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March 2022 Wrestling Discussion


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Another guy who was a big star for the majority of his career, but wasn’t great shakes week to week throughout it was Rick Rude. Great character work from him, but sometimes I think his work needed to reflect more of who he really was. It wasn’t until the WCW run when he put on 30 pounds of muscle, and started working more like a bruiser that I started to enjoy his in ring work.

Edited by LoneWolf&Subs
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When I heard about the Butch thing, it felt like they were just giving Dunne material for his eventual AEW debut promo. Poor guy must be looking over at the other channel and shedding a tear knowing he'd be the young gun in Regal's group.

The DVR has changed the game for being able to ignore wrestlers entirely. ( I can proudly say that i have not watched a single current Dolph Ziggler match since his Miz/Spirit Squad feud.)Another factor should be how involved were wrestlers in major storylines which made a crummy wrestling match required viewing. For example, Mike Rotunda may has no redeeming qualities as a wrestler, but I could miss almost all of the Captains matches and it wouldn't change my ability to keep up with things. 

So the answer has to be HHH. He is the perfect combination of pre-DVR, boring matches and always being in the mix. 

 

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59 minutes ago, JohnnyJ said:

When I heard about the Butch thing, it felt like they were just giving Dunne material for his eventual AEW debut promo. Poor guy must be looking over at the other channel and shedding a tear knowing he'd be the young gun in Regal's group.

The DVR has changed the game for being able to ignore wrestlers entirely. ( I can proudly say that i have not watched a single current Dolph Ziggler match since his Miz/Spirit Squad feud.)Another factor should be how involved were wrestlers in major storylines which made a crummy wrestling match required viewing. For example, Mike Rotunda may has no redeeming qualities as a wrestler, but I could miss almost all of the Captains matches and it wouldn't change my ability to keep up with things. 

So the answer has to be HHH. He is the perfect combination of pre-DVR, boring matches and always being in the mix. 

 

Your  reasoning is pretty spot on here.  HHH has some legitimately great moments over his career, but the sheer amount of terrible shit you have to sit through to get to those great moments is fucking incredible.  There are literally years of bullshit you have to watch to get to something worth watching.  If you tried to do a retrospective of HHH's career, you'd literally have to sit through about 15 straight years of overly long promos, overly long matches, and some of the worst "comedy" you've ever seen.  No one has been more overbearingly terrible week to week for a longer period of time.  He has to get some extra credit for that.  Jeff Jarrett is someone I didn't think about, but I feel like he's a great candidate.   He's kind of the Kirk Cousins of wrestling.  He isn't bad, but if he's the best you got, you aren't very good.  Chavo is an interesting choice, but I don't remember ever being annoyed that he was on my television, which should be part of the criteria.  

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1 hour ago, LoneWolf&Subs said:

Another guy who was a big star for the majority of his career, but wasn’t great shakes week to week throughout it was Rick Rude. Great character work from him, but sometimes I think his work needed to reflect more of who he really was. It wasn’t until the WCW run when he put on 30 pounds of muscle, and started working more like a bruiser that I started to enjoy his in ring work.

In WCW he toned down the "wrestling stripper" aspect of his gimmick and got a lot meaner. He was absolutely brutal (in a good way) in his jobber matches there.

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Rude was fun in the tag team with Manny Fernandez and I think had an enjoyable WWF run. His 1992 WCW run is one of my favorite calendar years for a wrestler, but his selling, facial expressions, and finisher were enough to make him interesting before then, at least to me.

He'd be on my list of guys who coasted for the longest time on charisma and a dope finisher before getting legitimately good, though.

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Triple H is like Shlak. Both have a physique that says "I do Press Slams", but neither is actually strong enough to do any power pots at all. Both look at the aesthetic choices of Germans in the late 30s/early 40s and say "Wow that is so cool!". And both have a thing where their match quality is directly proportionate to how much they bleed.

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3 hours ago, HarryArchieGus said:

That may have been the last straw for me too.  The transitional DDT win over RVD had already sent me on that road tho.  Not to mention having to watch Raw on delay to ffwd thru his insanely long rambling bad promos (alongside all the other bad skits).  That whole era of WWE was the antithesis of Tony Khan's 'give the fans want they want'.  WWE monopolized and weren't even subtle about doing whatever the fuck they wanted to.  I hope the memory of that WWE era (and every year since? I stopped watching) alongside the arguably even weaker Jeff Jarrett-alternative will never die.  Wrestling fans need to know how bad it can truly be while they complain about a Dynamite match not going as well as they thought it should.  

