Strummer

Vince's limo just blew up. OH MY GOD

Have Estrada be his manager

Tony Schiavone at the XWF taping in fall of 2001: (Before Hogan v Hennig) Schiavone: (as Hogan has a noticeable gut and is clearly limping to the ring) Hulk Hogan looks to be in tremendous shape!

Bonnie Steamboat once faked a pregnancy in 1987. Tom Zenk eats babies. Shane Douglas burns $100 bills in homeless people's faces just for the hell of it Larry Zybysko steals mail from the elderly

Whenever this topic comes up I always think of Bobby Heenan's definition of good wrestling and if that is the general thought of people within the business.

IMO, workrate does not draw on it's own. Joe/Angle proved that. In the history of wrestling there have tons of bad matches that have drawn. It's all about build.

Hell I'll say it: the Samoans. They might not have been that great on offense but they sold like crazy and could bump very well for big men. You didn't see many heels in early 80s WWF do 360 sell jobs of punches or go flying out of the ring unprotected.

You can probably add Michael Hayes and Dusty Rhodes influence on the booking

I think House Show attendance has risen the last year or so because more women and children are buying tickets to see Cena and to a certain extent DX. I went to a RAW House Show last December and couldn't believe the amount of young 18-30 year old women and young kids. The problem is that they are not buying the PPVs at a higher rate which of course is the reason the company is staying status quo/or slighly below financially

Yeah, I should have rephrased that. Slow matches can of course be good matches. But a lot of people equate speed with good wrestling and the company back then was more concerned with drawing heat then having fast paced matches

As far as guys "dumbing it down" once they arrived in the WWF I think it was a combination of WWF policy and lack of motivation. The agents at the time would tell mid card workers not to outshine Hogan and the other main eventers. Plus the WWF has always been about drawing heat and not necessarily having good matches and the slower style allowed the crowd to see and react to every spot. Add to that was that there was absolutely no motivation to have good matches. Steamboat, Dynamite Kid, etc. could be having the greatest matches of their career and it would have meant nil in terms of a push. There was no upward movement, in financial terms and in their place on the card. Also, in terms of jobber matches the WWF used to hire very inexperienced guys to be jobbers. A father of my friend in middle school used to do jobs for the WWF at the TV tapings in Poughkeepsie in the early 80s and had very little, if any formal training. He was a big guy and was just there for his size. That is often why WWF squash matches tended to be beyond awful in the 80s. Sure they had their regular crew of jobbers but a lot of the guys were beyond green. Add to the fact that the NWA had good experienced workers as job guys and it was night and day between the two promotions.

I agree Sek about the mainchild dilemma but there has been somewhat of a backlash online where if you even remotely suggest a WWE or wrestling "diva" is attractive you are automatically an "overweight dork who obviously can't get laid" or that "you should be watching porn buddy, because this is WRESTLING" and stuff of that ilk. For example was anyone kind of horrified when a group of posters at TSM were saying some absolutely horrible things about Torrie Wilson back in 03-04? It's like they were angry that she was on a wrestling show and that some fans dared to find her attractive? You can find women in wrestling attractive and still be a functional male who treats women properly. Suprisingly these people do exist. So yes the "manchild" is often misogynistic, but often so are the "smart" wrestling fans that claim to be normal.

For the sake of argument you often find drug issues (especially steriods and performance enhancing drugs), misogny and homophobia in major sports also. How would parents explain to their kids their favorite player getting busted for a DUI or for firearm possession? Or why brawls happen?

Well that didn't last long. via Rajah

From his Blog: It’ll probably open the show, and I don’t get why everyone thinks MVP is winning the belt here. Benoit has been the midcard goto guy for months now as US champion, and I don’t see any reason why they would take the title off him here. Benoit by submission, should be decent, but then I thought that about Benoit v. JBL last year and he couldn’t pull of a miracle there, so who knows. It's been 3 years (3 years!!!) Scott since JBL beat Eddy for the title. 3 years and you still can't forgive him. I like how he implies JBL is a worthless worker that can only have a good match if a "miracle" happens. Scoot Keith criticizes Vince McMahon for holding grudges while he himself constantly takes shots at JBL because he beat one of his favorite wrestlers in a worked wrestling match. This is a new level of cluelessness for Keith.

That's kind of suprising about the Rumble.

