SirSmUgly

On Episode 89 of RAW, Lawler comes out for The King's Court and starts insulting the crowd. Lawler says to a woman in the audience, "Look at this girl. You look like you fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down." The camera cuts to the woman just in time to show her, utterly pissed off, mouth clearly and distinctly "YOU CAN JUST GO FUCK YOURSELF, DUDE." I laughed so much.

It's really too bad they shot their wad with Lesnar killing Mark Henry because they could have saved Henry's return for a one-shot against Lesnar at NOC. Henry is maybe the only other guy that the crowd accepts as a killer if he's portrayed that way.

I hate to be Mr. Negativity, but this show was tough to sit through. Nothing was actively bad except as for that Ambrose/Rollins mess, but it just wasn't very good. Every match was the same - meaningless stuff to open, meaningless stuff in the middle, finisher battle at the end - except for Cena/Lesnar because Cena was up for taking a sheer beating. Plus when Lesnar hit that early F-5 and even after Cena kicked out at two, both Lesnar and Heyman grinned knowingly that it was a harbinger for things to come, that was great. Ambrose/Rollins made the stipulation for the match meaningless about six minutes in, had some shitty crowd brawling and wandering around ringside, and then had that terrible spot where Ambrose dove on Rollins while the latter was being carried back by the lumberjacks which was so lame and clearly set up that it took me totally out of the match. Obviously, it worked with the live crowd, so obviously "actively bad" is a more obviously subjective judgment than it would be for many other matches, but I really hated it. The best performer on this show was Stephanie McMahon, who is such an over-the-top evil villain. She has been amazing for months and months now. I love her faces she was making while on offense and in holds tonight.

Mabel and Bob Backlund were the stars of 1994's Survivor Series, now that I've finished it. I haven't watched it in years (since the days of VHS), but Mabel doing a Cactus clothesline, a second-rope cross-body splash, and taking a press slam off the top rope are all basically insane. When he went out of the Guts and Glory/Money Inc. match, everything got pretty lame. Also, Bob Backlund's infamous "I FEEL LIKE GOD" promo is on this. It's a top-ten promo in the history of promo watching for me.

Sasha Banks is amazing. I look forward to seeing her every week. She's not perfect or anything yet, but she is going to be really, really, REALLY good. She threw that second double-knee strike in the corner so hard that it looked like Bayley threw a pretty hard lariat in response. That match had a couple of issues, but it rocked. I love that the early pinfall attempts and reversals foreshadowed Bayley getting a pin off of a submission reversal in the end. To put on my total uncritical fan hat here, The Vaudevillains and Tyler Breeze had better win the Tag Team and NXT Championships respectively in the next few months, or I riot.

The Lawler/Doink feud in 1994 was the pits, but the crowd in San Antonio was eating up the four-on-four Doink/clown little people vs. Jerry/royalty little people match during Survivor Series at various points.

Sadly, this is your Wrestlemania 31 main event. Accept it folks, either Super Cena or "The Roman Empire" is the future. I think it's more likely that Roman cools off and Bryan's arms and shoulders begin working right again just in time for Bryan to take the gold off Lesnar at that time. I think there is a less than 1% chance that Cena wins on Sunday, but I have been completely wrong before.

This is a ridiculous argument. You don't criticize a promotion for booking their hottest act into a position to be successful. You criticize the promotion for not having booked their second- and third- and fourth-hottest acts to be in a position to take that first guy's place in case of injury. If WWE books Cesaro strong and goes through with a full face turn at WM, for example, maybe they have a better option than this Roman Reigns face push. Re: The Shield shouldn't have crushed Evolution as quickly, that's also ridiculous. The Shield was hotter than ever after they mowed down all the old dudes. There are more than two options here. One might be a call-up of guys in developmental that could feud with the Shield (this might have been a good time to add some other dude to The Ascension and see what you could get out of a trios team against the Shield). Another might be not to break them up and to let them pursue individual goals while still teaming up to beat down any threats. They were so incredibly over as faces after dispatching of Evolution, so of course they were broken up.

