Elsalvajeloco

Who would be the Disco Inferno of this wrestling war? Shawn Spears? Robert Stone?

It's weird cause they (WCW) didn't draw in Minneapolis until they got to the NWO era much like a lot of other places. Hogan did one WCW house show at the Target Center in 1994 and it drew 4,300. I know Eric has the AWA connection as well, but if a guy like that is a worldwide star, ideally you could put that shit just about anywhere. Shit, I probably believe the Kate Kennedy, my mistress works there thing over the AWA thing. By the time Nitro started, Hogan was already several years removed from AWA.

Mackenzie Dern vs. Randa Markos is being made UFC 253 in September. I don't see that going very well for Randa.

It depends. First of all, let me get this out of the way by saying I wasn't sure why it went from Connectpal and premium Snapchats to OnlyFans. Some have all of that on their Linktree, but I usually only see OnlyFans. Then, I figured it out based on who the hell was getting on OnlyFans. You cannot preview the content. Yeah, let me put my credit card information in this form so some chick from IG can give me a TED talk in a bikini. Naw, you can keep your pot luck porn. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take a shower.

One day Mike is going to run into the wrong person, and it's not going to end well for him.

There is a UFC fighter named Luis Pena whose actual nickname is Violent Bob Ross. I like Luis, but I feel Harley Race personifies that very nickname.

I feel like whatever the subject of the final Purge film is won't be as timely as they hoped it would be.

I would say niche and being inclusive is part of the mainstream, but it's not THE mainstream if that makes any sense. I was going to use this as an addendum to my prior post, but I'll use it here: Kenya Barris is a pretty successful producer/showrunner right now. He has this new show called BlackAF. To be fair, I've never watched it (or any of his other shows since it's not my cup of tea). However, I've heard some of the hype/buildup that falls into my space of black/African-American politics and why this one in particular might be problematic. Basically, if you're Kenya Barris and your aim is to show how black rich people are underrepresented in society or how they struggle with their blackness, I don't know who you expect to catch in this net you're casting. You know why black wealthy people are underrepresented in television and film? Because essentially there are none. There is Oprah, Jay-Z, a few rappers, and a few pro athletes. There are about 40 million black people in the United States. Why would you think this is the time for "yeah, we gotta show how this extremely tiny subset of people live and personally interact." This is you doing too much. When you have something that niche you're trying to pull off, it comes off as a vapid and soulless (which looking at the critiques of this show, it seems like a recurring theme in the criticism). I remember when Channing Dungey, then ABC Entertainment president and now current Netflix VP for Original Content, was asked something to the effect of why there isn't a black show like Roseanne (which had just returned) instead of bringing back Roseanne. The TL:DR version of her answer was basically as much she would like a show like that, her job is wish fulfillment television. Hence, why black people got Scandal and blackish under her tenure at ABC. Keep in mind, Channing Dungey is black. Not only is she black, but she's one of the very, very few black people with any sort power in Hollywood. Think about that shit. You (as one of the few black people in your role in the entire world) bring back a show that depicts lower to middle lower class white life in a realistic manner (which made it super successful in the first place), but depicting black people outside of this imaginary existence/escape hatch is far from your grasp. Okay, got it. This is why I kinda always push back on certain forms of escapism. Why? Looking at what has gone on just in the past six or seven weeks alone in this country, you come off extremely tone deaf ESPECIALLY in hindsight. So...vapid, soulless, and tone deaf. Any of those adjectives or labels, you can put on pro wrestling. It's the reason why so many people like myself dropped out. For myself personally, it wasn't one big reason. It just took three insanely bad Raw episodes in a row like six or seven years ago and I was gone. Never really been back, and probably won't ever be back full time. That's what it took for me. If the object of the game is to get as many eyeballs on your show as possible, you cannot drop out of the mainstream in that way. At one point, it was called jumping the shark in television. Now there is something worse than that in televised entertainment: people not remotely giving shit and dropping like flies. This is what happened with pro wrestling. Moreover, unfortunately for wrestling, the whole term niche is designed to be not welcoming and also not inclusive. You cannot start a group and then invite everyone in. Then that's just called everybody, not a group. Part of being inclusive is also being at the same time...exclusive. As an heterosexual, black male, I cannot then say I am a gay or queer identifying white male...cause I'm not. If I was applying for a college scholarship to get black males in STEM or whatever years ago, you can fucking bet I want that shit to be exclusive as humanly possible to better my odds. Matter of fact, make that shit even more exclusive because I don't want someone fresh from Nigeria or Ghana or Senegal with two working professional parents getting a leg up on a scholarship that was designed for me with parents and grandparents who had to bare the bloody cost of living in this country for several generations. It's the reason I need the scholarship in the first place. By understanding that concept or principle, you know you start off filtering people when you're niche. You don't get elevated to a place where you just start adding fans in droves because you're looking for a certain category of people. Everybody else becomes expendable. That's not something I can see pro wrestling being able to afford. Baseball, even with abhorrent racists and other terrible people passing through, can afford it because it was engineered into the American way of life. You would never call baseball niche even when there is a work stoppage back in like 94 and people were taking huge dumps on the sport. Never. When people started hitting balls to the moon juiced out of their goddamn minds, people came back for a little while. Why? Because there is an attraction ingrained in people to watch something that's current, relevant, and (what they feel) is their birthright as American citizens to see. Being a part of the mainstream is a lot of things, but everything still revolves largely around timing and perception. You cannot escape that. Just like I brought up with Barris, his first attempt at this concept was a smash hit (blackish). A lot of that could be contributed to it coming in the Obama era when the door was wide open for any and everything black, regardless of quality. His second attempt, blackAF, was a huge swing and a miss. Wrong time and wrong place, baby. It probably (dare I say likely) only got renewed cause Netflix gave Barris some money, and they've got to make stealing Barris, Dungey, and Shonda Rimes from ABC worth it. Hence, my content mill assessment earlier. However, they could never replicate their success at ABC with Netflix because it was built on a dishonest (at least intellectually) foundation in the first place. You're just throwing shit at the wall, hoping it works. Again, you can use this same logic to describe the current state of pro wrestling. You cannot flail this wildly and not appear to be desperately clinging to relevance. It's too evident.

