Matt D

I will say that if I was watching live wrestling very frequently then maybe I could.

I think the best way to look at it is this: For years, we, as fans, weren't given what we were wanted. There was an undercurrent counterculture against what we were offering. It wasn't even an alternative. ECW was an alternative. WCW and WWF were on some level alternatives from one another. Japan was or Memphis or older tapes or Mexico or Puerto Rico. It's not about being an alternative. It's about being a targeted, focused, product. An alternative is just some other promoter's vision. This was in response to an audience that wanted a specific product and catering to that audience in a way that it'd never been catered to before. Thanks to video and the internet to get the word out and for distribution, finally there was an audience that could come together and that would spend money and marketing to this newly bolstered community became worthwhile. I don't think alternative is the right word. EDIT1: I'm glad you guys talked about Eddy a bit. I got to see him from ten feet away wrestling against The Student "Timothy McNeany" and someone else I can't remember. I need to find the picture in the ring with him. EDIT 2: I'm going to have to watch that Xavier vs Low Ki match now. I'm not sure I ever did. EDIT 3: I definitely was more in tune with some things than others. I didn't really leave New England (so it was a lot of Chaotic and NECW for me, with some WWA New england, which is where the Eddy match was), and I'd catch stuff that showed up as real media files.

Matt you were around back then this was an important time in the wrestling business as so many new stars were born that are headlining today. It was an escape to what WWE was offering back then and being 21-24 it was just a fun time to be a wrestling fan. Absolutely. It was an amazing time. I think, in a lot of ways, this was the most important match of a 5-7 year stretch for our community. I think that's the one. I remember everyone going nuts over it at DVDVR at the time. Just nuts and it sort of felt like it changed everything, like nothing would be the same afterwards. And then when ROH started coming to MA (I was 20 going on 21 when Honor Invades Boston hit), it was the difference between going to a show to see Brutus Beefcake and maybe some guy who had clocked in at #405 on the DVDVR 500 (like Luis Ortiz) and going to a show to see Daniels and Low Ki and Styles.

The best part of this is just how personal it all is. Obviously there was an element of that to the Freebirds episode as well, but your experiences as a youth are different than your ones as an adult and it makes for a different sort of recollection. More "from the trenches."

It's actually sort of interesting to see so many people independently come up with examples for him. It's not like any of us were really straining for another one. Even the podcast that was all about him didn't seem to list them out so explicitly.

I haven't been to a lot of live wrestling in the last decade but I was at the Rumble this year, and there was no way I could rate the Three-way having seen it live. It's a wildly different experience to watch a match live than on tape. It's also a different experience watching a match the first time and the second time. It's a different experience watching a match as it happens and later on, especially if you know how long it'd be. I think we might understate this a bit in discussing matches. In some ways, all of that makes a lot of what we do in looking at matches from the 70s/80s more uniform, I think, more valid, not less, because a lot of us come from the same point of reference in watching something like an 80s set in 2015.

This basically should be 5 minutes talking about the Roadies in Chicago and then two hours going over Triple H.

Crush's IX loss is a good one. He had a lot of momentum in the first few months of the year, way more than you'd think.

I'm sure you guys are going to do Demolition justice.

Not debating that the decision was 100% incorrect, but how is this on the same level as Austin going heel? Some of you guys can pull out numbers and actually back your stuff up quantitatively. I'm going off of vague memory or feel here, but I guess my argument is that there was a weird buzz around that angle, in that there was a lot of new attention from people who weren't usually engaged with the WWF and that it could have served as a real shot in the arm to help keep the boom going for a while longer, and likewise, that things were already further gone by the time Austin turned. That's my main argument. It drove away a lot of people who were just getting invested in the product and that by the time Austin turned things were already cooling off. As I said, I could be wrong.

This is probably blatantly wrong but I think HHH beating Angle at Unforgiven 2000 was the single match decision that did the most to kill the boom.

You fiend.

I'm not sure these are separate things to me, unless I'm at a live show. I don't just shut my brain off because I'm watching a match. In some ways, that's when I'm analyzing things the most.

Meant to reply tot his the other day but saw it on the bus. I could be wrong but I'm almost certain that Portland used Race vs Martel (and they ran it a couple of times in that week or two span) as a way to build Martel up as one of the big babyfaces for 1980. That was his introduction to the territory and it was an extremely successful one because they'd do great business all year with Martel and Piper as the lead faces. They also had other gimmicks like claiming Martel demanded they lower ticket prices for kids to get him over. Usually the travelling champ comes in to make the established face or heel look good. I'm not sure of many other times where he came in to establish a brand new one who just had come in to the territory, something that'd be especially useful in a territory like Portland which was a little bit smaller and further outside the center. Are there other examples of this?