Don't forget the classic match where he beat Spike Dudley with a sleeper. For fucks sake, if he was going to make us sit through a match where he was trying to revive a long dead finisher he should've at least brought back the old trope of "the ref demands that the heel revive the downed face and the heel refuses for a while before smacking the face in the back to wake him up".

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3 hours ago, supremebve said:

If you tried to do a retrospective of HHH's career, you'd literally have to sit through [...] some of the worst "comedy" you've ever seen. 

are we counting the Katie Vick skit, or does that get a category all to itself?

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9 hours ago, AxB said:

WWE has Butch

AEW has The Butcher

Someone on the indies, start calling yourself "The Butchest".

I feel like if Impact used that for one of their Knockouts, that would be on brand.

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You won’t convince me otherwise that Triple H spent that 2001 injury period doing only 3 things: lifting, gassing, and watching 1970’s St. Louis tapes.

The guy that left was literally right in the middle of one of the best matches ever. The guy that came back was whatever the hell that was that showed up at MSG.

Edited by For Great Justice
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I always felt that Chavo was pretty good, unfortunately he is always going to be compared to Eddie who was a generational talent. The Eddie Guerreo is my favorite wrestler stuff was fun and I enjoyed his CW title run with his dad as his manager both from an in ring perspective and character work 

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On 3/12/2022 at 3:19 AM, supremebve said:

Since you brought up Wallstreet,  I have a question for the board.  Who is the wrestler you've watched the most, but enjoyed the least? My two choices are Mike Rotonda or Billy Gunn. I'm pretty sure the best match I've seen either of them in was the dumpster match at Wrestlemania XIV. That's a good match,  but Billy Gunn's contribution has pretty much zero to do with the quality of that match. 

It's an interesting question and there have been a lot of interesting answers.

For me? Last couple of years it's definitely been EVIL. I watch a fair bit of New Japan because I have some real-life friends who really enjoy their style and it gives us a fun thing to talk about. Plus, I love Ishii, MiSu, Cobb, Hiromu, Shingo...

But it also means sitting through endless EVIL matches with more-than-predictable interference finishes... plus a stinking title reign! I didn't mind the guy when he was teaming with SANADA on the mid-card, but I loath him as the lead heel. That run has really hurt New Japan, in my opinion.

All-time, it's either Boris Zhukov or Randy Orton.

Zhukov because we used to get AWA on TSN in Canada and he seemed to be on a lot, while entertaining everyone very very little. Soldat Ustinov  was worse, but he wasn't on TV as often. then Zhukov moved to WWE and formed The Bolsheviks. Volkoff and The Iron Sheik were a wildly entertaining tag team. Not so Volkoff and Zhukov. I suppose the quick loss to the Hart Foundation at VI was the most I have ever been entertained by a Zhukov match.

I know Orton has his fans here, but he has never really done it for me. I find him consistently, reliably boring. Which I think is the worst thing a wrestler can be. At least with HHH I was able to work up a kind of hatred for him during his reign of terror. Orton never got me to care that much. Even in recent years, where I only very occasionally watch a big "premium event" like RumbleMania, Orton always seems to be in some interminable, overblown, bullshit match with bugs being projected on the mat or something. 

I was there live in the building for Backlash 2004 when Orton had a hardcore match vs Cactus for the IC title, so I have kind of enjoyed at least  one Orton match (even though -spoiler- Cactus losing a hardcore match definitely bummed me out) but there is no famous, well-regarded, highly-pushed wrestler who has ever bored me more. Not even EVIL.

Edited by Gordlow
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1 hour ago, zendragon said:

I always felt that Chavo was pretty good, unfortunately he is always going to be compared to Eddie who was a generational talent. The Eddie Guerreo is my favorite wrestler stuff was fun and I enjoyed his CW title run with his dad as his manager both from an in ring perspective and character work 

I've just reached the Eddie heel turn stuff on my WCW watch, currently watching the Nitro after Bash at the Beach 1997. I'm really looking forward to getting to see Chavo in particular.

Also, has anyone pitched Danny McBride to play Nick Patrick in a comedy about southern wrestling ref yet, because I feel like they're long lost brothers.

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Guest Stefanie Without Stefanie
On 3/11/2022 at 1:19 PM, supremebve said:

Since you brought up Wallstreet,  I have a question for the board.  Who is the wrestler you've watched the most, but enjoyed the least? My two choices are Mike Rotonda or Billy Gunn. I'm pretty sure the best match I've seen either of them in was the dumpster match at Wrestlemania XIV. That's a good match,  but Billy Gunn's contribution has pretty much zero to do with the quality of that match. 

I've been thinking about this question since it was asked because I can usually try to find something good out of everyone, especially if they've had a very long career, and I can't really say with any certainty that I'd say I have a hard line that I enjoy them the least of anyone.

