SirSmUgly

I suspect many of us will like WWE Davey alot more than we like indy Davey. If anyone could ever benefit from being handcuffed, it's him. At worst, he turns out like Kurt Angle circa-2005 in the ring, which will get over with the crowd. There are worse fates and worse wrestlers.

Thanks for the correction. I have had this in my Netflix queue for months now. I suppose I should watch it, but I actually saw all those Nitros up to mid-1997 a little while ago, so I haven't had the desire to see it again in doc form.

I wonder what everyone thinks of Magnum T.A. as a worker and talker. I ask this because I have been watching quite a bit of him on weekly shows from 85-87, and I totally love this dude. I am not able to articulate what I like about him in the ring. Maybe it's just that he has that no nonsense, blue collar shitkicker sort of thing going on. When he talks, though, man, he sounds like a shining beacon of justice. Someone mentioned, in an earlier conversation, that one of their favorite babyface reactions was Magnum standing over a bloody, begging Tully after the I Quit match ready to beat him senseless before walking off and leaving a sniveling Tully to think about his actions over the past few months. That sort of encapsulates it for me. I would love to have a beer with a guy like this and talk about honesty, justice, and college football. And I say this as a black dude from the PNW. Somehow, he just connects with me in a way that most wrestlers in this vein do not. I would love to see T.A. in current WWE. Cena and T.A. against the Authority would be awesome. Lex Luger?

To be fair, (mostly inconsequential) people troll other inconsequential people all the time on the internet, so I don't know if that really proves anything.

Watching Baby Doll be forced to be Dusty Rhodes' valet for thirty days makes me think: How awesome would it be if Daniel Bryan beat Triple H in a "winner gets the other person's wife/fiance as a valet for thirty days" stipulation? I want to see Stephanie trying to cut logs with an axe in the middle of the forest somewhere and then making her escape by stealing DB's Prius. "Stephanie, this isn't how you make steel cut oatmeal with organic banana slices. Do it again."

Re: Barrett, I honestly always thought that he should steal as directly from Dudley in Street Fighter 3 as he possibly could - take most of the moveset, maybe do a rising European uppercut as a finisher. Heck, even steal some taunts from that character. Every time he beats a dude, he throws a single rose on him and calls him "gutter trash."

I can only offer my perspective. What I have seen of Davey Richards in the ring reminds me of Benoit on steroids. Look, I love Daniel Bryan, but I have a hard time watching him do some of the stuff he does in the ring. Davey Richards is almost impossible for me to watch considering his style and the pace at which he wrestles that style. I'm not against stiff wrestling - I spent thirty minutes last week watching Kevin Sullivan jobber squashes on DailyMotion - but something about Richards' style does bother me. Gonzales might have a good point about it being a bit too reminiscent of Benoit, at least for me. Beyond that, I'm just not a fan of workrate-style matches. I like the occasional match like this, but those are few and far between for me, and they typically don't age well. For example, I enjoyed that Benoit/Angle match at the 2003 Royal Rumble the first couple of times around, and at the time it happened, it stood out as a really go-go-go match for someone like me that doesn't watch lots of Japan or workrate-style indies. But it sort of wears off after awhile as overkill for me. I tried watching some Tanahashi matches from the past couple of years after reading lots of stuff about how awesome a worker he is, and I think that he's really great at the style he wrestles, but it isn't for me.

Also, Hogan was TOTALLY macking on Savage's woman. I thought so when I was five, and I still think so now. He was way out of line. If Hulk wanted Liz, he would have taken her. Now Bill Apter put across the theory that Hogan was using Liz to provoke Savage into attacking him. So when Hogan took his title back, he could claim self defense. Even worse if Apter was right, then! I could forgive Hogan for having a lapse in moral judgment because he was mesmerized by Miss Elizabeth's wholesome beauty. However, driving a wedge between a couple just to make it look like he isn't the aggressor and so that he can get a shot at the belt? For shame if that is true! This sounds like the type of thing that a man who showed poor sportsmanship at the end of the 1992 Royal Rumble and that joined the Outsiders to rip apart WCW would do, however. You would think that Hogan would at least just ask Savage for a shot at the belt straight up since they were friends, but then again, we see how he reacted when Andre the Giant did the same thing to him. Shameful.

