WrestlingPower

Finished watching the RF shoot w/ Adam Pearce. If you are a big Pearce fan & have heard a bunch of his podcast appearances, like I have, this interview is definitely not essential. The stories behind ROH, his ascension to power, issues with Ross, leaving, 2 failed attempts to be brought in by SBG as commentator, etc. have all been covered elsewhere in more detail. The NWA title mess with Colt & Sheik, again, all covered elsewhere in more detail. The main "new" material of interest here was all early career stories of indies & experiences getting into the SoCal indy scene & going to Mexico & stuff. I never felt bored and I really respect Pearce but again, this was by & large stuff I'd heard before. They made reference to a Faceoff interview they did with he & Gabe about ROH that sounds much more intriguing to me. Not sure if that is out yet or not.

It's been 10 years since I've been there but I have a fairly detailed Q&A I put together about how to find wrestling shops, etc. if anyone is interested. There used to be at least 6-8 shops within walking distance of Korakuen (Suidobashi section) and at least a handful of others we would frequent that took some guidance to find but I tried to document. Shosen used to have a bunch of stuff and there were 2-3 locations about 10-15 min walk of Korakuen. There's really not much reason to stay anywhere other than near Korakuen. The Mayfield crew always stayed at the YMCA hotel (which was called a "hostel" online by folks who didn't know any better) that was like 60ish a night. We stayed at Tokyo Green the first time I went there & it was 80ish. I don't know if "ka-to" (Kurt) is still on DVDVR but he still goes over each year & had a place on the other side of the Dome/mall that he had started staying in that was actually a closer walk than the Y. I'm sure it's easier to get around now than it was then. The last time I was there in 2005, the website for the subway & rail was pretty new & not all signage etc. had English. It sounds like that may have changed. No more mix & match on the kanji characters I guess.

One positive take-away from the OMEGA show, Brad Stutts should really get votes for Best Announcer especially given that I'm sure most would be hard pressed to come up with anyone they would feel comfortable even voting for, much less 3.

So I watched the OMEGA Loco in Joco 2 show. In short do NOT believe the hype. Do NOT waste time or money watching this show, it is a massive disappointment. As maligned as the unreleased Roanoke Rapids show was, this might be only slightly better because the talent was better and none of the matches were just blatant stalling. I'm pretty sure the crowd was not miked well on the DVD (which may have been an attempt to mute out copyrighted music) but it made the show come across as if nothing really got over with what appeared to be a sell-out crowd. So that made it much harder to get into. 1.Mikael Yamaha vs. Jake Manning Manning is very good at what he did here. But what he did here was over-the-top stooging & selling which really stretched believability. A typical Southern opener but probably better than what they delivered in Roanoke Rapids. 2.Trevor Lee & Otto Schwanz vs. Country Jacked (Adam Page & Corey Hollis) This had a few moments where I thought this might be worth something (namely when Otto wasn't in), but it really didn't amount to much. Lee & Page could have saved this but didn't. 3.Scotty Too Hotty vs. Mickey Gambino Good God! If you are a promoter and have money to completely throw away with zero return, book Scotty 2 Hotty. I literally do not know why anyone would book him as anything other than an autograph guest. I've never seen someone so phone in performances as the last few times I've seen him. 4.PWI International Heavyweight Title Match: Hurricane Helms vs. Zane Dawson This was really nothing all that special but in some ways this may have been one of the better matches on the show as they pretty much did the best they could & didn't disappoint. 5.Christopher Daniels vs. Caprice Coleman This was like a hybrid of ROH style & Southern indy style. There were flurries of ROH style action interspersed with slowing the pace down. Nothing wrong with this or the performances here whatsoever, but they didn't deliver like they would in ROH or PWG or wherever. **1/4 range, best match on the show. 6.CW Anderson vs. Cedric Alexander WOW! What a disappointment. 10 minute draw, worked largely like the match above, some sequences of really good stuff & some times of slowing things down. And with the horrible finish, I'm not really sure why they even bothered booking this. This was a cock tease of a match if there ever was one. 7.The Hardy Boyz vs. The Bravado Brothers This was coming off the Hardys doing the triple shot TV tapings for TNA with all the gimmick matches so they were hurting. Nothing was bad here per se, just very by the numbers, half speed match. Nothing to get excited over. Even the Hardys didn't elicit much of a reaction from this crowd. This match ended with some shenanigans that led to an impromptu 8-man tag involving the guys from match #2. By this point I decided I was done with this show. Not that I was really planning to watch 2015 wrestling anyway, but I'm done with OMEGA 2.0 after this show. It's pretty obvious now that the Cameron show was more an aberration than any indication that this promotion intends to do anything more than just deliver an adequate product. If anyone wants to take this disc off my hands for a few bucks let me know.

