SirSmUgly

I wouldn't just trust Jake Roberts's claim that Watts not wanting to pay him was the big reason that he left. Also, I enjoy the hell out of Watts-run WCW. Even stuff that seemed dumb to me as a kid like the no-top-rope-moves rule (which is still kinda dumb) made for some fun spots in matches. Rick Rude was great at using that rule to cheat effectively in particular. I also loved Ron Simmons winning the gold, even if Watts then booked him against scrubs, Goldberg-style, rather than actually having him beat people of consequence. He wasn't WCW's savior financially and never would have been, but from an aesthetic/entertainment standpoint, I could watch 1992 WCW all day every day and be pretty happy. Kip Frey also actually had some fun stuff during his brief WCW leadership. I know Bischoff pretty much has to be the best booker that WCW had, but who would the worst be? Jim Herd? Ric Flair?

The last two or three minutes of Dory Funk Jr. vs. Nick Bockwinkel is amazing. Love that thing. It starts out sooooooooo slow and then they have this great 2.9-trading finishing run if I recall correctly.

JohnnyJ pointing out that WWE is/traditionally was a face territory is a great point that I didn't think about. Still, there must be a way to keep heels strong even if you have just fed them to a top face that doesn't include trading wins with another secondary face. If you're going to have Bray Wyatt get blitzed by John Cena, you need him to steamroll Jericho to get his heat back, not trade wins and losses.

Oh, there are no worries. I do disagree that I'm too harsh. I am generally pretty positive, though there are some things that I just don't like and will probably never be positive about. It never hurts to hash things out, though. It's about talking about wrestling more than making a difference. at least for me. I also think that I probably am not taking this position in 2002; I do think there is something deficient about WWE's booking patterns over the last decade that has me thinking this way.

Why is the story that WWE's hand got forced? They listened to the audience which is what we all wanted. They stuck the landing at Mania. Forget their record. Why do you need to frame the issue in a way that takes that victory away from them? They got that one right. And have been getting it right with the Shield. And in spite of how much the Wyatt's have cooled off, the amount of time they get and their placement on the card suggests that the Powers That Be still see great things for them. Cesaro petered out (a result of miscasting or a lower ceiling than most smarks see for him) and they continue to see nothing in Ziggler (a point of view I tend to share), but they've still been handling their business a lot better recently than you're giving them credit for here. They'll never win them all. But they're not as bad as you're making them out to be. The story is that WWE's hand got forced because typically, getting over with the crowd doesn't seem to matter if the office isn't interested in strongly pushing you. This has happened multiple times with guys in the past decade or so beginning with RVD in 2001. We can list a number of guys that they didn't really push very strongly when the crowd was ready for it (or worse, de-pushed when they got hot). Their odd de-pushes of hot wrestlers as some weird test for their wrestlers isn't made up by fans that just love to hate. They also tend to go in their own pre-conceived direction rather than paying attention to the audience, which is why the audience being particularly vocal by the beginning of January was so striking - this time, I guess fans weren't going to put up with a de-push for Bryan. In the end, do I care how WWE gets it right? Not particularly. However, the original conversation was sparked by Gregg, whose optimism I love but whose sometimes blind belief in WWE's approach to building wrestlers and feuds I find confusing, saying that fans just love to hate on WWE and that many fans think they could do better. Well, yeah, but that's only because fans actually pay attention to what other fans seem to want. You bring up Ziggler right now. I don't particularly like Ziggler either, but it's pretty clear that the guy should at least be in the Edge role of "upper-midcarder that works as a transitional champ in a handful of instances" because the crowd buys him as that and clearly wants to see him do well. I won't be interested in it, but a bunch of other people will. I also don't think WWE is getting it right with the Wyatts. In January, they were very clearly ready for primetime according to the crowd's response to them. What sense does it make to then have Bray lose a feud to John Cena and have the Usos kill Harper and Rowan each week? That sort of booking is just objectively awful no matter what one thinks of the Wyatts. We'll see how The Shield's singles booking turns out. They want to force Reigns as the future champ when the crowd seems to want Ambrose. If in February, they're pushing Reigns into the main event, but the crowd gets vocal again about wanting to see Ambrose in that spot, we'll see if they change course again. It might take the crowd getting ugly at multiple shows to do it, but even if that works in this hypothetical situation, it shouldn't have to get that far. It likewise shouldn't have had to get that far for them to clearly set Bryan up to stand alone at WM. I'm not a WWE-hater at all. The only reason I said anything is that Gregg got over-the-top in his defense of WWE booking, though I should have ignored it because that's what Gregg does occasionally and he's simply a good guy with a lively fandom 99.9% of the time.