Terry's pronunciation of Hayabusa gets me everytime.

I think this pretty much is an indicator that television (both linear and OTT) is basically a content mill now (shit, look at the beating Quibi is taking right now). You would have a shorter amount of time naming who doesn't have a television show in some shape or form. As much as I'm not a fan of the "intersectional/being black is not a monolith" crowd, I can say confidently as an African-American that the black spectrum now on television is vast compared to the 90s when Living Single was a breakthough for black television. A show like Pose for example on FX wouldn't exist even twenty years or fifteen years ago let alone thirty years ago. No way in hell. It's not because being identifying as both black and LBGT is now super popular, but television is in a different space from the past. Representation is looked at differently. So I would not say wrestling even feels more popular as much as wrestling isn't as demonized as it was several years ago. The problem still though is if you have your finger on the pulse of now, there is no way in the hell you continue to do record low numbers. I think a big issue is the stigma developed within wrestling fans where if wrestling does try to be hip and cool, the fans (or more importantly, lapsed or potentially new fans) revolt against that because of past failures. You might love your parents to death, but if your dad got up at a family function and starting dabbing (five years after it was cool) out of fucking nowhere, your skin would crawl in embarrassment. I think wrestling being so popular at one point in time makes it feel like a relic of a bygone era especially if you keep trotting out old wrestlers from that specific era. As Bert Sugar would say, horse racing, baseball, and boxing were the biggest pastimes in America in the early 20th century. If Bert were still alive, he would see that they ain't now more than a century later. Yeah, you will get a couple boxing mega bouts that do 1 million or more annually. The Triple Crown does well for NBC every year. The World Series captures the intrigue of people for a couple weeks every year. It still ain't the same as it was back then. I think part of the reason why wrestling was so big at one point is that it didn't necessarily have to have it's finger on the pulse. It was not an either/or thing. You could do both. Seamlessly if need be. The Undertaker is perhaps one of the greatest gimmicks ever. Maybe you can tie it in with some of the dark, over the top rock music in the 80s, but there was nothing that made it extremely time sensitive. You can do that gimmick in ANY era of modern pro wrestling. They haven't produced anything since then even close to that, which is why this motherfucker is still around. Therefore, it comes off as wrestling still looking for that magical formula that worked when wrestling was cool. So no, I cannot imagine or fathom it feeling remotely close to the Attitude era. I think that's more anecdotal evidence.

Some creative show names here.

How is that currently translating to the popularity of WWE though? To be fair, they tried with stuff like Rad Radford and Man Mountain Rock (juxtapose with stuff like the New Rockers). However, it was just way too one dimensional because who in WWF creative was going to get that. Ross? Nah. Cornette? I'm 50/50 on that. Prichard? Probably, but I'm not sure how much weight he would put behind it. They would go one step forward and then do shit like Rockabilly and the Real Double JJ (although you can argue Achy Breaky Heart was such a crossover hit you had to do some shit related to country music).

No Paul Felder on commentary for the next couple shows due to possible COVID-19 exposure. He was seated next to Din Thomas on a flight from(?) Las Vegas. Din Thomas has since tested positive for COVID-19. Thus, Felder is in a two week quarantine. He's hopeful to be back for the 7/18 and 7/25 cards.

