Dark Side of the Ring

[The Thread Killer]

On 4/18/2020 at 1:52 PM, Zoo Enthusiast said:

I couldn’t get past Irv Muchnick’s taped-together glasses.

I know in the bigger picture it's inconsequential and irrelevant to the episode, but I had a similar reaction when I saw Irv Muchnick.  Dude, you're going to be on national TV.  If you don't have a pair of glasses that aren't basically being held together with adhesive tape, then maybe don't wear the glasses for the interview? He looked like a character from Revenge of the Nerds.

[SirEdger]

3 hours ago, Loss said:

I've been impressed in recent years that while many of the second or third-gen wrestlers clearly respect their parents because they're their parents, they don't have blinders on about who they are either. Charlotte seems to have had a tumultuous life before pro wrestling, but seems to have her head on straight now and seemed on ESPN to be very fair-minded about who her dad is. Natalya seemed to accept the good and bad with her father, but had no false ideas. The Usos even came across on one episode of Total Divas, whether it was just for the cameras or not, that their relationship with their dad is mainly cordial. I would imagine that Curtis Axel understands very clearly who his dad was as well. It's not the delusion we used to get with the Von Erichs, for example.

The Von Erichs are quite an example in themselves. That episode from last season was hard to watch, and not necessarily because of the recount about all of their tragedies.

[sek69]

I can only imagine having a dad who was also your boss and pushing you to be flawless Christian heroes had quite an effect on the Von Erich boys. 

[Cornette's racket]

I actually rewatched the Von Erich episode over this weekend and while I have all the sympathy in the world for Kevin Von Erich for the fact he's  able to keep going with his life after the amount of tragedy he's seen. Even at the end of the episode he couldn't admit his dad was anything less than a hero was bizarre because Fritz was anything but a hero or good person. 

[MoS]

Related to that, Stu Hart used to take a shit ton of liberties with rookies in his dungeon to show off - under the guise of weeding out the weak or just having fun of course - but I don't think Bret, or anyone in the Hart family, ever criticised him for that. 

[Robert S]

Stu Hart is the guy famous for it, but I am pretty sure that beating up / stretching rookies was (maybe still is) standard in the wrestling business. Hogan cannot be the only one, who got injured on one of his first days of training. There are also more than enough TV squashes that are uncomfortable to watch regarding taken liberties, if you turn on your brain for a second.

[MoS]

Yeah, I remember old-timers beaming with pride as they would talk about the number of rookies Danny Hodge would beat up, leaving them bloody and often with broken bones. 

[Loss]

It comes from a place of insecurity about wrestling being a work.

[sek69]

Wrestling's preoccupation with who's a legit tough guy (among fans and those in the business) has always been something that amused me. Like who cares if someone could beat everyone up for realsies when pro wrestling is the complete opposite of that.  

Beating up trainees would have come from trying to keep kayfabe by roughing up people trying to break in so they don't go to their friends and be all "this wrestling stuff is easy".  I suppose it could be argued that guys like Stu were playing a role in keeping out the riff raff, but it sure seemed like it was also a perfect job for folks who liked hurting people. 

[Robert S]

For a certain generation of wrestlers I can understand why they wanted wrestlers breaking in to be legit. There were people shooting in world title matches as late as the 1930ies, with Stanislaus Zbyszko beating Wayne Munn being the most famous one. And I would not be surprised if smaller scale shoots were still not uncommon up to the early days of the NWA. So people who broke in back then or at least got taught by people who had their heyday in the 20ies or whatever, I can see why they thought that a wrestler had to be able to handle himself in the ring. Later on, there was of course still the point that it would break kayfabe, if a wrestler got beaten up in a barfight (therefore the famous Bill Watts statement about who if you get into a barfight, you better win it).

[sek69]

It was important for the NWA champ to be legit in case the local promoter was tempted to pull some shit, the champ was expected to be able to handle business. Other than that, there really wasn't any reason for guys to be legit other than the whole "wrestlers have to be the toughest guys in the room at all times" mindset which just screams "we're insecure because this is fake" to me.

[Al]

You wanted guys to be legit. Not just for the NWA title but there's also a bunch of small scale promotional wars flaring up here and there. But certain wrestlers/promoters, especially Eddie Graham in Florida, took delight in bringing rubes into their facilities and flat out torturing them. 

[MoS]

Surely there was a way to get legit guys other than making rookies run 10 miles, do 500 Hindu squats, and then breaking their orbital bones while stretching them to within an inch of their lives. Stipe Miocic would kill any pro wrestler on the planet in an actual fight, but if you make him expend all his energy doing brutal workouts, then even Seth Rollins would probably kick his ass. I really think such a system turned off far more talent than it attracted. 

[Laz]

I think that turning guys off was part of the intent. Rituals and rites of passage were an easy way to see if somebody was serious about joining the club or not, and also taught some of them humility. As much as we like to look back on things like that with 2020's social awareness, we also need to remember that things like that served a purpose at the time.

 

[MoS]

True, and the business was far more brutal then. But I also think such behaviour would have turned off a lot of legit athletes from other sports who would otherwise have been interested and would have done well. And I have to think insecurity was a huge reason behind this conduct as well. I always think back to how the New Japan dojo was notorious for hazing rookies, but no one pulled any shit with Bad News Brown because he would have fucked them up.

[C.S.]