Surprised this isn't in here already: http://www.pwponderings.com/category/podcast/ PWPonderings has a weekly newscast recapping major events in the indy wrestling world, a Podcast of Honor regular show analyzing what's going on in ROH, normally focusing on previewing the big shows, there's a Chikara podcast every so often along with various other shows that interview indy promoters & workers.

So how many heads exploded hearing Dave's remarks over Fabulous Ones not being on the ballot next year? Important to mention that he did not immediately say "Stan Lane's already in". He said "I don't see them as HOFers". I thought that was the point of putting it up for a vote. He did say though that no one has pushed for them to be on the ballot. As mentioned already in the thread I'd rather see more movement of names on & off the ballot than for Dave or a small handful of people to decide who deserves consideration ahead of time.

Today's the day, right?

Finally caught up on this thread and one thing reading the Meltzer C&P caught my eye. He mentioned something about Samoa Joe & if he would even make the ballot. I'm sure this is mostly my interpretation rather than anything ever explicitly stated, but I thought one of the reasons of trying to prune that ballot was to give the ballot more fluidity. To me rather than Dave discussing with 2-3 close friends whether someone is ballot-worthy or not could be equally as complex as discussing those on the ballot. To me anyone who was a reasonable level star should go on & let the electorate decide. Just like with AJ last year, if voters don't see where Joe has any merit, he will get less than 10% and fall off. I'm not sure what is gained by picking & choosing who even goes on the ballot in a case like this. Unless the thought is having too many choices spreads out the vote too much. I'd rather people have more choices than to look back in hindsight and say "if X had been on the ballot I would have voted him instead of Y & Z". Also are we to assume that the historical category will eventually go away? It seems like that's largely a category for people who were overlooked over the years and are put there because their primes were so long ago. If he's going to be adding any reasonable level star during their actual careers, and possibly adding them as early as 35, people are going to run thru their 15 years of eligibility before even moving to historical. It still seems odd to me that there are Mexican & Japan historical candidates in with modern candidates and that non-wrestler votes can cause a voter to unintentionally vote in the historical category.

The shows must be worth the time & effort for those that host them. I just have a hard time with the constant Amazon plugs, like these guys that made millions in their career are trying to nickel & dime people over ad clicks. I'd rather use a link to a site that is more mom & pop.

When do the results come out?

I've been hoping for years that someone would do a shoot with Randy Hales. Ideally I thought Highspots should have done a series with him, given all the years he ran USWA, they could do a disc per year of the promotion. re: Cornette shoots about SMW: The Q&As he did each year during SMW Fanweek give a good insight into where his head was at that moment in time in running SMW. I can hook you up with these if you want them. They were done in 1993, 1994, and 1995. The 1995 one is like 4.5 hours and he talks about behind the scenes stuff in WWF regarding the trial, Jarrett's role, etc. This was also exactly in the height of the USWA/SMW deal. But yes, you are right he's never done a shoot where he specifically sat down & went thru booking decisions that never came to fruition when the promotion shut down. I know the tag titles were supposed to change over Christmas week, Flash Flanagan was coming in as a regular, and they were getting ready to run some interpromotional deal with another Knoxville area indy.