Everyone is a mark, so I'm not insulted by that term. However, if you think that the company's hand regarding Bryan was not forced by the crowd, you would have to be incredibly optimistic about the company's record with hot acts over the past ten years to take that position. If you can't understand why people aren't incredibly optimistic about the company's record with hot acts over the past ten years, you are either somewhat clueless or you just really like to put your faith in the company, evidence to the contrary be damned. Except for Bryan breaking his neck a month in and throwing the booking into a tail spin it still has not recovered from. If the bookers are unable to deal with an injury, that's not Bryan's fault. I love your posts, Vic, but you pushed this asinine "BRYAN GOT HURT SO HIS PUSH WAS A MISTAKE" line a few weeks ago, and it still doesn't wash. If Bryan gets hurt, but Bray Wyatt and Cesaro are right there and the crowd is ready to get behind them, you don't blame Bryan when the company has John Cena beat the tar out of Bray Wyatt in a feud and books Cesaro 50/50 with a bunch of other midcarders. You blame the company. Steve Austin got his neck destroyed, but they kept him in the mix and hot, so they've done it before...unfortunately, that was seventeen years ago, i.e. before Vince McMahon totally lost his touch.

This is so dismissive, and it flies in the face of what is demonstrably true: All those guys Niners mentioned have absolutely cooled off. You can defend Bray's booking all you want, but in January, he, Harper, and Rowan were incredibly hot, and in August, Bray was struggling to draw heat while trying to get a win back against Chris Jericho. The Rhodes Brothers have massively cooled off. Cesaro looked like the next big face in March, and now he's trading wins with Jack Swagger and RVD. The only reason we got the WM that we got in the first place is that the fans essentially hijacked every show on the road to WM until the company was forced to do what the fans wanted, so I guess the fans actually did know better than the company.

I don't know much about lucha, but my favorite stuff is the brawls, actually. Watching Negro Casas knock a dude's dick stiff is awesome, for example. Since most brawls in U.S. wrestling are now really a bunch of high-spots with tables and ladders and cinderblocks, lucha probably has the best brawls there are, with two guys punching the shit out of each other until they are both bleeding.

I think the best of those Undertaker matches between 21 and 29 .vs Orton, followed by .vs Henry, one of two casket matches that were actually really good. I thought each match in the HBK and HHH series got more overwrought and consciously epic. I disllike all of them, but I get why people really rate them highly. Just not for me.

I bought my PS4 at launch. The first year after launch is usually pretty rocky in terms of games; the N64 and Dreamcast defeated this by having a fairly decent proportion of high-quality releases early on, but most consoles don't do that. The WWEN does run better on the PS4 than on any other device I have aside from my Android. I actually have PS+ primarily for the games rather than for playing online. At this point, we're getting two indie/smaller releases a month. The DS4 is a fantastic design in terms of how comfortable it fits in my hand, but it wears down quickly. I don't bash my stuff around or abuse my controllers, but I had to send one back about four months after launch because the right trigger got stuck. The rubber covers on the thumbsticks also erode kinda quickly. I am hoping that more games do cool stuff with the in-controller audio and the touchpad; really, only inFamous: SS has tried to use both in cool ways. If you do get a PS4, I definitely suggest MLB: The Show 14. A big part of me deciding to go with a PS4 after having a 360 is that it has the only decent baseball sim out there. I also enjoyed Rayman Legends (which is out on every console), Resogun, and inFamous. I also ended up sinking a ton of time into Don't Starve: CE. Looking forward, I'm excited for Fallout 5, WWE '15, and the next Red Dead and Saints Row games in terms of franchised releases, but I really am interested in No Man's Sky, which looks like a game that I will play off and on for years and years until I somehow sink a hundred and fifty hours into that sucker.

I've heard that Chessman is having a very good past two years. If someone agrees out there with that idea, would that someone mind posting a match or two that I should go find for myself?

