April 2023 Wrestling Discussion

[JohnnyJ]

First, I think he’s already resigned. Second, AEW owes a decent amount of its existence to how much WWE underpays its talent in relation to their value to a billion dollar company . And on top Tony has deep pockets. Third, MJF has a really good thing going. No house shows. Making 40-50 appearances a year. Wrestling a handful of times. I understand that there is cache attached to being with the WWE but there’s a lot to be said for not being on the road 200 days a year.

Edited April 9, 2023 by JohnnyJ

[Cobra Commander]

3 hours ago, A_K said:

Page as champion, for example, I feel had zero big media appearances or interview segments?

Page showed up at World of Wheels in my part of the country during his AEW title reign. One can decide how many echelons below big media that "autograph signings at a car show" is. It's no Comic Con, but it is a very non-wrestling crowd too.

[Cobra Commander]

With the Masters having happened this weekend, a reminder that they were gonna use the name Pain Stewart for the name of the Barry Darsow golfer gimmick, but then they didn't

Payne Stewart died at the end of 1999 when his Learjet depressurized and killed everybody on the plane and the autopilot took them all the way to South Dakota, a year after the gimmick debuted and a few months after it got shelved. Maybe I could have just said "in a plane crash"

[Octopus]

11 hours ago, John E. Dynamite said:

The big torneo

The big cibernetico with the young guys did a ton for me + whoops on the school vs. school tournament finals from a month-ish back (and I thought that one was pretty good). Those two matches got me caring about Neon and Crixus and Rey Samuray and Vaquero Jr. and a bunch more.

The multi-man match reminded me of when my friend and I would simulate the WWE games. We’d put it on hard so there would be tons of reversals and do an all cruiserweight 6 man He’ll in a Cell. So much fun action.

At times, it is hard to follow the specific rules of a match (Battle Royal leads to tag style?) but I’ve learned it’s best to just roll with it and it isn’t too hard to follow who is on what side. 

I’ll have to cross reference names with pictures. I always use LuchaBlog when I watch these events. Lack of lower thirds and my ignorance makes it tough. Plus, watching with my son, half of it were playing and having fun. I actually went back to watch the main event which I missed and this crazy match. All these guys are super impressive. Pink guy vs Red guy had a really awesome sequence where pink caught Red’s leg in the second rope and jumping stomped his knee to the mat and they went off. Bunch of fun moments like this. I actually like the layout of whatever this match is. Everyone in the ring going crazy and then a weird one on one segments of a semi-lumberjack tag. Just non-stop excitement. Great looking masks. The final two guys really made it a nail biting finale.

The legend match was a treat. I just love the old lucha body. Fantastic seeing these guys work together. Satanico is one of my favorites.

The main was fun. I was excited to see Soberano having seen some of his matches before. Plus, Mistico is over, hot dog. Another interesting rules where it was three falls but the first two rounds was two falls in a row. Bad guys take out  Mistico with a double bodyslam on the ramp leading to his poor teammates being dominated. Soberano gets hit with an elevated assisted ass kick and Angel de Oro gets hit with a very cool looking three-man double powerbomb. Mistico returns to health and the good guys are good. Angel is maybe a Rudo though? Love it! 

Hoping to keep this going as a father-son bonding tradition where he doesn’t know what’s going on and half the time neither do I, but we still have fun. All hail CMLL.

[Guest]

What's the worst wrestling match ever?

[John E. Dynamite]

39 minutes ago, Octopus said:

The multi-man match reminded me of when my friend and I would simulate the WWE games. We’d put it on hard so there would be tons of reversals and do an all cruiserweight 6 man He’ll in a Cell. So much fun action.

At times, it is hard to follow the specific rules of a match (Battle Royal leads to tag style?) but I’ve learned it’s best to just roll with it and it isn’t too hard to follow who is on what side. 

I’ll have to cross reference names with pictures. I always use LuchaBlog when I watch these events. Lack of lower thirds and my ignorance makes it tough. Plus, watching with my son, half of it were playing and having fun. I actually went back to watch the main event which I missed and this crazy match. All these guys are super impressive. Pink guy vs Red guy had a really awesome sequence where pink caught Red’s leg in the second rope and jumping stomped his knee to the mat and they went off. Bunch of fun moments like this. I actually like the layout of whatever this match is. Everyone in the ring going crazy and then a weird one on one segments of a semi-lumberjack tag. Just non-stop excitement. Great looking masks. The final two guys really made it a nail biting finale.

The legend match was a treat. I just love the old lucha body. Fantastic seeing these guys work together. Satanico is one of my favorites.

