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I am here for considering 1997 as being "semi-recent"

First off let me get this off my chest. I fucking love the new day. They are me in a nut shell being geeky black dudes. With that being said. Big meaty men slappin meat is one of the best most useful phrases to describe hoss fights I've ever heard and still use it to describe matches to my wrestling loving friends to this day. That and meat festival.

It's Goldberg. Came up on the pod pre pandemic.

Not to be confused with Blood Alcohol Level…

She must be on the list of current wrestlers with the most cool and varied gear. She always seems to have something different and has already created some iconic looks like the ‘Mexican flag’ with the blood over the skull white and emerald green in the unsanctioned match.

The New Days genuine love for each other as brothers always comes through no matter the medium.

WWE turns all of their top babyfaces into smilin', milquetoast, boring, pieces of shit. All of these guys are infinitely better when they're just allowed to beat someone's ass. It's rare when the "smilin" shtick works.

I can't view the video at work, but Darby and Eddie and Hangman are three guys that all have a legit special aura to them that I haven't seen in, shit, since maybe Cena or Punk? Darby doesn't speak that much and is skinny as a rail, Eddie is in that Austin/Rock/Cena/Punk tier of promos and has the body that most regular fans have, and Hangman is the most in the middle of those three but he feels like the most honest wrestler out there. None of it makes sense, but all three guys stand out so much. It makes me wish we could turn back the clock on Eddie and give him an extra 10 years of a career because that is a dude that every major company should be tripping over themselves to sign. And as for Darby, we can't turn back the clock, we just have to hope the guy even has 5 years left in him, let alone 10.

That's a great question! 1949 leaps to mind: Ric Flair, Jerry Lawler, Stan Hansen, and Yoshiaki Fujiwara at the top of that class make it pretty hard to beat. Then you've got Paul Orndorff, El Felino, Austin Idol, Iceman King Parsons, Don Muraco, Jerry Blackwell, Jim Brunzell, Chavo Guerrero, Sr. and quite a few others rounding out the list.

Cancelled my Peacock Premium plan. Tonight's event clinched it for me. Literally the worst wrestling app in the history of existence.

I agree with your sizzling hot take, and you know what else is sizzling? These steaks I received from Omaha Steaks. By the time I finish this plate, I’ll have just shit a brick in my MeUndies.

Quintuple post? Is that a record?

I'd be more concerned with what Darby does OUTSIDE of the ring. That guy is like the 2021 version of Johnny Knoxville - so maybe that's why I gravitate towards his act so much. Most of us grew up in the Jackass era and from his social media, that seems to be the type of a guy he is. Eddie Kingston is a guy that I'll be honest, I knew his name but had never seen him work really let alone cut a promo before AEW. Now, he's in my top 3 favorite acts in wrestling right now. Yeah he's 39 and yeah it would've been nice if he had those 10 years, but think about his story. This is a guy who wasn't even in AEW a little over a year ago. It was a pandemic Cody Rhodes open challenge that brought Eddie Kingston to AEW and that one performance alone gave him what he has now. I mean, the guy was in a PPV main event for the title not too long after that. I'm just happy AEW came into existence so people like Eddie Kingston could get the shot that they so clearly deserved.

Right man won. Congratulations, Big E.

You can tell that Jericho really took her under his wing, and got her to this point. Her promos, her gimmicks, and even the weird top knot are all 97-98 Jericho.

At least she's not a Super Hero In Training

Shingo made the cover

I've been on a two-week road trip which actually culminated with the Slammiversary PPV(and the tapings the following day) so I'm still trying to catch up with what I've missed on this board since then but I will say that that Slammiversary crowd was one of the best crowds I've ever been a part of, big promotion or small. I hope it came off well on the PPV.

Okay, here's a negative I hope we can all agree on: not everyone needs to do a split in their match, and no one should do it more than once.

