rzombie1988

Why would people hate Jon Jones for being black but not hate Cormier, Rampage or Evans for being black also? If it's racism, both people would be hated for being black. I've never even seen a Jones match but upon reading his wiki, I can find minimum 3 reasons not to like him. I don't really like Anderson Silva and it has nothing to do with his skin color. I just think his cockiness and showboating are not admirable. Racism is alive and well though and until we start treating everyone as humans and not races, it will never end.

You guys need to consider also that the Dome show was on a weekend this year, as opposed to some years past where it was on weekdays, which are going to cause less people to come.

I do agree that virtually everyone is wrestling the same style nowadays, which is really sad. The beauty of wrestling is having different styles and different takes on what wrestling is. Add in no one having gimmicks, any type of character, charisma or mic skills and it really brings things down.

I know people like to look at DB's Mania run with rosy eyes but what I remember is: - He was turned heel in 2013 as they tried to get people to stop chanting YES by making him yell NO. Even though he was the hottest guy at the time, this was somehow necessary. - He was put in some of the dumbest comedy segments. - Him being called a troll, a dwarf and a goat for months on end along with being called an internet geek and a dork - Him being pushed as "the weak link" and pushed as not being able to beat people he had already beaten - Him being embarassed for months on end with no retaliation by the authority - Big Show crying - Him not being in the Rumble and myself and others in the crowd destroying WWE for it live - Him being passed over again at the Elimination Chamber and after in favor of Big Dave - Punk leaving, finally giving him a chance. - The sit-in and him finally getting his due at WM. Compare that to say Big Dave when Evolution broke up where was pushed as a big deal and protected at all times before getting the big win, and I know which storyline was better.

Onita would no doubt be in mine and would certainly be high up. A big FMW Onita match honestly felt and looked like a war movie, with Onita playing the part of the wounded soldier who wouldn't quit. I honestly don't think there's anyone could do that genre of wrestling better. His charisma was off the charts and he just knew how to dramatize pro wrestling better than anyone else. Onita carried FMW on his back up until his retirement, but he also was the biggest reason it got destroyed due to being selfish and an asshole. If you think Onita wasn't solely responsible for drawing those big crowds, you are on crack, so let me show you the semi-main events on those shows: FMW 9/23/91 - 33,321 Fans - Main - Onita/Goto - Semi-Main - Gregory Veritchev d. Katsuji Ueda (16:44) via KO FMW 9/19/92 - 30,000 Fans - Main - Onita/Tiger Jeet Singh - Semi-Main - Tarzan Goto & Gregory Veritchev d. Leon Spinks & Brian Sayodill when Goto made Sayodill submit. (10:39) FMW 5/5/93 - 41,000 Fans - Main - Onita/Funk - Semi Main - Gregory Veritchev d. Leon Spinks (8:10) - GREGORY VERITCHEV VS LEON SPINKS. GREGORY VERITCHEV VS LEON SPINKS was your semi-main. FMW 5/5/94 - 52,000 Fans - Main - Onita vs Tenryu - Semi Main - FMW Brass Knuckles Tag Team Championship Match: Mr. Pogo & Hisakatsu Oya d. Tarzan Goto & Mitsuhiro Matsunaga when Oya pinned Matsunaga (16:30) to Defend the Titles for the 1st Time. Mr. Oya was your draw here? I think not. FMW 5/5/95 - 58,250 Fans - Main - Onita vs Hayabusa - Semi Main - FMW Brass Knuckles Tag Team Championship Match: Hisakatsu Oya & Ricky Fuji d. Mr. Pogo & Yukihiro Kanemura when Oya pinned Kanemura (12:45) to become the NEW FMW Brass Knuckles Tag Team Champions. Man, Oya-mania running wild here huh? Now, Kawasaki's without Onita's main event and draw: FMW 5/5/96 - 32231 fans - Terry Funk & Mr. Pogo d. Hayabusa & Masato Tanaka and Combat Toyoda's retirement vs Kudo. Notice, Funk is in the main event and draws 9 thousand less than his main event with Onita on 5/5/93. Kudo's retiement with Onita: FMW 4/29/97 - 16,000 fans - Kudo vs Shark explosions match, Onita 6-man return(I think) and Hayabusa vs Gannosuke mask vs hair Onita comes back in 1997 and look what happens: FMW Kawasaki Stadium 9/28/97 - 50,012 fans - Atsushi Onita d. W*ING Kanemura (17:41) in a No Ropes Exploding Barbed wire Exploding Cage Death Match. This card was a bit more loaded though with a Shamrock/Vader cage shootfight and Hayabusa/Shinzaki vs Mossman/Kobashi. Sorry, but the evidence is clear. Either Onita's a super draw or Gregory Veritchev was the lost draw of the 1990's. I'm going with the former. WWF and WCW couldn't even draw 40,000 fans during the mid-90's despite having a much larger population and audience to work with. And if you think any other promotion was getting even 10k with a Veritchev vs Spinks main event, you're on drugs. No other promotion at that time except NJPW and one UWFi card came close to the 40k-50k an Onita main event was going to do. President Arai of FMW and Mick Foley both confirmed that the explosion matches were pretty safe and were just gimmicktry. You can even tell by watching them as Onita never gets blood after taking some of the explosions that they don't do jack except create some smoke. Arai tells a funny story in his book about how they had to go to 11 different hospitals at one point before someone would even take Onita in, because his injuries were non-serious. Onita's worst injury had nothing to do with wrestling - He jumped into a dirty cold river with cuts and almost killed himself. This was not part of a match and he got pneumonia from it. I'd blame the really violent and hardcore stuff on Pogo/Matsunaga/WING/BJW more as their stuff didn't look safe at all and none of them had any concern for anyone's well being. They were doing the truly stupid and dangerous stuff. Oh and Onita's injuries are part of the work. He always wears a bandage on his head.