The main was fun. I was excited to see Soberano having seen some of his matches before. Plus, Mistico is over, hot dog. Another interesting rules where it was three falls but the first two rounds was two falls in a row. Bad guys take out  Mistico with a double bodyslam on the ramp leading to his poor teammates being dominated. Soberano gets hit with an elevated assisted ass kick and Angel de Oro gets hit with a very cool looking three-man double powerbomb. Mistico returns to health and the good guys are good. Angel is maybe a Rudo though? Love it! 

Hoping to keep this going as a father-son bonding tradition where he doesn’t know what’s going on and half the time neither do I, but we still have fun. All hail CMLL.

Tornero Ciberneticos start as a two-team multi-man tag match where you always tag out in a set order (lucha ruleset, so leaving the ring constitutes a tag). If one team is entirely eliminated, the remaining guys keep going, still tagging out in order, until only one remains. 

Basic lucha trios tags actually use a Captain's Fall rule, where you either have to pin the captain or both of the other guys to win a fall. This is why you so often see two guys get pinned/submitted at the same time. Sometimes a non-captain from one team will get beat but the other two will rally and take the fall.

Lucha is like jazz sometimes. Follows its own weird rules that aren't immediately apparent. But I think the Martinete is legal now so it's getting less confusing!

[Octopus]

Yup, all that is what I saw and now both those matches click in retrospect. And the dual fall on previous matches make sense, lol. This opened up a lot for me. Thanks!

[Elsalvajeloco]

7 hours ago, Cobra Commander said:

With the Masters having happened this weekend, a reminder that they were gonna use the name Pain Stewart for the name of the Barry Darsow golfer gimmick, but then they didn't

Payne Stewart died at the end of 1999 when his Learjet depressurized and killed everybody on the plane and the autopilot took them all the way to South Dakota, a year after the gimmick debuted and a few months after it got shelved. Maybe I could have just said "in a plane crash"

No, it just makes it sound like he was killed by a James Bond villain.

[Elsalvajeloco]

9 hours ago, Cobra Commander said:

Page showed up at World of Wheels in my part of the country during his AEW title reign. One can decide how many echelons below big media that "autograph signings at a car show" is. It's no Comic Con, but it is a very non-wrestling crowd too.

I am trying to figure out what media appearance means in 2023. Maybe you can grab a small cross section of people who never heard of you, but 90% of the time the guest is the one bringing the clout to the platform and not the other way around unfortunately. There are less and less places where someone like your average notable pro wrestler can show up and make a significant impact on who watches the company they represent. There is no simple button you can press to convert people into wrestling fans or specifically WWE or AEW TV viewers. If there was something like that, folks would use that method until it didn't work anymore.

[A_K]

2 hours ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

I am trying to figure out what media appearance means in 2023. Maybe you can grab a small cross section of people who never heard of you, but 90% of the time the guest is the one bringing the clout to the platform and not the other way around unfortunately. There are less and less places where someone like your average notable pro wrestler can show up and make a significant impact on who watches the company they represent. There is no simple button you can press to convert people into wrestling fans or specifically WWE or AEW TV viewers. If there was something like that, folks would use that method until it didn't work anymore.

It depends. The "platform" still definitely has the power to legitimise the "content". Roman, for example, coming across fairly-well in a tailored suit on Jimmy Fallon, looking suave and every-bit as though he could have wandered in off a Hollywood set. Perhaps not the typical "pro wrestler" perception. Equally, avenues like Barstool likely to have the segment of male audience who "grew out" of PW as it has been over the past 10-15 years, but may have their eyes swayed by the right sort of character presentation. It is a promotional-tour in the same way actors doing interview-circuits ahead of movie releases are.

We know, for example, that there were 1.4 million people intrigued enough to watch AEW Dynamite #️1, with 2.3 million people watching PW on that night combined w/ NXT. So there is some dormant interest that is not being leveraged (only 1-in-3 of those eyes stick around to watch Wednesday night PW 3 years later), and the media circuit is a platform to amplify that if you have the correct presentation / narrative buy-in. AEW's problem hasn't been converting new-eyes, it has been that they have shedded those who have watched it by the hundreds of thousands and Wednesday-night-wrestling has lost 1.5 million viewers peak-to-trough. 

Edited April 10, 2023 by A_K

[nate]

6 hours ago, Dural said:

What's the worst wrestling match ever?

Sharmell vs. Morasca, 2009.

[Elsalvajeloco]

3 hours ago, A_K said:

It depends. The "platform" still definitely has the power to legitimise the "content". Roman, for example, coming across fairly-well in a tailored suit on Jimmy Fallon, looking suave and every-bit as though he could have wandered in off a Hollywood set. Perhaps not the typical "pro wrestler" perception. Equally, avenues like Barstool likely to have the segment of male audience who "grew out" of PW as it has been over the past 10-15 years, but may have their eyes swayed by the right sort of character presentation. It is a promotional-tour in the same way actors doing interview-circuits ahead of movie releases are.

