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The Thread Killer Talks Too Much: The Recaps


The Thread Killer

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7 hours ago, C.S. said:

Arquette won't get any votes, but it has mine.

Mine as well

I have seen the 4 star summit - I think it's on YouTube actually - and amongst the 4 journalists, Meltzer is the only one I would go out of my way to listen to, and I do love you TTK, so you don't have to recap it lol. I would also like to read the Jim Herd recap

You are doing the Lord's work, man. Thank you for all of this

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Also, is it me, or does the recap of the Vader fight leave you with a better impression of Leon's shoot skills? He hit Ondorff with an open-handed slap, clearly not meant to hurt him too much, and then, instead of GnPing him, he started shouting at him. Then Arn got in the way and when Paul got up, he basically threw a sucker punch, given Vader was engaged with Arn at that time. It was aimed at Vader's chin and yes, it knocked him out, but as all of us who watch MMA know, most knockout blows are the ones that land to the chin when the person getting hit doesn't see or expect them. Clearly Vader did not see the punch nor was expecting it, given he was engaged with Arn. This doesn't really show me that Ondorff beat Vader in an actual shoot. This is not like the Booker-Batista fight, where both parties decided to actually fight, and Booker clearly got the better of Batista and left him wounded, Batista sucker-punching Booker later notwithstanding. Or even Hart-Michaels in 1997, where Hart yanked a lot of hair out of Shawn's head and where Corny has said that Bret was absolutely destroying Shawn and would have injured him bad had Lawler not interrupted his shit and broken up the fight.

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It's almost horrifying to think that Haku was the calm one trying to break up a fight in this situation.

But by all accounts, Paul Orndorff seems to be a very nice individual, something that we don't see a whole lot in the wrestling business, in terms of being appreciated by everyone.

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Thanks for doing the write up on that one!

It definitely sounds like Vader could have taken Orndorff if Arn hadn't been in the way, but it also sounds like it needed to happen that way for the sake of the WCW Locker Room.

as for Haku breaking it up..... who else! I just have this picture in my mind of him walking out and looking at them both disapprovingly, and them immediately both being like "Sorry Meng"

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9 hours ago, MoS said:

Also, is it me, or does the recap of the Vader fight leave you with a better impression of Leon's shoot skills? He hit Ondorff with an open-handed slap, clearly not meant to hurt him too much, and then, instead of GnPing him, he started shouting at him. Then Arn got in the way and when Paul got up, he basically threw a sucker punch, given Vader was engaged with Arn at that time. It was aimed at Vader's chin and yes, it knocked him out, but as all of us who watch MMA know, most knockout blows are the ones that land to the chin when the person getting hit doesn't see or expect them. Clearly Vader did not see the punch nor was expecting it, given he was engaged with Arn. This doesn't really show me that Ondorff beat Vader in an actual shoot. This is not like the Booker-Batista fight, where both parties decided to actually fight, and Booker clearly got the better of Batista and left him wounded, Batista sucker-punching Booker later notwithstanding. Or even Hart-Michaels in 1997, where Hart yanked a lot of hair out of Shawn's head and where Corny has said that Bret was absolutely destroying Shawn and would have injured him bad had Lawler not interrupted his shit and broken up the fight.

Even if it was a sucker punch, knocking out a guy who outweighs you by some 200 pounds is a hell of a feat. And Orndorff did it with his weak arm to boot.

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4 hours ago, Blehschmidt said:

as for Haku breaking it up..... who else! I just have this picture in my mind of him walking out and looking at them both disapprovingly, and them immediately both being like "Sorry Meng"

The way Vader put it, that's kind of what happened.

I can't help but feel that whole situation would have been avoided if Harley Race was still in WCW. He could have been effective in calming down both guys before things ended up the way they did.

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3 hours ago, Log said:

Goddammit, Arn.

I have to admit I was pretty shocked when I heard Arn say that Kane was his pick for the best big man of all time. But after thinking about it, there is a long history of Pro Wrestlers who when asked, seem to have a totally different set of criteria to determine what makes somebody "great."  I think guys that worked with Kane thought he was a great big man because he never hurt anybody and was really easy to work with both backstage and in the ring. Whereas with Vader, it sounds like he was moody and temperamental, never washed his gear and smelled really bad (JR recently said the office had to officially order to him to wash his gear because he was making guys sick) he was impossible to move around, and oh yeah...if you worked with him you were pretty much guaranteed to get smacked around.  No wonder actual Pro Wrestlers like Kane better.  He might not have been as much fun to watch, but from a worker's perspective at least Kane didn't stink and knock you loopy on a regular basis.

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Arn has also praised Kane for his ability to convey emotion through body language, which is hard to do when you wear a mask.

Honestly, though, the public statements wrestlers make in praise of their colleagues have to be taken with a grain of salt. Meltzer once posted that a lot of the folks who publicly call HHH an all-time great privately say he would have been an average main eventer in the 80s. Regarding Kane, he said that most wrestlers say he's either mediocre or the total shits.

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I think the people that make something will always view it differently than the people who consume it.  I used to be a news photographer.  I can watch the news with you and I'll like a story that you may not find all that special because I will get what went into it in a different way than you do.  

It makes sense that wrestlers would gravitate towards the people who are easiest/most fun to work with.

