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August 2021 Wrestling Discussion


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1 hour ago, Eoae said:

I feel like there’s a big difference between saying “Punk didn’t move the needle” and “Punk didn’t move the needle as much as the Rock”

Lol @ "didn't move the needle as much as The Rock"    So what does that mean?   Only 2-3 guys in history should be celebrated as needle movers?  

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14 minutes ago, SirSmellingtonofCascadia said:

I definitely saw it, particularly in the early days of Dynamite, with the middle fingers and focus on how much of a lone wolf he was in his promos. He might have evolved his character since then, though, which would be a fair point. I haven't watched AEW programming in months, so I only really have a feel for the first few months of his portrayal there.

Middle fingers and being a lone wolf is not really exclusively copied by a Jon Moxley though. That's more of the alt/anti-authority/rebellion culture you got in the wake of like Raven in ECW or some of the other characters in ECW in the mid to late 90s. Austin just made it wildly popular because he put a extremely creative spin on it by making it more a Southern rebel thing. 

Go back to like late 96 to maybe midway through 97, when Austin was still trying to find his character and ending every sentence awkwardly with "son".  I think the watershed moment for Steve was at IYH: Ground Zero when he stunned JR. When he goes, "LETMETELLYABOUT.." in the mic like he's coming out of a goddam school intercom (also helps Louisville Gardens is a small venue with terrible acoustics) and it's KICK-WHAM-STUNNER, you wanna replay the shit 100 times. A 100 times minimum. That's energy you cannot replicate, and I think most guys aren't foolish to even try to do that. If anything, Mox is basically All American Onita.

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I don't think Mox would be "the guy" in a hot era, either. That doesn't mean that he has no value, though!

I would also agree that he's better than either Reigns or Rollins, but that's not a particularly high bar to clear. And those guys aren't terrible, either (well, Rollins struggles with both talking and understanding when and why to do something in ring, but he's clearly athletic and has crisp in-ring movement)! 

If we're talking about having a person who has the skillset to be the main act on TV for a national company who gets buzz for that company, I don't think it's wild to assert that none of the Shield members are at that level. Hey, it's a hard level to be at because of how special the talent has to be.

Re: SCSA, I put forth my argument about why I felt that Mox was aping Austin above. I feel confident that I could go back through early Dynamites and point out specific promos and interactions he had to support it if need be (but please don't make me do it). 

Re: elsalvajeloco's point, I don't think the "those actions aren't exclusive to Mox" argument really holds water. Pretty much everything that's done in wrestling is a recycling or repackaging of something else. It's an extremely tropey art form. But beyond that, I'll just say that we can agree to disagree because I don't plan on revisiting Moxley in the early days of Dynamite to support my point. I think it's interesting that, according to you, likening Mox to Austin is common, which I honestly didn't know. This doesn't mean that the mob is correct, of course, but it is telling that apparently quite a few people think that Mox is evoking Austin in 1997.

Re: Niners's point, I'm not sure that "numbers are somewhat stronger when Moxley is on TV" means anything to me. I guess we need to define "taking the company somewhere." If "beat up NXT TV so that the WWE decides to revamp it entirely" is "somewhere" to you, then how can I disagree other than to say that I wouldn't agree that it matters. If your argument is simply "hey, we now have a legitimately viable #2 promotion on national TV and Moxley is a huge part of that," again, I wouldn't necessarily disagree except to say that I don't know how much that matters in 2021, either. But again, I'll concede that even if I disagree, I can see why you would feel the way that you do.

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23 minutes ago, SirSmellingtonofCascadia said:

He's fine as a guy, but he's not going to take a company anywhere. Who is? I don't know. I feel like wrestling is so niche at this that it would take another Rock-level guy to actually bring casuals back.

i disagree with this whole take because the numbers show that Dynamite is stronger when Mox is around and their average of 950,000-1.1M viewers and 0.45 in 18-49 is good enough most weeks to be #1 on Cable on Wednesdays.  

To me that's taking the company somewhere.  if you want to call it "niche" that's fine but that would mean that everything outside of sports is niche programming. 

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8 minutes ago, SirSmellingtonofCascadia said:

This doesn't mean that the mob is correct, of course, but it is telling that apparently quite a few people think that Mox is evoking Austin in 1997.

I think it's more of folks seeing how he debuted in AEW and thinking "well, he can be their Steve Austin", which isn't fair really. He's their Jon Moxley.

I feel like if you had a Venn diagram for people who cross into Austin territory, you would get a lot of names. Why? They let Austin do a lot of things in a five year span when they started to ramp up doing crazy shit and pushing the envelope. 

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7 minutes ago, EVA said:

I mean, in the 2021 TV landscape, everything besides the NFL is niche, right down to the brand of news you consume.

I don't really agree with this. The NBA is clearly not niche even if it doesn't get NBA-on-NBC Saturday afternoon game ratings because of the fragmentation of television. For that matter, CBS can still churn out bonafide sitcom hits like BBT or HIMYM even in a fragmented market.

Surely, there are multiple points in between "mainstream hit" and "niche interest," no?

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9 minutes ago, Niners Fan in CT said:

Lol @ "didn't move the needle as much as The Rock"    So what does that mean?   Only 2-3 guys in history should be celebrated as needle movers?  