I heard Dave say this on a podcast and after trying to put together a MOTY list, it really struck me that current day matches just aren't as memorable or as good as previous years. It really seems to all start to go downhill around 2005ish with all of the 90's stars being put out to pasture. I watched a ton of wrestling from 2010-2013, and more than any previous years and I can honestly say that I struggled to put together a list of matches that were comparable to previous years. For whatever reason, the matches don't seem to be as good or as memorable and those "big match feel" situations really seem to have gone away. I think it's kind of strange too when arguably, we are getting better matches on TV and on PPV than we ever have before and we are getting better execution/moves/timing. What does everyone make of this? Is it just me? Is wrestling just not as good as it used to be? Have standards gotten too high?

I reviewed RINGS Mega Battle Tournament '95 1st Round 10/21/1995 here: http://prowresblog.blogspot.com/2014/12/rings-mega-battle-tournament-95-1st.html Overall thoughts: This was a pretty good show. There were some really good matches like Zouev/ Ilioukhine, Petkov/Tariel and Kopilov/Zaza that made the show. Nothing was terrible. They also kept things moving with most of the matches being under 7 minutes, which really helped things out when you have some workers who don't really get wrestling. I think this would be a good introduction to RINGS and since it's on youtube, you can check it out if you'd like. Zouev/Ili was definitely the match of the night and Zaza/Kopilov would be close behind. Some shots from the show:

Yeah, that's definitely not a ponzi scheme.

I reviewed FMW's 5th Anniversary show in two parts here: http://prowresblog.blogspot.com/2014/12/fmw-5th-anniversary-show-551994.html http://prowresblog.blogspot.com/2014/12/fmw-5th-anniversary-show-551994_22.html Overall thoughts: This show had a little bit of everything and was good overall. The M-Pro tag was the first highlight with all the M-Pro crew looking great. The women then stepped up and had a good match. Later on, Terry Funk stole the show with his selling and we got to see Mike Awesome murder junior heavyweights. The semi-main was violent but too long. The main event was easily the best thing on the show though and was a classic match. It had theatrics, cool gimmicks, a hot crowd and good wrestling. I do recommend this show and I think it has something for every fan. Some shots from the show:

Dave knows everyone in the business. He pimps and critiques their stuff always. He would just be nicer about it instead of saying "that was f'ing stupid". Dave and Bryan interviewed Jeff Jarrett recently, despite ripping TNA apart for years. Dave ripped Dana White in the past, and still texts him all the time. Bryan had everyone from ROH on shows recently, and still is able to say what he likes and doesn't like.

