SirSmUgly

The wrestling is very strong to be sure, but after seeing a high amount of very good matches in the same style over the past two years, I sometimes have problems delineating between them. Don't get me wrong, I love the in-ring work on in-ring merits alone as much as anyone, but what separates 2014 WWE from, say, 1985 NWA is the fact that the weekly wrestling was good AND everyone had motivation besides, even if it was just "I want to be the champion really badly." Does Kofi want to be champ? I don't know. He has the belt and has these non-descript matches and loses it and marches on. Maybe he gets a few rematches before then, but there's no buildup of "I lost and I desperately want that belt back because I'm getting paid less and because you cheated to win it from me" or anything like that. As I have posted often, I'm watching WCW from the mid-90s. Take something like DDP's character arc which spanned four years. He was a scumbag with a hot valet that he took for granted until Johnny B. Badd beat him and took his title, his money, and his woman. DDP, at this nadir, goes off TV for a bit and then comes back re-focused. He gets the support of the crowd as he starts to find success again. Then, the nWo comes around, and DDP is now a changed man who appreciates the crowd's support, part of (not all) of the reason that he decides to stand against the nWo for the fans of WCW. This gets the crowd even more behind him, and eventually, he gets to the top and becomes champion...before reaching that goal turns him back into the petty, jealous, cheating shit that he was before. Meanwhile, here in 2014, we have a bunch of midcarders that interchangeably win and lose solid wrestling matches with one another and never change, ever, unless there is a jarring re-shaping of the character out of nowhere. Now, take the Shield. These are guys that are mercenaries and violent people, which they have been since they got here. They won a lot of six-man tags, and now they lose some, but that's about it. What are they doing with the Shield except putting them on autopilot until the inevitable Reigns turn? Align them with someone or give them a motivation to focus their attacks on someone. Hell, even if they just decide they want to be champs and annoy everyone by invoking the Freebird Rule because they like money, and titles equal money, that would be an improvement. WWE wrestling in this day is great to watch on YouTube. In isolation, there is great work there. But as a whole show, it's a bunch of guys having similar good matches over three hours for little discernible reason for the most part. This brings me to another point about the WWE's specific ring style, which is that watching the same style of match with the same "the faces are on fire, can they keep it up?!" breaks in every tag match and the same your-finisher/my-finisher kickouts in every "WWE epic" really makes every match the same special type of match at one point, which is to say "not so special at all." Even early-mid '90s WWF had cool wrestlers like Doink the Clown doing mat wrestling and stump pullers and guys like Hakushi doing random awesome flippy stuff. Going further down the road in the post-Attitude era, why was Tajiri so over? Well, he has incredible charisma, but also, he did visually interesting stuff like the mist and the Tarantula and didn't wrestle like Regal, who didn't wrestle like Austin, who didn't wrestle like Jericho. Now, we have guys who don't get to show any real personality wrestling the same segmented WWE-style match on like eight hours of television a week. When FSW or other people say that this is boring, I totally get it because I feel the same way, even though I love great in-ring action as much as anyone. This is just my thought on it, and anyone who disagrees and really focuses on the in-ring action, I absolutely do get where you are coming from.

Big E is funny as hell in a quirky way. Well, off television. Which leads me to what I think the problem is. If Big E is charismatic when he does his own thing on social media, but is boring as shit when doing whatever the WWE's writing team asks him to do, it indicates that the problem with being boring (which FSW is dead on about) is not really on the wrestlers. Well, most of them.

Wade Barrett is great at being a smarmy asshole.

Where things really started to go cattywampus with the nWo angle is when Savage inexplicably turned heel in early 1997. They had a perfect angle to end the nWo forming before this happened: Sting and Savage were hanging out together with Savage having finally cracked after all the Flair stuff and now Hogan turning on him too. At the same time, DDP was being harassed by Hall and Nash for not going nWo and Eddie was in a feud with Syxx over the U.S. Championship. Both these guys were over and would have been cemented by getting a rub from fighting alongside Savage and Sting. You have those four guys come together to ultimately end the nWo by defeating all the major members. Maybe add the Steiners, who were unfairly stripped of the tag championships, in there along with them (or Luger/Giant, as they were also unfairly stripped of those titles). It ends the nWo story definitively and elevates DDP and Eddie Guerrero at the same time as new main event players. Furthermore, this is a logical group of people that had reason to come together and finally end the nWo. So, yeah, sorry for the fantasy booking, but I'm going through 1997 WCW right now, and it's pretty frustrating how logical an ending to the nWo story Bischoff set up for and then failed to actually book.

