Stevie Ray Von Erich

Nice to see Burgundy Slurpwell still being booked like an old school scary monster heel. I'll have to watch the New Day bits tomorrow, but what I saw was pretty good.

WWE nostalgia is weird. I feel like it boils down to "REMEMBER THAT TIME WE DID THAT THING YOU LIKED~!" without recognizing the context behind why those THING's stuck out. Really down on the 'E lately, and I actually enjoy Seth Rollins as champ.

Davey Richards posted his support of marriage equality on Facebook today. AJ Styles versus Davey Richards inside a steel Davey Richards. BOOK IT~!

I saw that they are running a Lethal Lockdown match on Sept. 16th for control of the company--between TNA and GWF, whatever the difference actually is at this point. Isn't EVERY Lethal Lottery match for control of the company?

I feel like there is a delicate balance in finding a finish for a big, ogre-ish guy like that. Fat Hosses need a move where they land on you, but Strong Hosses need something where they throw or slam you, I think. Could Bruce Strongbow pull off a claw-STO like Kenzo Suzuki was doing, or is that too technical?

With Bone Strawman's finisher, I wish he would do something similar to the Diamond Head Kobashi used once. I think he broke dude's ribs with it though. I know what he's doing now was called the Lift and Cutter in Smackdown: Here Comes the Pain.

I still feel like a lot of people don't understand that a large part of the Bucks' in-ring style is driven by their gimmick.

How has WWE not resigned Brian Cage yet?

As a kid I would wear my sister's pleated, plaid choir skirt so I could have a kilt like Roddy. He's also one of the reasons I own a leather jacket. Growing up in the early nineties, he was one of the first wrestlers I thought was cool. Damn shame. Hope his family and friends can find peace.

Whoa, okay. Let me parse some of this out, because there's a lot. I feel like women wrestlers are presented as equals to men wrestlers, then AT LEAST TO ME, it doesn't come across as intergender violence. It's an entertaining exhibition. I should also clarify that I'm arguing from a point that I don't think equally trained men and women should be treated differently in physical labor. It's been proven that the argument that MEN ARE STRONGER THAN WOMEN is false (men tend to have higher potentials for upper-body strength while women tend to have higher potentials for lower-body strength). The reason I FEEL things like domestic violence are wrong is because it's a violation of trust and intimacy, not to mention severely psychologically traumatic. I don't feel like women are inherently in need of protection or coddling. For instance, I think it would be just as inappropriate for a 6'2", 250 lbs trained male athlete to fight a 5'5" 180 untrained man as it would be a woman. Do I support intergender shoot fighting? I don't know. I feel like that's complicated and not really what I'm talking about. But wrestling is about cooperation. It's a performance. We don't have to worry about any of that. Thinking that women have to be superheros to fight dudes sucks TO ME, and I think being a trained pro wrestler is plenty of equal footing to allow women to wrestle men as long as it's not book to be a creepy, sleaze type of thing. Not trying to give the guy shit about his opinion, it just felt weird to call it absurd given MY PERSONAL VIEWS on it. Roll Tide, y'all.

Why is it absurd? It's entertainment. Is it absurd when women in action films fight men?

I'm convinced that season 3 was written exclusive with Buzzfeed .gifs in mind. Boo is a completely different character this season, and so many of the backstory flashbacks for the other characters either were never hinted at or felt like they directly contradicted things set up in previous seasons. Caputo had a nice sympathetic face run, then a nonsensical heel turn. I have no idea why so much time was given to the sons or Oscar (or whatever the dude's name is that takes care of Daya's family). Just a bad season and that last scene was so out of nowhere. Just cheesy and terrible and so bad.

Someone mentioned Only God Forgives a few pages back, and it is absolutely gorgeous. Really, any of Nicolas Winding Refn's fit into this thread.