I don't really see the controversy here for a lot of reasons: 1) Every wrestling fan would love to call a show. No one here would turn down a commentary gig for the Tokyo Dome. No one, unless they were physically unable to. Dylan does a radio show. So would him doing it mean it wouldn't morally correct to do so? Should ___ ESPN commentator stop covering their sport because it wouldn't be ethical? Bullshit. 2) Dave is already connected with almost every promotion in some way or another. Dave talks to Dana White and Dave used to talk to Vince. ROH and others run ads on his site. Dave brings wrestlers on for interviews. Dave gets information from people in the business and probably gives them some information too. Every time Dave or Bryan mention a promotion, they are by default giving it promotion and advertisement. Every wrestling site or message board is a living advertisement for a promotion. 3) There's not a ton of English speakers to choose from who know about NJPW. There's me, the F4W/PWTorch crew, former wrestlers, Josh Barnett and other journalists/fans/wrestlers. I don't think NJPW's gonna be searching message boards for fans either. Dave would clearly be a top pick as would Striker, Ross, Tenay, etc. 4) You can't review a wrestling show without any bias whatsoever, because so much of wrestling is based on opinion and not fact. There is no factual standard for a good promotion. Money doesn't count either because WWF made a ton of it in the Attitude era and had awful wrestling. You can tell on the box score when a player has a good game, but you can't with wrestling because it's FAKE. With that being said, yes, Dave pimping NJPW has no doubt helped its popularity as it did with ECW and AAA in the 90's, but the number is still low. Even the Tokyo Dome reviews on my site still got 1/10 of an unpopular Raw review. if Dave got into say Zero-1 tomorrow, a bunch of people who didn't have any interest before would suddenly be interested too. 5) It's a lot more fun and enjoyable to review and talk about shows when you like them, as opposed to when you hate them. Cleaning a toilet would have been more appealing to me than sitting through a 3 hour Raw. Listen to a Bryan and Vinny show when they have to talk about Impact and you'll always hear a loud "UGH". Meanwhile, they enjoy a show like NXT more and have much more positive reviews of it. Screw Dave for trying to do something he'd enjoy and for trying to do something that would benefit him, right? Obviously, he should be taking career and life advice from Keith Harris, whoever the hell that is.

There are some FMW lucharesu trios matches on their anniversary shows that looked good. Sasuke looked amazing in them. See it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ra02IWmZt4

I don't really know if it's fair to say that Baba lasted long, he was in comedy tag matches for a good part of his career. I think Choshu lasted a pretty long time. He was very good in the mid 90s but you could see he was starting to break down. Baba had a 24 year run...with another 14 as a comedy/part-time guy.

Terry Kanyon vs Tyranoclaw from Ultimate Muscle, I think.

Imagine Henry in Dr. Death's role in AJPW!!!! How awesome would Kawada-Henry, Misawa-Henry and Kobashi-Henry be? Not half as awesome as Dr. Death's run?

Billy Graham should have debuted in the late 70's ala Hogan and should have stayed away from the drugs. He would have been perfect for the 1980's. This is an odd one, but I think Meng would have been better had he debuted in the 2010's. He'd be a legitimate tough guy and I think could get movie roles and stuff with his rep. I don't know if they should, but I would be curious to see what a Benoit/Eddy would have done had they debuted in the late 90's along with Punk, DB and Joe. Owen should have came around later for sure. I could see him being like a modern day Regal or something.