I'll have to find the promo, but he went beyond that to call Regal gay for calling people sunshine and insult him for drinking his tea in a feminine way and not being a man, saying "we don't breed American men that way". I just saw it a couple months ago and pretty vividly remember it. It wasn't the contract-signing, where he does just ask Regal not to call him sunshine, but it was the promo Sting cut on the night of the match. I could be wrong/oversensitive, but I remember thinking it was pretty ugly when I saw it.

My favorite work from Tenta is as one-half of the Natural Disasters. They were such an awesome fat-dudes tag team and are the best thing about that early-'90s WWF tag team scene, to be honest. Is his early work in AJPW worth seeking out in your opinion? If I was to watch one or two matches of his from that company, what might you suggest?

Sting and John Tenta (as The Shark) also had a really fun three-minute match on Nitro, too. Sting is one of those guys who I love, but beyond Ric Flair and Vader, I don't remember many of his matches specifically as must-see matches. On the other hand, you were pretty much never going to get a stinker out of him or even a boring match. He would always do something really enjoyable and get the crowd into it. Sting had a fun run of matches before he was taken off TV to get Crow/Sting over. I forget the PPV in early '96 it was on, but he had an underappreciated match with Steven Regal (that is only marred by an embarrassing homophobic promo he cut before the match, so feel free to skip that part).

True, RandomAct. There were some good Nitro matches between the cruisers, however. Heck, the first Nitro kicked off with Liger/Pillman. I would be remiss if I did not mention the "Luger is a heel and everyone knows it except for Sting" and Pillman/Horsemen vs. Sullivan/DoD quasi-feud that Benoit got slotted into within the Pillman role once the latter left for the WWF. Those were both hot angles looking back at those shows, and I liked how everything was interconnected. Flair was busy dicking with Savage, but he also was dicking with Sting while at the same time trying to hold a Horsemen/DoD alliance together to take down Hulk Hogan. Sting was backing Luger as a changed man and was tag champs with him, but Luger was running with Jimmy Hart as manager right after Hart turned on Hogan and joined the DoD. Was Luger fooling Sting (probably)? Was Sting going to get turned to the DoD with Luger? Was Luger just dumb as a sack of rocks and making bad choices? Savage and Flair were at one another's throats, but Savage was also asked by Hogan for help against the DoD. The faces didn't know whether they could trust one another and there was some in-fighting, but the same was true of the heel alliance. It made for some damn fine pro-wrestling drama. Add to that the juniors and some good undercard wrestlers doing their own thing like Alex Wright, Badd, DDP, Paul Orndorff getting a nice little push before he got hurt [see Badd/Orndorff on the 9/18/95 Nitro for a pretty nice TV match]. Plus the tag ranks were great because the Steiners and Road Warriors both came back around that time. I like bomb-throwing tag teams beating the shit out of each other with dangerous moves, so Steiners/Road Warriors/Harlem Heat/Public Enemy was basically pure joy to me. Some of this stuff happened in '95, so '94 and the first part of '95 did have some serious problems, but by mid-to-late '95, there is good stuff all over the weekly shows. Nitro in particular really saw a step up in game of both in-ring action and entertaining booking. It's total hindsight, but watching that stuff again, I was really sad that some of the ongoing angles got dropped abruptly (and others pushed to the side) for the all-encompassing nWo angle. I know that's just because the nWo thing didn't turn out very well in the end, but the pacing and development of the shows beforehand were hitting such a stride by early 1996.

I hate to sound stereotypical, but everything involving Hogan sucked. The rest of it was pretty entertaining. Flair/Savage was definitely great overall, but whoever said Johnny B. Badd was dreadful is wrong. That dude was pretty good, and Badd/DDP was a really fun feud with a bunch of good matches. As for DDP, one of the pleasures of watching WCW in the mid-'90s is watching DDP get better with each match and start getting himself over with the crowd organically. Once Nitro hit in September of '95, they started working Malenko, Rey, Eddie, etc. into the shows so that the undercard gets really fun in a hurry, too. Lots more good matches than bad. It's just that the bad was comically bad (Hogan vs. Dungeon of Doom being the prime example).