Well, no, but that was Roman's actual comment.  And that was the crux of the issue - Punk was more over than all but one or two guys in the company, was pushed harder than all but one or two guys in the company, and was making both himself and Vince more money than all but one or two guys in the company.  And he wasn't satisfied with that, so he retired.  There were other issues, of course, but the "glass ceiling" seems to have been the deal-breaker.

Lol, I forgot how tiresome Punk debates were.  

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3 minutes ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

I think it's more of folks seeing how he debuted in AEW and thinking "well, he can be their Steve Austin", which isn't fair really. He's their Jon Moxley.

I feel like if you had a Venn diagram for people who cross into Austin territory, you would get a lot of names. Why? They let Austin do a lot of things in a five year span when they started to ramp up doing crazy shit and pushing the envelope. 

I think it's also just the way archetypes and the critical vocabulary that results develops and atrophies over time, in the same way that "Kafkaesque" has been about the least useful thing you can say about a surreal or nightmarish piece of prose fiction for years. 

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1 minute ago, Eoae said:

There were other issues, of course, but the "glass ceiling" seems to have been the deal-breaker.

I just re-listened to the Cabana podcast(s) last week, and I don't know if this is entirely true. A lot of it seems to stem from him repeatedly telling management and medical staff that he was hurt, and them refusing to do anything about it in his side of the story. Vince calling immediately after he gets discharged from the hospital after knee surgery, and booking him in 3 weeks for a TLC match against Ryback on RAW, shit like that. He was also outselling Cena in merch at the peak of his babyface run in 2011/2012, had various outside deals ready to go but WWE swooped in and replaced him with other people when he told them about it (Slim Jim being the one that sticks out to me right now).

It's less "glass ceiling", and more "you weren't supposed to get THIS over, let's cool it down". And gross negligence when it came to his health and wellbeing. And then there's the whole "talked to Triple H two days before my wedding, and then suddenly an overnight FedEx delivery is on my doorstep on my wedding day letting me know I'm fired", and that's after Vince lied to investors telling them Punk was on a sabbatical when Punk had quit.

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7 minutes ago, SirSmellingtonofCascadia said:

Surely, there are multiple points in between "mainstream hit" and "niche interest," no?

Probably but you are the person who said wrestling is "niche".   Personally i would say that neither WWE or AEW are niche because they do too well to be niche. But that's me. 

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11 minutes ago, Casey said:

It took WWE like eight years and a fucking heel turn to make people care about Roman Reigns as a main eventer, I don't even know why we're having this conversation.

No, they've cared since at least 2015. People being salty pissbabies because he wasn't Daniel Bryan is a form of caring. 

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11 minutes ago, Niners Fan in CT said:

Probably but you are the person who said wrestling is "niche".   Personally i would say that neither WWE or AEW are niche because they do too well to be niche. But that's me. 

I don't think that I ever said that there are only two possibilities, "niche" or "mainstream," and therefore since wrestling isn't mainstream, it must be niche, so I'm not sure what your post is trying to assert. Are you just disagreeing with me that wrestling is niche and that you would classify it otherwise? OK, sure, that's cool. Agree to disagree.

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45 minutes ago, Niners Fan in CT said:

Lol @ "didn't move the needle as much as The Rock"    So what does that mean?   Only 2-3 guys in history should be celebrated as needle movers?  

Haven't read the whole discussion, so sorry if this has been covered.

My understanding was Roman was being asked something like "In your SummerSlam match, Cena is coming back as a part-timer and taking a main event spot. When CM Punk was in WWE, he said he had a problem with that, like when the Rock came back and did it. How do you feel about that?" and Roman's answer was basically "If the part-timer is more of a needle mover than the full-time guys, then it makes sense for the part-timer to get the main event spot."

Obviously taking a jab at Punk was a bonus, but he wasn't trying to deliver the biggest possible slam on Punk.  He was answering a question.

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Also it makes sense to bring Punk into it because if he doesn't, then his answer becomes something like "part-timer Cena is more over than any other full-timer on the WWE roster" and now Roman's burying his own company.

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On a board where people constantly (and accurately IMO) assert that WWE can screw up any can't-miss prospect, do we really have people arguing that WWE's difficulties getting Roman Reigns over as the company ace are an indictment of Reigns and not WWE?

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1 hour ago, tbarrie said:

On a board where people constantly (and accurately IMO) assert that WWE can screw up any can't-miss prospect, do we really have people arguing that WWE's difficulties getting Roman Reigns over as the company ace are an indictment of Reigns and not WWE?

i guess the question becomes: how would a different company (AEW or anyone else) book Reigns to be a breakout star and THE GUY? 

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Moxley/'Dean' emerging as the actual guy from The Shield was not what was supposed to happen, so WWE treated it as a borderline irritation.

Roman wasn't The Guy. 

Now he's miffed because he finally found something and isn't such an obvious lame (that glove is pretty stupid though), but now of course 'Dean' has helped create competition that exposes WWE as a whole as super lame. Of course he's bitter.

 

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13 hours ago, BobbyWhioux said:

 


in fact, he should start in on Bryan too.  "he left and he even changed his name to get away from how much better than him I already proved I am." etc etc.

oh, the twitter rage he could spark by implying that the WWE Name is the real name and someone's actual name is the alias they're trying to hide under. Would be pleased to see it.

Case in point, Reigns telling Bryan to go "hug a tree, be a dad" in the most condescending way possible. If WWE let Roman Reigns act like this when fans started becoming lukewarm to his main event babyface run in 2015, I think Reigns would be an even bigger star and draw today. 

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