Ishii's old too at age 38. Realistically, he only has 5-7 years left. His next injury is likely the big one. A bunch of comments here: Tanahashi and Nakamura haven't taken half the abuse Kawada and Misawa did. Shoot, they'd do germans as opening spots near the end there. Tanahashi's gonna have a bad time with his knees, but I can't recall a ton of Nakamura injuries and he works pretty safe. I do like the two dojo boys they debuted this year but they are both a bit small. I like Desperado/Namajague, but they blew it by putting him with the juniors. I don't see anything with Kushida at all. He's like a bad Tajiri spot machine. Tenryu's a special case and shouldn't really be brought up. I can't really think of any other older guys, maybe minus Baba, who lasted that long at a main event level in Japan. I don't think NJPW missed the boat with Shibata as much as Shibata missed the boat with Shibata. Shibata jumped to Big Mouth Loud and did jack for 6-8 years. I will never be able to make sense of why he left.

Been watching since I was 2. I went to a bunch of mid-90's WWF shows but I don't know if I watched the TV or not. My parents say I did. I remember getting big back into wrestling in 1997, with ECW's Barely Legal really doing it for me. I stayed interested for 1-2 years, stopped due to the shows being really raunchy. Got back in during the Invasion and WM18. I stuck with it up until the last few years. Had a big year of watching in 2012-2013, but haven't watched much at all this year and I don't feel like I've missed a thing. I hate the commentary in WWE, I hate the format and you couldn't pay me to sit through 3 hours of Raw.

The big move now is same day delivery. I don't think it will work though because there's too much hassle involved.

You should ALWAYS be working on your next generation of talent. All Japan Women's did for a long time and did quite well with it. NJPW seems to be more interested in taking other companies talent at the moment though. They haven't really had any big recruiting classes since the early 2000's with Nagao and crew. It has to be hard to recruit new wrestlers though in Japan. You have to go out of your way to see wrestling on TV(by buying the right channels or staying up til 1AM for NJPW's TV show) and wrestling isn't popular with everyone preferring baseball or soccer. The training is brutal and the average Japanese person doesn't exactly look like a wrestler. It's also not a good long-term job, there's no real security and you have to hustle. Japan also has an interesting problem with recruiting due to their racism. Basically, all non-Japanese are treated as second class people and looked down upon. Japan looks at all of its foreigners as the same whether they are from USA or Norway. It's a big problem because they likely could find better recruits worldwide but they really don't want or need any more foreigners, they need more Japanese. Even AJ Styles and Devitt have gotten lumped in with the foreigner gang, when they could be successful without it. I do think NJPW is on their way to being stale. We've seen just about every combination multiple times over the last few years, minus Naito. All of their top guys are in their mid-30's minus Okada and Ibushi and Tanahashi are really banged up.

Thoughts on the interview: - If you were really expecting Austin to crucify Vince and really push him, you were going to be disappointed. With that being said, I think Austin asked a lot of good questions but due to it being Vince's company/network, there was only so far he could go. - Cesaro is charismatic and has character, but Vince outright said that he doesn't get Cesaro's character or understand it. I also do think him being Swiss is a piece of it, since Vince basically admitted it. If they ever let him do the "HEY" stuff, Vince will get it. Vince gets catchphrases. - Funny how Vince doesn't want to have meaningless matches but never gives any non-main eventers much time to talk. I'm certain Triple H talks more in one Raw episode than Kofi has had in his entire run. - I'll never understand why anyone cares about the Hall of Fame. There are limo drivers in it as well as Pete Rose. WWE will induct anyone they can to make some money off of it or to get attention from it. I bet WWE inducts Snookie or K-Fed someday. - Vince seemed to forget his struggles invading Memphis and World Class, but some of that was probably due to the little interview time. He also seemed to forget Crockett expanding as well. - I have no idea where Jake came in as a special attraction. He certainly was never positioned that way. Andre and Hulk were. - Vince did have a strange childhood, but his dad had money, connections and power. Vince wouldn't be where he is without his dad being who he was. Maybe he would have been a wrestler if he wasn't a McMahon, but who even knows. Vince had a head start that others would dream of having. - I didn't really get the story about Vince Sr. not giving that announcer the raise. I'd like to hear both sides to that story. As we saw in Memphis with Lance Russel, a strong television announcer is priceless. - Vince can make anyone a star that he pleases. Anyone can be a star by never losing, getting a strong push and constantly getting good programs/storylines. I've yet to see Roman Reigns in any 20+ min singles matches and yet Vince is strapping the rocket to his butt. Meanwhile, Daniel Bryan was given lousy storylines, a heel turn, Kane, was forced to change the "YES" chants into "NO" chants, was pushed as a troll/goat, was mocked by the announcers and somehow was still the most over guy on the roster while having the best matches. You think Roman Reigns and Triple H could have survived all that? I don't. - I don't think Vince really understands why people don't take as many risks these days, even though his company doesn't take that many risks nowadays either. It's likely because he's rich and hasn't had to apply for a job in 40+ years. WWE has no real competition and unless you are a main event guy, if you leave WWE, you're likely not coming back. Where else can you make 6 figures unless you're a big manager, programmer, lawyer, doctor or something similar?