Like I said, he came out of the Konnan lawsuit looking pretty despicable and practically proud of his warped view of the world. If you have sources, would you mind helping me source this? I knew of the lawsuit, but I am not able to find any transcripts or summaries of what was said in deposition/at trial online. I would just love to read it and research more about the topic.

One of my fondest WCW memories was her against some fat sexist. Mainly because I watched it when my friend's grandmother. My friend refused to give a shit about the show, but her grandmother wanted to order the PPV but didn't want to watch it alone. So, I volunteered. The visual of an 79 year old black woman jumping out of a rocking chair to yell "THAT FAT BASTARD CHEATED! THAT HONKY! I OUTTA WHOOP HIS ASS MYSELF!" while her dog, a couple of kids under the age of 10, and the cat stared at her in shock was worth it. Those are moments I miss in wrestling. That is why in 2013, I still rave about the Wade Barrett Nexus. My own grandmother had a similar reaction to Wade antagonizing Cena. I miss it and I miss her. This reminds me of my grandma, who is from the south and probably had ingrained social reasons for Harlem Heat being her favorite wrestlers to watch because "they're just two big, bad black dudes that take care of business." This also will explain why I may seem irrationally high on Booker T or Harlem Heat if they ever come up in conversation in the future. I'm a fan from watching WCWSN with my grandma. She is the best.

I absolutely agree with this. In the end, no one should have a long control segment where they beat down a guy like Brock, Goldberg, Henry, or monsters like that while the monster is selling a beating. It makes no sense. The reason these guys got over in the first place is that everyone from job guys to main eventers spent a lot of time eating their offense and desperately trying to find a way to survive. There is no need to deviate from that formula unless two monsters are wrestling one another.

Re: Brock Lesnar, the bloom was off the rose no matter what because he had lost too much by the time he wrestled Punk. Punk doing the typical babyface comeback that is in every WWE match isn't the problem so much as WWE almost never books a heel monster properly anyway. Who is the last heel monster to shrug off the typical babyface comeback and win with any regularity? Mark Henry? Before then, who was it? This is a serious question. WWE doesn't get that not every heel needs to stooge for a bunch of babyface finishing-run offense. Furthermore, if I'm bringing back Brock Lesnar, he's going over Cena and HHH so that whoever actually beats him gets something out of it. Cena beating him out of the gate sort of killed that, though the way Cena did it made the damage minimal. Those HHH matches, even the one Brock won, finished him off, though. I hate to mindlessly hate on HHH, but HHH control segments just suck the life out of a match and end up with him beating down guys like Brock and Goldberg for minutes on end whom should instead be shrugging off punishment and throwing attempted killshots on a regular basis. Re: The Cena/Lesnar match, I agree with people that in a vacuum, that match was an awesome "plucky babyface overcomes monster's onslaught." In fact, I think Cena got in less meaningful babyface offense in that win than Punk did in his loss to Lesnar. In terms of telling a story, however, they really screwed up months of booking where Cena gets destroyed, gets a break until Summerslam or so, then comes back and fights his way back toward the title, including a win in a rematch over Brock and then the win over The Rock. Frankly, I would have put Cena over in the first matchup with The Rock in the first place, but that gets into another topic altogether and fantasy booking and such.

As I recall, he worked a Ludvig Borga-like "foreign heel disgusted with American poverty and neglect of the environment" sort of deal on the indies.

