Death From Above

The denial of puroresu being an actual word complete with the translated magazine cover containing said word only for the denial to continue, was truly one of the most bizarre threads I've seen. I mean, why even go that way if you want to go all tin foil hat denier of reality? That's not even a top 1000 wrestling tin hat idea. I can't believe I remember that. Ancient history.

Much love for the return of these.

I've read that five times and still can't decide if it is the setup, or the punchline. God bless Dixie, and TNA. They need all the spiritual intervention they can get.

Too many people went into the hall too fast, and pretty much killed the gimmick. I don't really see any way it can remain relevant (whatever that means with a wrestling hall of fame) for any length of time to come.

Not an in house WWF track, it sucks. Duh.

Poker is a "game" not a "sport", but the poker hall of fame is the only example not cited by jdw that I can think of offhand. Makes sense in that case since it's theoretically possible to keep playing until you die, a la Doyle Brunson. I can't remember if Phil Ivey is in already or not, but either way he's only in his mid-30's and will probably be playing for another 40 years, if he wants to.

If he isn't, it's a Goddamn miracle.

Bischoff calling other people a mark never gets old. It's always fun watching people that don't get their own jokes based on their own behavior. It's not like he's wrong that RoH is basically an overblown vanity project (which isn't to say many of their workers over the years haven't been talents, and the transition to NEW PEOPLE BAD isn't even worth going over). But Bischoff's pattern in the business indicates he's probably as big a mark for the bullshit he feeds himself as anyone the business in my lifetime.

I once saw a large part of a Maeda vs. Hogan match in the 1980's that was part of some compilation of totally random mish-mash New Japan that I got... but it went to commercial and I never saw the finish as it wasn't on the comp! Frustrating. That was certainly a bizarre style clash but honestly given it was the bizarro match of Maeda vs. Hogan I thought what I saw of it was pretty good. If Maeda could work a match with Hogan I don't see why not Flair. Agreed it would have been strange but I could see it working at the time, at least as a one off. I don't know if I'd want to see them have a best of 7 or anything. This reminds me given the current run of the conversation that Tenryu and Koshinaka had an absurdly great little match on NJPW tv in the early 1990's that is pretty much the match Flair should work with smaller guys but never really did. I tried to find it on YouTube but no luck, it's possible it's in there but I can't read the Japanese only titles. If anyone else does stumble across it, watch it, it's a total blast. One of those little lost gems in all the good matches that piled up in the first half of the 1990's.

I found that kind of a weird comment too, in that when I've seen Flair work in Japan it's not like he wasn't still doing just what Flair always does. But of course that doesn't mean he couldn't have been a fan of some of their guys too. And Flair like most everyone else in that company should have been in a position to see that they needed *something* new to freshen things up a little. Having said that, I think Tenryu could have been a great opponent for him in theory, and I think of the Japanese stars around that time his style might have been the easiest to transition into American audiences getting what they wanted to see. I'm not a big believer that what works in one market necessarily works in another but Tenryu seems like a guy with the right style to be able to perform a relatively seamless crossover. Given the right mouthpiece while he works the silent foreigner thing, I could see Tenryu as a top heel without stretching reality all that much, for at least a short term run if nothing else. Tenryu could have worked with a lot of the guys they had without really coming much out of his box. Tenryu just wailing on people as a foreign heel to be fed to Flair I could have seen working just fine in the USA and I'm sure a lot of people would have enjoyed it.

There's something really weird about how Canadians slamming the US seems to bug them ("them" being a subsect of ITS STILL REAL TO THEM DAMNIT, of course), but when every other evil foreigner does it it's just a gimmick. I mean shit that Bret Hart thing was how many years ago (and he apologized for it later no less)? Personally I blame America's inferiority complex. ;-)

I laughed. I didn't know the Dean Douglas gimmick was the real thing.

Please tell me that Douglas wants to bet his whole salary for the year on what kind of a rating this will draw. Again.

This is the greatest film ever made. I almost fell out of my chair when he gave a speech where he literally says in order to get the big money on the Evangelical circut you've got to be the guy with the best gimmick because that's what draws. And really it's (somewhat disturbing) thematic similarities to wrestling aside, it really is a pretty good movie.