Ambrose is the lone-wolf crazy guy who gets beaten to a pulp, but keeps coming back for more. He's Austin-lite. What they really need to do is have Rollins use the full power of the Authority against him. Ambrose having to be taken down by five guys at once and still trying to get at Rollins with his last conscious breath for the next few months will work. When the Rollins feud is over, make Kane useful by having Ambrose try to take him out for a few months, going one-on-three, four, five, etc. with regularity. Just like Austin fighting the whole Hart Foundation.

I think part of what Caley is saying has merit; some dudes just hate on anyone who becomes popular. However, I think the bigger issue is how inorganic this push feels. For a counter-example, people don't hate Bryan because he is popular, but part of that is that at some point, almost everyone in the audience - men, women, kids, families, groups of single dudes - decided that they really were going to believe in him and want to see him win. With Roman Reigns, he was positioned as that guy before the whole crowd really had a chance to get behind him on their own, which leads to fans feeling resentful that a dude is getting pushed down their throats before they are ready to accept him as their guy. Re: DVDVR specifically, there were a lot of questions about the abilities of these guys to get over on their own even as most folks here enjoyed The Shield as a unit, and lots of the carping on Reigns here is fair because the guy is all signature moves at this point. The "his slightly different gear is a marked negative" stuff is a bit silly in my view, though.

I look forward to the feud between Nina Tenine and the evil D.I.S.H. faction that wants to take over NXT so they can get it dropped from the Network's schedule.

Web Conn, I am a long-time Booker T fan too. I used to watch Saturday Night with my grandma, who loved Harlem Heat at the time. I did too, and Booker winning the gold off Jeff Jarrett at BATB 2000 is still one of my favorite wrestling moments ever. I really loved your post.

Cesaro's not on the card, Bryan's not on the card, and Luke Harper probably won't be doing much substantial stuff, and those are my three favorite guys. This will be another show where most of the wrestling is solid, but the finishes and decisions on who goes over will be questionable at best and just leave promising guys spinning their wheels for another month at worst. I do look forward to Brock Lesnar straight up murdering John Cena and then only showing up once a month to defend the championship, however. That will give the title some extra importance.

Is that the one that lasts like thirty seconds and ends with Backlund rolled up in a ball after being kicked in the solar plexus while the crowd gets unruly, or was that a different UWF/UWFi match?

I love the idea of seasons. I've been watching RAW from 1994 during the baseball strike, and the tag line is "Our Season Never Ends." The supposedly heart-warming nature of the commercial juxtaposed against how many wrestlers have died or been seriously injured precisely because the WWE calendar has guys working three hundred dates a year has really bothered me quite a bit. Craig H's idea would really save the lives and bodies of countless guys. Think of someone like Dolph Ziggler, who seems to bump like a madman whether he's on PPV or Main Event. He'll be in a wheelchair if he's bumping like that for 275-300 dates a year for twenty years.

Malenko and Misterio had a great GAB '95 match that I remember and an awesome match at Havoc '96. They also had a good match on Nitro at some point. Basically, just watch all of Malenko's PPV matches from about mid-'95 to late '96 where his whole gimmick was basically desperately wanting to be Cruiserweight Champ and that title seemed like the second most important one in the company. He had awesome matches with Psicosis, Rey, Ultimo Dragon, and also had a little thing with Eddie Guerrero going that produced fun matches.

Dean Malenko proves that a lot of the fun of a good match can be in clashing styles. Malenko wrestling luchadores and Japanese wrestlers and actually working matches where it was basically a battle of wrestling styles made them so much fun. He's the secret star of the early Nitro era of WCW. Also, I like that even when the middle part of his match was sort of forgotten at the end, it seemed like when he'd work holds, it was actually a struggle where he was always trying to get out of the hold if he was in it or he was working to keep it on his opponent as they struggled out of it. That sure beats the typical Randy Orton-style chinlock where both dudes look bored as hell while they sit around waiting for the next meaningless mid-match sequence to begin.

