami Toyota & Toshiyo Yamada 2nd among former professionals, 33.8% total Larry Matysik 3rd among former professionals, 39.7% total Dominic DeNucci 5th among former professionals, 32.1% total Randy Orton 6th among former professionals, 31.6% total Edge 7th among former professionals, 27.6% total Matt & Jeff Hardy 8th among former professionals, 35.6% total Tony Schiavone 9th among former professionals, 23.4% total Mike Tenay 10th among former professionals, 48.6% total It's really funny, that former professionals voted for a lot of announcers, but did not vote at all for Jesse Ventura (who is on the ballot as an announcer).

if you ignore the elephant in the room called Jesse Helms

To be fair, there have been a lot of stretches over the last 25 years where an AI would have done a better job than Vince and the writers staff did. As was pointed out time and time again, booking wrestling in theory is anything but rocket science. You have your standard formula and tropes that you use again and again, just making sure to not repeat stuff too soon.

Public European TV stations usually were very good with archiving their stuff so if the SRF (RTS) produced it, they very likely have the tapes somewhere in a vault. If they only got the tapes from the French promoters and aired them unedited then I guess the stuff is gone. Re. Lasartesse: I remember that he went to some trainings and maybe shows promoted by the scene that Claudio Castagnoli came from. He talked there a bit about his attempts to run shows in the German-speaking (Germans would argue that this is not really German, as a guy living less than 2 km away from the Swiss border, I obviously have a different opinion ;-)) parts of Switzerland (covering about 2/3 of the Swiss population) and drawing poorly. His conclusion was that Switzerland was (at least at that time) just not the right place for wrestling. Cagematch has some results for shows in Switzerland pre 1990. The 80ies stuff looks to be CWA-affiliated, there is a 78 card that has an Inoki vs. Lasartesse main event where I think David Mantell posted some clips of, the 60ies cards look to be Lasartesse-run shows filled with French talent, the 40ies and 50ies cards might actually have been run by promoters in Switzerland (maybe promoted by Paul Berger as he pops on most cards and is the only Swiss regular from what I can tell). And on why only the French station in Switzerland had wrestling: that's probably just simple geographics. I guess back then it was already possible for most people in the French-speaking part of Switzerland to receive French TV and probably wrestling on those stations was popular enough that it got coverage in newspapers and someone got the idea to air wrestling themselves, buying tapes from French promoters. You did not have that for the German-speaking side. I don't think there was (apart from clips here and there) regular wrestling on German or Austrian TV (and considering geographics, it would have had been German TV) that could have swept over.

"If you called yourself the pedophile killer (...) you would have plenty of opponents [in this business]." - that's a great line

Colby Corino started at the age of 13 (he had matches earlier, but I would assume those were comedy matches or whatever as they were all on "Toys for Tots" fundraising shows)

As there was some talk about Jim Cornette and his podcasts on this board: Cornette has fired the guy who did the art for his podcasts (the youtube thumbnails) because he found out that that guy posted all kind of right-wing-nutjob conspiracy theories on social media. (okay, to be precise, it was more that that guy quit before he could get fired - Brian Last apparently told that guy to stop acting crazy on social media and he was, "nah, I'm good")

After spending two minutes on Wikipedia clicking on "Personal life" on the pages of the main eventers I remember one of the reasons why I stopped watching MMA.

In some parts of Europe (e.g. Austria or France), WWE PLEs are still part of the original WWE Network. The expectation was that content will be moved to Netflix in 2026 or so when local TV deals expire, though so far nothing official was announced. Not that I care too much, to be honest. I am neither interested in their product to begin with, them going full-MAGA (and stuff like bringing back Brock) does not help either.

