Matt D

I only feel a little bad for Steph because she seemed so honestly happy about her Slammy in 2013.

There are plenty of people who will never give Stephanie credit because of her previous performance and things like her slotted in to the ECW owner role, not to mention notions of her on the storywriting team.

It feels like a risk to have Bryan at 1. I know he says he feels healthy but it just seems like a bad move. It increases the chances that something can happen. Look at Punk, randomly stricken down by Kofi Kingston entering the ring last year. You want Bryan healthy through Mania at least at this point.

Despite what I said above, I ENJOY CMLL. I watch it on my terms. If there's a match I want to see, I watch it. I can understand how it'd be rougher on someone who watches everything. I've come to enjoy the ebb and flow of their trios structure for the sake of it, not just for awesome matwork or great dives or whatever. There's a ritual nature to CMLL matches and maybe it's actually just detritus and laziness, a pale shadow of the mastery of decades past, but since it's how I came into lucha, I actually kind of love it. Which isn't the same necessarily as liking it. It's less rational maybe. When I have 20 mins I have to kill, a great way to do that is to see if Cubs has posted anything new and to watch a match. On the other hand, I'm not really engaged by them in a way I was last year really in my ignorance, when I actually thought that, let's say, they might bring Del Rio in as the perfect tecnico to give Rush his comeuppance. The timing just seemed absolutely perfect. I just didn't GET it then, just a few months ago, the level of complacency and bare minimum mentality. (Parka randomly appearing is another great example of this). That said, I kind of want to see, let's say an Ingobernables vs Ultimo Guerrero/Olimpico/Rey Bucanero match (or hell, a relevos increíbles with Atlantis in the Olimpico role) because I think there'd be a novelty in that. So maybe my standards are just lower, or maybe I'm looking for something a little different than longer time fans. It'd nice to be more emotionally engaged which would come with better (see: "some") booking and a few even minor risks taken, but I enjoy it, how I enjoy it, for what it is, and frankly, I have no desire in the least to watch NJPW, so there you go.

Ross certainly wouldn't shut up about the football thing.

Why can't Taker just be in Bryan's corner when he faces Brock? Taker teaches Bryan how to rule at Mania and keeps his eye on Heyman. Bryan wins, Taker gets some sort of revenge for the streak being defeated, everyone is happy. Did they really not do a vignette of Big Show in the desert with Undertaker? All I found of it was a promo where Y2J interrupted them.

I have a hard time faulting Dave for being Dave. He's not some sort of omnipotent, unbiased, body. He's a wrestling fan who was so into being a wrestling fan that he created this monolithic force of opinion and reporting. At the end of the day, the WON is, was, and will always be, a well made fanzine, basically. It's one where he does good research and is somewhat tapped into the industry but it's still ultimately fan-driven. If he was unbiased, he probably would have never started to write the Observer in the first place. He made it into his livelihood. It's just that we don't have anything better given the nature of the industry we follow so we hold him to higher standards than we probably should.

I think it cost you a year or two off your life.

I didn't watch one NJPW match last year and saw well over a hundred 2014 CMLL matches and probably enjoyed every single one I watched to some degree but CMLL seems to succeed in spite of itself when it succeeds at all.

It could just be the case that Benoit asked him not to? They talked right?

That match is out there. I like it more than most people but it's still not what it could have been. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/15682-bret-hart-vs-randy-savage-wwf-yokohama-050794/

There's an alternate reality where La Parka was brought in to WWF and had a crazy series of violent street fights with Undertaker.

With good enough booking they could have made someone like Reigns or Bryan do it. I just don't know if they're capable of that.

I think they're a little crazy not to run Sting vs Cena. That's easily the biggest match they could run in March, 2015, the one that would get the most mainstream attention and network buys, and it doesn't exactly salt the Earth or anything.

Yeah, I actually bailed from the Lizmark match and I'll be doing the Infernales match from 9/30/93 instead for the third match of the week. I can see how he was a poor fit in the age of workrate, as you put it, but I love the guy even in what I'm seeing in 93.

Cota was still awesome in Fall, 1993. I'm going to do some matches next week on Segunda Caida nominally as part of a Lizmark vs Satanico feud, but Cota totally stole the show.

Hopefully this show ends with Orton coming back because he's really not a "surprise" royal rumble entrant no matter what WWE might think.

The crowd realized the fix was in.

I haven't seen any yet but who wants to watch a bunch of one-fall lucha?

Wrestling doesn't interface with the rest of my life so it's either on the cpu (at work usually. I have the docus on in the background while working, but on the bike too; ppvs while multitasking and doing other things like watching TV with my family), or on the tablet at home sometimes. I haven't tried it on a TV yet.

The problem with Stevens is that he's not a guy they talk up. The current fanbase has no idea who he is and no point of reference. Maybe they're a little better off because Flair's mentioned him in interviews once or twice but in general no idea. Certainly no one under 20. Very likely no one under thirty and probably not for most people under 40. You could make a list of names more familiar to the WWE Universe that's 60 names long. A guy like Dastardly Danny Davis seems somehow more likely to go in than Stevens, unless Stevens goes in as a favor to Patterson (which I think is how Mad Dog Vachon got in). It's one thing to put Gorgeous George in or to put Carlos Colon in as part of a footage deal or to get paid by Inoki or whatever. There's a hell of a better chance we see Stacy Kiebler in there than Ray Stevens, and frankly, she probably does the company more good to put in than Stevens does by a degree of ten.

I stay true to the title of this thread. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/16445-one-and-only-demolition-thread/page-7 (that feels like so long ago now)

The cosmic key that unlocks all of the proper possibilities to Mania is using Sting in a tag match.

What ever happened with getting Canada specific content because of some laws up there or something?