Also, Hogan was TOTALLY macking on Savage's woman. I thought so when I was five, and I still think so now. He was way out of line.

And it being Vince Russo, Nikki Bella will get physically attacked by a male wrestler, sometimes unprovoked, once a week. Then eventually her implied rapist stalker will piledrive her in the ring to a huge pop, and I'll die a little inside. Actually, no one type his name a third time because I hear that if you do that, he pops up on your favorite wrestling show and starts wreaking havoc Beetlejuice-style

Man, Cena is so good at the pro wrestling.

I disagree a bit, actually. Hogan's WWE return in 2002 was the best he ever was. His old vet character made his matches amazing. He was worn down and old, and you could physically beat him down and do things like get him to tap out now where that was completely unheard of when he was in his prime. However, he was still Hulk Hogan, and if you weren't careful, 47-year-old Hogan would channel up 30-year-old Hogan and then it was all HULK UP, FINGER WAG, YOOOUUUUUU, BIG BOOT, LEGDROP and it would be like eight-year-old me watching him come back against some monster of the month all over again. It was glorious. He was like an old QB with a dying arm and lessening mobility that has one more four-hundred-yard, five TD game somewhere inside him for the prime-time audience at home. It was great. I actually wanted to see him recapture that greatness, if only for the five minutes that it would take for him to sneak out a victory.

I typically enjoy Hogan, but I have to comment on Brian Fowler's post and state that 1994-95 Hogan is downright AWFUL. He just kills everything that he's involved in. At one point, he's gone from TV in some sort of worked suspension, and the shows that are headed up by Savage trying to end Flair as a living being and Luger and Sting having their "will he turn or won't he" angle, with The Giant and Dungeon of Doom sprinkled in there are just AMAZING. Like, astoundingly good, fast-paced television. Then Hogan comes back and is annoying and shitty doing his '80s schtick, taking up too much time and heat from a bunch of performers that were gold otherwise.

And the first ten thousand of those reasons are that glorious mullet. I think the Eaton/Lane/Cornette version of MX is my favorite. Their feud with The Fantastics ----> short feud with Arn and Tully ------> murder at the hands of the newly-turned Road Warriors is one of my favorite things that I have ever seen out of one team. They were just so awesome and this is my favorite Cornette work on the mic ever.

You know what random thing I miss about WWF/E wrestling? That giant, partitioned off video board that they used to use pre-Titantron. I'm watching a random Superstars from 1992, and I love how they would zoom in on a still-shot from the match that just ended as Vince talked us to another segment of the show (this time it was Fatu trying to eat a dude's face after hitting him with an awesome splash). Also, I want more cutaway segments to Josh Matthews in the "control center" to have wrestlers hype house shows by cutting those little sixty-second interviews in front of their green-screened logos. Watching now, it's amazing to see how the really good talkers get their point across in just sixty-seconds. My respect for Ric Flair's talking ability just somehow went even higher than it already was. EDIT: And I know there's a thread for this now, but I just had to mention here: Marty Jannetty just used a diving fistdrop as his finish. Quick, somebody in current WWE steal that!

Yeah, he does. Really and why is that? "NOT ENOUGH FLIPZZZ" Seriously outside of the Daniel Bryan, Punk, and Rey Mysterio matches can anyone name another really good to great Henry match? I like Henry as a character, but when it's time to deliver in big matches he tends to fail a lot. You didn't like the Henry match against Cena earlier this year, the Henry/Orton series from a couple years ago, or Henry's work against Matt Hardy on ECW? That's just off the top of my head. Honestly, I watched the Undertaker WM streak DVD on Netflix a few months back, and I found Henry/Taker to be the best Taker WM match of like the last decade, too. If you're not into super-heavyweights, you're just not. I totally understand. Personally, I only watch WWE for Cena, Henry, Bryan, and Cesaro at this point. They are the only four guys that either a) kill it in big matches every time or do amazing spots that I want to see or c) both.