Which is funny because aren't the "Polynesians" actually really tribal (pun intended)? I mean the story going around why it took forever for Samoa Joe to get a chance in WWE was because he was NOT an Anoa'i and the Anoa'i family was actively pushing against Samoans not related to them.

this I am able to do approx. conversions from pounds to kg (divide by 2 and round down a little), from feet to m (divide by 3 and round down a little) and from miles to km (times 5 divide by 8 - or if I need rough estimation is good enough, times 2 divide by 3) in my head, but I will never be able to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius without using digital assistance. There should be a section in the Geneva Conventions about the the use of non-SI units.

Even better was Virgil (an obvious shot against Dusty Rhodes, Vince at that point really had it out for Dusty considering Akeem "the African Dream") being called Vincent in WCW.

It feels like that they have these kind of plans every 10 years. There is this famous picture of Triple H in front of a world map with lot of small NXT markers on different parts of the world and I am pretty sure there were similar news sometimes in the early to mid aughts. Anyway, who could they grab in Europe? Both RevPro and wXw feel too small to make actual plays for real fulltime touring companies.

There are about four page on this at DVDVR (though far) in the general April discussion thread, so I wouldn't say there were no reactions over there.

I am realizing only now that in some way Triple H bought AAA, at least there is something funny about this.

Even cockroach is borderline considering that cockroaches are vermin and you know who used the termin "vermin" for whom.

Yeah, that was one booking decision that seemed suspect (as have no clue about Joshi, I can't judge the booking of those matches), though Aoki does not seem super protected in DDT either, so I guess you could try to argue for that result. I was positively surprised about Natalya's performance. She was the biggest name WWE provided for the show (with maybe the exception of Pete Dunne) and you could have expected her to do the bare minimum here, but she seemed motivated. Except using the Sharpshooter as a finish and spot or two, where I guess her instincts made her do something that did not fit to the style, it was a pretty good match.

I generally agree with that sentiment. The early shows at least had a cool "underground" vibe to them and it felt fresh to have wrestlers outside their normal environments trying to work matches. Also the shows were relatively short which made them easy to get through (in a good sense). Now it's three hour shows in a fully lit arena. I would say in general the quality of the work has improved (I am halfway through this show and all but the first match were at least okay, the opener was a stinker, though). I guess it's still good enough to watch one show a year of that style. The point regarding inconsequentiality is definitely spot on. The agenting was a bit suspect. In one match, you have Regal's kid winning after a backdrop suplex (or a Regal-plex, I guess) where the ref stopped the match immediately after the move. In the next match you have a similar finish, though the ref did not care that the guy taking the backdrop was selling the move like death and had the match continue. Not the refs fault, just bad booking / agenting. I guess you have to expect such things on an indy show (especially full of wrestlers that probably wrestler 2-3 times that day).

It's from a home release, WWF Wrestling World Tour, released in late 92 (so I guess the commentary was taped during Flair's second run). The match is from the same Barcelona show (in 91) where Tito Santana pinned the Undertaker: https://www.prowrestlinghistory.com/videos/wwf/listing/coliseum.html#misc https://thehistoryofwwe.com/wwf-results-1991/

Seriously, fuck this company. As bad as WWE was at its own, somehow TKO made it even worse. I finally cancelled my Network subscription a couple of months ago (not that I was interested at all in the current stuff, but the back catalogue kept me there) as I could not give that detestable company any more of my money in good conscience. Fuck them and fuck a lot of the people who work there.

The WWE Hall of Fame class of 2025 - whoops, all nepotism?

Which is funny, because my only interactions with him were when he was 15-16 years-old and was posting on a German message board (and he was like "I am the son of Axel Dieter and I am going to become a wrestler" and I was like "sure, you are"), so for me he always will be a kid.

Is the record supposed to be that he was the oldest wrestler to have a match? If you don't count Mae Young's last "matches", Dory Funk Jr. has Nagasaki beat by a couple of months and I am sure Kojika will surpass both in 2025 or 2026. Also who knows how old Gypsy Joe really was when he had his last match.

In hindsight, those 100 million were well spent and will go a long way to keep Vince out of prision (via AG Matt Gaetz). Well, those 100 million and whatever they gave to Trump directly in the last 10 years.