Kropotkin's Beard

As a foreigner looking in, Athletic Commission regulation of pro wrestling is about the dumbest thing I ever done heard. I understand that it's partly a legacy of the kayfabe days and partly just state governments wanting a cut of the gate revenue, fine. But banning piledrivers, really? Needing to discuss whether or not the Canadian Destroyer is actually a banned move? It just seems silly.

Esther Lin is such a good combat sports photographer, glad she's started getting shots of pro wrestling now.

With the number of good and above matches the broomstick has been involved with over the decades maybe it's time we accept it wasn't always being carried?

I actually had no idea he was a pro wrestler at any point. Always just the big roided up wrestler from Dark Ages era UFC & later from Pride. Cool to know.

With 3 hours of Raw, 2 hours of Smackdown, 1 hour each of NXT, 205 Live & Main Event every week, plus a 4 hour (plus potentially another hour for the preshow) PPV every month? 36 hours of WWE wrestling a month makes me want to scream about the old cliche, "less is more". Sure, you don't have to watch everything. The 1 hour shows don't really have much to do with the PPVs. Even Raw & Smackdown are skippable because the PPVs tend to do a decent job recapping everything relevant to the show you're watching. But spreading your creative people so thin to fill all the content has a negative effect even when you don't watch everything. They have to burn through programmes quicker, they burn through gimmicks and feuds quicker, it's got consequences. Especially in a company where so much of it is channelled through one crazy old man. So yeah, "less is more". If, somehow, the WWE don't produce enough wrestling every month for someone then I'd suggest that person would be hardcore enough to know that wrestling exists outside of the WWE, in which case there is literally more wrestling available at the click of a button than at any other time in history. From New Japan to small indies in places as far flung as Portugal & Australia. I understand why the WWE want to monopolise wrestling but I'm not a WWE shareholder.

Hmmmm. So, I was reading this and "Live events will also be accessible anytime as part of the VOD library which also includes complete access to the ROH TV Archive, and the VOD Vault containing historical events, compilations, interviews, and more" So the question on my lips is the VOD Vault as it stands is terrible. So is that going to actually include the full ROH archive? I can't be alone is having a stronger interest in seeing old ROH, reliving the CZW feud & seeing Homicide's great chasing of the title at the tail end of 2006 and stuff before I got into it. I mean, you own the tape library, might as well use it. I know it's a very different promotion now but if they aren't going to utilise the library they'd be as well getting paid to put it on somewhere like Powerbomb or Highspots Network.

I feel like you have to also mention Suzuki's matches with Goto at Wrestle Kingdom and Tanahashi at New Beginning in Sapporo as far as top moments in January 2018. Maybe I'm just overreacting to my first first exposure to him outside of Pancrase/MMA but boy, he's a scary dude. I'm in rapture over someone who makes dropkicks look stiff and nasty. That said, if the first month is going to be a sign of things to come then 2018 is going to be a hell of a year for wrestling.

That is uhhh. I don't remember hearing about this at the time. I can't say it's very surprising though. He's a wealthy man and it seems just par for the course these days. Very grim sounding.

It works for soccer, where lots of the leagues & clubs are sponsored by bookies & they take bets on shit as weird & varied as who will get the next throw-in, for the real addicts.

Isn't getting the best reaction to the very minimum of effort & absolutely zero danger of injury pretty much the most traditional pro wrestling thing? I mean yeah, Joey Ryan could do a lot more of that but like you say, dude is approaching 40. He's done his fair share of dumb shit in his first few years and has been cruising by on a dumb gimmick and lame comedy spots for over a decade. I might not want to watch it but probably smarter doing what Joey Ryan has done than Nigel McGuinness or Necro Butcher did (I was really struggling to think of indy guys who didn't end up in the WWE for a decent amount of time. And I know Nigel is there now but c'mon, you know what I mean)

So fans of things really like a thing, yeah? And often they want to share their joy of that thing to more people, both so they have more people to talk about cool thing with and also to help support the thing they like. Also some fans, especially those on the internet, are socially maladjusted idiots who don't really have much in the way of social graces. So they think a great way to talk up the thing they like, be it NJPW or underground hardcore punk and metal or Pride MMA etc, is by talking down the other thing like the person only has room for one thing. (Which to be fair, with the amount of content WWE put out each week isn't exactly the most outrageous assumption) So mostly it starts from a good place, a bit of evangelising for a group they love, but then it turns into a slapfight between haters & defenders of the shit you talked down & everyone gets embittered & hardens their position.. Needless to say, telling someone they think is good is shit rarely is a good way to win someone over, but it took me years of being an obnoxious dickhead to work that out. And by the time one generation works it out there's new dumb people to start the cycle of obnoxiousness all over.

