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After listening to Shoemaker's podcast this week with Peter Rosenberg and Sam Roberts, my theory is confirmed; he is THAT guy at the indy show standing in front of you who thinks he knows a lot more than he does, and his friends all think he knows a lot more than he does. Awful.

 

I've said it more than once but it amazes me the simple things he gets wrong. Like, common knowledge things he gets wrong or doesn't know. I always use it but he and Bill Simmons were talking about Curt Hennig and Bret Hart. Simmons asked why Bret Hart essentially took Hennig's place in 1991 and Shoemaker said he didn't know when someone who wasn't an idiot would have said that's when Hennig fell into injury problems.

 

 

Yeah, on deep pro-wrestling knowledge, I'm a minnow compared to some of the guys on this board. But, literally, every week I listen to the podcast (when you work 8 hours a day at a computer, you scarf up anything halfway entertaining to listen too), there's some obvious fact that you could either glean from reading the Observer that week or paying attention to wrestling at all in the past decade on the Internet.

 

Plus, he's not even that good on the podcast. I understand why Rosenberg is on there, aside from the fact he's Shoemakers buddy. OTOH, I could name half a dozen people on various podcasts who could do a better job of being the "wrestling guy" on the podcast.

 

As for Barnwell, yeah, he's gone a bit off of where he should. I mean, I doubt we're going to see Lowe write a Running Back Championship Belt article this August 'cause he has nothing better to do.

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Cox COMPLETELY skipped over the main story from this week's podcast. In the opening minutes he totally disavows the label himself from the label of the being the leading Wrestling historian. Instead he said he is just a guy who writes about Wrestling.

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This week it's The Battle for the Best Sports Movie Villain of All Time, which is brutal.

 

Their list of the best sports movie quarterbacks was far worse. How do they have a top 10 and barely even mention Paul Crewe? How did some guy from Napoleon Dynamite make the list but Paul Crewe didn't? Awful. At least the sports movie list had Clubber Lang.

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It was OK but really gave little sense of what Inoki is actually like, how he got to be who he is or how he's really viewed in Japan now. It ended up being a somewhat dry recitation of his weird diplomatic missions (which makes sense given the author is a professor writing a book on Japanese-Middle East relations). If I set out to profile a character as colorful and outsized as Inoki, I wouldn't be satisfied with that as a result.

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cannot say I have read much from the grandland.com site, however, Bill Simmons posts on there, or owns or runs that site, and I just cannot bring myself to follow anything that he does. I realise that big networks have to get analysts, but why do they have to get tools like him. He is not objective nor thought provoking. He is a homer for Boston-based teams, and is not shy about it. I get that some are passionate about their local sports teams, but he seems to represent the homerism that seems to permiate throughout Boston fandom, and possibly the entire northeast part of the US.

 

I will be the first to admit, that he is not the only contributor to that site, and that there are probably other fine reporters, however, he and his kind are not cool, and must be avoided. BTW, I dispise the East Cost bias of sports reporting.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...

 

“The Internet wrestling community thinks in-ring wrestling action should take up every minute of every show,” Russo says, practically shouting. “That’s what they believe the business is. That’s what they are fans of. I mean, they rate fake wrestling matches on a star system. The matches are fake! They are not real!”

 

Wow, I can't believe that wrestling fans like wrestling matches! What a novel concept.

 

What a dope. He has no idea that the real reason people hate his writing is because, simply put, he does not write good television. It's all based on faulty logic, hating women, and shock angles at the expense of good, long-form storytelling.

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"I mean, they rate fake wrestling matches on a star system. The matches are fake! They are not real!”

 

So only "real" things should be rated on a star system. Has anyone here ever rated a football, soccer, or baseball game, or boxing match on a star ratings scale? Has anyone NOT gone by a rating system for movies to at least some degree?

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I found this piece monotonous and poorly formatted...a slog to get through. Is it just me or my mood today?

 

Edit: Maybe I'm being unfair and letting my distaste for TNA color my opinion. It's obviously well-researched, with firsthand quotes (a rarity for internet wrestling pieces), but I just want all of these people to go away!

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Well, I certainly wouldn't put myself on a pedestal. I'm just some dude. But this was poorly constructed. There's no flow, no clear purpose or direction and he does a bad job writing into and out of his quotes.

 

Pretty much my opinion as well. The piece feels very "cluttered."

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  • 6 months later...

And then today, Zach Lowe drops a Jerry Lawler "pulling down the strap" reference in his 35 things to like and dislike about the NBA season column:

 

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/the-supersize-nba-season-ending-things-i-like-and-dont-like/

 

Have to say, of all of the places I expect to read a Jerry Lawler reference out there, Zach Lowe's column would have ranked at or near the bottom of that list.

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