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AUGUST 2017 WRESTLING DISCUSSION THREAD


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On a side note about Luger, I always thought he was one of those guys that wrestled up or down to the level of his opponent.  Put him in there with someone that can work (and yes, carry a bit) and Luger can hold up his end of the bargain and they can have a good match.  But Luger was not the kind of worker to go the other way - if he was in there with someone green or just not good, hooboy.

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He had good matches with Nikita in 87. 

Michael Hayes said everyone was watching the matches and expected something awful and were shocked they turned out good. The US title change is on Youtube and it is a good match. I would also say Lex did good work with the Giant in 96 in different TV matches. I thought the Goldberg matches were good. 

I think Luger got a bad rap during his mediocre WWF run. But I thought his WCW work was always good. 

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9 hours ago, Hagan said:

So, Karen admits there was an altercation but says they were just working an angle at the bar for some reason. Okay, fine. I mean...weird. Really, fucking weird. But absolutely in no way refutes what was reported. 

"We had fun with it and somebody took it and turned it into something more than what it was" seems to be a clear reference to Meltzer reporting an exaggeration of the truth, but feel free to die on this hill if you'd like.

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I always felt like Luger kinda got an unfair rap. If anything he's the proto-Brock Lesnar - in it for the money, will put in minimal effort for maximum reward, matches are consistently okay to good.

Hearing the story of Steamboat calling every single spot and powder for him in their 89 matches always made me chuckle though

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I heard Steamboat say Luger called their matches and was surprised at how good he was. Luger was in it for the money but I think he took pride in his work. 

People should listen to him on the Flair show.  Lex had a really good sense of what worked and what didn't. Also as Matt has pointed out, he understands Ric better than Ric does. 

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I think Luger's heart was always with WCW. He genuinly worked with Flair and Sting but he went "up North" knowing Vince could make him a star.

There was a lot of going through the motions with WWE buthe was good enough to be passable in everything they gave him

When he went back to WCW though he was very good to great again. If the nWo didnt become all consuming I could imagine a world where DDP has to beg a cynical Sting to let Luger help them win the War Games and finish the nWo for good.

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I can't help but feel his WWF career would have been a lot more successful if they'd just run with The Narcissicist gimmick for at least a year, it was such a note perfect character for him and he pulled it off effortlessly

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14 hours ago, Horton Hears a Wooo!!! said:

 Maybe they can resurrect  the gimmick and get the sort of responses they could have gotten if they had come in at WM with the Broken characters - but it seems more likely its time will have passed and WWE Creative won't be able to reignite it. 

WWE Creative couldn't reignite a pile of sticks and tinder if you spotted them a tank of lighter fluid and three blowtorches.

I mean come on.  Most people thought Bayley was a can't miss prospect -- "the female Cena," everyone said -- and look where we are now.  The writing for her was so bad that she's getting booed.  It's gotten so bad that we've come all the way around to questioning whether she was ever really good or if was just "NXT smoke and mirrors."  Which is funny because wrestling is supposed to be about a combination of talent and smoke and mirrors.  That's WWE creative.  It runs talent into the ground and pushes everyone, save  a select few who are either Vince's favorites (Cena, Roman) or just too damn good to be kept back (Styles), to the middle.  They do this over and over until you wonder why you liked a certain wrestler in the first place.

So back to the Hardys.  Even if they'd come in with the Broken gimmick on day 1, creative would have gotten involved and pissed it all away in short order.  Partly because they can't help but step on their own dicks over and over for all eternity, and partly because they just can't abide seeing something they didn't create get over.  Or it would have been a constant fight over the direction of the characters until Matt got fired again.

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20 minutes ago, ChesterCopperpot said:

Meltzer vs Corbin is not the Twitter feud I was expecting to read about this morning

http://wrestlingnews.co/wwe-news/baron-corbin-reacts-to-dave-meltzers-comments-about-him/

 

This is like Uwe Boll talking shit on film critics.  Dude, just stop.

Also, this:

Fuck do I hate this kind of intellectually dishonest comeback.  "You can't criticize what I do because you've never done it."  It's always a telltale sign of a really stupid person, someone with no other defense, or just a flat out asshole.  Or possibly a combination of the three.

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12 minutes ago, Matt D said:

Biggest issue with Luger was the bulk he put on in 91.

I know Luger was on his way out but man did JR bury him on commentary during his title defense against Sting. He talked about how it was a foolish decision on Lex' part to bulk up for the title defense and was dogging his intelligence in general throughout the whole match. Which is funny b/c JR used to always talk about how smart Luger was. Bringing up his degree in marketing and all that.

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1 hour ago, nofuture said:

Or he's just trolling Meltzer and he took the bait.

Since a big part of Corbin's character is him shitting on Indy darlings and the fans who love them, and the fact that he's from a football background and doesn't probably give a shit who Meltzer is, I'd imagine you're right.

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I think Luger was clearly good from '87-'91 as an all-around talent. I also think Luger's character work is underrated. I enjoyed him in '95 as a tweenerish-heel who was taking advantage of Sting's trust and good nature, and his Total Package work in '99-'00 was actually quite good, even considering that it contrasted to the sea of crap in WCW. For that matter, I liked the Narcissist, too. 

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I think Luger was really uninteresting to me in the ring, but he could show fire on promos. Part of what really soured me on him was his head. I always thought he looked weird. The mullet looked strange on him and, yeah, he just looked awkward to me. His matches were fine, I guess.

By the way, listen to the heat in this match...

Two babyface teams going at it and Scott Steiner comes in and gets a bigger reaction than Sting. For the life of me, I can't remember what the programs were at this time, but I'm going to assume this is when they had the two different world champions and Rude was one of them. It makes me think they badly missed the boat on Scott vs Sting back then. 

Oh yeah, one other thing from this clip, I fucking LOVE the sound of the ring when someone bumps on it. I've always loved that about WCW. It sounded so distinct. Going from memory, NJPW's ring sounds like this too I think. It has such good oomph to it. I love it. The WWE rings sound find when someone bumps on it, but nothing comes close to how the WCW rings were miked up.

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Holy shit Scott Steiner has so much charisma there. He's freaking electric and totally feeling it. Now I need to go and watch this on the Network. How good was this match in full? Crowd sounded super hot for it so I'm assuming it was great.

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No, that was from Superbrawl I in 1991 which was headlined by Flair v Fujinami for the NWA title (featuring one of Flair's most pointless blade jobs in history)

There was no programme behind the tag really, I think it was just a case of four friends seeing who was the better team

EDIT: It was one of the best matches of 91 and is pretty much none stop action from bell to bell. When you hear the reaction to the Steiners back then it's hard to not image Scott being the ace but I guess he figured the team was more important.

Was the rumours of Vince wanting to strap a rocket on his back and mega push him in 93/4 just a Scott Keith rumour? Why did they leave WWF?

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I knew that about Scott thinking the team was more important than both guys going it on their own, but I think they could have still been a tag team with singles careers. Both guys were extremely over. Now you know how crazy athletic Scott was back then, but all of my friends were mostly WWF fans, but of the WCW guys that stood out was the Dog Faced Gremlin. I think each guy would have been successful as singles and as a tag team. Rick would have been perfect for the US or TV title and Scott would have been perfect for the World title.

And it's funny to think about because if you plucked each of those guys from WCW then and put them in WWE now they would do exactly that with them. They would be the tag partners with singles careers and all that, but back then, it wasn't really much of a concept.

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