This. After hearing Dave talk about these uncovered gems that were not really rare at all, I am less interested in seeing the dead end that seems to be his VHS being converted or sorted through. It really is kind of amazing that the person who most of us think of as the preeminent pro wrestling historian is kind of lost when it comes to the availability of matches. No it's not. He doesn't tape trade anymore and he's got a million things on his plate. It'd be more amazing if someone like myself, goodhelmet, Dan Ginnetty, Jeff Lynch or Mike Lorefice didn't know. Even then, we all are going to know different availabilities of things than the other will.

i've never done it and have no interest in doing so. I can't use my PC well from the couch and if I'm on the couch, I can't use my PC. Meanwhile, I can watch anything on my pc. I can also kind of watch TV from my PC if need be. Now, if I could get my TV on my computer without special boxes from Comcast, we'd have a winner. Like OJ said, they have to get this on phones as Japanese use their phones like we do computers. Keep in mind Japan doesn't have cable(they have satellite packages) and most people are cool with having 10-12 channels only. I think it's a good move overall as: - It cuts out the uStream and Samurai TV middlemen. - It gives people who aren't in the Tokyo area a chance to see more stuff at a cheaper price. - NJPW has few worldwide TV deals, whereas WWE has tons of them. They can basically allow anyone from any country to get this. They're opening the world to NJPW. - It plays really well with the new TV show. If they can get the TV show to a weekly deal, they can advertise their network service and all of their upcoming shows. I can see it now - "Check out the 1/4 Tokyo Dome show LIVE on NJPW World". - It's pretty fresh and it gives them an extra step above rival promotions. There's multiple promotions in Japan where you can't even buy a show you want to see. NJPW already was ahead of everyone, but now, they are really ahead. I'd have to think Dragon Gate will be trying something similar soon. - If NJPW wanted to, they could also get some other promotions in on this thing. The smaller indies won't have money or fans to start a service like this and NJPW could possibly loan their service out for a show or two if needed. Won't happen, but it's an idea. My next question is - How far away are we from a Mexican promotion trying this?

I don't think Vince is as good as he used to be. It doesn't take away what he accomplished. WWE has been basically the same since the brand split. The format is the same and a lot of the top guys are as well. Big Show, Cena, Hunter, Orton, Kane, Rey, sometimes Brock, sometimes RVD, sometimes Jericho, sometimes The Rock, once a year The Undertaker, etc. I'd say the best stuff out of the last 10 years were Evolution(though not HHH's reign), The Shield, Nexus and Punk's summer run up to his MITB match with Cena. The big problem and wrestling's big problem as a whole is a failure to keep talent fresh and create new stars. Every promotion I can think of now mostly has the same top guys they had 10 years ago. The only promotion I can really think of that solved that problem was All Japan Women, though they likely also lost a lot of money by forcing people to retire. A promotion that can constantly create new stars will never lose. Vince's best and dumbest move will forever be killing the territories. Instead of constantly keeping a supply of gold coming in, Vince took the gold all in two swings and now doesn't have a source. Had he figured out a way to keep the promotions he destroyed open, he likely could have kept his own personal territory system and had new stars for years. He also could have kept things fresh by sending stars to his other territories while bringing in stars from those territories to take their place.