Robert S

WWE has cut out all rain delay stuff from the Network version of night 1 in the mean time. So if you have not seen Samoa PonJoe live, you are out of luck (at least regarding legal ways).

Those are guys (and girls) who (1) don't have highly paid contracts and (2) often come directly from colleges (if at that). Once they are released, they have at best a college degree in their pockets and did something for a couple of years that won't entice potential employers to hire them. They might find it fun during their stay there, but very soon afterwards will find out that they squandered their time.

That's basically the Tuesday Night Titan's version of Wrestlemania so far.

Lance Storm wins the day

Mother nature called and said it will continue to rain until fans put on their masks.

The season is supposed to be 14 episodes long, so more than enough space to get to cut off thumbs, blown up police stations and firecrackers in the anus.

After hiring the wrong one-legged man, scouting the wrong Japanese guy (I think that happened twice) now showing the wrong black women wrestler from the 50ies? Is it a coincidence that this happened less then a month after the return of Johnny Ace?

For one there is the "Walter does not want to move to the US" thing. Plus he has an accent, see how that "helped" Cesaro. Also I like me a good 3.5 count. Io forgot to kick out in the main event (I rewound three times to make sure that the first count was not just the ref hitting the mat) but the ref reacted quickly enough and just continued counting.

It's weird when you have people as part of the regular inductions (Hall, Nash, Hogan) that were born before some people of the "legacy wing" inductions (Dr. Death, Buzz, Brickhouse). I mean Dr. Death was around during the Attitude era both in WWF and WCW.

If you look at it deeper, than maybe the mid 90ies are a better starting point for the crisis that Japanese pro wrestling eventually ended up being in: - the aforementioned bad timeslots started at that point, I think - AJW started to have problems in 96 (partly due to external factors with the Matsunaga brothers losing a lot of money in the real estate market) - AJPW got stuck in a Misawa vs. Kobashi vs. Kawada cycle with matches that were built on further and further escalation that on the one hand had its natural limit and on the other hand was done on borrowed time. Underneath, besides Akiyama, no one came up that could follow them in that style. - NJPW was depending more and more on bringing in outsiders to pop houses. To some degree that always was a New Japan thing, but the way they did it really escalated by the late 90ies. There are only so many interpromotional feuds you can run, and to diminishing returns. Where do you go after UWF, WAR and UWFi (if All Japan is not available)? Same for bringing in shooters. The cagematch search for "Antonio Inoki" and "differerent style" in NJPW leads to 6 results from 1/1/70 and 12/31/89 (you get 6 more hits if you include non-Inoki results). Searching for "different style" matches in NJPW from 1/1/90 to 12/31/99 gives you 43 results. - I suppose Japan at that point heavily began to feel the effects of the territory system in the US. The total number of wrestlers in the US shrank and most heavyweights that could go were either bound to WWF or WCW. The remaining gaijin stars got older and older and could not be replaced. The only bigger, younger wrestlers that did a tour or two were guys between jobs or talent that did not make it in WWF and/or WCW or were having drug problems. In the 80ies, Japan tours were so lucrative that US wrestlers adjusted their US schedule to them, by the mid 90ies, the contracts with WCW and especially WWF did not allow you to do both (there were exceptions like Vader and the NJPW-WCW deal, obviously).

I agree with your general point, but after they inducted André in 93 (to form the HoF), they had yearly ceremonies until (and including) 1996. At that point they stopped doing the HoF ceremonies until 2004.

The existence of the following Twitter channel should tell you all you need to know about Edward Annis: https://twitter.com/isteddyinjail

Hmm... judging by a quick look on his Twitter, Walter seems to be okay. Almost exclusively wrestling-related retweets, and the small amount of political tweets or retweets don't contain any conspiracy theories or racism.

The future Emma was on that show (I think they presented her as a bitchy diva). Also the guy who went by the name French Stallion (who was the star of the show) was in NXT for a couple of years as Sylvester Lefort basically doing nothing (I think he had a feud with Enzo Amore over who looked sillier or something like that).

I am literally speechless.

From what I know and remember about that story, Khali was the last guy to blame there. Whoever was in charge of heading training that day was to blame, not Khali.

What makes the Piper blackface thing so baffling is that it was not a one time thing. He did an interview in blackface a couple of weeks before Wrestlemania on Superstars: If it happened once you could have blamed Piper, as it happened twice you have to blame the company.

10 months don't sound fast to me. Even in competitive sports you can make that recovery and probably faster (being back in 7-8 months is definitely not unheard of; quick googling says a usual recovery time for athletes is something in the range of 6 to 9 months, so the 10 months are actually and the slower side), and in wrestling you can theoretically return and take it easy for a months or two while you are still re-building muscle mass and so on.

Nice line by Gorilla: "How does Mr. X from Parts Unknown get through immigration here in Toronto? Does he put Parts Unknown down on the immigration form or what?"

A mathematician with some knowledge of logic should know NOT to believe/think in absolutes as Gödel taught us.

Wasn't Caruso the only of those more or less interchangeable backstage interviewers who had some kind of personality and seemed to give a shit compared to the other robots, or am I mixing her up with someone else?

Either that, or Patterson was the only one who was able to play the "yes, and"-game with Vince.

Considering what professional wrestlers do for a living, is it that surprising that a lot of them lack the intelligence to get the concept of moral highground?

Does that link rick-roll to a QAnon page?

Also, in lots of martial arts doing "showcase fights" is not an uncommon thing. I did Judo for a couple of years as a kid, and we did one or two exihibitions a year that besides individual technique demonstrations always contained a showcase fight or two. Furthermore, I once attended a guy doing an evaluation either for the 1st kyu (brown belt) or the 1st dan (black belt), I don't remember exactly, that contained a five minute demonstration fight, that was basically a worked match.