El-P

Yep, interesting to watch Pillman do his Loose Cannon gimmick in three different promotions in a span of only a few months.

I don't remember the WWF saying anything about Piper at the time. Can you refresh my memory ?

Well RVD *really* doesn't know how to work though. But that's another thing. But yeah, all these are good exemples.

Namely, HHH, who was just getting his very first main event push after years of carrying to Shawn Michaels bags. And HHH wasn't over as a main eventer in 1999 despite years of sustained push. Jericho came in as hot shit, people knew him from Nitro because he was the star of the show, a guy who was fresh, funny, had excellent matches, had shitloads of charisma. Jericho got the biggest debut in WWF of the decade with the Y2J hype, interrupting a Rock promo. Quite frankly, WWF could have put him right into a program with The Rock, and the audience would have bought it. Jericho would have made HHH look like a complete mid-carder with mediocre wrestling skills, no charisma, mediocre mic skills and boring matches from the get go. And all of a sudden, Jericho is feuding with X-Pac, losing on his first PPV, Ken Shamrock who was on its last leg and didn't mean shit anymore by then, and most of all, Chyna. Fucking Chyna. And he gets told he doesn't know how to work. Seriously. Meanwhile, It takes Stephy and Cactus Jack killing himself to finally put some heat on HHH. While Jericho is working matches with Chyna and the august talent, I guess a WWF style specialist, of the über worker Bob Holly. And soon enough, they put Jericho and Benoit together to rock the undercard, WCW style, I guess "not knowing how to work" didn't keep him from having the best match of the card each and everytime. And I guess they threw rookie Angle into the mix to learn them japanese style boys how to work "da" style too. Unless Jericho and Benoit were suppsoed to make him look good, which would be odd since Jericho was supposedly not a good worker. This is such obvious bullshit from the HHH camp it's funny.

That is too much details.... Yeah, Sunny looked absolutely great back then.

What about Raven ? Wasn't Waltman the first guy who complained about jericho anyway ? I still think this is mostly bullshit. Two years later, Jericho was having great matches with Rock and Austin, toning down his style to work the infamous "WWF style". That didn't keep HHH from stunking up the joint with him in overlong boring matches that did nothing but bury Jericho. Anyway, the book does sound very interesting, and I'm looking forward to read more of your thoughts about it.

Probably, but Jericho spent years in WCW working with different kind of workers, from guys like Dean and Eddie to luchadors like Juvy and Rey to ECW guys like Raven and had no issue at all. Suddenly he gets into WWF and problem occurs. Reminds me how Shane Douglas was already excellent in 94, gets in WWF and Waltman & Hall decide Douglas can't work, then when Douglas gets back in ECW in 96 he delivers matches better than anything that was happening at the same time in WWF against Sabu, 2 Cold Scorpio and Whipreck. Way too much bullshit with the so-called "WWF/E style".

I'm aware of that, I'm being overly simplistic on purpose. I just dislike the WWE for all these bullshit rules, that make wrestling much less fun to me.

"Knowing how to work the WWF style" always seemed funny to me since really, "WWF style" = toned down, simplistic wrestling. WWF style really is the lesser style ever anywhere. Throwing tobacco spit would have got over just fine in Mid South or Memphis in the 80's.

If HHH hadn't married the boss's daughter and wasn't such a politician, it's pretty obvious Jericho would have been a much bigger star. It always cracked me up when I heard about Jericho "not knowing how to work" when he first showed up in WWF in fall of 1999. Yeah, right.

2011 : the year of the official rehabilitation of Marc Mero.

Yep, totally agree. I've argued about Mero in another thread, and Buff Bagwell pre-neck injury was quite good and a really fun douchebag chickenshit heel.

I think so. A few months later he was on WCW TV bashing WWF.

I remember at the time putting over this promo over HUGE as an example of just how great Hogan was. They thought they were moving past Hogan, and he just turns everything back around himself, and is so strong on the mic that the marks would go, "Yeah... that's right, Hogan is The Man in WCW despite Sting having that belt over there." And quite frankly, they had no reason not to believe him. Add to that fact Sting showing up on TV *without the big gold belt* in the weeks after Superbrawl, looking just like before. Amazingly stupid. And you don't get any big Sting promo or even statement on Nitro that he is the Man now. It's just business as usual, Sting shows up to fight the nWo without his belt. It's shocking to watch how quick the booking degenerated. It seems once they fucked up Starrcade, they just all sense of what they were doing. It's mind-boggling to watch Bischoff being so arrogant, poiting to "Raw fears ratings" signs in the crowd, and then holding the mic for Hogan to do this kind of deleterious promo. They only had one month or two winning the rating war at this point, and they have no idea what is going to hit them. It's fascinating, and sad when you think how hot and fresh this promotion was just two years before.

In 1998, Luger would have sold poorly a bit then put Eddie on the torture rack after just a few minutes. And Schiavone would be talking about the main-event coming up, which would be the biggest match in the history of our sport. Said match would begin 6 minutes before the show ends, and end with a massive run-in of the nWo after some nondescript wrestling. I'm watching some 1998 now, and the gap between 96 and 98 is pretty big. And things are degenerating pretty fast as early as late February.

