SovietShooter

I could swore there was a Private Party vs Andretti/Rush match announced... or was that for Dynamite?

Yeah, looks like they're late 2023. I read them this summer, so it counts to me!

I imagine most "best of 2024" lists will have The Last Real World Champ and Blood & Fire on them... and both are excellent.

Riccaboni skeeted before the show that he was taking over as the new host for Rampage, so AEW does seem to be Kayfabing that Rampage wasn't supposed to be ending.

Me too. But Daniels clearly pointed out how everyone else in the four way has a group backing them, but him. If not the Bucks, it's gotta be someone else, and I don't think it is a spot for the Dark Order. Maybe just Kenny?

But the build up the whole time has been that Mox has no fear of the three challengers, because he knows they cannot and will not get along. But last night they all worked together to get one over on Mox. I think that was foreshadowing the return of the Bucks, to align themselves with Hangman against the Death Riders. I hope not, because we already got the Elite vs BCC feud that blew off at Blood & Guts when Mox quit to spare Yuta. But, Hangman & Bucks going after the trios titles makes sense... although it would be in injustice to how Hangman should be booked.

I worked Naohiro Hoshikawa on that show where Hashinoto won the title back in Pittsburgh. I uploaded both matches to YouTube a few months ago and I got a takedown strike almost immediately from Skyperfect. I do have a handheld version that I need to convert to digital and upload...

If spinning back fists and Judas Effect can be finishers, so can a heart punch. Mind you, none of these things should be finishers in the year 2024.

That, and he was going to walk out with the belt around his waist on a UFC PPV. As underground as UFC was back then, that was more exposure than the NWA name got anywhere else, sans the "NWA Revival" on WWE TV... which didn't help the NWA at all ...

I thought Howard Brody's book "Swimming with Pirhanas" would've covered a lot of that ground in depth, but it really did not. Most of his bio was more about him trying to find investors and obtain television deals than it was about the NWA in that period. The folks who would probably have the most info about the organization at that time are probably Bill Behrens, Dave Marquez, Rick O'Brien, Simon Inoki, and Jim Miller... and I'm not sure if I would believe any of them without documents and evidence backing them up. A lot of the other major players at that time (Brody, Corraluzzo, Rubenstein, Hashimoto, Inoki) are no longer with us. I was fortunate enough to work for multiple NWA promoters, and to be in communication with others since I helped book and do office stuff, so I often got "both sides" of things that happened, and was in the loop on rumors and gossip. But I have no "receipts" or documentation. And it was so long ago, I don't have access to email accounts or anything from that long ago.

The way the business has always worked, is if they can draw money, then that justifies their push. The financial aspects of the business don't necessarily work the same way any more, but if a guy like Benjamin can add a few more PPV buys, pop the ratings, get views (or whatever metric you want to use to determine a "draw"), and he is on a contract with a fixed salary, why wouldn't you push him to maximize return on that contract? I think folks forget that sometimes other factors go into who gets pushed than just talent. If you're paying one worker three times what you're paying another, that worker is probably going to get three times the exposure, three times the push, and three times the opportunity.

So, not too get to autobiographical, but I grew up on the NWA, and when I got I to the business in the late '90s, I was kinda shocked to learn it was still a thing. When I had a chance to finish my training and start working for an NWA affiliated promotion, I jumped at the chance. Little did I know what a mess that all was! But anyway... that era of the NWA from when Shane Douglas threw the NWA title down, to the TNA "takeover" of the titles is fascinating, and an overlooked chapter in the organization's history. With the boom in independent wrestling that started in the late '90s, the NWA had a chance to be relevant as a brand name for various regional independent companies to operate under - a "seal of approval" of sorts. But instead it was really just a group of under-capitalized pseudo-businessmen cosplaying as promoters and trying to out-carny each other to be king of shit mountain. As I got more involved with the office and somewhat being the defacto promoter in the Pittsburgh promotion, I got more and more involved in the politics and office bullshit for the NWA as a whole. All of the people in it just wanted to use the NWA name to add legitimacy to their bullshit bi-monthly shows that drew 20 people. There were like 25 members of the organization at the time, and only like three or four were running shows more than once a month (us in Pittsburgh, Wildside in GA, Southwest in TX, ECCW in BC). No one wanted to work together, they were all just trying to fuck each other over. I'm kinda rambling... I think it was a massive opportunity to do something different, all the groundwork was in place, but it did work because none of the pro.oters wanted to work together and build the other guys talent (or pay for that talent). It couldn't been something.