Giant Haystacks never bumped like Mark Henry. I've seen Henry take guardrails, barriers, and tables apart. He's an awesome big bumper for such a big guy, too. It seems like a huge thing when he actually does it.

I love heel Mark Henry in the ring. He's always looming, always stalking you in order to rip you apart, something like Jaws except instead of that "dun-nun" music, there's just a stream of shit-talking to warn you that he's coming. Face Mark Henry is fun for when he comes out smiling at the thought of murdering the cowardly heel in the ring. Then he murders the cowardly heel in the ring. What isn't fun about that?

Cageside Seats has been pretty brutal since they got the new guy Mrosko or whatever running the site. Not to be too mean or anything, but the quality of articles started to go down then along with the quality of comments. You mean that ass-clown who banned me for calling him out for putting Impact spoilers above the cut on the main page? Yeah, that sounds like something he would do, from what I have seen. I don't really read there anymore because he seems to take suggestions poorly and lashes out like your typical message board poster, which is probably one of a handful of signs that he's not the guy for the job. SB Nation is a weird beast. Some sites are fantastic posting from guys that are doing more-than-blog level work, and there are other sites that are just above some dude's Angelfire fan page from 1998. I don't really know what their goal is over there - fan-run sites or high-level analysis and journalism from bloggers that are reporters/analysts first and fans second.

Cageside Seats has been pretty brutal since they got the new guy Mrosko or whatever running the site. Not to be too mean or anything, but the quality of articles started to go down then along with the quality of comments.

I want the Slingshot Suplex and Flair delayed vertical to come back. I second the slingshot suplex, which I still think is awesome, and I wonder why more wrestlers just don't rip off the Horsemen in terms of cool signature moves. HHH is a suit and not a full-time wrestler anymore, so someone else should take Arn Anderson's spinebuster as his own as well. Also, Arn might have my favorite DDT ever. I would also buy the Savage-style double-axehandle as a finish. Just adjust it so that you really clubber the guy as you come down instead of just making contact.

Tito Santana did a spot a couple times where his opponent would give him an atomic drop, but he would "block" it somehow and turn it into a figure-four. Rick Rude did the best atomic drop sell, IMO. Speaking of Rick Rude, somebody needs to do a neckbreaker as a finisher and have the announcers sell it as death because that worked on me big time when I was a kid, and when I go back and watch late '80s WWF/early '90s WCW, it still works on me. Also, and unrelated to the topic, Rick Rude is the absolute BEST. EDIT: Oops, didn't see this before I posted. This person is sooooo right though.

For under-used moves, I sort of like ring-assisted moves as long as they aren't too contrived. I remember being a kid and totally buying the Stun Gun getting an insta-three, but maybe that's because I have a bit of a choking/suffocating phobia. Still, someone on weekly TV should be using the Stun Gun as a finisher.

Wait, can we also count the Billy and Chuck theme here and make it five? I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but "YOUUUUU LOOOOK SOOOOOO... GOOD TO ME" was almost like hearing the glass break at one point. It was an automatic insta-pop from me.

Poor Jindrak got a good push as part of the NBT in WCW, but he ended up getting overshadowed by his regular tag partner O'Haire doing a senton bomb, which actually was kind of cool to see from a bigger guy. Also he was overshadowed by Above Average Mike Sanders, who was a hell of a shit-talker and pretty entertaining in the ring, too. Going back to finishers, I love simple finishers that are just done with impact, like lariatoooos and running powerslams. I'd love to see Big E do a running powerslam if he just buries the dude on it.