Meltzer:

I was thinking about the "time honored tradition" of a wrestler leaving a territory or promotion being "jobbed out" and whether the jobbing hurt their debut/initial run in a new territory/promotion. Meaning if a guy was buried so badly on the way out that it really affected how much they were over in the new territory. The first name that popped into my head was Rick Steamboat in 1989. He was treated so poorly his last year in WWE, including doing a humiliating job to HTM and getting squashed by Kamala and the like around the circuit, that you have to believe that it was a factor in the Flair/Steamboat program not drawing that well and Ricky struggling to get over as a big babyface. That may be a stretch but you can make the case he never recovered from that job to Honky Tonk Man ( I know there was big gap between Ricky leaving the WWF and joining the NWA but I still think the point stands.) JYD was buried by Watts on the way out. Don't know if that really hurt his WWF run as a result though. Any examples?

If this were based purely on personal taste, I would say ECW from 1998-2001 but for whatever reason the company had their most successful house show run in 2000-2001. At this point Paul had lost all of his creative juice and was simply pandering to smarks by putting on token "good matches" that were not supposed to emotionally connect with the crowd. I *really* hated WWE 2003. You had Vince wrestling in Main Events in 4 PPVs, the insane Sable push, an incredibly stale, unmotivated HHH, Zach Gowen, Mr. America, Bischoff v Austin in the putrid co-GM angle, the Shane-Kane feud, Redneck Challenge, Bischoff "raping" Linda McMahon, Jim Ross set on fire, the Test-Steiner feud over Stacy, a Maven push, La Resitance, "Sheriff" Austin, the goofy comedy in Angle/Brock. Plus stuff I've forgotten. Add on to the fact that business was down. Definitely 1999 for WCW. There were some good matches (especially in the tag division) but the bad far outweighed the good. You had Sid's streak, macho Man-Nash feud, the inexplicable Madusa push, the Cat getting wins over popular midcarders, David Flair, Junkyard Hardcore Battle Royal or whatever it was called, Insane Clown posse, Van Hammer getting TV time,the aborted "new" v "old" angle, West Texas Rednecks, the Windham brothers getting pushed, No Limit Soldiers, First Family squashing Revolution, Duggan ruining Berlin's push, Hogan/Flair double turn. And that all happened before Russo showed up.

I think it is a combination of both. Vince was putting big matches on RAW, including rerunning actual PPV main events for free (Bret v Bulldog from Dec, 95 IYH, plus matches from Survivor Series 95 and Royal Rumble 96) well before Shawn's reign. They also did gimmick shows like the "Raw Bowl" and did shoot style angles with Shawn collapsing, Kevin Nash revealing Vince McMahon actually owned the WWF and even Goldust calling Razor Ramon "Scott". However even during this period they were still doing long term booking as Shawn was obviously being groomed, the new guys from WCW (Foley, Vader, Mero, even HHH to an extent) were being phased in and the old guard (Nash, Hall,Mabel, Tatanka, Jarrett, 1-2-3 Kid, etc.) were being phased out. There was a clear change in booking style after Shawn's reign tanked as the title was bounced around like a hot potato (I know a lot was due to politics) and there became a gray area around the heel/face structure. Plus wrestlers were turning left and right (Ahmed Johnson, Owen, Bulldog) in attempts to finally have them catch on to something. I really could talk about this period in wrestler forever (WWF, WCW, ECW at least) as it rejuvenated my passion for the business(although I never stopped watching during the dark years)

I think Shawn's business-tanking title reign in 96 changed Vince McMahon's viewpoint on long term booking. Shawn was Vince's pet project and when his title run bombed, I think Vince was desperate and just tried throwing random stuff at the wall. If you look at late 96 through 97 there were *so* many new angles and characters introduced that the fans could hardly keep up. A few of them caught on and the rest is history. Basically Vince, with the possible exception of Cena this past year, has given up on long term booking and favored the more "scattered" approach

Meltzer's Update today: Notice how he said for much of 2007. I take that as he sees this as a somewhat long term hot period for the company with it not just being attributed to football ending and it being the always successful road to Wrestlemania push. WWE really hasn't made any drastic changes to the core of the product or how they present their product. So why do you think all of a sudden the company is on a hot streak, and a potentially sustained one at that?

Meltz: All this talk around the net makes me really want to see a Shawn/Taker singles match and program. They haven't wrestled each other in nearly 10 years so it could still be fresh. And yes this is 2007. Oh and I know it's bizarre, but this might be the most over Shawn Michaels has been in his entire career. Again it is 2007.

What happened to the Briscoes?

Wasn't the story that Shane kept calling Albano fat and Albano dared him to say it again and Shane did and Lou beat the shit out of him?