That said, we're talking all-time here, Arn.  Kane is the best you can do?  

Oh, and the answer is Andre.  Andre is the best big man of all time.  Every big man wishes he could be Andre.

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eh, Bigelow's long been considered overrated on this board - cf. his placement in GWE

the usual line on him around here was that he never did anything better than his rookie work with Lawler, and a lot of his career was less than the sum of its parts.  respect for the LT match tho!

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Bam Bam is a dude who I think is awesome, but I wish he was better. He seemed to have so much potential and just never quite got all the wag there. 
 

But, man, there is a very short list of wrestlers who had a better, pure-pro wrestling look than him. 
 

Oh and he’s totally up there with best wrestling names ever. 

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3 hours ago, The Thread Killer said:

Instead of Greatest Wrestler Ever, we should do a poll of Greatest Big Man Ever.  I assume Vader would win, but I think Bam Bam Bigelow would deserve some votes too.

I would probably be the high vote on Scott Norton & One Man Gang in that one too! :D

Bam Bam was awesome in ECW but that was mostly booking. He had a good bad ass aura about him which they didn't really capture in either WWF or WCW.

I like Big Van Vader but I wouldn't vote him above The Undertaker I don't think, anymore. I don't know. I did in GWE I think. EDIT: Just checked, had Vader #11 (he has def dropped for me in the past five years) and Taker at #30 (and he's def went  up)

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18 hours ago, SirEdger said:

It's almost horrifying to think that Haku was the calm one trying to break up a fight in this situation.

But by all accounts, Paul Orndorff seems to be a very nice individual, something that we don't see a whole lot in the wrestling business, in terms of being appreciated by everyone.

From what I can tell Haku seems to be a legit nice guy who just happens to be the baddest motherfucker anyone's ever known. Like he didn't need to talk a lot of stuff or bully anyone since he knew he could beat anyone else's ass if need be. 

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Tremendous recap, @The Thread Killer.

This whole scenario makes WCW look so bad, like the bush league it was and really never stopped being, even when things were hot.

Why the fuck should Vader have to call the arena or agents and tell them he's fulfilling another obligation for the company? That should be Bischoff's job, just like it should've been Bischoff's job to enforce Vader doing it when it was supposed to be done instead of putting it off for four months and kicking off the chain of events that led to this monumental shitshow. 

I had no idea Arn and particularly Haku were so closely involved, so that was new and interesting information to learn.

Vader probably deserved to be fired, but it sounds like the real reason for it was more because he was playing hardball with contract negotiations, and Bischoff used this as an excuse to get rid of someone he was fed-up of dealing with. 

Unpopular pain in the ass or not, Vader probably knew he was a special talented, acted accordingly, and expected to be compensated accordingly. 

It's a shame things went even worse for him in WWE.

On 1/11/2021 at 10:28 PM, Dav'oh said:

If that's You Can't Kill David Arquette, do you agree that he's one of wrestling's best babyfaces? That's what I took out of the film, that and Arquette's undeniable love of this thing of ours. I'd buy a ticket to see David Arquette perform, something I would've slapped myself (or worse) for saying back in the day. He really came across well, for mine.

On 1/11/2021 at 10:35 PM, The Thread Killer said:

I really want to see that documentary at some point.  Once I do, I might actually recap that interview just for @C.S.

23 hours ago, MoS said:

Mine as well

I have seen the 4 star summit - I think it's on YouTube actually - and amongst the 4 journalists, Meltzer is the only one I would go out of my way to listen to, and I do love you TTK, so you don't have to recap it lol. I would also like to read the Jim Herd recap

You are doing the Lord's work, man. Thank you for all of this

Yeah, I was referring to You Can't Kill David Arquette. I haven't watched the documentary yet. Should I wait for TTK's recap first so I can do a double feature of sorts?

Count me in as another one, BTW, who would love to read a Herd recap.

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7 hours ago, The Thread Killer said:

Instead of Greatest Wrestler Ever, we should do a poll of Greatest Big Man Ever.  I assume Vader would win, but I think Bam Bam Bigelow would deserve some votes too.

We’d spend a year debating what the criteria of a “big man” was. There would be acronyms: “A.N.D.R.E.”

 

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1 hour ago, Matt D said:

We’d spend a year debating what the criteria of a “big man” was. There would be acronyms: “A.N.D.R.E.”

Coincidentally, I made this exact point on Twitter five hours ago. Is it height, weight, both? How tall? How much weight? Is The Undertaker a big man? Hulk Hogan? Mark Henry?

No one would argue about someone like André the Giant or The Great Khali but what about Kane or A-Train? Shit, half the roster in the WWF 80's was big men. We talking about the likes of The Warlord? If you start putting criteria on it, suddenly guys like King Kong Bundy or Bam Bam Bigelow might not even qualify.

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The "Eric Fires Back" series seems to be getting a lot of votes, but I could use a bit of a break from listening to Bischoff for a while.  Plus, those "Fires Back" shows are going to be a bitch to transcribe because I'll have to recap both the Shoot Interview clips and then Eric's rebuttal.  I will definitely do the first episode, but I'm going to put that on hold.  Based on the reaction in this thread, I think next up I will tackle either an episode of Mailbag with Mike Chioda, or the Herd Interview.

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