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9 hours ago, thee Reverend Axl Future said:

On WWE booking of late:

How can you not be pushing and making money with Keith Lee?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Ricochet?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Aleister Black?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Andrade?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Angel Garza?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Big E?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Chad Gable?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Killian Dane?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Isiah Scott?

I see any of the folks (and this is off the top of my head and having not watched any WWE shows for the past year+) as worth investing in and potentially able to hold their own at the top of the card. Politics? $$$? Vince? Fear of the new? It is mind-boggling.

- RAF, befuddled as well

Black, black, foreign, foreign, foreign, black, short, foreign, black.

Vince comes from an age where being non-white and/or a foreigner was enough for a gimmick, so these guys are gimmick workers unfit for a major run in his mind.  Gimmicks are fun but that's not the money, right?

Edited by Technico Support
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6 hours ago, Technico Support said:

Black, black, foreign, foreign, foreign, black, short, foreign, black.

Vince comes from an age where being non-white and/or a foreigner was enough for a gimmick, so these guys are gimmick workers unfit for a major run in his mind.  Gimmicks are fun but that's not the money, right?

I certainly cannot disagree with your conclusion (and I dig the way you phrased it) BUT Vince may be behind the times and a bit mad, however he is carny as all get out, and green is the only color (flag, dimension) that matters. He would have pushed Lashley fercryinoutloud to the top if that had worked out at one point in time. Maybe he thinks that the fans/marks/universe/shareholders are not ready for it. Recent events, The Rock and the indys have shown that not only do these former "restrictions" don't matter, they can actually be assets. Maybe the writers think that Vince and/or the audience still wans not just the same ol' type of workers, but the very same workers...

- RAF

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12 hours ago, PetrolCB said:

You mean The Riddler. Oh wait, we haven't gotten there yet. 

What's the over/under on the date when the first question marks show up on Matt Riddle's gear? I'm going with Dec 1 and taking the under because I think he'll debut it at Survivor Series.

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It's changed now as I get a kick out of his antics but as a kid I absolutely could not fucking stand The Boogie Woogie Man. I thought his whole presentation was stupid and I might've been the only 6 year old in the world who was rooting for Paul Jones in 1985. Actually I was probably the only person in the world rooting for Paul Jones in 1985, regardless of age.

Edited by cwoy2j
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Leaving aside out of the ring nonsense, Adam Cole and Johnny Gargano as the poster children for overdone epics. I know intellectually they are both very talented and by all accounts great people but I can hear Mauro screaming in my ears right now and I’m not interested. 

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5 hours ago, cwoy2j said:

It's changed now as I get a kick out of his antics but as a kid I absolutely could not fucking stand The Boogie Woogie Man. I thought his whole presentation was stupid and I might've been the only 6 year old in the world who was rooting for Paul Jones in 1985. Actually I was probably the only person in the world rooting for Paul Jones in 1985, regardless of age.

Boogie's one of those guys like Warrior and New Jack that could talk me into wanting to see them wrestle anyone, despite being the worst fucking wrestlers ever.

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Y'all gotta stop being wrong and hating on Thee Boogie Woogie Man. He is the Arcane Pope of my Dancin Rasslin Funky Church, the Hierophant of thee Street Peoples, the ArchShaman of Gettin' Down DADDY, for the love of Dusty.

your Boogie Man loves you,

42 minutes ago, mattdangerously said:

Boogie's one of those guys like Warrior and New Jack that could talk me into wanting to see them wrestle anyone, despite being the worst fucking wrestlers ever.

It's all about putting asses in seats and soul in your heart, baby.

- RAF

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22 hours ago, thee Reverend Axl Future said:

On WWE booking of late:

How can you not be pushing and making money with Keith Lee?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Ricochet?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Aleister Black?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Andrade?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Angel Garza?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Big E?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Chad Gable?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Killian Dane?

How can you not be pushing and making money with Isiah Scott?

I see any of the folks (and this is off the top of my head and having not watched any WWE shows for the past year+) as worth investing in and potentially able to hold their own at the top of the card. Politics? $$$? Vince? Fear of the new? It is mind-boggling.