I've said this in the past - buy the NWA brand and use that as a "governing body", and then pimp the NWA name out to "affiliates", creating a faux territory system.

This reminded me... On Collision they were talking about Harley Cameron in commentary (I think during the Ford/Stat match) and Excalibur said something along the lines of "Harley Cameron has a great promo spot for ShopAEW", followed by Menard throwing some doubt on how "great" it was. "I dunno, have you boughten anything from ShopAEW?" It is quiet for a couple seconds and then Excalibur just quietly says "Well, I've PURCHASED things, but no, I haven't BOUGHTEN anything". It was just like a stone cold execution, in one line.

Wrestling works best when you structure everything around one of these two proven tried-and-true formulas: 1) An über Babyface on top, and you keep feeding them monsters to slay 2) A dastardly heel on top that an army of babyfaces need to overcome. So many of the problems with modern wrestling is straying from one of these formulas for too long. This is a really great observation, and I think you may be on to something. If you view how AEW is booked thru this lens, it makes a ton of sense. This also explains the disarray of the tag division - the Bucks are the "main eventers" for that division, and they seem to have had their minds elsewhere since Brawl Out.

I have a feeling FTR poses the same booking conundrum as the Road Warriors did back in the old days (but for different reasons): If you don't have them on top of the tag division, what do you do with them? I think you can have FTR take a loss more often than you could the Roadies for a variety of different reasons, but they should probably always be in the mix for the tag belts. But, if you are going to take FTR out of the mix and run with a more high flying junior style in the division, then by golly have the belts defended often! PP should've defended the belts multiple times by now against both Action/Rush and Top Flight. No combination of those matches will make me buy a PPV the way Briscoe/FTR or Bucks/Lucha Bros would. The value of PP as tag cha.ps is filling the undercard with exciting matches.

They're putting Stat and Willow back together, and the Stat turn has been virtually reconned. TK said that the Stokely/Stat pairing "could not continue". Stokely is nowhere to be found on AEW or ROH programming. *Sigh* What did Stokely do?

I just meant that he was kept out of the heavyweight title picture, and was dominating the TV Title division. He was kind of in the same spot as Scorpio or Jericho, and not in main events. His ouch back to the main event started after Barely Legal, when they put the Triple Threat together again w/ Candido & Bigelow.

In ring wise, Shane Douglas was a safe worker with solid and credible looking work. He was never the flashiest guy with amazing high spots, but you could put him in there with anyone and he would have a good match with them. He was like a heel Tito Santana. I think he was excellent when being a big fish in a small pond, but when put in a bigger pond all his weaknesses were exposed. When he was still an up-and-comer tagging with Steamboat in WCW, he looked great, I thought. I thought the "Franchise" gimmick in his first ECW run was great, and then his abortion of a WWF run killed all that momentum dead. When he went back to ECW Heyman rehabed him well by keeping him in the mid-card, and using him in that TV Title "work rate" role. Character wise, Douglas was tailor made to be a heel territory champion; "The Franchise" gimmick was essentially a heel champion that the Babyface challengers needed to overcome. That worked in the early days of ECW, where being a former WCW tag champ alongside Steamboat gave him credibility at the Indy level to be a top guy of a smaller company. But for that gimmick to work, he had to be booked on top and as a champion, and that was why it didn't really work in WWF or his post-ECW run in WCW. If somehow ECW was around in the USWA post-territory days and Douglas was the Lawler-esque perennial heel champion that lost the belt to babyfaces and won it back, I think he'd be looked at differently.

Collision may do the biggest ratings number in the history of the show on Saturday. How much you wanna bet that the first segment is the fucking Adam Cole/MJF promo?

Y'know what would get Big Bill over massively? Him power bombing the everliving shit out of Wardlow.

Change your name to SovietWorker right now. Being a shooter is all a work pal.

It's all a work.

You ain't lying. For so long WWE had a virtual monopoly with a crazy man in charge, so they could get away with ignoring any criticism, and just plowing forward with whatever Vince wanted to do. But that is not a normal way to run a business, and that seems to be the path AEW is headed down. TK & company are going to do what they want, everyone else be damned.

5) 00s all-gold UFC Titles 4) UWF (Watts) Heavyweight Title 3) Big Gold 2) Mid-80s NWA Television Title 1) Classic 80s/90s WWF Intercontinental Title