A lot of those platforms have lost the steam to do that (legitimizing the content), and that's sort the issue as to why a lot of actors can go on what use to be the late night run and it doesn't mean a difference to the box office. Thirty years ago (I will even give you 20 years ago), a single appearance could harness the power to leverage getting eyeballs on something people weren't entirely sold on. If you were a comic on Carson, that made your career. If you needed to rehab your image after a big scandal, go on Letterman or Leno or Arsenio, give a sad sob story (or act wacked out if you want to keep the ball rolling), and that shit was news for weeks. Now? Going on that little press run doesn't mean as much unless you do something on those shows that would warrant some type of attention (like figuratively showing your ass or saying something outrageous). When WWE sends people to do stuff like that, short of a planned angle, they're going to be well dressed, super professional, and avoid any tough questions that's out of the realm of what WWE wants them to do or say.

Between cord cutting and everyone being readily accessible, it makes it tougher to create a type of buzz on a podcast or any type of media appearance unless it is a coup for WWE or AEW where whatever big platform that typically doesn't have wrestlers on decides to take a chance.

3 hours ago, A_K said:

AEW's problem hasn't been converting new-eyes, it has been that they have shedded those who have watched it by the hundreds of thousands and Wednesday-night-wrestling has lost 1.5 million viewers peak-to-trough. 

I don't think they shedded them as much as Wednesday night was never the or "a" pro wrestling night. Wednesday wasn't like Saturday use to be for pro wrestling where you had whatever local territory wrestling, two WWF syndicated shows, one WCW syndicated show, and then the main NWA/WCW show at 6:05. Even Raw had the precedent of Prime Time Wrestling. It had a much smaller audience in 1992 than in 1987 but the groundwork was still laid. Even then, wrestling has been a place where you have to replenish the fans that left after an inevitable churn. Every company has to go through that. If they're getting 800,000 - 900,000 viewers for Dynamite, that's the actual number of people who watching and not whatever number of you got at the outset or the height of Dynamite vs. NXT. 

Moreover, there is no specific timeline hitting certain goals. In the height of the Monday Night Wars, I don't remember anyone setting a certain goal of reaching X million by week X of their programming. It's not an "or else" thing. 

Keep in mind, AEW is the first real wrestling company that I remember that had original programming where they (TBS/TNT) decided that strong lead in be damned and just decided that's the programming that is going to be the crown jewel of whatever it's on. Remember Vince in the early days of Raw? He use to do all those reads for those shitty TV movies. Why? It's cause they did ratings. What comes on before Dynamite or Rampage where AEW has to hold on to that audience and try to retain those viewers? 

If TNT or TBS were not satisfied with those numbers, they would be out of those time slots.

[HarryArchieGus]

7 hours ago, Dural said:

What's the worst wrestling match ever?

Names like David Flair, Eric Bischoff and Vince Russo in a cage come to mind, but I tend to push that shit out. Not suggesting the other 3 didn't elevate it from 'worst', but did anybody see young Parker Boudreaux 'working' the Rampage Main Event against Dustin/Keith Lee a month or so back?

[Shartnado]

8 hours ago, Dural said:

What's the worst wrestling match ever?

That one Inoki vs The Great Antonio (or whatever the big guy was called) has to be amongst them, for more than one reason. If the big guy was actually suffering from some kind of mental disorder or another and Inoki took such an advantage of him inside the ring, that makes it several magnitudes worse than the absolute shit that the in-ring "action" is, until the unprofessional blows start landing.

[Zakk_Sabbath]

This might be a stupid idea - I'm too old to know - but it seems to me that social media influencers are the new celebrities when it comes to the younger crowd. 

If TK put me in charge tomorrow, I'd say, you know what? Let Vince keep The Tonight Show and ESPN and all that shit; we're putting our people on TikTok. 

Again, I'm too old to really know what's popular now, but I think there are a lot of people with potential to really take off in that sphere - I think like Nyla Rose, Jade Cargill, Silver/Reynolds, Sonny Kiss, Best Friends and more could be well-positioned to generate eyeballs just with their natural selves.

A good start would be even just having someone over there who's job it is to chop up random humorous clips from the main shows and BTE and throw them up there with a tag giving the date/time/channel 

[Log]

19 minutes ago, Zakk_Sabbath said:

This might be a stupid idea - I'm too old to know - but it seems to me that social media influencers are the new celebrities when it comes to the younger crowd. 

If TK put me in charge tomorrow, I'd say, you know what? Let Vince keep The Tonight Show and ESPN and all that shit; we're putting our people on TikTok. 