I took wrestling out of the smoke filled arenas and put it into garish, LED-engulfed hellscapes so gaudy that even the most ostentatious Branson Missouri lounge singer would say "damn, Vince, that's too much." --Vince McMahon, probably

I have an office next to my supervisor. He now knows I haven't been doing shit for the past 20 min. I crack up every time I see this & Big E gets to "BIG MEATY MEN SLAPPING MEAT!" part.

I'm picturing Vince in baggy shorts and a Lakers jersey trying to pretend he fits in. Of course, the company should be able to hire people in the right demographic that can figure out how to tailor the shows to young people. But they should also be able to hire writers who can write segments that are compelling and comedy that's actually funny, and we've all seen how well that's turned out,

When they started talking on the new day pod about a haunted arena in Kansas City, i thought it was going to be about Owen haunting Kemper Arena. Luckily, not about that at all..

I've seen this come up a couple times now since the match Wednesday. I'm sort of torn on the way I think about it because obviously hey, safety and longevity first, but the flip side is with no house shows hopefully that style doesn't take as much of a toll as it did in the past. Maybe a Mick Foley or a Jeff Hardy or a Sabu doesn't deal with the chronic pain, or sneaks a couple extra years in, if theyre just doing the one TV a week instead of the insane old schedule. Just food for thought anyway (and possibly also just some standard wishful/hopeful thinking)

Preds prospect Luke Prokop has become the first active NHL player under contract to come out as gay I should note that he came out publicly in an Instagram post but had been coming out to family members during the year. He said he had come out to Nashville management last month https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/31843069/nashville-predators-prospect-luke-prokop-says-gay-hopes-living-authentic-life-helps-nhl-career

Ok, so I am much more mellow about this than I was five years ago. Some of that is because I don't have to read people laud Volador every week like I did back then. I've got more distance from all of it. I miss CMLL. I miss lucha in a setting like that. I miss a crowd like that. That said, I don't feel in the least that I'm wrong about these guys and Volador especially. Obviously, they left it all out there. Ten year old me would have loved this. There are so many moves and innovative spots and they're all hit well. They throw themselves into the bumps so well. Some of the offensive, like Sombra's clotheslines (a missed one leading into the end of the primera so it matters as much as anything does in this), look very good, as did the finish, for instance, and they turned it up in certain ways for the setting. I've never seen the double moonsault spot look as good as when Sombra won the segunda with it. Some things, like Sombra's mid-air twist off the ropes before hitting a headscissors was just spectacular. I thought beginning with the stage dive was a novel bit of structuring that worked for the match and set a tone. But they just miss the mark on so much of what makes an apuestas match work. They completely misunderstood what that once-a-year crowd wanted to see. I mean, some of that isn't their fault, because that crowd wanted to see Atlantis vs Ultimo Guerrero, but there was a reason for that. They were for Volador and against Sombra and past Volador clapping on the ground a few times and Sombra showing just a little more aggression once or twice, that wasn't in the match at all. The stakes were about athleticism and not hate and that works far better for a title match than a mask one. Add in the lopsided time of the falls and the sheer number of moves, with everything in the tercera (which went 15 minutes+ to the primera and segunda going, what? Two or three each), and I mean everything, being something that could have been a match ender and it's obvious how much this match could have benefited from a few minutes of Sombra just beating the crap out of Volador in there. The fans would have eaten it up and it would have made all of Volador's big offense in the tercera mean all the more because of it. There wasn't a sense of escalation in the tercera either. What's the hierarchy of any of the moves in this? Why is a poison rana less deadly than a top rope rana? A spanish fly vs a canadian destroyer? Part of that was because just about everything was hit. They would have been well served by going for things earlier in the match and it not working out. For guys so used to each other and so imaginative, the match needed about 20% more counters and feints, which would have been another good way to extend the first two falls. They were never going to fully embrace the struggle they needed because half of what they had to do needed to be collaborative and for the other half, they were going to rush through it to get to the actual spot, but counters and feints were thing within their wheelhouse that would have helped. Just going to drop an example of that rushing here because I don't want to pepper it into my last paragraph: At one point, Sombra gets one of the only submissions in the whole match on Volador in a gory special type hanging stretch. Usually there's some drama to this, some drama and getting it on, some drama in getting out of it. Then, eventually, the person can sit out of it and they can go from there. Sombra immediately gets it, no problem. Volador is starting to sit out of it before it even registers with the fans, and then they move into the end point, Sombra dropping him into a waistlock for a German. Now, I know what you'll say here, that I just complained about feints and counters and this was there, so maybe i was wrong and even the feints and counters would have been infuriating, but I would have rather seen them on signature offense that came later, not something that was just done to set up a cipher of a spot. If Sombra DID lock in that hold later, then this would have mattered more. I will say this: Volador is a lot less annoying with his mask on, so if I was going to spend 25 minutes with him, I'm glad I didn't have to see his face. Ok, going too far on this. Look, I'm glad to have watched this because tastes and opinions change and I'd be curious if mine did, but in the end, mine didn't, I'm just less angry about it all, even Meltzer going 4.5* on this. Seriously, though, what's the point of working this hard for such little effect and drama? They could have done one-third the work, taken one-third the bumps, had one-third the "action", and it all could have meant three times more if they knew how to tap into the once-in-a-lifetime sort of emotion of an anniversary apuestas match in Arena Mexico. Here's one difference between me now and five years ago: now I still think they could have had "their match" with a lot of their trappings, and while I probably still wouldn't have liked it a ton relative to what they could have done instead with something not "their match," it could have still been much better with a different layout, more meaning, more purpose, more anticipation and proper build and payoff. They could have remixed what they did and what they wanted to do for greater effect. If they did that, it would have been a better main event and a better match, even if maybe not a better mask match. edit: Here's my only edit. I want to add: "Wrestling can be so much better than this." Just that.