- RAF, befuddled as well

Lee was NXT champ, but was moved too the main roster without a plan. He is in a holding pattern where he isn't buried or anything, but he isn't getting a major push either. That said, he is one of the guys featured on Raw's SS team.

Ricochet couldn't talk worth a damn last year when he was feuding against Joe & AJ, and I think that sunk him.

Black is a case of Vince not really getting him and bad writing that didn't really lead him anywhere.

Andrade seems like a case of Vince just losing interest.

Garza only debuted this year. He has been somewhat protected. He just isn't getting pushed to the moon.

Big E just won a feud with Sheamus before the draft, and most assume he is the guy who will win the RR and dethrone Roman at Wrestlemania.

Gable's height is held against him despite his talent.

Dain isn't as beloved by the NXT fans as some assume according to at least one of the people here who was going to the shows regularly pre-pandemic. It kind of showed on tv last year when he came back. He currently is in a strange bedfellows/comedy (Drake) tag team with Drake Maverick that is working well for him. I don't think Dain has a future in WWE on his own otherwise unless its in NXT UK.

Scott lost a feud with Escobar on NXT where he took him to the limit at the last Takeover. Scott is a guy I doubt Vince even sees with the likely small amount of attention he gives NXT.

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The booking of Andrade in the past 6 months screams out "he's in the doghouse" so much that I am stunned nothing has come out regarding that. If you look back to right before it all fell apart for him his US title run was a mini-disaster even with mostly okay matches due to a pair of injuries on top of a wellness suspension during it and I would not be surprised in the least to find out that it soured some higher-ups on him

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6 hours ago, cwoy2j said:

 Actually I was probably the only person in the world rooting for Paul Jones in 1985, regardless of age.

I might have considered rooting for Jones as a kid, but, even then, I thought his stable was weak.  I mostly thought of the Army as a group of jobbers-to-the-stars.  They never seemed to mesh well as a stable and even at a young age, I figured out that a lot of them weren't going to win the big matches.  I think a lot of guys just didn't appeal to my younger self.  I didn't really dig Baron von Raschke, Teijo Khan, Shasta Whatley, the Barbarian, the Russian Assassins, etc.

I did get into a couple of those guys later on.  And I should have been into Rude and Manny Fernandez back then, but wasn't.  I didn't Boogie Woogie at the time, though looking back... well.  I don't think I've ever hated Valiant, but, if you made me rewatch enough of his matches, I might be willing to change my mind.

I don't blame Vince for Ricochet not getting over.  He does some amazing stuff in the ring, but I don't think I ever watched him in the indies and thought "that guy has the tools to get over in the WWE."

 

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14 hours ago, Technico Support said:

Black, black, foreign, foreign, foreign, black, short, foreign, black.

Vince comes from an age where being non-white and/or a foreigner was enough for a gimmick, so these guys are gimmick workers unfit for a major run in his mind.  Gimmicks are fun but that's not the money, right?

There is certainly validity to that but Lee probably was more the victim of Vince's body fetish like Vader was and Vince originally did attempt to give Lashley the megapush in 06-07 but it really didn't work out.

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4 hours ago, Eivion said:

Lee was NXT champ, but was moved too the main roster without a plan. He is in a holding pattern where he isn't buried or anything, but he isn't getting a major push either. That said, he is one of the guys featured on Raw's SS team.

Ricochet couldn't talk worth a damn last year when he was feuding against Joe & AJ, and I think that sunk him.

Black is a case of Vince not really getting him and bad writing that didn't really lead him anywhere.

Andrade seems like a case of Vince just losing interest.

Garza only debuted this year. He has been somewhat protected. He just isn't getting pushed to the moon.

Big E just won a feud with Sheamus before the draft, and most assume he is the guy who will win the RR and dethrone Roman at Wrestlemania.

Gable's height is held against him despite his talent.

