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SMACKDOWN LIVE IS BAD HAIR VS. WORSE


piranesi

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Bryan was a better performer than Miz but I would rather have Miz's life/career than Bryan's.

I once made a half joke about how "If I could be any NFL player it would be Matt Cassel" and it kinda applies here as well.

Miz is not the flashiest or the most talented but he has had a perfectly acceptable career and made plenty of money. He will always be remembered as a solid upper midcard player and was good enough to main even a WrestleMania as one of only 2 heels to retain the title, the other being Triple H. Unless we count Austin at 17 with the turn that got cheered because they were in TEXAS Vince you madman!

Throw in his fantastic tag team work, convincing Maryse that he was worth getting married too and being smart enough to jump on the WWE Films train to start that transition to a post ring career and I think that Miz is the obvious choice for 'Who would you rather be?'

But if we are talking purely at the peak of their powers then Bryan has him covered in terms of sheer ability.

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5 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

The best part of this clip was Cky's "96 Quite Bitter Beings" being played. 

For a while there, that song was the background track for everything on MTV after being adopted as the de-facto theme for Jackass.  It is the guitar riff that will not die.

I have said for a while that while Miz's ring work may aggravate you, he's got a better hold on heel psychology that most workers will ever begin to grasp.  I suppose the jury is out on whether or not the reason he is such a good heel is because he's a total d-bag in real life.

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7 hours ago, Go2Sleep said:

Are Raven and Hogan really in that much better shape than Funk or Foley these days?

Did Funk watch the same Raven we all did? I mean Raven did his fair share of bump's from the mid 90's till the mid 2000's. Only thing that destroyed his body was all the drugs he was doing more so than the crazy bumps.

Hogan's probably in decent shape for a guy who had half the joints in his body replaced.

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What PL said.  Levy started off his wrestling career as Scotty the Body and he was in phenomenal condition.

I know that he has Type-2 Diabetes now and he's always struggled with borderline personality disorder.  The drug use and alcohol abuse were symptoms of his mental issues. 

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On 8/24/2016 at 4:44 PM, Nice Guy Eddie said:

The first name that popped in my head was Bret. 

Bret had such a great comment in Wrestling with the Shadows.

(paraphrasing) 

"You have a wrestling match. It looks like it hurts...but it doesn't have to actually hurt. And, at the end of day, you should ideally go home no more beat up than if you'd been in a hockey match.That's how you keep doing it three or four times a week."

He's always been distasteful of the ultra-stiff and incredibly painful Japanese wrestling-style too.

Because, you know, ultimately, it's fake. If you want a real fight, do MMA.

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A key thing about the infamous Gaea Girls documentary:

They told the filmmakers that Japanese wrestling, unlike American wrestling, was usually a shoot. Only the big matches were scripted. Everyone else was real.

The filmmakers, as shown by their comments at various film festivals truly believed this. Because, you know, they were utter idiots.    

You know why AJW did that? Because otherwise the filmmakers would have asked: "So why are you brutalizing, beating up and traumatizing these innocent teenage girls for something that's fake?"

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2 hours ago, J.T. said:

For a while there, that song was the background track for everything on MTV after being adopted as the de-facto theme for Jackass.  It is the guitar riff that will not die.

Nor should that riff ever die

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I will say this:

One of the few times I ever looked at Dave Meltzer, a man I 100% respect and like immensely, and wondered "WTF, dude?" was when it came up in f4w board discussion that Benoit (an utter psycho who was 6 months away from murdering his family) famously trashed and bullied Miz and kicked him out of the locker room for eating chicken there.

Dave: "Well, he was getting chicken juice everywhere."

Dear God. 

 

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If you bring everything back to the Roland Barthes (oversimplifying) hypothesis that the overarching myth of Pro-Wrestling is the clash between the simple, brutalist machismo side of the masculine identity, and the exhibitionistic, showy, camp 'effeminised' form of the masculine identity, Miz is clearly doing a fantastic job of embodying the Fancy Dan archetype. And being awful in the ring, wrestling in a 'don't hit me in the face' style, is (consciously or unconsciously) a great way of playing into that archetype.

