Matt D

It's funny because on this week's countdown, one of the first things anyone says is Barrett saying "To be a great villain you have to go out and make sure that not one person in the arena is cheering for you."

What's been typical on it? Dave said: "Since Foley publicly said what he did, we got notes from three major names (these are not the Cena tier, but pretty close to it), and their video game checks were in the $10,000 to $15,000 range, and two years ago they were $70,000 to more than $100,000. The general rule of thumb is that if you are in the video game, you get a royalty check for about $75,000 in the first quarter of the year."

I'm watching the last Clash and there were sleeper/reversal spots in both the Mongo/Jarrett match and the Wright/Dragon match. I'm curious: Who were the road agents in 1997?

It's nuts how much the video game money has traditionally been.

Has anyone mentioned Goldberg vs Brock yet? Ah, yep. Hm. Was there a good Steiners vs Hall/Nash match?

We've gone around with Kane before. Usually as far as I'll go is that he does have a number of good matches scattered across his career, and he's certainly capable of that in the right situations. I fight hyperbole when it comes to Kane, generally, though I did posit that Kane had a better 1999 than Chris Jericho (which is relevant since Kane was one of the people they pointed to so Jericho could learn how to work which made the people very angry). I would be more curious to hear Bix' defense. I'd suspect, it is in part that all of his fellow wrestlers/management think Kane is very good or how consistently over he is, neither of which are metrics we usually use much in this sort of an argument.

I think Demos vs LOD/Warrior is a lot of fun but in general, yeah, the feud didn't live up to what it should have been.

I think they should move him on to be involved in the Rhodes' brothers' break up after this. I'm not sure that makes booking sense but I kind of want to see it.

I do that at work sometimes. It's really best for syndi shows though, none of which are on yet.

Man,if they did a three way Wyatts/Shield/Evolution feud.

I read this as Jim Mitchell at first which would be a lot more interesting a conversation.

JBL is kind of great.

Or it could even end on some network special Main Event that they want to push. Or hell, they could run a Clash of the Champions to hype that they're adding them to the network. All that said, they can't go inferno match after this. Bryan already set him on fire. If Batista is staying, then they could run Bryan/Shield vs Kane/Evolution and that'd be a fine way to go at things.

That flaming table spot was pretty terrible. Bryan winning definitively was good.I think it was also important that he spent a lot of the match as the aggressor. Kane doing the fire thing afterwards wasn't.

Big E probably deserved better. They could repackage him with the 5 count. He had a great little act in NXT.

Wait, what did he have to say about Bray Wyatt?

Feels like a Clash of the Champions to me.

I pretty much agree with all that entirely. They can't book him like Rey Mysterio the Champion.

He was still wrestling Bret on the house shows RIGHT up to Survivor Series (some shows Shawn subbed for him, some he didn't). I'm pretty sure he would have known who he'd be married with on the house shows post Survivor Series considering how long they had people work with each other and how far ahead things were planned out. He was the #2 heel in the company at the time (pretty unquestionably, too, if you look at it). I give you he might not remember.

What I'd REALLY love to know, if you can ask it in a careful way, is what the plans for Lawler in Nov, 93 - Wrestlemania in 94 would have been, especially where he would have been slotted at Wrestlemania X? My guess is a feud with Doink, but he might have been involved in Bret vs Owen too.

Thanks, Gorilla! I think I'm making that stupid thing my DVDVR sig photo.

There are a decent amount of Mid Atlantic handhelds that i've seen online pr as part or comps and what not. How much of that is this and how much of that is just stuff we've never had any access to at all?

He's more like the Buzzkill of podcasts.

Oh I want to hear more about the potential unification match in 1991 with WCW. That is one of the most interesting stories I can imagine.

I'd be curious about the difficulties of wrestling in front of the same crowd every week. It means you can't take shortcuts that you might have been able to on, let's say the WWF roster in the 80s, where you'd work the same match 40 nights in a row.