Lita and Trish main evented Raw, you jerks. And Lita and Victoria had a cage match! Don't forget that there have been at least decent workers in the women's division pretty consistently until the late 2000's. There was always a Jazz, Molly Holly, Ivory, Victoria, Mickie James, Gail Kim, Beth Phoenix, etc. to at least keep the illusion of legitimacy. I feel like it wasn't until after Candace Michelle left that they just stopped caring. But even then there was Tamina, AJ Lee, and Kaitlyn after a while. The WWE has a terrible track record with their women's wrestling, but it hasn't entirely been because they didn't have talented workers. The divas "mattering" is, in part, perceptual and subjective. If you haven't been trained to care, you're not going to notice when you should.

I really wish they'd let Fandango just be Johnny Curtis again. I feel like there is more mileage there and he looked good on Monday in what should have been a nothing match. I also love that people still have no idea how WWE booking works and think that losing a single match or program means someone is buried. You know who was buried? Ryder after his US Title win. He was slowly pushed back down the card into irrelevancy and isn't regularly on the main shows. That is being buried. Being involved in storylines and featured matches with top stars is not buried by any means. Unless y'all just don't know how holes and burying stuff works.

You really gotta do the perv pics every show, huh? I was a huge fan of the Bray segment, but it didn't really advance anything. Like, we already knew Luke was back in the fold.

Dumpster fire, indeed. The mainstream seems at least mildly interested in this, but I haven't seen anywhere calling out WWE's terrible track record yet, which would be an easy piece for some clicks/viewer. Seems like fish in a barrel, really.

From what I understand it's the moment where both guys are down and at an "even" point in the match, both fatigued and looking for any advantaged. The type of thing that HHH and HBK got grilled for doing way too much in their early 2000's matches together.

That's just the basic version. "Shine-heat-comeback-finish" is the shorthand label for the general formula; and it's not just wrestling, you can see the exact same storytelling progression in most Hollywood movies as well.In reality, there's much more to a match than just that. A bad match can happen all by itself, but a great one always has a context. That's partly why the big climactic matches in All Japan in the 1990s are still considered to be so special; because Baba & Co. were pretty meticulously detailed in the way they built up long-term storylines. Things that happened years ago would still influence what was happening now. Paul Heyman's best-booked matches in ECW tended to have several different storylines happening to intersect at once, creating a multi-car pileup effect which could be spectacular to watch. Point is, the match isn't just the match. It's also the angle and the hype and the promos and the entrances and the announcing and the differing personalities and the differing body types and the contrast between their in-ring styles and a hundred other things. The Rock already has the people on their feet and "electrified" before ever making physical contact with his opponent. And if you ever want to hear a crowd roar in a manner to make your hair stand up, just go find any of the old Mid-South tag matches where Bill Watts is in one of his post-retirement comeback tag-team revenge matches and finally manages to catch Michael Hayes and punch him right in his stupid mouth. Oh, I totally agree. So much so, actually, that this sort of build and payoff in storylines built inside actual matches feels like something else entirely, like another level of the craft. Almost like comparing a fun pulp novel to something like LoTR. Yeah, they're both books, but one is working on a few more levels than the other (but this is not to say we should enjoy one more than the other). It's the reason why, though I enjoyed the Cena/Owens series, I felt like we missed a couple matches. That first match was such a spectacle because of all the moves and seeing Owens, a cocky upstart, match Cena move for move and eventually beat him. Part of this is the desperation and high stakes WWE main event style tries to build with multiple finisher kickouts, but I feel like that first match COULD have been something like those All Japan classics if we had gotten the first two acts. As it was, we basically got the same really good third act match three times with, I think, diminishing returns. Now, as far as that basic structure is concerned, I feel like it, like it was designed to over years and years, can do a great job of engaging and entertaining an audience as long as the parts are placed and paced well. A big criticism of the Reigns/Wyatt match at Battleground (aside of starting with headlocks and ignoring the story they'd built to start) was Bray's boring heat segments which relied a lot on a couple of long chinlocks. I really liked this match, but I feel like Bray certainly needed to build heat with different, impactful-looking offense, if only based on Reigns's character as someone who can take a punch. Bray, though, is AWESOME at cutoff spots and Reigns has developed into a really good hope spot and comeback guy, in part because almost all of his signature moves pop the crowd, look painful, and can be pulled off from a variety of set-up positions. This match has historical context with the Shield/Wyatt feud, previous singles matches between the two, and a storyline promoted on tv. But it pretty much ignored those things. Still, there is a way to dissect the match using its component parts that really makes me feel like I'm understanding what's happening on a fun, new level. Dean posted this match in the 2015 INTERNET MOTY thread, and I feel like it does a really great job of telling the story of that basic match structure without a bunch of context. Or, if it's there, as someone without that context, I still really enjoyed this match out of Quiet Storm, who I haven't seen wrestle since the early days of ROH, and Mikey Nicholls, who I've only ever heard mentioned on the board. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ylit0_mikey-nicholls-vs-quiet-storm-noah-sem_sport It tells a simple story, both guys do a good, not great, job of telling their part of the story, and I think it works.