If that's true that's very silly because most moves are easily imitated by idiot young fans, source me & probably most kids. Sleepers, Boston Crabs, Camel Clutch, all moves which were really easy to imitate and you could probably do some damage if you kept them in for any length of time.

Jon Koppenhaver is a nothing. Outside of the MMA bubble his name is completely unrecognisable. "One guy on the wrestling board with a MMA subforum making the connection" really doesn't prove the point that War Machine is a name associated with a violent piece of shit.

Despite the UK scene being in a pretty good place for a few years now I still find this all quite surreal. Growing up in the '90s, post WoS but pre-FWA & Alex Shane having a radio show & that minor indy explosion, going to a wrestling show basically meant getting to see fake Undertaker (and it certainly wasn't Brian Lee) against fake Doink. Granted, 20 years is a long time but it's so impressive how big wrestling is here, or specifically indy wrestling. Especially with the only wrestling on free-to-air TV being Impact. It's people going to watch stuff live. And it's everywhere. Obviously London is the centre for a lot of stuff, but even in the '00s stuff like FWA & IPW:UK were all England based. Now Glasgow has got ICW but more than that there are groups running in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, & Inverness, & presumably Wales has stuff to see now.

Nope, seems legit sadly.

When you say movies are on a four star scale, is that an Ebert thing? Because I can't say I know of it in the UK. I always wondered, the .1/4 stuff always just weirded me. 5/5 makes sense as someone who grew up reading games magazines where it'd usually be out of 5, 10 or 100 (though I can remember one magazine doing it out of 25) but they'd only ever use whole numbers.

So I've got a question for anyone who might know. Obviously Wrestle Kingdom was today and so wrestling Twitter is going wild with their star ratings. What I want to know is how come everyone rates wrestling on a 5 point scale? Leading to the absurdity of 4 3/4 stars and all that, which I've always felt was very arbitrary and not a bit silly. If people wanted that much granularity in rating matches how come we've not seen ratings out of 10 or even 20 catch on? As long as I've been online I've wondered how that became the standard, it just always seems a bit silly to see quarter points as the standard system for rating wrestling.

Which goes to show how fucking terrible TNA could be in that it basically sucked his enjoyment away completely.

People pay money for it so it doesn't seem unfair to expect some sort of quality control as far as editing goes. I doubt it's a sticking point for most but it's a reasonable complaint even if it is relatively minor.

He really was a disturbing shade of orange. I couldn't remember if he'd always looked like a well worn leather bag, but nope, I did check an old IWA MS DVD & he was at least a bit whiter. Hasn't he always been quite orange in his NXT referee run though?

Man, that was a lot of fun from top to bottom. I really don't watch much in the way of modern wrestling these days, mostly I just have the Network to watch the stuff I couldn't see as a kid, Raw and Nitro. The women's match felt a little that something was missing, maybe enough time, maybe I've just seen Ember Moon once so her winning meant less to me. But the opener was a perfectly paced hoss off, that actually made both guys look strong. Black/Dream was an absolute riot, simple idea, executed close to perfectly, all about one guy getting that respect. Wargames was chaotic, wild, crazy, and just a blast. Now, I don't have the attachment to Wargames a lot of you do, so far I've only seen the one with the Dungeon of Doom. But the new rules didn't really hurt it for me. A bit slow in starting but I loved it. Hope O'Reilly doesn't get into too much trouble for that unprotected chairshot he gave himself...

That joke was barely worth telling once. Stupid slow internet.

Wow, Daniel Bryan has put on weight since I last saw him.

I also remember a really great post covering time spent in Mongolia, teaching or working with disadvantaged kids, something like that. It sounded really cool.

Yeah, I'm not going to argue that Emma was an all-time wrestler, but I think the way she's been treated highlights a flaw in the NXT system. People get these characters that often develop a following in a quite natural way, over weeks of TV, if not months. And then they just get promoted and the extent of the character build is "it's X from NXT", which ignores that most people who watch Raw won't be an NXT viewer so the reason clumsy Emma or Boliever Bo are fun characters is totally lost and they are just another nondescript wrestler on a roster that is already huge. And it happens so often I'm left questioning if it's just deliberate negligence or if it's sheer inability to understand that NXT doesn't have the same audience as Raw.