I don't know how I would order everything after it, but my favorite WWE match of the year is the Cena/Henry title match. I'm going to do a little writeup to explore why I feel that way just off the top of my head. To be honest, I also need to watch it again because when I first saw it, I was far too busy rooting for Mark Henry and reacting like it was an actual fight: "Watch out for the trip into the STF! WATCH THE TRIP!" I have problems, I guess is what I'm admitting. John Cena © vs. Mark Henry, WWE Championship Match, Money in the Bank 2013 First of all, it feels weird that a former whipping boy like Mark Henry got such a pop coming out first. I know that it is in large part because Henry has improved into being one of the best superheavyweight workers ever and in large part because of the anti-Cena part of the crowd, but it's still weird. Anyway, Henry comes down looking utterly pissed off and focused, which is only second to Henry coming down smiling because he is going to ruin someone's life in a few seconds. Cena coming out with his arms spread and sarcastically remarking "The City of Brotherly Love!" to the camera was genuinely funny too. Then, Cena gets in the ring and Mark Henry talks shit before being backed off by the ref while Cena stares with what could be described as moderate uncertainty, high motivation. So, I already love this match before the bell because everyone looks like they're ready to kill to be champion. Cena wants to keep the pace up, stick and move, and Henry wants to slow it down, something emphasized by Cena trying to start the match running and getting planted with a knee and a headbutt. Cole helpfully points out this idea on commentary. Cena is bumping and selling like a pro as Henry does basic, cool superheavyweight offense with big headbutts and a running splash in the corner. They go outside kinda early, but Henry front suplexes Cena across the stairs, which was a great spot, so it's okay. Cole trying to sell Henry wanting to destroy Cena early and put this thing away helped put the move outside in context. It also helps that Henry is going for pins off of the more hard-hitting spots. Anyway, I could watch Henry in control against a good bumper and seller all day. Running splash against the ropes got another audible gasp from the crowd, and Henry again goes for a pin off of it. Cole again emphasizes that Henry knows that Cena will come back on you if you let him in response to Henry cursing once Cena kicks out. I guess they are moving through some of this stuff pretty quickly, but it all fits together on commentary and in what Henry is doing during his control period here to start the match. Henry fends off the first Cena flurry of the night and hits a giant swing, and the crowd stops with the "Cena Sucks!" chant to chant for Mark Henry because Mark Henry is basically awesomeness personified. Giant swing against the barricade is a sweet spot, though Cesaro has done it better. Cena tries another flurry but gets reversed on a slam where Henry just falls on him. Cena finally gets through by using his speed and agility rather than just relying on strength, and he nicely gets rewarded for doing so by knocking Henry off his feet, but when he goes back to trying pure strength, Henry reverses the AA. I like that the story of this match is "Cena always overpowers other people, but he cannot play the strength game he normally does here, or he will lose." Cena tries brute strength and gets clubbed down. Cena uses speed to counter and then attack (such as off the shoulderblock after ducking a clothesline and turning Henry around or off a tornado DDT counter) and gets rewarded. Cena finally gets Henry down long enough for an AA which is rightfully treated as amazing, but pure strength is not beating Henry, as has been established, and Henry kicks out at two. Cena overacts a smidge as he looks confused, then hopeful that maybe the ref fucked up and it was actually a three count, but it's awesome because here is where Cena really gets it, story-wise, that strength won't get him through this match and he has to use speed, agility, and brains to tie Henry up somehow. Right after this, he goes up top for a crossbody and gets countered into a WSS, but he's still John Cena, dammit! and he has the resiliency to kick out at two. Even if his strength game isn't working tonight, Cena still has heart; you can't club that out of him. Henry, meanwhile, is losing composure here. With each two count earlier in the match, he got visibly and audibly frustrated, and after only getting two on a WSS, he loses it and rips the cover off of a turnbuckle. Then he decides that this won't be enough and he needs a couple of chairs as well. This distracts the ref, who tosses the chairs out. Meanwhile, Henry rips off another cover in the corner, but Cena drives his head into the corner, having had time to regroup since Henry lost focus, and follows up with a quick STF attempt. Again, this is an awesome sequence to me precisely because Henry's inability to put Cena away takes Henry off his game. He was focused before, stalking Cena and stuffing Cena's attempts to get any offense going for the most part by staying on top of him. At this point, however, his patience has eroded, giving Cena an opening. Cena, for his part, moves with speed and purpose whenever he gets an opening, really driving home that he needs to be purposeful and stay on top of Mark Henry to win this thing. Also, as a nice note, good guy Cena won't break and takes most of the five count to let go of the STF - even Cena isn't above bending the rules to beat a monster like this. The ending run, I remember not being as big on, but it makes more sense watching it again. At this point, Henry has abandoned his "kill him with power" gameplan and has decided that cheating is the best method. A low blow doesn't work, but it gives Henry a chance to try for another WSS, and Cena uses speed and agility, not power, to counter and get the winning STF. Cena came into this match and wrestled it like a dude that had to find something to rely on other than his typical power game, eventually figuring out what he needed to do over the course of the match to survive. Henry came into this match as a guy with a plan to use his awesome power to win, but he simply did not account for Cena's heart, and that caused him to deviate from a gameplan that was working and give Cena enough openings to finally beat him. Awesome story here where you could see the strategy for both guys and how it evolved over the match just like a real fight. Plus this match was mostly Henry in control on offense, which meant a) Henry with his awesome strong man offense, shit talking, and stalking of Cena like a lion stalking an antelope and B) Cena selling and bumping quite awesomely. I would not call it perfect, and I'm sure people might pick nits about Cena not fully hitting the DDT counter or his STF or what-have-you, but as a story and a match with a bunch of awesome spots, this thing works so well. Definitely, I would say it is the best WWE match this year in my view. It also makes me want to see a Cesaro/Henry feud where they do crazy strongman spots to one another all the time. EDIT: This was ridiculously long. Sorry about that. I need an editor.