In an attempt to better understand general wrestling psychology, and to try to figure out why certain matches and wrestlers were better than others, I've been doing some research about match structure. I feel like the way a wrestling match is organized by component parts is still one of the more protected and kayfabed parts of wrestling, but there are also some available blocks to understand what is happening, and why, during a match. The basics I keep coming across are: lockup, face shine segment, cutoff, heel heat segment, hope spot, down and down, and the finish. I'm curious if that's it, though? Also, I think there is huge potential in using these component parts to breakdown specifically why great matches are great, and specifically where they are great. Same with wrestles. Folks almost certainly do this now, but I feel like it's rare around here. For instance, lots of Dustin Rhodes's matches in the early to mid nineties are great because he was so excellent are garnering sympathy in heat segments and showing great fire in hope spots. There are certainly lots of other reasons he is/was awesome, but I feel like a lot of discussions like this lack organization, and using match structure might be a more clear, enlightening way to talk about and explore THIS NERDY SHIT WE LOVE.

The Wyatt character is so perfect for building a stable around, and there are tons of interesting choices and good explanations for people to join The Family. But this is a company that is fine with running a rematch a year and a half later between an old zombie with magic powers and an MMA Godzilla (which are both incredible characters to explain into literally any storyline) simply because "THEY WANT TO FIGHT...AT SUMMERSLAM~!" Even when characters explain themselves, like Bray did in the Reigns feud a couple weeks in, they reduce the story to "HE KEEPS ATTACKING HIM AND SPEAKING IN RIDDLES!" I love wrestling and, for huge chunks of time WWE has been wrestling for me. But I might be done for a while after SummerSlam. The explanations and reactions to the shows here are often more insightful than anything we get on the show itself, and it's just frustrating. Even watching the shows on DVR and keeping up with the PPVs has become a chore. It's just bad TV. On the plus side, the 2015 Internet MOTY folder has introduced me to Big Japan's Strong division which is like a bunch of hosses who powerlift together stiffing each other for a half hour at a time for our amusement.

Was I not clear on that when I said Sasha ripped it and she looked real good out there? You said something about how attractive she was, so obviously you don't care about or respect her work, you sexist pig. How dare you verbalize that you think someone is pretty? FOR SHAAAAAAAME. Everyone in Divas division needs to get masks ASAP. It's the only way to stop the micro-aggressions. #SJW This place needs to get a goddamn grip on it's casual sexism. It's not a joke. And just to keep this on topic, aside from the US Title, how else does Rollins get heat on Cena with Kane out?

Brother, I'm from southern Alabama. All we do down here is bad wrestling. This clip is from a promotion than ran in an old train depot every week for a few years called Lower Alabama Wrestling. I attended, like, two summers of their shows when I was home from school and even managed to ring announce for them for a while. I was instantly the largest guy in the "promotion." All the cards had, like, five matches on them and would run for 3 or more hours. Dothan, AL has a great wrestling history, but the southern Alabama indy scene is basically dead.

Ok, I did!

I need to find more of this art.