Matt D

That'd be a better story if it led to Kofi actually getting over.

the invader match: Starr is great at being chickenshit in the opening bit. He keeps trying to contrive a way to get on offense but Invader outpresences him completely. The best part is when he whips Starr off the rope and Star hangs on, drops out, and shadowpunches outside for a while. WE get a cut for a commercial as Starr had one of his temporary advantages but it's fine things are more even when we come back since that followed the story of the early match. The transition comes right after as Starr tosses Invader out cheaply and as he distracts the ref, his valet hits him with a chair. Invader bleeds like no one's business and he sells out on the floor for the next five minutes or so with just a few stomps from Starr now and again but it's really well done. Invader just bleeds around the ringside area and collapses and garners sympathy. Starr doesn't even need to do anything. Eventually, Invader makes it back in and the way he earns the comeback, getting beaten down, and then coming back with a few collissions, and losing a step or two but just gradually coming back a little more and a little more is great until both guys are selling heavily. He never QUITE gets the big comeback though and finally misses a big desperation move and eats the DDT (which he blocked brilliantly in the early match) for the win. Huge heat. Great match.

I'll get to them, and I'm sure I'll either appreciate them more because I've seen whatever else I've seen first, or i won't, and then we'll have a problem when it comes to Hansen's ranking. But that he didn't click with some others does matter when it comes to things like "Is he #1 ever?" which isn't off the table as of now by any means.

Most likely, Danielson and Low-Ki were known quantities. Gulak and Busick aren't. Most people who are fans of any kind of entertainment give creators they like more rope than people they have no idea. This, basically. And wrestlers most definitely work in stuff where they think they're going to get a This Is Awesome chant. Guys who work to that aren't doing it right. That's not organic. That's reactionary to the point where it's like a Pavlovian reflex. I understand the idea that Joe's presenting, but there's a big difference between a couple of guys doing something organic that elicits that type of reaction and a couple of guys working through spots for the hand clapping or This Is Awesome chant in response. You don't work for that response like it's a spot in the match. If it's worked that way instead of portraying organic competitiveness, or, you know, actual heat and hatred, then something is innately broken and that's when the "pretending to be a pro wrestler" criticism comes up.

I always did kind of love the Canadian crowd though, and at this stage I'd much rather watch the Raw after Wrestlemania than Wrestlemania itself, so I'm probably a hypocrite.

I can't even begin to stress how much I hate the early 1999 WWF crowds. There are self-serving signs up the wahoo, just people dying to get on TV and to make it all about themselves. It was the height of the frat boy audience era and it's just brutal.

People are more ironic and irritating than in 2008? Five years is a long time. There's five years between 85 and 90. Look how wrestling changed then.

At least I was honest about my laziness. That makes sense though because he had some Inoki matches right around this point.

Dusty Rhodes vs Stan Hansen, 5/6/80, I assume All Japan Dusty's robe is great. He seems a little lither than I'm used to but that could be the camera. There's three or four stretches of great brawling here, really enjoyable stuff that reminds me a little of the Andre match. It's broken up by a chinlock and Dusty making an attempt at control armwork, but all of this is fine in general. It's just not as fine for so short a match. It goes seven or eight minutes tops. They do tell a little story with Dusty making comebacks and Hansen cutting him off and Dusty taking it to the outside to fight back. Dusty hits two postings throughout the match but when he goes for the third, Hansen tosses him off, hits a Lariat, then as Dusty makes it back to the apron, another, which drops him so he can't get back in. I wish this had five more minutes.

I don't know, they certainly made points like that on the Best of Nitro DVDs they put out. Johnny 1, Matt D 0. I underestimated just how much they were going to brazenly rewrite history on this one. That's on me. One point to Johnny in the name of my naïveté.

We were going to get Rollins/Ambrose HIAC anyway. The point is we were going to get both matches and now we're just going to get one and the other one was thrown away in a short segment, making a PPV that felt like it needed to be more stacked actually less stacked than it was a week ago.

My favorite are the people who will chant for both guys in the "Let's Go .... " "Let's go .... " sequence. I bet there are people who chant both Let's Go Cena and Cena sucks actually.

I think it was a terrible decision to pull the Cena vs Ambrose pole match from the PPV and I don't quite get why they did it. I imagine that segment didn't really pop any numbers and it made the PPV much less of a fresh feeling draw, which is something they needed without the WWE title on the line.

Grimmas is right.

I imagine we're not that far away from some complicated computer program that will be able to look at the video and compute how many people were there.

Was Global a bigger deal in Texas than it was elsewhere?

How do people feel about the 2/10/85 Dibiase match?

I think most indy guys are hugely helped by going through the WWE system, but I'll listen seriously to the idea that Bryan is the exception.

Will Chris/Mookie be helping out with this?

"I know some people said that they could guess the finish to my match vs Randy Orton (where he went up to the top rope to do... what? -MD), but come on, we all know they're all lying. It was great." Is the RVD match rant still online? I wonder if I can find it. Got it.

I'm not typing that rant out again but honestly, it does play a little bit into Shawn Michaels "performer" and as a guy who would take certain parts of the match that he shouldn't to the detriment of the match.

I kind of love Countdown. It's a lot of fun to see the WWE guys as talking heads for the most part.

That still doesn't explain Robert Gibson.

I'm not saying this with Tanahashi necessarily, but just in general: I can appreciate someone who connects with the crowd and not with me, but given the sheer number of great nominees on the table, that will very likely make that person an honorable mention at best.

A wrestler giving the fans what they want is a very, very tricky thing to weigh in all this.