That Vaudevillains/Cassady and Amore match just made me want to see them wrestle except for twenty minutes. Loved the quick pace and the varied double-team moves that they did even in that small amount of time. I know the pacing won't be like that over a longer match, but I really liked what I saw from them. Cassady always seemed lost as a singles guy, but he is a solid big man archetype in a big man/little man tag team. I didn't read the spoilers, so I'm genuinely intrigued at the GM reveal next week. I think the GM concept is played out, but I still care. I wish Triple H had announced the replacement of the GM position with a championship committee. Watching Tyson Kidd on NXT makes me want a Tyson Kidd push on the main shows. He's very slowly getting more comfortable cutting promos and he is just awesome in ring. I went from not being too interested in him to really looking forward to him after the last three months or so of NXT television. Loved Tyson outsmarting Breeze at almost every point for the first three minutes before Breeze got frustrated and gave up, but the best was Tyson celebrating like he just beat Brock Lesnar for the WWE WHC. This was another short match that made me think that I wanted to see a longer match between the same guys. I wanted to like Charlotte and Becky Lynch, but the match just felt disjointed, and Byron Saxton was being pretty shitty at heelish color commentary during the match besides, which made it tougher to watch. Charlotte is so awkward during mat wrestling exchanges; I don't know if her length is the issue or what. I much preferred their little counter exchange they had while standing up back in the corner. That felt more crisp. I look forward to seeing them have a more cohesive match in the future. Oh, Mojo. He's still trying to figure things out. So many people do such awesome character work in NXT, and he still sounds like a dude in a backyard fed yelling generic promos into a camcorder. I'm rooting for him, though. On another note, I think instead of a sit-down splash, the Hyperdrive should be a Muta-style corkscrew elbow. There aren't enough people using the Corkscrew Elbow. While we're at it, he should alternately consider using a slingshot suplex as a finish because somebody needs to be using it as a finish in WWE or NXT, damn it. Zayn and Sin Cara doing really crisp matwork was fun to watch. I know there's not really room for Zayn up on RAW/Smackdown, but he really sticks out like a sore thumb as a guy who probably should have been up on the main roster a few months ago. Callisto did a bunch of really cool shit. Callisto and Sin Cara are going to be a super-good tag team once they get used to one another, and I really want to see them versus Harper and Rowan right now. Harper and Rowan trying to swat these two out of the sky and slow the match down would be a perfect style matchup. As for Adam Rose, I love the idea that he's fun-loving and goofy until he smells a shot at some gold, at which point he reaches into the depths of his soul and taps into Leo Kruger so that he can stomp the shit out of you. Anyway, this match was super fun.

actually, Shawn broke his hand on October 14th, 1994, and worked two matches (one tag squash and Survivor Series 94) in-between breaking his hand and January 10th, 1995. I think that explains it because Lawler is still around doing the King's Court during this time. Thanks for the info. I didn't know that he got hurt at some point in the fall.

Random question: Was there a reason that Vince McMahon put Shawn Michaels on color commentary for awhile there at the end of '94-'95 instead of Jerry Lawler? I know Savage left suddenly, but they had Lawler in that position before putting Michaels there instead. It seems kinda weird to have a guy that isn't injured and is on the cusp of the main event doing color on RAW every week. Should I chalk it up to Vince's crush on Michaels, or was there a reason Lawler was taken off color?

I like Konan. I like him even when he's shitty and terrible in WCW, and I like him even when he's shitty and terrible in AAA. I have a playlist on my phone with various wrestling music themes that have lyrics - Disco Inferno's theme, Paul Orndorff's "Wonderful" operatic theme, "Simply Ravishing" - and I sing along with them while I drive.

I just liked seeing Dean Ambrose, chaotic good character. He's like a violent, wet-haired wrestling version of Larry David on "Curb." He has a definite ethical construct that he lives by; it's just that he seems to be the only one who understands that construct.

I wish there were more people like Caley's dad attending wrestling shows these days. Harlem Heat is my favorite tag team ever, and also I really like Stevie Ray even though he was objectively terrible. Well, at wrestling, at least. He was actually pretty awesome on color.

That is nothing to be embarrassed about saying. He got rapidly better to the point that you can see him progress from Nitro to Nitro very clearly in '95-'96. Later on, he had something with the Berlyn character, what with the goth thing and the good-looking interpreter. I find watching Wright progress on replay is as fun as watching some of my favorite NXT guys and gals progress. I liked the Taker vs. Taker feud from 1994. I loved the Midnight Rider angle. I think New Jack in SMW is one of the five best things I have ever seen in wrestling, ever. I think Matt Bourne as evil Doink is one of the twenty-five best. I really enjoy late 2000/early 2001 WCW.