6 hours ago, MoS said:

Surely there was a way to get legit guys other than making rookies run 10 miles, do 500 Hindu squats, and then breaking their orbital bones while stretching them to within an inch of their lives. Stipe Miocic would kill any pro wrestler on the planet in an actual fight, but if you make him expend all his energy doing brutal workouts, then even Seth Rollins would probably kick his ass. I really think such a system turned off far more talent than it attracted. 

Batista wrote in his book about how Sgt. Buddy Lee Parker's bullshit in the WCW Power Plant turned him off from pursuing a career at first.

Say what you want about Batista, but he eventually became a massive star. Buddy Lee Parker never was.

Wrestling was far better off for having Batista than Buddy Lee Parker by a mile. 

[sek69]

The Dino Bravo episode was interesting for just how entrenched the mafia was in Quebec. As a dumb USA-ian, I knew surely that there was organized crime everywhere but I never thought of Quebec as a place so dominated by the mob people were afraid to talk about it 25+ years later. 

[SirEdger]

Nowadays, the mafia here isn't what it used to be, as the Hell's Angels have pretty much picked up where the mafia left off when it comes to organized crime. But we're always reminded of their existence whenever a mobster gets murdered every once in a while whenever New York says so (seems like NY mob is very influential over Montreal's historically, whether it's the Gambinos or Bonnanos). I've yet to see the episode on Dino; will probably do so tomorrow.

[The Thread Killer]

Whenever I see him interviewed, no matter the setting or context, Jacques Rougeau always comes across as eminently unlikable.

[Blehschmidt]

14 minutes ago, The Thread Killer said:

Whenever I see him interviewed, no matter the setting or context, Jacques Rougeau always comes across as eminently unlikable.

This could not be more correct. 

[SirEdger]

Actually, I met Jacques at a Comic-Con a few years back and he couldn't have been nicer to everyone (He even signed two of my DVDs I had just bought a few moments earlier). The thing with Jacques is that he has a tendency to embellish the truth sometimes to look better than he actually is. This comes from the fact that as he grew up, given that his brother Raymond was the oldest and the first to break into the business at the age of 15, Raymond had all the attention from dad Jacques Sr and their illustrious uncle Johnny. It certainly affected Jacques in some way because all he ever wanted was for his dad and people to be proud of him. And I believe it certainly affected him in general, even after he retired from the business.

[C.S.]

Kind of a frustrating episode because Dino Bravo's murder still an open cold case. Of course, that's not the show's fault. Rick Martel and the police opting not to participate was a bit strange, but I didn't get the sense that they declined for malicious reasons. At least they had that archival interview with Rick, but I'll be damned if I understood half of what he said.

Dino seemed like a cool guy. In every pic, he had a sly smile and a twinkle in his eye. It's a shame what happened.

Not from the episode, but my own side observation: chronic sourpuss Bret Hart didn't seem to respect Dino much. In his book, he got injured and took a countout loss instead of jobbing to Dino - or something along those lines. I wonder what the issue was between those two. Maybe some weird ego thing where Bret wanted to be the top Canadian? Who knows.

BTW, were my eyes deceiving me or was the bullet hole in the window still there when they showed modern footage of the house?

22 hours ago, The Thread Killer said:

Whenever I see him interviewed, no matter the setting or context, Jacques Rougeau always comes across as eminently unlikable.

I think this is just because he's loud and blustery, exactly like The Mountie and his other heel characters. He was basically playing himself with a costume.

22 hours ago, SirEdger said:

Actually, I met Jacques at a Comic-Con a few years back and he couldn't have been nicer to everyone (He even signed two of my DVDs I had just bought a few moments earlier). The thing with Jacques is that he has a tendency to embellish the truth sometimes to look better than he actually is. This comes from the fact that as he grew up, given that his brother Raymond was the oldest and the first to break into the business at the age of 15, Raymond had all the attention from dad Jacques Sr and their illustrious uncle Johnny. It certainly affected Jacques in some way because all he ever wanted was for his dad and people to be proud of him. And I believe it certainly affected him in general, even after he retired from the business.

Which is ironic and unnecessary because Jacques is easily, by far, it's not even close, more famous than his dad Jacques Sr., his brother Ray, and his uncle Johnny on a worldwide level. They may cast a shadow in Montreal, but in the rest of the world, Jacques is far more high-profile.

[SirEdger]

That's absolutely true on the worldwide stage. Even today, Jacques Jr is probably the most famous Rougeau after his uncle Johnny in the province. Johnny Rougeau has the same God-like status in our sports culture than Maurice Richard has. Not that surprising, considering that Johnny Rougeau and Maurice Richard were close friends.

[Johnny Sorrow]

I know the Conrad podcasts are hit and miss for a lot of people, but the shows he's been doing with this show's creators add a TON of info they couldn't fit into the episodes. Conrad is pretty blah and the creators aren't all that engaging but there's a lot of info there.

[The Thread Killer]

3 hours ago, Johnny Sorrow said:

I know the Conrad podcasts are hit and miss for a lot of people, but the shows he's been doing with this show's creators add a TON of info they couldn't fit into the episodes. Conrad is pretty blah and the creators aren't all that engaging but there's a lot of info there.

Completely agree.  "Dark Side of the Podcast" is pretty much becoming a must listen every week for me.  They are always able to add a lot of extra info and insight into the filming of the shows.  This week I found the stuff about how hard they tried to get Rick Martel very interesting, for example.  I don't really dislike Conrad anyhow, but he is much more "businesslike" when he hosts this show.