But there's a disconnect, because he likes to act tough, to let people know how tough he is. And when you're playing the pansy, it should always be clear that your tough guy act is an act - that when you try to act tough with someone who actually is, you get scared and back down. And Miz doesn't do that. He tries to go 50/50 with guys who should spend most of the match working him over before Miz sneaks a win he doesn't deserve.

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8 hours ago, Charlie M. said:

Rhyno is going to beat him up because everyone is unusually mean to a poor guy who just wants to keep the job he somehow lost during a draft. :( 

It'll be awesome if Rhyno plays the sympathetic vet character/mother hen and carries Slater under his wings. Whenever Slater is getting bullied backstage, you'll just hear a roar from left field as some poor bully foo gets gored into next Friday.

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2 hours ago, AxB said:

But there's a disconnect, because he likes to act tough, to let people know how tough he is. And when you're playing the pansy, it should always be clear that your tough guy act is an act - that when you try to act tough with someone who actually is, you get scared and back down. And Miz doesn't do that. He tries to go 50/50 with guys who should spend most of the match working him over before Miz sneaks a win he doesn't deserve.

THIS. That's my main problem with him as a performer. 

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2 hours ago, Michael Sweetser said:

Miz made it out of Bassman's UPW in one piece and relatively sane.  I consider that an achievement in and of itself.

What's this referencing? Lot of guys who spent time in UPW did okay for themselves (Cena, Joe, Daniels, Kazarian)

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TIL I get an achievement too!

The concern about UPW is much less about danger and insanity and more about Rick Bassman wanting his hand in your pocket for life if you're a homegrown talent (which Kaz, Daniels, and Joe were not.) Bassman is the man who got the biggest regular star in the past 10 years into the business, but he's bitter about it because he doesn't get money for it. 

 

 

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Ha! Yeah I remember that now. APW's Roland Alexander used to put a clause entitling him to 10% of all outside earnings in the contacts of every student at his wrestling school. He would bitch that no one ever paid him a dime off of that, which you'd think would be a sign that it's completely unenforceable, but hey, wrestling promoters.

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3 minutes ago, Cristobal said:

Ha! Yeah I remember that now. APW's Roland Alexander used to put a clause entitling him to 10% of all outside earnings in the contacts of every student at his wrestling school. He would bitch that no one ever paid him a dime off of that, which you'd think would be a sign that it's completely unenforceable, but hey, wrestling promoters.

Jericho said that whichever Hart who ran the school he trained at under Ed Langley tried to do that as well. On their first day, Jericho, Storm and the other trainees signed paperwork saying they'd give 10% of all future earnings to the school. Seems like a trick that trainers/promoters tried in the 80s/90s and I wonder just how often it worked.

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3 hours ago, Michael Sweetser said:

Miz made it out of Bassman's UPW in one piece and relatively sane.  I consider that an achievement in and of itself.

What? No dude, he went straight from the Real World onto WWE TV. He definitely did not spend almost 2 years on the indies before his developmental deal.

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Mike Larry Sharpe also asked for a percentage of all future earnings which no one ever paid. It was one of the reasons for his falling out with Bam Bam Bigelow.

Seems like total bullshit to me. You pay your ~$3k to train, get trained and go on your way. Transaction over. No need to be indentured to someone for your whole career. But carnies gonna carny.

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Yeah, if the guy's actually getting you bookings, that's one thing, (although if he's taking 10% of your cut, odds are he's double-dipping, getting a booking fee from the promoter then ripping you off,) but "I own a piece of your career" is obviously BS. If it were enforceable, someone would've lawyered up (probably Bassman, cuz Cena's probably made more money off of wrestling than anyone not named "McMahon") and gotten them some.

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