Death From Above

I'm the weirdo who likes Brian Knobbs. He also takes one of the most retarded bumps ever in that PPV match. Hooray!

Bigelow was a bad garbage wrestler, and although I'm not his biggest fan, it doesn't show off his skills at all. I am pretty sure the only reason they had him doing it is "he used to work in ECW", which is pretty stupid rationale. I think he's a prime example of a guy that was hurt at this point by them not really taking the tag titles that seriously. Which is weird because as you've noted, there's a lot of decent matches going on in the tag scene at this point (probably because it's an area most of the power players in WCW are ignoring it so it got filled up with guys actually working). There are quite a few loose end guys in WCW I could have seen making a cool team with Bigelow if there'd been much of a division there. Instead they have him hitting guys with cookie sheets. The whole thing reeked of copying a trend that was already cooling off for the WWE if I remember the timline of the WWE hardcore title correctly (which I probably don't). I remember this two world title matches thing. So over the top. Also Savage helping DDP win hurts the wrestling fan compartment of my brain. I have no memory of this whole sequence where Juvi won the title then dropped it to Rey in a nothing match at all. There was still the odd good thing - I will go to bat for 3 Count as a gimmick any day of the week - and it was so bizarre watching all these relatively interesting workers involved in such a terribly uninteresting, yet hypnotic trainwreck.

That's how plenty of these sorts of things end. Things like: "Your product is faulty and caused me harm." "Shut up. Have some money and don't tell everyone." "Okay."

That Flair/Piper angle and the whole nuthouse thing is the total shits, but I actually enjoyed their PPV blowoff match. Just two old dudes (Piper in particular looks pretty immobile) just doing THAT MATCH they both know how to do where they chop and eye poke and low blow each other for 12 minutes. That I can go with. Stupid angle though. I can't decide if they were really trying to bury Flair or if it was just a really dumb idea someone actually believed was good. It's hard to tell with WCW sometimes. I seem to vaguely recall that Piper's WCW contract guaranteed him something like 6 PPV appearances and they cooked this whole thing up to fulfill the last of those, but that might not be quite right. The Gorgeous George/Charles Robinson match was damned funny too. Robinson hamming it up to the Nth degree as Ric Flair Jr. was pretty great as a one-off, or at least I thought so then. I think I might still have that tape, I should pop it in when you get there next update or two. I do feel like the fact there's a Konnan vs. Stevie Ray match on that same PPV should come with a warning label, though.

I have stopped even reading their spoilers. Is Robbie E vs. Robbie T for the right to keep the name Robbie? If not, I am disappointed.

I think it needs writing to a degree, at this point. But certainly not to the degree they take it. It needs a basic structure but what made wrestling work as an entertainment form was "here's what I want for the finish. Here's something else I want you to work in. The rest, you idiots work out for yourselves". The less input workers have into wrestling the less interesting an entertainment subgenre I tend to find it. There's a real inherent lack of creativity in current mainstream American wrestling. The thing that made it unique, to me, was its status as a semi-improvisational art form. That's been lost and as such, it's very hard for me to care about it anymore. Matches that are just totally laid out in every detail in advance, and scripted promos for 10 different guys that all come out of the same writer... there's nothing there, for me. It eliminates too much of what makes wrestling tick on a fundamental level.

I thought he was over the top when I was 9 so I can't even imagine what I'd think of him now.

I don't hate Sid but his good qualities have been blown so far out of proportion with the rose-coloured glasses of time that I find taking a lot of the praise he gets now hard to take seriously. I guess I'd vote Godlberg though I'm not that enthusiastic about either in the end.

It's the 4/29/1996 Tokyo Dome show.

Hashimoto vs. Takada IWGP title match.

Death threats on the internet still count, legally. Not to get too deep into this particular mire, but just saying.

Onita/Tenryu. He has a singles match with Cactus Jack in IWA Japan that I'd throw out there.

We could only wish. Also it's hilarious that "Bizarre Turn of the Week" can basically be a real thing. What a company.

ELO used for wrestling is both ridiculous and utterly sublime. I love numbers so that is great. Also: Poor, poor Funaki.

I actually found Old Baba totally hypnotic when I first started seeing early 90's All Japan (which was where I started from), but I get why a lot hate that shit with the fury of a thousand suns.

Was Baba really put in a ton of positions past that point where he "had to be good" and not just some dude? It's one of the things I find fascinating about him as a booker. He actually got out of the way at some point more or less, which is pretty rare.

Shit like this was always my TV main event when I would play Extreme Warfare Revenge. I'd take all my main event feud dudes and just throw out random tag nonsense with them every week. Either that or the classic "double count out, brawl to the back" singles match that gives away nothing before the PPV, of course.

I'm trying to think of any way I can use this as a signature somewhere on the internet that won't make me look like a lunatic.

That Hogan/Flair match is such a glorious clusterfuck, it's really fun. If you have a sense of humor for that sort of thing. I mean the whole thing makes no sense, but it's way better than some of the Flair and Hogan work over the previous years. Bizarre stuff. I never have quite figured out what was up with the first blood thing though. They ran that angle where we can't say "blood" on TV so go check the WCW website to see the stip (which in itself probably wasn't a bad marketing ploy for wrestling in 1999), then... Flair just bleeds like crazy. I wonder if he just got busted open so everyone said fuck it, let's improv. The way WCW insisted on always keeping their own announcers out of the loop never failed to entertain. I still haven't recovered from Stevie Ray vs. Vincent. I also own the VHS of this show. Lucky me.

God, I don't even remember Flair and Goldberg ever having a singles match and I actually *liked* WCW. Then again that probably tells you something about what was wrong with their matchmaking. I mean how do you fail to make that a big deal? Even the Hogan/Goldberg match, you can argue (quite correctly) that giving it away for free was a mistake, but at least it was memorable for what it was.

I can't believe I've never heard that rugby story before, even if rugby is considered akin to a Martian activity in this part of the world.

The blood clot/plane story is where this went from being kind of amusing into "Okay Ric, I've had enough now" for me. On the other hand... court sleaze. What am I supposed to do, not read? Ric trying to argue in court that he's not a "cheating scumbag" would be so very great.

I'm pretty sure there is still yet to come a PPV match between Terry Funk and Norman Smiley with Ralphus, where Tony absolutely loses it by the end. If you haven't seen it... well, you'll enjoy that. It's a classic.

I like how everyone just sort of glosses over that half of high level amateur matches are flat out decided by either drawing a red or blue ball out of a hat at this point. As if anyone could possibly find that shit interesting.

If you've ever lived in a very rural area as opposed to a more cosmopolitan environment, you know that time travel to the past is a very real and easily achieved phenomenon.