Robert S

After reading the Abraham's book about Vince and the interviews she did w.r.t. Vince's childhood and adolesence I would be careful to believe VInce about anything reg. that time period, he is a very unreliable narrator. His personal version of his history seems to be full of exaggerations and telling stories of others as his own. I have no doubt that he experienced physical and verbal abuse as a child, though if it was beyond the typical level of abuse the average child had to deal with growing up in the 50ies, who knows. Same goes for the sexual abuse part. It could be that everything he said for example in the Penthouse interview is true, but it might as well be pure fiction.

Fair enough.

I am surprised that everybody seems to be excited for Copeland vs. Minoru Suzuki. (1) Suzuki is someone who is not above coasting through a match if he is not interested in it and I doubt that he was a huge WWE fan 15 years ago and (2) I am not sure if I have seen a single Edge singles match since the Smackdown Six era that I enjoyed that was not full of smoke and mirrors.

Even though the announcers always bring up Kawada, Kobashi etc. comparisons every time Kingston is wrestling, but at least the psychology is much more in the vein of Choshu or Hashimoto.

It would be very old-school WW(W)F though, Graham beat Sammartino with his feet on the ropes, Backlund did not quit himself but had to had Skaaland throw in the towel and Hogan lost it to André due to twin magic. Koloff beating Sammartino was clean as a whistle though, there is no footage of Stasiak vs. Morales, but from I can read on Wrestleclassics, it was the George Scott special (double pin with Stasiak raising his shoulder at 2.5).

They should try to sell autographed pictures of Fritz, David, Kerry, Mike and Chris (like Fritz did after David's death).

A picture of a B+ wrestler and a C+ popstar.

Motoko died a couple of years ago. Anyway, if they introduce Baba, it would be as part of the legacy wing.

Considering that the WWE somewhat seems to work together with AJPW (for now), is there anyone closely related to All Japan (in 2024) who could be introducted? Tajiri did not wrestle for All Japan in 2023, maybe Kensuke and/or Hokuto via Nakajima?

Just checked, the official distributor of The Iron Claw for Austria does not even list a release date (interesting because it is already out in Germany). IMDB lists mid-February or early March for a bunch of European countries. I would assume if the movie does not get some kind of Oscar push, it will get a very limited-only releases in most markets (e.g. I checked if there any German cinemas relatively close to me that would show it and no luck, the closest one I could find is in Munich, something like a 2h drive away; it's also not dubbed which limits the scope of the release further).

I am sure there were a bunch of young guys who got hurt really bad, Kentaro Shiga comes to mind, Takayuki Iizuka was a bit older, but he seemed to be on the brink of a big breakthrough when Nagai rearranged his face.

In don't know anything about the Ridge thing but using real injuries to boost programs is as old as wrestling as well. Hansen-Bruno, Khan-André, ... Hell, Ox Baker was a made man because Ray Gunkel died after a match with Baker.

It would only be a question of time until there is a Santino to Punk's Cornette.

I suppose Okada will get his win back against Danielson. Though politically this does not make that much sense. On the one hand is Okada not someone who gets hurt by losing to a US star (in North America), on the other hand it seems that Okada might leave New Japan anyway. If New Japan gets Danielson to do a job in the Dome, there are a lot of better candidates who would benefit from the rub (and I doubt that AD would refuse to lose to e.g. Umino).

The Iron Survivor Challenge rules are so convoluted. I am surprised that they are giving that gimmick another go.

I tried to watch an NXT show two weeks back because I wanted to "prepare" myself for Deadline. The wrestling itself was fine, maybe even good, but the skits were SOOOO bad. Let's watch the mafia eat dinner! Let's have a fake press conference of a fake dean (?) of a fake university! Let's watch a big simpleton having dinner with a 50ies-TV-style family. Let's watch a backstage argument where people are completely ignoring the camera. It felt like a mixture of an AEW b-show and Tuesday Night Titans, and not in a good way. Are they still trying to make movies? I hope the main shows are not like that because if they are, yikes. And if they are: Vince McMahon is out of the picture, there is no need to play to him.

I suppose running less house shows is a precursor to cutting down the size of the roster. I am especially wondering how long TKO wants to keep paying for I-don't-know-how-many people in the PC. In the longterm both running house shows (because it binds more people to the product if they have a semi-regular chance to see it live) and having the PC in its current state probably are worthwhile things to have, but in the short term, cutting both down will increase profits.

This. That had to be one of the worst performances on national television in years. AEW had some pretty rough women's matches in the past as well but none were in that league. 3 in 4 things he tried were screwed up. Thank god no one gut hurt. Some things you can put on the language barrier, but there was way too much stuff that he missed, was out on position for, stumbled through etc. for that to be an excuse.

As Flair's first wife pointed out in the ESPN docu a couple of years back, at a certain point the person Richard Morgan Fliehr ceased to exist and now there is only Ric Flair.

That is happened before (and might happen again in a year) doesn't make it less sad.

AFAIR, his Democratic and Republic opponents did not take him that seriously, mostly concentrating on each others. Ventura was down by 15% or so in polls up to the very end. The whole idea of using a movie career to work towards a presidency is so bizarre to me. Johnson has absolutely zero political experience, AFAIK wiggles out on any questions about political stances, and the only skills he would bring to the job are being able to convincingly read from a teleprompter and smile into a camera. Okay, the bar for presidency seems to be as low as ever now with next years' election likely being between a fragile, maybe close to senile octogenarian, a sociopath (who also seems to be a complete moron - and would turn 80 during a presidency as well) and an insane conspiracy theorist.

Call me crazy, but Dwayne Johnson being very protective of his career (or rather of the portrayal of his characters) in recent years has to do something with Dwayne Johnson dreaming of the White House and his warped mind thinking that The Rock losing a wrestling match might make Dwayne Johnson look like a loser. I mean that thing has come up so often, there has to be some smoke to the fire.

That's a pretty stacked card too, being in one of the main events (getting billing above Carpentier, Mad Dog Vachon, the LeDucs, the Hollywood Blonds, Mulligan ...) means he got a pretty good push here.

The Swerve vs. Page match went way too long IMO. If you do a 0.9 blade job on the Muta scale and by the end of the match, most of the blood is washed away by sweat, you have gone too long. They also did the more gruesome stuff at the beginning (or at least during the first half) of the match like the stapler or the blood drinking. The thing in the end was more gimmick-y like the cinder block (come on, if it basically crumbles in your hands, the gimmicking is way too obvious). And yeah, this match did not need Brian Cage - actually no match on this planet really needs Brian Cage, come to think of it.

Good to see that Adam Cole adheres to Towel Day, even if he is half-a-year off.