That said, if you deleted the entire library of matches featuring Kaoru Ito from my memory, I don't know if I'd be that heartbroken.

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35 minutes ago, Matt D said:

Do people really need me to talk shit about Bruiser Brody again?

My honest argument would be that hating a wrestler's work, as you do with Brody's selfishness, as I do with Helmsley's or Inoki's self-conscious self-aggrandizement, can be pretty enjoyable. Particularly when there are people who strongly agree or disagree with your take and there are discussions to be enjoyed as well.

So my take on the question is that it isn't "who have you seen a lot of, that you hate?" so much as " Who have you seen a lot of, that doesn't create much of a response one way or another? "

Overthinking it further: It's probably possible to hate a wrestler (or their work) and not enjoy talking about it at all. That might be worse than just being bored.

Edited by Gordlow
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1 hour ago, Gordlow said:

I was there live in the building for Backlash 2004 when Orton had a hardcore match vs Cactus for the IC title, so I have kind of enjoyed at least  one Orton match (even though -spoiler- Cactus losing a hardcore match definitely bummed me out) but there is no famous, well-regarded, highly-pushed wrestler who has ever bored me more. Not even EVIL.

I vividly remember 13 year old me doing yardwork in hopes that I'd be able to order that PPV. It is funny you mention Orton though, because I respect his work but feel pretty much the same. As of right now, Orton has been on WWE TV for TWENTY straight years, there's bound to be fatigue in a guy who has nominal changes in his character over that period. Legend Killer Orton was peak Orton IMO 

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Guest Stefanie Without Stefanie
47 minutes ago, Matt D said:

Do people really need me to talk shit about Bruiser Brody again?

My favorite thing about Bruiser Brody was how much he inspired the Berzerker, because I really enjoyed the Berzerker.

Edited by Stefanie the Human
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2 hours ago, Gordlow said:

know Orton has his fans here, but he has never really done it for me. I find him consistently, reliably boring. Which I think is the worst thing a wrestler can be. At least with HHH I was able to work up a kind of hatred for him during his reign of terror. Orton never got me to care that much. Even in recent years, where I only very occasionally watch a big "premium event" like RumbleMania, Orton always seems to be in some interminable, overblown, bullshit match with bugs being projected on the mat or something. 

Orton was going to be my answer, but I gave it to HHH on a technicality because I'd been watching him for 7 years by the time Orton showed up, and I took some time off during the prime Orton years from 2007-2011, so I was taking the whole "watched the most of" part in a sort of literal sense.

Orton gets love from other wrestlers because hes a night off and has great timing and everything, which hey, if I had to work him I'd be thrilled, but he doesn't do a whole ton for me as a viewer.

Overall, I'd be lying if I didn't say both guys have some flashes of brilliance. HHH had a great 2000 as pointed out by a bunch of you, and when I did start watching again in 2011, I really liked Orton's fued with Christian. If he's ever had better matches than he did with Christian and the Foley match you mentioned, I haven't seen them.

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6 minutes ago, Zakk_Sabbath said:

Orton was going to be my answer, but I gave it to HHH on a technicality because I'd been watching him for 7 years by the time Orton showed up, and I took some time off during the prime Orton years from 2007-2011, so I was taking the whole "watched the most of" part in a sort of literal sense.

Orton gets love from other wrestlers because hes a night off and has great timing and everything, which hey, if I had to work him I'd be thrilled, but he doesn't do a whole ton for me as a viewer.

Overall, I'd be lying if I didn't say both guys have some flashes of brilliance. HHH had a great 2000 as pointed out by a bunch of you, and when I did start watching again in 2011, I really liked Orton's fued with Christian. If he's ever had better matches than he did with Christian and the Foley match you mentioned, I haven't seen them.

I really enjoyed the Orton/Styles match at Mania a few years ago. That was cagey veteran vs. cagey veteran pulling out all the stops to avoid each other's outtanowhere manoeuvre. It didn't feel like the traditional Mania match where the goal was to hit their finish as many times as possible with as many shocked face close-ups along the way, but rather the chase to being able to get to hit in the first place being the key. Things built up nicely and made sense. 

Orton when he's had something to do, has generally been good, but there's 11 months of the year of total cringe phoned in to get to it. He would have a significantly bigger legacy if he was around in his father's day, or even when there was only 90 mins of syndicated TV a week to fill in. 

RNN, early days of Evolution putting on solid midcard 6 mans, the Legend Killer/Foley stuff, the Taker feud, "I have IED you know", being the Batman to Cena's Superman, the Bryan feud, Evolution/Shield, putting over Mark Henry as a monster.....that's about it for 20 years, but it's enough to not completely write him off. 

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