I can't imagine that they put the gold back on Cena at this point. They need the audience that is actually thinking about re-uping to do so, and pissing them off by having Cena beat Lesnar would be the worst way to achieve that goal. The problem is that they are booked into a corner; Cena can't get obliterated again. He almost can't even lose cleanly. However, Brock shouldn't be winning matches with outside interference or through screwy stuff either. Whoever said "submission match" might have a way out, though they have run the "passes out in a submission" thing with Swagger just now. I really thought that they might throw Sheamus in there and have him take a beating so bad, it makes him angry and hateful again because that dude badly needs some sort of catalyst for a heel turn.

I find it interesting that, whereas past championships had a prominent globe on them most of the time, this one does not, instead just having a giant WWE logo. That's some very subtle "WWE = the whole world when it comes to wrestling" conditioning there. Or I'm just trying to read too much into the design as if I were a first-year grad student desperately trying to analyze an image.

Oh absolutely, it is no mystery why Lesnar is champ and has the deal that he does. I just love the delicious irony, using the word "irony" in a more contemporary sense.

RVD beating Cesaro beating Jack Swagger the next night is weird. Does that win over Swagger mark the end of Cesaro jobbing without complaint so that they can feel comfortable pushing him or what? I love that while every talented dude gets the obligatory de-push to test their loyalty, the guy who started the trend because he just up and left ten years ago is the current champ on a sweet limited dates deal.

Also it IS true. A good portion of the NXT roster WILL be in game. The announcement is currently planned for NXT Takeover II (it is like NXT is taking over the WWE video game or something.....). Where did you read, hear, or find this? Every day, I get more stoked about initially saying "Fuck it" and pre-ordering 2K15 after the Sting commercial, but a good amount of the NXT roster being on the game would just take me over the top with glee and childlike excitement.

I agree, but a byproduct of a loss of blood means that guys are instead conveying violence and hatred (and violent hatred) through the type, variety, and creativity of plundah they can use on one another. It isn't as good as two guys punching each other bloody and trying to scrape out each other's eyes with shards of wood, but it's more humane than blading, so it's a trade-off that I personally prefer to live with in the end. Not that Ambrose/Rollins wasn't a very good ECW-style hardcore brawl because it was a really awesome example of that. Also, Mark Henry is the best and I want to be friends with him.

I'm glad people liked that Ambrose/Rollins match. I definitely am in the minority, and I accept that. The important thing is that most people enjoyed it. However, they made the stip useless in the first six minutes, had a terrible wandering brawl around ringside, and had the obvious "lumberjacks carry Rollins back so Ambrose can splash everybody" spot that I just really viscerally thought was stupid and fake, in the sense that it was obvious that it was coming and that normally, they would have just dragged him back and tossed him in otherwise instead of carrying him. People might say, "Well Ambrose is crazy and of course he'll ignore his own stip," but if the match is going to be one where Rollins wants to escape and Ambrose wants to hunt him down, they needed to make it a cage match. Have Rollins escape for the win, and blow it off with a cell match where the top is on and now Rollins has to stop running away and confront Ambrose. I believe in making the stipulation as meaningful as possible, and the lumberjacks finally bringing Rollins back wasn't enough to make up for the fact that somehow, these guys are fighting in the stands during a lumberjack match, which is stupid on its face. I'm also not a fan of Kane being a focal point at the end of the match, even for a bit. I know that it set off the part where everything breaks down into chaos (and I do appreciate Cesaro at least taking the chance to attack RVD again), but there's another spot that just felt contrived when I'd rather have Rollins going into his final plan for survival against Ambrose to be the focus. I mean, I like Goldust getting in Kane's grill and all, but this is a case where structurally, it made sense - I just didn't like the structure. I didn't like the structure of any of it. Most lumberjack matches are terrible, but I feel about this one kinda how I feel about that Diesel/Sid one that I'm figuratively shuddering to re-visit once I get to '95 WWF in a few days/weeks. Not that the matches were structurally similar in any way, but just as a "man, I really hated that" sort of thing. I love Ambrose and really like Rollins, so it was disappointing, but I think the cage/cell will serve them better, even without blood.