Again, I'm too old to really know what's popular now, but I think there are a lot of people with potential to really take off in that sphere - I think like Nyla Rose, Jade Cargill, Silver/Reynolds, Sonny Kiss, Best Friends and more could be well-positioned to generate eyeballs just with their natural selves.

A good start would be even just having someone over there who's job it is to chop up random humorous clips from the main shows and BTE and throw them up there with a tag giving the date/time/channel 

WWE has been embracing the "new" celebrities/influencers/whatever. I'd say they've actually done a really good job with it. But, for me personally, that's a turn-off. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some clouds that need yelling at.

[Zakk_Sabbath]

Yeah, can't say id *love* it, but in service of growing the company (it feels gross and overly Bischoffian to say 'brand') I'd put up with it. For example, my reaction would probably be similar if they brought back Punk - I can think the guy's a jerk all I want, but I logically know that's gonna help with merch sales, rights renewals, selling the video game, etc.

To be clear though, I'm not talking about like, Logan Paul working matches. I'm talking about (for example) some of the ladies doing makeup/hair tips, or moving some of the BTE comedy stuff over, to try and feed more and more of the AEW stuffing and potatoes into the algorithm.

[JohnnyJ]

 

The problem with all of the ratings arguments, etc. is cable is a dying platform. The fact that pro wrestling can still bring in some kind of audience is what makes these properties so valuable. Traditional tv is not how a lot of people are receiving their content. Higher ratings are always better, but there's a reason why major tv companies from Warner Brothers to NBC/Universal to Fox all want in on what is supposed to be an industry in the middle of a decline. 

Take a look at AEW ppv numbers. Even when cold they are consistently bringing in around 150k buys on a show with 800-900k viewers. The conversion numbers only make sense in the context that there is a larger audience than what the ratings reflect.

The same argument can be made about WWE. The Raw before Mania had 1.8 million viewers. WWE then brought 160,000 fans in over two nights of Mania. I'm sure these were a lot of the same fans but we're still looking at between 5-10% of the viewership showing up. 

[The Natural]

https://twitter.com/LoganPaul/status/1645440170949320706

Logan Paul's renewed his WWE contract. Amazing how he's taken to wrestling as he has.

Edited April 10, 2023 by The Natural

[The Natural]

https://twitter.com/WrestlingBlog_/status/1645446944150499328

Long reigning champions in Roman Reigns holding the WWE Universal Championship (953 days)/WWE Championship (372 days), Bianca Belair the WWE RAW Women's Championship (373 days) and GUNTHER the WWE Intercontinental Championship (300 days).

Edited April 10, 2023 by The Natural

[John from Cincinnati]

I find the "MJF can't work clean" concerns overblown. Talented guy who seems to have a good mind about storytelling coming in as a star should be able to thrive even if the road he's driving has guardrails. What he's doing to establish himself and get there isn't necessarily what he'll always have to do to remain relevant. And if they want, they'll find a line he can walk up to -- it won't be the ones he plays tiptoe with now, but because WWE is so sanitized it'd likely still hit. 

The discourse about MJF not being able to work in WWE is way overheated. 

Edited April 10, 2023 by John from Cincinnati

[Log]

Agreed. I think when it comes down to MJF -> WWE, it's just a matter of him wanting to, financially and "artistically". I think they'd take him for sure.

[Octopus]

1 hour ago, Log said:

Agreed. I think when it comes down to MJF -> WWE, it's just a matter of him wanting to, financially and "artistically". I think they'd take him for sure.

On top of this, it would come down to how WWE would want to use him. Going after a Main title vs a midcard or as a Miz type or as a personality. Success can mean a number of things to an individual or even a company. Personal achievements, flange paychecks, time with family while being financially secure, and/or artistic pride. 

[AxB]

3 hours ago, Zakk_Sabbath said:

Again, I'm too old to really know what's popular now, but I think there are a lot of people with potential to really take off in that sphere - I think like Nyla Rose, Jade Cargill, Silver/Reynolds, Sonny Kiss, Best Friends and more could be well-positioned to generate eyeballs just with their natural selves.

The reason Jade suddenly had a faction with herself, Red Velvet and Keira Hogan (despite Velvet and Hogan having been babyfaces up to that point), was because they danced together on TikTok and it blew up a bit.

[Cobra Commander]

8 hours ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

I am trying to figure out what media appearance means in 2023.

One thing I learned from watching Tiger King in 2020 was how many local morning show segments there could be that would totally fly under the radar if they weren’t posted online.

There’s probably enough of a void in the market for wrestlers to do local market interviews these days?

edit: just imagined how much local media 1980s Hulk Hogan could have done if he was working "400" shows a year in an era where he could just Zoom call into the places where he's about to appear.

Edited April 10, 2023 by Cobra Commander