I don't know how people feel about Johnny B. Badd, but I really enjoyed the hell out of his WCW stuff. He did lots of fun stuff with Austin, with DDP, etc. I am not saying he's amazing, but he is a whole lot of fun. Anyway, here's a ridiculous tuxedo match between Badd and Austin on Worldwide just because. (And thanks to the person that showed me how to embed!)

I would like to see how Okada and Tanahashi do in this tournament, so definitely reserve at least a few spots for non-U.S. workers. Maybe you could just take the top two or three guys from some of the major international promotions like NJPW and AAA? Also: Respectfully, I would like to say that I disagree with this because, when I was lurking here, I personally used March Madness to see everything that I did not otherwise see. People would bring up guys from CHIKARA and CMLL that I had not seen and post some videos, and it really expanded my viewpoint of modern wrestling. My favorite thing about this exercise is really that I get to learn about wrestlers that I don't know from you guys. For example, the MM tourney is responsible for my enjoyment of Vordell Walker somehow, even though I don't remember him actually being in the tournament. Someone brought him up and posted videos, however, and it was fantastic. It is really fun to get to evaluate guys that you have not seen up against the guys that you are familiar with, which splitting up the tournament into multiple brackets would take away. That is why I was so happy to get a chance to post here and maybe contribute in my own small way; you all have given me quite a lot to watch and consider and think about when I watch wrestling, and MM is a big part of that.

There are some smart writers there, but too many guys try too hard. Wesley Morris won a Pulitzer and it absolutely ruined his writing. Andy Greenwald is a guy with some bright ideas clouded in some truly awful metaphor and essay structure. These writers remind me of when I went to grad school and started writing impenetrably and in the language of convoluted bullshit to match my setting. Robert Mays is the tits, though. I love the NFL Podcast he does with Bill Barnwell, even if Barnwell is somehow kind of grating. Anyway, Shoemaker is fucking terrible. Getting the Grantland job was the worst thing for him. Dead Wrestler of the Week was awesome, but now he incorrectly uses the label of "postmodernism" on everything and writes the worst kind of wrestling-opinion wankery. He's like Geno Mrosko with a dictionary, and I know that deep down inside, he is better than that, dammit.

I'm too stupid to know how to embed video, so I'll link to the first of my favorite series of Worldwide matches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlQFDw5vA2k When I was a kid in the '90s, I got to stay up late on Saturday nights and watch American Gladiators and WCW Worldwide (which showed back to back on the channel that syndicated them) since I got good grades. In a house with lots of people, I would be the only one up. It was kind of my time to be awake and enjoy myself. Anyway, I saw a ton of stuff that I vividly remember and love. However, to start, I would have to say that my absolute favorite is Regal/Flair in the Marquis of Queensbury Rules matches. This was the first time that I had ever seen a version of the British rounds system. I still probably irrationally love these matches for more than they are because they were my first foray into that style of wrestling, and I loved it so much. I ended up tracking these matches down again in 2006 or 2007 on YouTube, and while I knew of World of Sport and UK wrestling, I had never even scratched the surface on them. Anyway, these videos led me to videos of Marty Jones and Jim Breaks and all those guys who are totally awesome. So WCW Worldwide was an intro to WoS for me, which I think at least partially explains why Worldwide was so awesome.

