Matt D

For some reason it's always striking to me just how quickly they went to the blood in Magnum vs Tully. And also how nice a dress Baby Doll had on.

So baby in fact happened Sunday night, but I did finally watch the Shawn/Bulldog 95 MSG match today. And there were things I liked a lot and things I didn't. Shawn came in with a massive energy and Bulldog fed on it, bumping big and making Shawn's offense look surprisingly great. Sometimes it's too much. He does a bump at the beginning which is just ridiculous. The story of the match was basically one of comebacks and cutoffs. I thought it was pretty well structured. I didn't like the chinlocks though. What I learned by watching a lot of old WWF is that it takes two to chinlock well and while Bulldog shifted the second one a little Shawn basically just laid dead in both. A guy like Flair or Eadie can make a chinlock interesting and there are plenty of guys who can work from under on it and make it look engaging. It's okay to have a chinlock in a match. You don't need crazy submissions/grinding moves unless the match warrants them, but at least look like it's hurting or like you're trying to get out, or if you're doing it, that you're trying to hurt the guy. Maybe he'd have tried harder on them if it was a taped match. Obviously I didn't love the triple kip up. I didn't completely hate it though. It was clever and self-aware. IT fed into the cut-off story of the match. If one kip up is believable, then three are sort of believable. And it didn't lead right to the finish Cornette was great. I've seen very little of him with Bulldog/Owen. Really, in my mind, the biggest difference between pre-and-post comeback Shawn is the match structure shifting to backwork post-comeback, and how the kip up operates. Yes, after he turned face again, he always had athletic superman comebacks, and it's partially problematic given his relative size (and how guys that size are traditionally portrayed in the WWF; context is king), but when they were smart and didn't automatically lead to forearm, bodyslam, elbow, superkick, like they later did, it's not quite as much of a concern. The back work structure is a lot more damning later on. Here, the triple kip up was a little bit clever but I wish they had come up with something ELSE just as clever that didn't involve Shawn shrugging off two pretty killer clotheslines (sometimes his selling actually damns him in trying to tell a story,if that makes any sense). It was engaging and clever but made everything around it resonate less.

Would Christian's 2009 work for this? It wasn't that his work was THAT much better but it was that he had the opportunity to showcase it on a weekly basis.

Barring crazy things like the imminent birth of my daughter, I'll try to watch Shawn vs Bulldog tomorrow.

As has been stated in this thread (or the other one - don't remember which), this paints Michaels in the worst possible light. Michaels, for whatever reason, was generally greater than the sum of his parts. His best quality was putting together entertaining matches - that or athleticism, but I'm aware that you don't put much stock in that. Most wrestlers were better when paired with Michaels, and not just because they were given opportunities to have longer matches or anything like that. I'm trying to think of someone who was worse when wrestling Michaels. Maybe Bulldog or Jannetty - I guess Bret Hart could be here, although it's not like his matches with Michaels were garbage. Anyway, an attribute-by-attribute checklist for Shawn Michaels would probably make him look worse than he was, but I guess that's part of the problem with him. If your strongest point is entertaining a live crowd, and you're not excellent at any of the small underpinning stuff, then you've kind of set a ceiling for yourself. The output probably won't be boring, but it'll be devoid of a lot of what makes people connect emotionally, especially on the second view, third view, and so on. Are those matches ultimately hollow when broken down and analyzed then? (and I'm honestly asking. 96 WWF is a hole of mine, as I fully admit).

You obviously need to learn to do the cartwheel out of the way instead

Instead of just randomly spouting out guys and the occasional match, would it hurt to go over (again) the qualities that Shawn did well and did not do well?

Which is ANOTHER thing I think we're long overdue to really think about.

His 92 has a lot going for it, including the miracle Snuka match, but I'm sure there are better. 88 has the Demos match I love, but that match is all Eadie. You can see how clueless Michaels was in his nutty complaints about Demolition not giving them enough in the match.

Re: Hogan. One thing I fully believe is that Hogan in WCW would have been coaxed into agreeing to something in advance and then the day of come in and say, "hey brother, that's not going to work." leading to last minute rewrites. Yes, wrestlers/bookers/whatever said that, and they're never the best sources, but I completely believe it.

I still don't think that "great matches" are the end all. How a wrestler deals with different (even difficult) situations, how well they can show they can "Get it" in every thing that they do. You learn different things about a wrestler in a squash match, and a six minute studio match, and a 14 minute House Show Match that was never supposed to be taped, and the house show match in a different town two weeks later, than you do in a 25 minute match PPV match. But all of these things are part of the equation.