Cowboy shit.

Big E has to cash in successfully.

And as if the decision to try that wasn't insane enough, they threw him out there in MSG BEFORE he had debuted on TV so the crowd that night literally had no reason at all to expect someone other than Snuka. That crowd turning on him before his entrance was finished, and then starting a "We Want Snuka!" chant during the match, and booing him when he climbed to the top rope for the finish...if the dude was a Bret Hart level worker he still would have been burnt toast after that.

Canned reaction narratives are back. Nature is healing.

Thunder Rosa

Well done, AEW.

Now they need to get off their asses, and get Worldwide on there.

This is the worst post.

D.M.D.

WCW didn't have their own production crew, they always used crews from Turner Sports. They ran into a problem in the summer of '96, the Summer Olympics were in Atlanta, Turner's backyard, so all of Turner production was loaned out to broadcasters for the Olympics. Faced with having to run a month of shows with no production crew, WCW went back to Disney, who had their own house production. However, instead of going back to the stale soundstage, they built a makeshift outdoor arena in the park. What helped was the timing of the shows, they ran Nitros here for five weeks, every Nitro in between Bash at the Beach and Road Wild. That means the first Nitro here was the night after Hogan's heel turn joining the nWo. There was a sense of uneasiness throughout these shows as you were wondering when the nWo would attack next, and being outdoors in a makeshift arena helped add to that atmosphere as it would be easier for the nWo to attack here instead of a real arena. WCW even played into that with Tony announcing all the main eventers who weren't at one of the shows because they were on a Japan tour. Seems like an odd way to market the show, "Look at all the guys who you won't see tonight!" but it worked in making WCW seem even more vulnerable. Then the big attack happened, one of the most memorable angles in WCW history, with the nWo laying out a bunch of guys backstage. They made it seem so real and not scripted. The show stopped to a halt as the wounded were attended to and ambulances were called. Guys who had just been fighting in the middle of the ring were now working together, Heenan walked off the set out of fear for his safety. We were told since all of the attacked guys were scheduled to wrestle that night, the entire show had to be rebooked on the fly with who was available backstage. That led to some funky match-ups, including a main event of the Giant defended the World Title against Greg Valentine. That entire episode of Nitro was a master class in wrestling angles, and the set helped add to that.

It's a ten years and a few months old, but: