Matt D

Is there anywhere I can read more about George Scott's South Atlantic Pro Wrestling?

This is what always amazes me about Memphis. the TV was so good at building to Monday. Every single week. It's insane the level of difficulty in that.

Can you say more about this Matt? If Flair has any sort of wrestling philosophy at all it's calling matches in the ring, thinking on your feet and reacting to / controlling the crowd. Which is to say that going into a 45-minute match, he probably only knows a few things: 1. the opponent, 2. the finish, 3. possibly one transitional detail How he gets from A to B is develops organically. A Flair match is almost entirely unplanned. Flair will dictate the match, the tempo and the transitions. This is the opposite of the "self-conscious epic" of today that El-P keeps talking about. Because of this, sometimes his matches aren't coherent, but A LOT of them time they tell very compelling stories. I watched the Jimmy Garvin cage match from Great American Bash 87 recently, and that match tells a fantastic story built around a chance knee injury from Garvin. Flair spends the first half of the match getting his ass kicked, but then the second half viciously going after the injured leg like an assassin. Garvin eventually passes out in pain. Flair is the consummate dick heel throughout. How did that set wrestling back 30 years? It came back around to Flair so I should say something. I will lead with the fact it was pretty late after a few hurricane days BUT my feeling is that Flair's feelings on wrestling (he doesn't consciously go out there trying to tell a story, he makes sure to hit his shit and pop the crowd, he does "what works") very much influenced general pro wrestling analysis thought in the 80s, along with Brody's "believability" and DK/TM ACTION over substance and I don't know, that shoot promotion in Japan I can't remember the name of (UWF?) Maybe I have the historiography wrong, but this is the feeling I've gotten from piecing a whole bunch of shit together and reading old Observers and listening to shoots and reading this board for years. To cover a bunch of other crap, I like the Magic Johnson reference since i was trying to indicate how Flair is undeniably great but he doesn't do the things I feel are personally great. He hits the marks for enough other people and I recognize those marks and respect them. What I feel is purely subjective. I would never participate in a GOAT or Best Worker of the X poll since I have way too many blind spots. I have a lot less than I did four years ago but I still have so many. And I certainly think you can go out there to tell a story without it being some sort of meta-fiction. There are elements I love like trying to make every movement fit into a narrative (I always point to Big Show vs Mayweather as an example of this), foreshadowing with things set up in the first act and paid off later, especially during transitions, and just good quality, consistent selling. All I really want out of a match is the ability to watch what's on the screen and piece together a narrative from what you're seeing with as few extraneous parts as possible. Wrestling is fiction, not sport. If the story is clever, then that matters, if the action is crisp or the moves interesting, all the better, but the bare minimum to me is coherence. Some of it can work out unintentionally, or through repetition of "what works" since what works is generally drawing the crowd in with a meaningful drama. Most of which has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but i always figure if I babble on enough about what I like, someone other than Dylan will get it eventually. Someone can go debunk my first paragraph if you want (It basically sums up as "Meltzer heard X through talks with Flair. If Flair, being the best wrestler, felt this way, then X has to be true and anything that goes against X obviously isn't important.")

He IS part of the conversation, so he sort of has to be. I've come to realize that he wrestles in a way that is very much not for me when it comes to the things I like and care about the most. That doesn't mean I don't think he's probably the very best at what he DOES do instead and I admit that what he does do is very, very important. But when it comes to what I care most about, Flair is basically blasphemous. I feel like there's an entire school of wrestling thought that stems from Flair's feelings about wrestling and how he (brilliantly) executed those feelings. To me it's wildly short-sighted and limited, and helped to set back wrestling analysis thirty years.

I'd go so far as to say that any potential negative reevaluation of Flair was due to more footage coming out too.

I watched a lucha match. I am broadening my horizons!

What I don't get with the whole argument is this. No one goes "Ric Flair is overrated." and doesn't then back up what they're saying. No one. Because it goes against the common accepted "truth" and as such, you need to back up your opinion at that point or it's going to get discounted as whatever "anti-consensus" bs has been tossed about. So people give evidence, they make points, they explain their opinion, and nine times out of ten that never gets engaged upon. It's all just buzz world bullshit in response.

I haven't seen this big a divide between people here in ages.

That didn't look all that bad to me. I think Orton's "C'mere" before the dropkick actually saved it. There's a missed move off the top rope, a lot of grasping for each other, and attempt at a kick, and then Orton's about to dropkick Del Rio, so he bounces off the ropes to get away only to get hit by it. It wasn't great or smooth or anything but it's hardly the worst thing ever.

As an infrequent viewer who caught a stream of the last match tonight, I can't say I'll blame them. Damn AWA finish!

Great Matches. Ptui. I need to write a lot of words about Bockwinkel soon.

Only show in town? I kid, mostly.

Nothing is presented as important. Nothing that happens is worth remembering, even when it is. Don't invest emotionally in this wrestler. We'll forget about him in a few weeks. Don't get excited about this match or this angle. They won't lead anywhere. Don't think of titles as something important. The important thing is that The Rock is challenging for it, and he's important, because he was a big star when we were important. But we're not important anymore. Pay us no mind. To me this is key to a lot of what's been said before. There are good matches every week. I think there are pretty much a couple every week and it's been an extremely strong ppv year when it comes to matches and I'm not sure most people would feel that way, because it's all superstars matches where nothing matters or something in a poorly booked feud.

It has to be counterbalanced by going three hours though. At one point Raw would be the only thing I'd always watch because it was live so you had the surprise and the unknown. Now I can't imagine watching it on anything but youtube.

What years would have a better 20 hour comp, wrestling wise?

Gerwitz is gone. That's a pretty big deal if you ask me. Also, there's a huge difference between who want a build to house shows or even PPVs and those who want to increase weekly ratings. We've heard from both in this note.

Aren't they doing fine when it comes to making money right now though? A lot of that is overseas, but they've been a lot worse off than they are now. The ratings are almost solely due to the addition of the third hour which I imagine that makes them even more money, far more than they theoretically lose by dropping a few points in the ratings. They also have the Main Event show that just started as well as the Saturday Morning show. This isn't 1986 when they're buying their TV time.

Do other people agree about this for 2012 WWE?

There's never a sense of WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT? which was a huge part of 97 Nitro's success or HOW WILL HE GET OUT OF THIS ONE which was a huge part of 98 Raw's success.

Or they can go with my AMAZING Black Scorpion idea.

Not El-P, but you really shouldn't underestimate how over Lex was in early 1991. He was very over as a face. As for the cage match itself, I find it fun because it's the most heatless cage match you could imagine. It basically becomes a prop for them to steady themselves on the top rope with. What it really reminds me of is WWE-PG cage matches.

Once Luger won the belt they ran Lex vs Eaton and Big Josh for a few weeks though neither was pushed on TV at all. Then they switched to Lex vs Barry or Simmons, with the occasional tag matches with Lex + Hughes vs Barry + Simmons with Zenk as the guest ref (there was a mini angle where they took out Zenk for a while) and even Lex vs Zenk. Right after Halloween Havoc they ran some spots vs Zenk, Pillman or Kazmier (the latter of which had at least a bit TV build). The next major program however, was vs Rick Steiner at the clash. The months after Flair left still had a bunch of good TV matches with the Enforcers, the York Foundation, Austin, Cactus, etc vs Windham, Pillman, Eaton, Rhodes, Borne, Pistols, etc.

El Gigante? Bobby Eaton? Luger. Sort of. In Oct 91 Simmons was bigger then Steiner since Scott had been out for the entire summer.

His blading scars kind of make the imprint of Superman's curly hair thing if you squint.