I'm watching Dean Malenko and Rey Misterio kill one another on the Nitro from 12/31/96 right now. I would like to make the case that Malenko was one of WCW's MVPs for 1996-1997. Someone else here mentioned that he was sort of the bridge between the typical U.S. wrestling viewer and cruisers from Mexico/juniors from Japan, and not only do I love and agree with that argument, but the clash of styles always makes for an interesting match. I like the current WWE style, but I miss two guys with totally different styles mixing it up, and Malenko might be the last great example of a guy who excelled at that sort of "clash of styles" wrestling in the Big Two companies. What do you all think is the best Malenko match of that '96-97 period? What about the best cruiserweight match overall during that time period? I'm pretty partial to the Malenko/Misterio Havoc '96 match, and of course Eddie/Rey from Havoc '97 is up there too. Also, I find that people over-exaggerate DDP getting a push because he was close to Eric Bischoff. DDP got himself over through that whole "lost everything to Johnny B. Badd" storyline and the fans already gave a shit about him before he got into it with Hall/Nash/the nWo. He was never overpushed relative to how the crowd received him. One final note: Is it a guilty pleasure to really enjoy '95 - '97 Lex Luger? His whole thing where it was OBVIOUS that he was a dick, but Sting couldn't see it was great, and he had solid matches on PPV with The Giant and some good tag matches as part of that team with Sting. Plus he has so many randomly awesome moments like winning the title on Nitro in '97 and racking Roadblock after three tries on a random Nitro in '96 (I think). I like Lex Luger more than probably 95% of the internet population anyway, though, so it could just be me on that one.

It was awesome in that match that Warrior kicked out, and I say that as a massive Savage fan. Five elbows can't go against the Warrior's gods, you silly mortal! That whole match/angle is my favorite WM match/angle ever. I am a sucker for any match/angle that gets people in the crowd to show genuine emotion. This is why I would categorize that MVP/Matt Hardy feud from like eight or nine years ago as one of the most underrated feuds in WWE history.

Five or six guest star spots for Big Show in that Bible miniseries?to the disappointment of DVDVR board posters lobbying for Mark Henry to be in a History Channel miniseriesWonder what kinda missile dropkick that Jesus feller has, in his moveset? Don't know, but the crooked moneylenders of the time say he throws a sweet right hand.

I wonder how much closer. Certainly not the billion/multi-billion dollar range of the NFL/NBA/MLB contracts. I know NBC paid 250M for Premier League rights in the U.S. If WWE got that much from someone, I would be impressed. That would also be a significant increase. If I had to guess, I think they will max out around 150M for TV rights. The stigma about the intelligence and income level of wrestling fans still probably exists to advertisers no matter how much WWE pushes that they are marketing to middle-income families. They made $168.4M in 2013 (source:http://www.voicesofwrestling.com/2013/12/10/can-we-predict-wwe-tv-rights-fees-for-2015/), so $250M is more likely considering they get better ratings than Premier League does. Great link, man. Thanks for the info. I guess 250M is a nice target for WWE, then. I would love to be in the room when Vince McMahon starts out by asking NBC/Universal or Viacom for a billion dollars in TV rights, though.

I wonder how much closer. Certainly not the billion/multi-billion dollar range of the NFL/NBA/MLB contracts. I know NBC paid 250M for Premier League rights in the U.S. If WWE got that much from someone, I would be impressed. That would also be a significant increase. If I had to guess, I think they will max out around 150M for TV rights. The stigma about the intelligence and income level of wrestling fans still probably exists to advertisers no matter how much WWE pushes that they are marketing to middle-income families.

Shawn Michaels is pretty awesome. He saved that Punk segment from being tiresome. I think the Mark Henry/Big E tag team should have the backstory of Big E being Mizzark's long-lost son. I want vignettes where they play catch together and have contests to see how far they can throw Smart Cars and break the bells on the strength games at various county fairs to make up for lost time.