I feel like we really haven't had a good Dusty discussion. And especially Dusty in the 80s. When athleticism has gone past. I was watching Dusty vs Arn in the cage last night from 1/86, and was thinking how differently he did things from Hogan and if Hogan would even be the best point of comparison.

I've seen very little of Shawn in 96. I never make a list like that since I have so many blind spots

Well in a month or two it's going to be out there because I will be SHOCKED if the AWA Set does not really shine a light on him and the Portland set will expand it. That would be the "little bit" I was talking about

Honestly, I think discussing Hennig's peak should wait a little bit. As for Eaton, if I ever did another project again I'd want to look at Eaton's singles run in 91. I've had that in my head for a while, but I'm not sure if I'll ever do it.

Really? I'm generally a big picture guy but part of that is internal coherency and moves and moments mattering to the greater whole. A structural underpinning. Things not dropped.

I have serious conceptual problems with Flair when it comes to his grasp of how wrestling works relative to my own, and Flair's a guy with great offense who can make a 20 minute arm hold interesting, both giving it and selling it. When I have the same sort of problems with a guy like Shawn whose strengths fall even more into the ACTION category it becomes a heck of a lot trickier to rank him.

Late Shawn's like a magic eye. Once you figure out the problems in his matches, you can't not see them.

I really like Magnum vs Wahoo and think it has a little more meat to it even if it doesn't have quite the same oomph.

1997 USWA seems like the most alien thing in the world to me. 1993 still very much felt like Memphis but I just can't imagine that reaching into 1997.

This is one thing I don't understand. It's as if WWE is willing to pay whatever royalties Jesse wants for a set where his commentary is absolutely essential, like the "Saturday Night's Main Event" set. But then, his commentary is included on the Starrcade set when he's only there for a small handful of matches. And then on this set, and dozens more, he's edited out? I also never understood why Jesse is the only announcer who sued for royalties? He had another career to fall back on.

This Raw was when Bartlett was pretending to be Vince, which was surprisingly awful the whole night (surprising only because lampooning Vince is the easiest thing in the world). BUT It allowed Heenan and Monsoon to sort of be on the same side for the first side ever, and it had the most hilarious exchange. Bartlett(as Vince): "Annnnd Backlund giving us the appearance of a younger, youthful Mickey Rooney." Gorilla: "WHAT! I'm gonna knock him out." Heenan: "Go ahead, I'll hold him!.. I've wanted to do that, and then I'll go through the pockets." Gorilla: "Do you think there's anything in his pockets?" Heenan: "Naaah. Let's just knock him out." Monsoon: "Vince?.... He's gone. Brain dead." Bartlett (as Vince): Heenan: "Didn't you make an appointment for him on Thursday morning?" Monsoon: "Absolutely." Heenan: "With Who?" Monsoon: "Dr. Kevorkian." Bartlett (as Vince): "I don't know about that, Gorilla Monsoon." Monsoon: "One visit will be sufficient." Heenan: "Do you have one of those stun guns on you?" Monsoon: "Oh, I wish I did." Heenan: "Hey, you know, the funny thing is, this is the best Vince's been!" And during this match, when they'd usually do the "Uncooked." "Uncut." "Uncensored." Heenan: "What is it Vince?" Bartlett (As Vince): "It's uncooked." Heenan: "Uncooked." Bartlett (As Vince): "and uncooked!" I cracked up.

I feel like HHH is, at this point, is a justified exception (if he's an exception, I agree that smarky gratuitous real name use is annoying) . HHH is the character on WWE TV, Paul Levesque is the real WWE executive. This seems fair since WWE uses his real name on the corporate site, they appear to be making this separation as well. At least it's more defined than WWE Chairman Vince McMahon and TV character Mr. McMahon which very often seem like one in the same. Also I agree with Loss, it's definitely one of those names that even when you know someone is pronouncing it correctly it still sounds like they aren't. I just wonder how long they can go with the "real executives get involved with storylines/wrestling" before they end up causing an issue. It's one thing for Vince to be doing it since to people out of the wrestling bubble Vince = WWE and that's just how it's always been. It might be different when HHH is the boss and going on TV solving lawsuits by calling people cowards and challenging them to PPV fights. At some point if they want to be taken seriously as a company to invest in, you can't have your CEO going out and rolling around in his undies anymore. I don't know. For the entirety of the 80s, they had Virgil Runnels listed as a producer and I don't think any of us are going to call Dusty that.

I've never seen that Samoans match. I need to do that.

And then there's "superstars."