February 1998 _Booker T puts Martel out with an injured knee. Man, this guy was not only mediocre in the ring but also not safe at all. Two PPV's and two injuries, to the same guy. He stopped doing the Harlem Hangover after giving Martel and Saturn concussions. _I had totally forgotten that Yuji Nagata was working in WCW at the time. Makes for odd matches like Yuji Nagata vs La Parka on Thunder. They totally missed the boat on La Parka, they should have pushed the guy, he was great and the fans could have cared about him easily. _Jericho continues to develop, and he's gold, although his "feud" with Juvy was sad in that Juvy just loses his mask for no reason whatsoever. But it's obvious Jericho was going to be something special. For a few weeks there's this über cool team of Jericho and Guerrero. These guys should have been on top of WCW by the next year or two if Bischoff had a brain. _Goldberg still has no smoke up his nose, but the crowd really gets behind him. They are aware of that fact and instead of putting guys like Mongo with him on PPV, he gets Brad Armstrong so he can look like gold. His match with Regal was really bizarre. I never bought the "Regal shot on Goldberg" story, but it's hard to not notice Regal being quite stiff and looking a bit uncooperative at times. It made for the best Goldberg match though, as squashing Armstrong, Jim Powers or Mark Starr really meant shit. _The revisionnist history wants to tell us that Bret didn't fit in WCW, but god the fact says otherwise, they just didn't do shit with him. After a month and a half they seem to remember that Bret was involved in the Starrcade main event, so we get some ass-half promos about Bret being Hogan's N°1 target. Then Bret is trapped by the new member of the nWo.... Brian Adams. Yeah. And then he gets into a feud with... Curt Hennig, who's a glorified mid-carder.... while Hogan quickly forgets about him. Seriously, they couldn't have handled Bret worse than they did. I got a kick out of Gene saying "We know who that guy was" when Adams show up. TNA 10 years before, anyone ? _I like DDP, but it's obvious he drags Benoit down in the ring. DDP as far as ring work and character clearly peaked in 97. _Superbrawl was a major PPV on paper, but didn't deliver. Way too much Booker T. And three nWo matches that looked bad. Finally we get the Steiner turn, which was way overdue by this time and the match was barely the angle itself. Still, Steiner turning was a good thing. Luger vs Savage again was just a nothing match, the only notable thing was the crowd shitting on babyface Luger, to the point of loudly cheering Liz when she interfered to break the torture rack. And Hogan vs Sting had yet another screwy finish, because god knows Hogan can't job clean. That said, Hogan was the only one working hard, as Sting looks just incredibly lazy, even in the post match celebration. _Amazing promo by Hogan on Nitro after he loses the belt, basically saying Sting is beneath him, that he'll work against Scott Hall (=midcard) while putting the main event focus on himself vs Savage. Way to fuck up one year and a half of build even more after the Starrcade main event fiasco. _I enjoy Disco Inferno and Buff Bagwell way more than I thought I would. _WCW signed Jim Neidhart, British Bulldog and Brian Adams from WCW after the Montreal screwjob, and they get TV and PPV time... Montreal really was a blessing for WWF... _Best random match of the month : Meng vs Barbarian on Nitro, beating the shit out of each others. _Crap, Public Enemy is back...

The last vestige of Hulkamania running wild against evil monsters. It's so stupid it's almost great. The match is horrible of course, but the sheer absurdity of this idea makes it so pro-wrestling and so Hulk Hoganish that it has to be seen at least once. The Ultimate Solution was called the Final Solution at first. Nice idea guys...

Hope you put the 4 Horsemen of Gayness on it (refering to the awesome video of Jim Powers, Renegade, Joe Gomez and Alex Wright in 1996).

Odd that Rick Bogner never did anything of note in the US. He was a decent power wrestler. Better than Jacobs anyway.

2 Cold Scorpio says hello.

Really fun stuff. Raven vs Sandman was an awesome feud, better than Raven vs Dreamer to me.

Iron Sheik ? Bad News ?

Come on. Stevie worked great with Raven because he was the comedic relief to Raven's stoic, dark character. They had a great dynamic *together*. Dreamer got heat because of Raven, not the other way around. Yeah, Dreamer was somewhat over after the feud with Sandman, but it was Dreamer vs Raven that made him (and really, it worked for both, but to me Dreamer was still bland as hell on his own). To me that's the thing with Raven, he makes people he's working with more interesting. Of course Raven is getting heat by himself, having an entourage was part of his act. He was getting booed the hell out of the buildings in WCW, and that wasn't because of Sick Boy, Hammer and Lodi. But Saturn and Kidman beneficiated from his own heat to get noticed by the fans. As far as booking matches with tons of shit, that was the whole point of the character, he was a guy who just wouldn't lose because he had minions willing to save him and get their asses kick for him. And to me it worked so well, Raven dog and poney show (like himself refers to it) got some of the most fun matches in ECW. I had a lot more fun watching these than the overrated Eddie vs Dean series, which was great mechanically but devoid of anything past the pure mechanics. I'm a big Raven fan, and it hasn't changed by rewatching stuff, on the contrary, I thought it hold up extremely well. Chaos, major asskicking and great near-falls never get old to me. The fact he never became a star is the result of bookers being incompetent to get the fact he was over (in WCW) and Vince never liking him at all.

Blame the 80's hairstyle.

Saturn threw him around, worked spots and submission holds, and although Booker was not a good seller at all, at least if was fun to watch. As soon as Booker went back on offense, he was doing his own 5 moves of doom and that was it. Saturn didn't really "carry" Booker, but he was the entertaining part of the match. Saturn was more fun here than he was in ECW though.