Man, y'all are hardcore. Not that we were backyarders, but when we'd mess around in the schoolyard or whatever sometimes, it was all headlocks, Sid Vicious like-punches to the shoulder, overhand chops, and kicks that missed by miles. Maybe if there were a trampoline or discarded mattress in the backyard where we'd be horsing around, there would be a sidewalk slam or two, which was the only move anyone would actually pick someone up to do. Oh, and splashes where we hit our knees first and THEN went the rest of the way to do the splash were a common finishing move. Basically, we wrestled something like Eva Marie, but with way better emoting.

It's easier to understand if you think of Daniel Plainview as Vince McMahon and Eli as WCW and that dude that Daniel Plainview killed in the middle of the movie who was pretending to be Daniel's brother as Randy Savage. Also, Daniel's deaf son is Shane McMahon.

What is the best casket match WWE has ever done? I'd think that it's either HBK/'Taker at Royal Rumble '98 or Mark Henry/'Taker at WrestleMania 22. Am I forgetting anything?

I politely disagree with this. I think Cena gets booed because a) he wins a whole lot, B) the fans want to see other guys win sometimes, so the perception is that Cena is holding that back from happening (whether directly or indirectly), and c), those fans really do want to see him as a heel and speak positively of him in that role; how many times do you go on YouTube to watch Cena and read the comments - mistake, I know - only to see people bitching about wanting to see Cena as a heel or wishing for his Doctor of Thuganomics days? I think what we all believe about why Cena gets booed by that part of the crowd probably colors our responses quite a bit. See, I think this could work in 1996, but in 2014, I bet a large portion of the adult male crowd would cheer for that out of irony or because they finally got the heel turn they wanted and thus are going to show how happy they are about it. Wrestling crowds at this point are really, really weird, particularly the adults that aren't bringing their kids to the show and that are mostly just going for their own entertainment.

I think he's already a heel to a certain part of the audience. He delivers cheesy promos and wrestles a traditional '80s babyface style. The adult males in the crowd hate him for it. If he makes a traditional heel turn, those same crowd members will love him again. As it is, they get the best of both worlds by letting him essentially be a tweener, probably the most effective tweener in the history of pro wrestling.

Between the Dynamic Dudes and Dean Douglas, Troy Martin should avoid any alliterative jobs or job titles beginning with "D" in his future. If someone asks him to manage a Dunkin' Donuts, he should turn down the job offer and maybe also head for the hills or hide out in a bunker somewhere.

NXT is a show that I genuinely laugh at more than any wrestling show other than maybe CHIKARA shows. This week, two things got me: First, when Adam Rose offered his lollipop to an unsure Sami, who looked at Renee for reassurance. The look on Renee's face was wonderful. I would have gone ahead and taken the lollipop too. Second, Adam Rose running around the ring to smack Gabriel on the ass, and then doing it again before getting kicked right in the stomach was a pretty funny sequence. Tyson Kidd has really turned into an awesome douchebag heel, and he always brings it in the ring. He's become one of my favorite WWE guys this year at this point. I really look forward to his segments. I thought Parker/Woods was pretty awkward, and then I saw Eva Marie attempt to wrestle. She does the weirdest faces for selling, like she makes an OWIE face five seconds after she was hit. Boy, she was awful. Whatever CJ Parker's new finish is supposed to be, he should go back to the drawing board with it. Why not just do a TKO from that position? Actually, he's a small dude and should probably go with a finish that he can actually hit on most guys. The lead into the finish was also weird; I have no clue why Woods would try to springboard from that position for a clothesline. Even though I didn't enjoy the match, though, I did like the rope-walk splash, and I thought that Woods going for a flatliner and flash pin while Parker was looking at the ref to bitch about the count was nicely done. They sucked me in on that one even though it was clear that Parker was winning. I hope Jordan and Dillinger get a push. They do good work, and their shit talking ways in the ring are really awesome.

The best thing about that stupid six-sided ring was that Monty Brown would hit the Pounce from all angles. It looked cooler in that smaller-looking six-sided ring than in the traditional four-sided ring.