Apparently, things are not going well in combat sports outside of the obvious https://www.mmanews.com/glory-kickboxing-goes-into-receivership-not-bankruptcy-as-initially-thought/ Also, RIZIN is "trying" to do two shows on 8/9 and 8/10 at a new arena in Yokohama but only with Japanese fighters (similar to the Dream show in May 2011 after the tsunami/earthquake). I put quotations around trying because they're looking for crowdfunding help to reach their goal of 50 million yen (roughly $465,000 USD). Much like Dream after that particular show, RIZIN might not be around too long after this.

Problem is this is post airplane incident so Gordy isn't exactly in the best of shape physically and mentally. I wouldn't fight Foley since he is a former amateur wrestler his damn self, and the motherfucker isn't scared to get literally blown up. If you don't give a fuck about your own physical well-being, I doubt you will care about mine.

Hopefully, they don't have to resort to that. Thankfully, American Top Team has the deepest bullpen in MMA because they still have Dyah Davis (the late Howard Davis Jr.'s son) for boxing, Katel Kubis for kickboxing, and Conan Silveira for everything in between. Even though Din Thomas left, Thiago Alves is a coach there now it looks like. However, being in Florida, it's evident they probably should have stayed resolute and kept the gym closed.

That's two major ATT coaches coming down with COVID-19. The other is Marcos da Matta aka Parrumpinha, who has been the lead BJJ instructor at ATT and a staple in corners for several years now.

I think the problem with the outdoor thing is it's getting up to 105°F (between 40-41 Celsius) in Abu Dhabi. The low is around 90-92°F at night with high humidity. Hopefully, they don't want anyone to die from heatstroke.

Prior to the Vikings game (@ Dallas) last year, Kirk Cousins was so laughably bad against (usually mediocre) Cowboys teams that he almost appeared not worthy of being in the NFL. That's what we're talking about here.

This. Also, I think @Zakk_Sabbath's stepdad might have sold Jimmy Snuka drugs and Snuka owed him money to the point where he had to make that phone call.

The last two franchise quarterbacks Dallas have had in Romo and Prescott, they've absolutely backdoored their way into. Look at their track record for drafting quarterbacks in the Jerry Jones era. It's absolutely abysmal (made worse by the fact Dallas is never high enough in the draft to get a potentially elite player save for Zeke maybe). They got something out of an undrafted QB for awhile and then lucked their way into Dak Prescott when that guy couldn't stay healthy. The chances of Jerry Jones finding another great quarterback in the manner he found the last two is slim to none. Dallas in free agency always plays it super safe (in part cause Jerry and Stephen don't know what the fuck they're doing), which has hindered the franchise for several years especially the defensive play on the field.

You're a strange little man. You're a strange little man who has this weird sentimentality about people getting paid because we already went through this in the MMA forum. Sidenote: What makes it worse is the UFC actually did pony up the money proving that you in fact have no clue what you're talking about. Did your state lower the minimum wage rate to the point where you get this irrationally angry about pro athletes making money? Did some quarterback or wide receiver in high school pork your sister? Dude, the money doesn't belong to you. Let it go. Moreover, Jerry Jones has overpaid players starting with Tony Romo and then you go to Zeke and D-Law. So it's not like anyone is fantasy booking Jerry Jones overspending. This is typical of him.

You misread? Have you been a Giants fan for all of two seasons?! You probably should know that you haven't beat your biggest division rival in three consecutive seasons as a fan of the team. The games are in primetime a good portion of time even if the actual teams aren't very good. Where did I give what I think he's worth? I don't give a damn what NFL players get paid or who pays them. All I said is part of the reason why he is going probably getting paid top dollar is he continues to donkeypunch Washington and NYG. You said for some reason that's not automatic wins when Dak as a starter is 13-3 (imagine if Dallas only played those two teams as that would get no least than a #2 seed every year) combined against those two teams. That's pretty automatic considering it's 6-2 against your shitty team and 7-1 against the other shitty team. If you continue to get 4 wins AUTOMATICALLY every season inside the division (no matter how a big pretender the team is), you are in race to win the division EVERY YEAR unless someone else (i.e. Philly) somehow runs the table AND get to 12 or 13 wins overall consistently. However, it's the NFC East so it's very unlikely. Moreover, you were advocating (as a Giants fan?....which again is weird since he's dominated the Giants since the aforementioned rookie season and some of those weren't even close) AND at the same time not advocating for him to get paid. If you're a Giants fan anyway, it shouldn't matter what's he getting paid. Apparently, you should more concerned about Giants ownership putting together better teams so you won't get swept by a "shitty" quarterback back-to-back-to back seasons.

I was fuckin around with you since you had already announced you read the spoilers and then proceeded to say you weren't impressed...which basically unconsciously infers you want everyone else to read those spoilers too.