Dain isn't as beloved by the NXT fans as some assume according to at least one of the people here who was going to the shows regularly pre-pandemic. It kind of showed on tv last year when he came back. He currently is in a strange bedfellows/comedy (Drake) tag team with Drake Maverick that is working well for him. I don't think Dain has a future in WWE on his own otherwise unless its in NXT UK.

Scott lost a feud with Escobar on NXT where he took him to the limit at the last Takeover. Scott is a guy I doubt Vince even sees with the likely small amount of attention he gives NXT.

You state some "reasons" - but... why? Anyone could come up with an equally valid list of the guys getting pushed that are not working out, with the reasons why they are not. It is the booker's job (if there is one, writing commitees my carny ass) to figure out someone's place on a card/roster and put them there. If it is the top, it might take some time. Ricochet can't talk? You want to listen to Baron Corbin speechify? So he can't talk - if they wanted to push him, they will find a way. My point is that there is a crop of new talent (and again my direct knowledge is over a year old) that seem to me to be worth a push --- and they are not getting a push. This is not a radical or original view. These guys seem like money to me.

- RAF

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6 minutes ago, thee Reverend Axl Future said:

You state some "reasons" - but... why? Anyone could come up with an equally valid list of the guys getting pushed that are not working out, with the reasons why they are not. It is the booker's job (if there is one, writing commitees my carny ass) to figure out someone's place on a card/roster and put them there. If it is the top, it might take some time. Ricochet can't talk? You want to listen to Baron Corbin speechify? So he can't talk - if they wanted to push him, they will find a way. My point is that there is a crop of new talent (and again my direct knowledge is over a year old) that seem to me to be worth a push --- and they are not getting a push. This is not a radical or original view. These guys seem like money to me.

- RAF

In other words you really didn't give a damn about an actual answer and just posted a list of guys you feel should be big names already?

Edited by Eivion
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Not exactly. I posted a question that perhaps is rhetorical, borne out of my frustration on hearing the Keith Lee talk. Why haven't at least a couple of those workers been given a real push? There are some reasons why the names I stated would not a get a try but those are not reasons why they couldn't succeed. You stated the reasons why the WWF may not take a chance on them but I still believe that with good booking a couple of them would be big. They audience is behind them. - roll the damn dice  If there is room for Ziggler, Orton, Edge, Bray, et al, how about some new blood? Do you really believe the reasons you stated are enough to justify devoting more screentime to Big Show or Rollins? I am left wondering at the timidity of the booking - the ineptness is a given. 

No need for hostility - in a sense I did post a list of wrestlers I think could  be big names some day (no one should be - you gotta earn it). My post was not about starting a debate (is there one?) on the specific names but about the pool of untapped talent they have and are not utilizing.

- RAF

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Honestly, I was more stating what has been done to them and in some cases maybe why they didn't make it. I don't necessarily agree with those reasons, just what I suspect it might be the why of it for WWE not making them bigger names yet in some cases. I wasn't trying to come off hostile either, but your initial response came across as rather dismissive. I actually think most of the guys you mentioned should be better off than they are though as someone who is sill watching I can't exactly pretend its like WWE has done nothing with some of them. Its just been bad (Black & Andrade) or in some cases (Big E & Lee) a matter of waiting and seeing.

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I don't agree w/ the thinking that big guys shouldn't do aerial high spot moves and that small guys should.  It's about execution and the small workers often times get away with lousy execution because the internet fans think it's okay and they tried something athletic and they need to do that shit because they're small.

Stealing a line from Cornette...you're better off having a spot with a difficulty of a 5 but with an execution of a 10 than a spot with a difficulty of a 10 and an execution of a 5.  Once I start to see moves executed at a 5 or require so much participation that they have a plausibility of a 5 is when it starts to chip away at my interest for the match.   Where I start to get into and excited about a match is when a wrestler executes a spot with say increased difficulty (say an 8 out of 10) and executes it at a 10.  

That's what made Misawa so special, he was consistently executing at a 10 and doing so many very difficult moves to pull off.  But he executed them perfectly and made them very plausible.  Compare that to a 160 pound wrestler doing a somersault plancha where the opponent waits forever to catch him and then he barely grazes the opponents shoulder.

