Matt D

Elliott's post (strong as always) made me revisit the the Bryan GWE thread. It was really good at times (even if personally, I didn't back my stuff up enough).

Shawn's logic, which may or may not have been BS, was that the student vs teacher story, no matter how primal it might be, was something everyone had seen before. Part of me thinks he just never felt much of a connection to Bryan, despite "training" him. On the other hand, I could see him wanting to work with AJ so they could tell some sort of thinly veiled, not all that deep, Christian parable or something.

There's just so much out there. I watched hours and hours of matches but he didn't come up.

The other night I watched my first Matt Riddle match ever and my first Catweazle match ever in the span of 30 minutes. While I though the Riddle match (vs John Silver) was okay, with an especially fun finishing stretch, just based on stylistic preferences alone, I'm almost 100% certain I'm going to watch another Catweazle match before I watch another Matt Riddle match.

If you look at Charlotte vs Sasha as something that's been building since February, the cell sort of makes sense. Really, you can go back even farther into NXT. It's Owens and Rollins that feels off.

Well, that should be something different. Looking forward to it for the novelty if nothing else. (Also I'm literally the only person who wants to see the main event match from that card being Stan Stasiak vs Ox Baker in the battle of the heart punch!)

I'm not at all comfortable with what I said either. I said it, to some degree, because I'm not comfortable with it. I was going to actually finish it, at first, with the comment that JYD may well deserve to be in the WON HOF but that the WON HOF didn't deserve to have him. That seems a bit much and I probably don't believe it. I do think that both Dave and the history and trends of the publication drive the HOF, and that's something which may or may not be changing. I think it's something Dave is aware of in some ways (I'd point to his interest in Morales maybe? I don't know). You're right about how consensus has schismed somewhat in years' past. I just sense more historiography than is usually accepted with the process and it makes JYD in specific (along with someone like Warrior or, I don't know, Invader I) somewhat surreal to me.

Shawn and Angle are the easy ones for a lot of people. I'm going to go with Christopher Daniels, though. When I was going to ROH shows in 2001-2 and was ~20 and even in the couple of years before that like when he was getting the Nitro tryout, he had cool moves, smooth execution, had a solid indy cult of personality, a strong online presence with weekly commentaries or what not. He was in the mix with Low Ki and Styles on the top of the super indy heap. As I came to value different things, he's someone that ended up left way behind.

Still, the big difference here is that they were at least filmed, right? So long as that's the case there's a chance. If something simply wasn't filmed (like, I don't know, lots of 80s UWA, right?), then there's no hope.

So, because there were random VHS releases in the late 80s, I kind of have to wonder. Is there any chance that a lot of this footage exists in some TV studio closet somewhere or something? Or is it all just lost forever (or never taped in the first place).

Johnny "Details Don't Matter" Sorrow.

I'd like to see Dylan make the argument that Phil should go in before Sting.

Now I want to see some Tex McKenzie:

New and Trendy if it's 2005?

I would have totally put money on Nevermind the Ballast. That's a winning name right there.

With these things, in 2016, I like some sense of stakes. In 1988, there was a huge novelty to the Survivor Series due to the nature of WWF TV and feuds. Most TV matches were jobber matches. Most feuds lasted 6+ months and dominated house show schedules. Just seeing 8-10 wrestlers interact with one another was a huge novelty. That's not at all the case now. Raw vs Smackdown is only a novelty of a couple of months, tops. I would have liked some single-brand matches, I think, to further feuds without having to give away singles matches. If they're going to go brand vs brand, there should be some stake, even if it's stupid, like which brand gets the main event at Mania, or even which tag title is listed first on WWE.com. If this was 20 years ago, they could kayfabe make it so whichever brand won would get a monetary bonus in title matches for the next year or something, but obviously they won't do that.

Somehow I doubt that Foley would have gone back-and-forth with someone to so much detail if it wasn't about the women.

I'm still waiting for this to get all Videodrome. I still think there's a 25% chance of it.

After reading Chad's comments, I don't think JYD should get in because there is a level of historiography and self-awareness to the WON HOF and JYD is one of the most, if not the most, ridiculed people in the history of the publication. It's the WON HOF at the end of the day. He may deserve to get in but I don't think he should be in.

It is amazing that the PR crowd completely bought into genuine blowjob babyface R'n'R RPMs.

Two quick thoughts/questions. 1.) Does the storytelling exist in the text? To this, I say yes. Personally, as I watch things, I try to "find the narrative." That's how I watch wrestling (or devour any other sort of fiction). I try to keep track of how they got to this moment and anticipate where they may be going. If I am going to seriously write up a match, I will take notes. I'll keep track of what happens, what it leads to, where transitions are, how they're executed, hope spots and cut offs, the run to the finish, callback spots (including revenge spots), etc. Then I use those notes as a guide to compile and figure out the narrative. They are dots. You connect dots to make a picture, but you can only ever go off of the dots you see. If a line connects two dots that are too far away, it suggests weaker architecture in the match. 2.) Does Intent Matter? This, I think, is the bigger question here. For #1, either the dots exist or they don't exist (though how you draw the lines between them and how much you value the picture you get at the end, or even certain elements of the picture is subjective). The question then becomes: did the wrestlers intend for the dots to combine to allow for the lines that create the picture? I think the answer to this is a personal one and it matters far, far more in comparative listmaking like the GWE project than it does in enjoying and even in analyzing the match. For the former, you can (and must) find patterns between the match and other matches, storytelling over time and in many different situations, in order to corroborate to the best of our ability what may or may not have been intended. As for the analysis of a match and the story within, even in comparison to other matches, intent matters far less. This is a divide Loss and I have quite often, actually. Matches vs Wrestlers. Analyzing the knowable vs seeking the broader truth underneath it. Both approaches are valid but they have different aims.

Years ago now, I wrote up a lot of Demolition matches. I did this with Victor (Victator). I more or less stand by that project. It was a good experiment and helped change how I look at wrestling. Victor's written a pulpy pro wrestling novella/pastiche e-book set in the late 90s with lots of analogues. I do think some of the people who hang out in this specific armchair booking forum and that have time to read all of the fantasy promotion stuff might get a kick out of it. It scratches some of the same itches, especially for people who like the written dramatization of the matches and what not. He's asked me to post the link here as the e-book is free for the next day or two. So I'm doing so. If you're interested grab it in the next day or so for free. He's on twitter (https://twitter.com/DrVictator), sometimes explosively so, and I'm sure he'd appreciate feedback. https://www.amazon.com/Chairshot-Savage-Sports-Victor-Rodgers-ebook/dp/B01LYCH74A/

I really love Boesch in all of this, by the way. "Committee for Justice, Youngsters, and Decency." How great is that? He's a really wonderful storyteller. I'm not always 100% sure that the stories he's telling are the ones being played out in the ring, but they're always entertaining. He has a moral authority but it's not quite in the same way Lance Russell or Gordon Solie had. He's more Willy Wonka than Bill Watts, but with that same legitimacy of having been in the ring to ground things. He's more like Monsoon than anyone else, but more wry and less languid, with less of a need to chop down the wrestlers in the ring.