At least this time Lethal is imitating a guy actually in the company so it's not like you're reminded every time you see him "oh yeah, I remember back when that other guy was actually good (many years ago) and he's not even here. Yeah this is a company going places." Flair working for comedy is probably for the best at this point. I mean shit is there anyone sane that actually wants to see him do anything else in 2010? Good for him I guess.

It's amazing what the Monday Night Wars did to the PPV model. I believe for the sake of storyline quality only 6 PPVs a year would make much more sense than 12, but I'm also a total realist that the bottom line is everything, and that really as long as the one a month model is making a lot of money you'd be insane to move away from it.

I remember that came up in the RF Bill Watts shoot although that might be a different one. They asked him something or other and then when did that happen, and Watts said "whatever year Kennedy was killed", and none of them really seemed to know when exactly that was. Bottom line is don't get your history lessons from wrestlers.

Funny because it's true. Anyone watching an Abby shoot and expecting truth out of it really doesn't understand what they were getting into when they got hold of the shoot.

I wasn't sure where to put this (it was here or bumping the Sleazier Business: Wrestling vs. Porn thread. I flipped a coin). But this old update from the Wrestling Observer got posted on DVDVR and it seemed so low that it had to warrant mention, somewhere, in some discussion about people conning people in wrestling. 4/26/93: So to summarize, Kevin Von Erich held up a promoter on a charity show raising money for the kids of his dead brother. That Von Erich family is really something else.

I thought Inoki lost a bunch of money in Brazil experimenting with some kind of bio-fuel thing. Or maybe that's a totally different time he lost a lot of money on non-wrestling experiments.

I think a guy like Paul Wight is kind of a victim of the modern state of wrestling. But I'm a fan of his. In the old days a guy like Andre would bounce between a bunch of different territories, crushing all in his path everywhere he went for ever and ever, and that worked great. Now when you're out there on national TV every month running a PPV every 4 weeks it's just not on to build up this invincible giant the way it used to be done. I could see Wight being pretty much that same thing today, if such a state existed. I guess The Undertaker is basically the one guy that gets this kind of status today and there's only really room for one guy with that kind of aura in the WWE universe. I think the current model of national tv wrestling is broken but I'm also a realist that you aren't ever going to turn the clock back and it is what it is now, and that's that. He's still had a good career but he doesn't have the aura he could have at all.

Interesting poll. Too bad only 10 people voted but still a good effort for all concerned. ECW is a funny case in that I don't really think it produced many matches you'd point to as "classics" that have held up the way the top matches in some other companies do, but there are a lot of matches on the tier below that one that are "a good amount of fun" if you're into the style being worked. Sandman is a guy that also fall into that same category - not a lot of super high end work, but consistently a guy that understood his audience and worked one of the most interesting matches on most shows. I haven't watched ECW in a while but that was always my impression, it wasn't as bad as it became "cool" to claim it was for a while and there was some fun to be had with it all, but there was a lack of genuine top level material. I think it's a company I'd enjoy more in a "full retrospective" sense that spent extra time on angles and promos as opposed to just straight matches. On the subject of Sandman I think a strictly matches comp without background material hurts one of my favourite matches of his, where he gets caned in the eye, Raven can't wrestle with a broken foot, so Stevie Richards volunteers to defend the ECW belt for Raven and we get Sandman vs Stevie. Giant clusterfuck of a match with a ton of run ins that is a lot more fun if you get to see all that setup, but it's just about as prime an example of making that work as anything. Bonkers crowd heat too. I would watch it again personally before a lot of stuff that collected votes, but I'm just some guy on the interwebz with an opinion. :-) I've never seen the Cactus Jack/Jericho match but that sounds.... interesting. The Terry Funk/Tommy Rich match is a ton of fun. The pop for Raven/Gordy is one of my favourite ECW moments ever. Crowd just lost their shit.

I'm not really sure that above statement is particularly controversial. If two fighters of relatively ballpark skill fight (or two teams of relatively equal skills play a game etc) it's not out there to think no one is going to win more than 7/10 without a lot of luck. I'm not sure if it applies to Fedor as much given his career arc being as dominant as it has been, but the general idea isn't saying anything sports fans didn't already know.

That whole last Russo section might have caused my head to explode a full half dozen times inside two minutes. I need to stay out of this thread. It hurts so much.

I'm not even debating any of that, gimmicky just seems like a weird word to attach to it. Other than that, clearly we've ran out of material.