 

 

 

HoC

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There was stuff in Vader's book about how Ole Anderson used to scream at him that big guys should never come off the top rope, and Vader's opinion was that Ole was stuck in a 70s mindset and couldn't accept that the business had changed now it was the 90s.

Then the whole thing with the Ospreay/ Ricochet endless counters clip (that was either super awesome, or looked so over-rehearsed it was more of a dance routine than a wrestling spot, depending on your opinion) happened. Vader didn't like it at first, but came to accept that he was looking at it while stuck in a 90s mindset, and should accept that the business had changed now it was the 2010s. But he pretending to still not like it for a while, because he thought he could get a high profile booking out of it. And it worked, so he was right.

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18 hours ago, cwoy2j said:

It's changed now as I get a kick out of his antics but as a kid I absolutely could not fucking stand The Boogie Woogie Man. I thought his whole presentation was stupid and I might've been the only 6 year old in the world who was rooting for Paul Jones in 1985. Actually I was probably the only person in the world rooting for Paul Jones in 1985, regardless of age.

It's me.

I'm the kid who felt sorry for poor Honky Tonk Man.  Just cuz he's a jerk doesn't mean it's fair to ambush him with a surprise opponent he doesn't get to prepare for.  Maybe on some level, even as a tiny tot, I could recognize something of Warrior's real life assholedom shining through in his body language that first time I saw him that flipped the "two wrongs don't make a right" response.

I'm also the kid who upon first glance of both teams instinctively wanted the Rougeaus to beat the snot out of those Rockers even if they were probably lying about the Rockers stealing their music, because the Rockers were that darn annoying.  [Maybe I was always just hard wired to like Jacques, hate Shawn, and roll my eyes at excessive Flippy Shit, I dunno]

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11 hours ago, Custos said:

Leaving aside out of the ring nonsense, Adam Cole and Johnny Gargano as the poster children for overdone epics. I know intellectually they are both very talented and by all accounts great people but I can hear Mauro screaming in my ears right now and I’m not interested. 

I understand and often agree with this criticism, but I also feel like it's a bit unfair to these guys.  When HHH and Shawn Michaels are intimately involved in the booking/direction of NXT, are we really surprised that this is what the main event style turned into?  If the people in charge think  non-self aware epics are the pinnacle of wrestling, how do you really blame the workers for working that style?  I'm not a fan of the style in general, but I do respect the quality of work those guys put into that style if that makes sense.  It is like if Biggie Smalls lived long enough to put out an autotune album.  It may be the best autotune album of all time, but I don't want to hear a Bigge Smalls autotune album.  That is how I feel about Cole and Gargano.  Those guys are both clearly talented workers, who understand exactly what is being asked of them, and they go out there and do that at an extremely high level.  The problem is, it's not really what I want from them...or anyone else for that matter...any more.  That isn't really their fault.  

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4 hours ago, Hustler of Culture said:

I don't agree w/ the thinking that big guys shouldn't do aerial high spot moves and that small guys should.  It's about execution and the small workers often times get away with lousy execution because the internet fans think it's okay and they tried something athletic and they need to do that shit because they're small.

Stealing a line from Cornette...you're better off having a spot with a difficulty of a 5 but with an execution of a 10 than a spot with a difficulty of a 10 and an execution of a 5.  Once I start to see moves executed at a 5 or require so much participation that they have a plausibility of a 5 is when it starts to chip away at my interest for the match.   Where I start to get into and excited about a match is when a wrestler executes a spot with say increased difficulty (say an 8 out of 10) and executes it at a 10.  

That's what made Misawa so special, he was consistently executing at a 10 and doing so many very difficult moves to pull off.  But he executed them perfectly and made them very plausible.  Compare that to a 160 pound wrestler doing a somersault plancha where the opponent waits forever to catch him and then he barely grazes the opponents shoulder.