Finally made it through. As always I enjoy Steven's low key enthusiasm. He comes across as a man in a world he did not make, as the Titans descend. I'll be honest. I don't listen to a lot of the main Titans show, if only because I don't have the WWF comp, so I can't follow along as much as I'd like. In general, I do like Kelly's historical retrospectives and I like them because they're good, but also because they're kind of how I'd go about it. They're human and research based as opposed to primordial wrestling knowledge based, if that makes sense. They're workmanlike. As for Fuji, he's such a weird figure. He has the bumps you'd sort of next expect out of him, and then after that it's all stooging, all the time. Best line of the show might have been how the kamikaze clothesline obviously didn't exist. That said, there's a strange appeal to what he brought to the table, and I think you guys picked up on that. He's someone who may have been bad by a lot of metrics, but that was also very effective and I think you guys came up with answers for why and how that could be the case better than for, let's say, Strongbow. Good show.

This is a little silly but there's something sort of refreshing about Extreme Rules. the card is looking sort of like: Rollins vs Orton Cena vs Rusev Bryan vs Barrett Ambrose vs Harper Reigns vs Show (or Reigns/Ryback vs Show/Kane or something) Ziggler vs Sheamus New Day vs PTP Cesaro/Kidd vs Lucha Dragons (?) Nikki vs Naomi. there's a refreshing lack of 4-ways and multi-mans as things go now. Obviously, they could change things, add Sheamus and Ziggler to the IC title match or do a 4-way tag match (and in some ways that might be the right call because I'm not sure Dragons and Cesaro/Kidd have enough of a feud yet). There could be some merit to a 4 way with Show vs. Kane. vs Ryback. vs. Reigns for the #1 competitorship (and if so, I'd use a 5th guy to screw Reigns and set up a match for next month and have Ryback win to face Rollins).

Since we're doing a few of these sorts of threads, I thought I'd go with this one. I think there's some level of tone to be sought for here. There's a line between "I wish Owen Hart didn't die!" and "I'd have been really curious to see the Owen/Blue Blazer IC title run that was rumored in 99." - I know he wasn't a good person. I know it, but I do wish that Buddy Rose had lived just a couple more years in order to reap the benefits of the tape library he unleashed upon the world. From all accounts, he was someone who put so much weight on his wrestling and his star power and that's why the tapes exist in the first place, because of his ego, an ego which was not really fed for the last twenty or so years of his life. If he'd made it a few more years there would have been people who really came forward and understood how good he was and talked about it and I think that would have been one of the things he would have enjoyed most in the world. - I think it's a shame that Warrior and Jake never had a match in 91 after their big Trust Me angle. - I wish we had another year or two of Austin/Pillman as a team. It's funny that Austin goes on so much about how they never keep tag teams together anymore when he was basically in the tag team of the 90s and they lasted less than a year.

I loved this episode but I can't even envision the sort of life one leads wherein he has time to listen to it TWICE.

Who doesn't love the Hogan/Slaughter feud? Wait, do you mean you love the angle and not just the matches?

I think by now most of you guys have seen most of my worst wrestling sins in action.

The best way to handle it is just to have him squash show. Just sort of give him the Brock treatment with a 5 minute match and endless chair shots. The crowd would eat that up.

Any combination of Chris Colt, Bobby Bass, Rip Rogers, and Mike Boyette in a match.

I actually think that six months of aping Cena is probably the way to go. Then he can turn on him for a special or two.

This doesn't matter to me at all. I use the "View New Content" button. So the biggest problem are yearbook posts when someone goes to town, but even then I can just scroll or go to page 2.

The weird thing is that there's no one who both should lose to Wyatt and can withstand losing a feud to him right now. They did Cena once and it blew, and Cena should be US champ for at least a couple more months. Bryan and Bray have had one great match, but Bryan needs to win as badly as Wyatt does right now. He's beaten Ziggler repeatedly this year and it got him nothing. Ryback shouldn't lose a feud right now. This is one of the many problems with booking all of your babyfaces as weak cowards: losing big matches stings more than it should. With Wyatt as a singles act, they've already blown through Jericho (Bray wins a bad feud), Cena (Bray loses a bad feud), Ambrose (Bray wins a bad feud), and Taker (Bray loses a bad feud). I know this is a broken record online, but breaking up the Harper/Rowan trio seems all the worse now that they have nowhere to go with any of them. He needs a new flock of NXT callups, but I don't know if the likely candidates (Solomon Crowe, a repackaged Blake & Murphy) would benefit at all. The answer might be giving him a feud against someone so under the radar that a competitive loss to Wyatt would actually elevate the jobber. Like turning Heath Slater into a Floridian ghost hunter type who's convinced he can save Bray's soul. Or a feud with Goldust over who's the weirder dude. Or even Neville. That's how far down the pecking order you'd have to go to find someone worth feeding to Bray. We talked about this with someone earlier but I'm forgetting who, maybe Reigns. They've sort of closed so many doors that they're in this perfect equilibrium where everyone needs to win and no one can afford to lose.