 

 

 

HoC

This reminds me of the Keith Lee/Jeff Cobb match everyone was really high on. It seemed like they were trying to build the match around being two big guys wrestling like cruiserweights. They ended up doing a lot of high spots at half speed and I thought most of it just looked like crap. Both of them are capable of busting out some size-defying maneuvers but I think it's best to save stuff like that for when it'll mean something and really get a pop rather than just spamming it. Though I think you could apply that criticism to a lot of wrestling these days.

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The most impressive thing about Keith Lee, to me, is that he's a really big dude that effortlessly connects as a babyface people want to root for.

I'm not saying he could be the next Hulk Hogan, but its a Hogan-esque quality. I can watch Keith Lee get beaten down for awhile and still buy that all he has to do is block one right hand, deliver a few of his own, hit a back elbow maybe and a splash and pin anybody. 

Its a cherry on the sundae that he does powerbombs and high-flying and whatnot, but its not even necessary for his act. 

We talk about how loaded the roster is, but its worth mentioning, the roster is not only loaded with great technical wrestlers and high-fliers, but also a bunch of guys that are over or could get over doing a more "minimal"/"basic" style like we had in the 80s/early 90s - and even those guys aren't getting over thanks to terrible booking and writing. Like, they're not all my cup of tea, but Otis, Braun Strowman, Bray, and Lee wouldn't have been short on bookings 30 years ago just based on look and size alone. And yet, in 2020, Vince books like someone whose best idea for Andre the Giant would've been to put a backwards hat on him and make him a rapping Frenchman.  

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On 11/12/2020 at 7:01 AM, Technico Support said:

Black, black, foreign, foreign, foreign, black, short, foreign, black.

Vince comes from an age where being non-white and/or a foreigner was enough for a gimmick, so these guys are gimmick workers unfit for a major run in his mind.  Gimmicks are fun but that's not the money, right?

Sometimes it feels like Vince has a "one at a time" philosophy for pushing minorities. I kinda feel like he doesn't want to push Naomi will Sasha is on top, And he waited till Rey left to bring in other hispanic talent 

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I read the first page of this topic and I will read the rest after I post. I was shocked in a good way to see Hogan’s name come up so fast, and more than once. I was also mad to see everybody go straight to the R card and either not mention or gloss over everything else he’s done just to get to the R card. Now here we are at where I have stood with Hogan, my personal choice for this topic.

Now first don’t get me wrong I have no use for a racist, and I have no hatred or judgement in any walk of life for anybody because of their race. What I meant by the above is how Hogan had done some heavy stuff before those racist remarks and pretty much gotten a free pass for all of it. The guy basically ruined WCW by backing out of a job that they’d built towards for over a year. The whole thing was originally conceived because he’d ran out of people to beat in the first place. The guy did the same thing to Vince who simply handled it better, but that doesn’t change Hogan’s behavior.

Then there are all the secondary stories like him not calling the Iron Shiek back in WCW, blaming Benoit and Malenko for his low ratings that week, and just on and on a list of seemingly irrelevant but nonetheless jerk behavior that he’s never had to own. 

Then it finally happened, the 1 thing society won’t forgive, the N word. I didn’t have the energy to get mad myself at this point because it was just another day at the office for Hogan. Remember another thing he said? He said GOD WAS PUNISHING THE PERSON NICK TURNED INTO A VEGETABLE! O that was no big deal but he said the N word. And here we are now he’s pretty much been forgiven for that, and rewarded what was it something like $300,000,000 for it lol! Along with the pussy he got lol! Ugh...

And I believe in forgiveness to don’t get me wrong but...gah...Hogan is my pick for this discussion lol!

 

Edited by BloodyChamp
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As for the nothing personal, channel changers because their actual work discussion that this morphed into, I could probably make a big list. 

Jeff Jarrett - just a boring, blond Johnny B Badd makeup wearing girly man. And his voice didn’t match his body wtf. And this was before TNA.

Earnest Miller - kickjobber 

Nash - not for his whole career but definitely way before it was  over in WCW 

Leroy Brown - what

Vampiro 

 

 

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