Greggulator
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Posts posted by Greggulator
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Also, the product feels so different and fresh with the change in production. I never minded the Kevin Dunn stuff as much as everyone else. Producing live television is insanely hard, and there’s a benefit to doing things the same way in order to make it as easy to produce as possible. People always pointed out when a spot or a big moment was missed by the camera… because of how little that actually happened. It’s not like real sports has changed its production too much over the years.
But the WWE also has the benefit of being scripted. And that adds in flexibility. Just the simple “walk-and-talk” quick promos they do before matches or the video segments like the Sami/Gable and Drew funeral stuff is so fresh and fun. They also have been experimenting with long tracking shots. Some of that feels a bit too much — it’s such a show-off technique in film and TV since people want to bite from Goodfellas. But last night, they had a really good one where Seth did his interview walk-and-talk, Drew’s awesome cameo, with the camera then trailing him for his entrance (which was so rad to see up close with how he switched right into the orchestra bit) and then to the ring. It really added to the atmosphere and gave a sort of “here’s what Seth sees when he comes to the ring” appeal.
They really are being smart about how to do these segments and who they are doing them with. The first one I remember doing a taped segment with was the KCs — they were probably used to it in NXT and if it doesn’t work with your low-card babyface act, who cares? Now they are using Sami and Gable and it felt really natural coming from two of the high end performers who have some acting chops.
I have no memory of who did the first walk-and-talks but I remember Kofi and Xavier having some quick bangers before their matches with Imperium. You have two all-time greats who know to not miss their marks for the blocking and staging and can deliver really concise promos.
It’s all so fun to watch.
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Over 10 million people watched the game last night. That’s right what the men’s tournament did the past weekend — which has a giant head start on women’s hoops, has huge interest because of (gross) gambling, and featured a bunch of blue bloods that always attract eyeballs.
It’s so awesome to see this unfolding. Women’s basketball is a really great product, even beyond Caitlyn Clark or South Carolina. It obviously can’t generate that at-the-rim highlights of the men’s game. But the passing, ball movement, player movement and the like is just at the absolute highest level. They barely stop moving.
I describe elite women’s basketball as the absolute highest form of basketball that I am familiar with playing. I grew up playing basketball with some really good athletes — one kid was a walk-on at Providence (total douche), a few other kids who played other D-1 sports at least for a little bit. But I did not play with anyone who could dunk in-game. Maybe, at most, someone I knew could barely do a one-handed ”dunk” more like a finger roll after 15 attempts in a layup line. This is not to say that I could have ever competed with a women’s player even on a crappy junior college team. But, aesthetically, the women’s game is how 99 percent of the world actually plays basketball and they are the absolute best at it.
Also: as stated before, I played daily with a kid who walked-on at Providence. He was more like a D2 level player if he wanted to actually play in games. That is still impressive. (Even though he is one of the biggest tool bags I have ever met in my life.)
He was NOT the best player in my neighborhood. The best player was my friend Patty. She balled out. She frequently beat the kid mentioned above one-on-one. She was also a starter for one of the top girls high school teams in New Jersey at the time as a freshman and sophomore. She was getting early recruiting letters from Top 25 teams. We were playing 3 on 3 and someone we were playing (another girl who was decent but not nearly as good) against took a cheap shot when Patty went up for a layup, and Patty came down and tore her ACL. Me and my other friend walked her home. She missed about a year and had to regain her athleticism right when recruiting really happens so the big schools didn’t give her any offers. She still ended up playing D1 (St. Peter’s) and is in their Hall of Fame. She was their leading scorer for two teams that made the NCAA tournament as a 16 seed, too. Awesome player and a really good friend when we were kids.
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The Bray Wyatt documentary is absolutely incredible. I don’t know if there is another wrestler whose work I have ever enjoyed more. Not everything was for me or for you, but we were really lucky to have a guy like Bray firing off all kinds of ideas and making a lot of them happen. You can tell how much he was liked and respected and enjoyed his time.
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4 minutes ago, Johnny Sorrow said:
Everything Sami/ Gable/ Gunther this show was fucking perfect.
Sami has acting chops. We saw it during The Bloodline stuff and even the comedy side with Knoxville. Would not surprise me if he ended up as a lovable goofball in a family comedy.
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Oh man, the final segment on RW was absolutely epic. I love a good heel whipping babyfaces angle. Rock and Roman properly laid in the lashing. Good on Seth and Cody for taking the beating. Great touch by Cody keeping his shirt on, because that got some crowd “noooo” murmurs when The Bloodline ripped the shirt off. Roman talking smack on the floor to the camera with the carnage in the background was so good. Only note was this had the opportunity for fans to pelt the ring with garbage like 90s nWo or a father trying to hop the railing since his kid was crying.
The Rock in 2024 just got a New York City crowd to chant “Rocky Suxks” less than a week from WrestleMania. So amazing.
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1 hour ago, TimLivingston said:
Jokic loves his game, which makes me think he’d angle to get him a shot in Denver. To see those two play together would be magical.
LSU/Iowa lived up to the hype and then some. We don’t deserve Caitlin and Angel, let alone in the same game. Near a 40-point triple double and a damn near 20/20 game? Outstanding.
Plus the comeuppance of Kim Mulkey!
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I am watching Raw in bits and pieces tonight. I just finished Richochet vs. Ivar. How many weeks this year has Ivar been involved in the best match on Raw? Because it has been many weeks. He is this secret awesome worker.
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Dear almighty were we treated to something tonight with Caitlyn Clark. What a great night for sports. My soon to be five-year-old son knows who she is and calls her Twenty Two and I am so glad that he gets to watch her during his formative sports fandom years.
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8 hours ago, Cobra Commander said:
I don’t know how long DJ Burns would hang around pro basketball. But for some weird reason, it wouldn’t shock me if he was coaching somewhere one day. As impossible as it would seem to predict current college basketball players future coaching prospects.
He reminds me a lot of Zach Randolph. I have been wrong so many times before but I could absolutely see DJ Burns as a bench guy for a playoff team next year.
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1 hour ago, RIPPA said:
There have been a few stories around for the past few years about A-Rod and his partner not having the money. Considering A-Rod does "financial freedom" seminars with Pitbull and has licensed out his name and the like with the scumbag who wrote "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" -- all stuff where you try and get people to pay money for these worthless rip-off classes -- I'm of the belief that A-Rod doesn't quite have the amount of money you need to buy a controlling share of a NBA franchise.
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Draymond just got ejected tonight. 3 minutes into the game for lipping off about a play he was not even involved in.
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My one wish is that we could get RIOT from the original WOW there...
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JJ and LeBron’s new podcast Mind The Game is incredible.
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On 3/25/2024 at 7:36 PM, Dolfan in NYC said:
Toronto's Jonay Porter is being held out of the lineup today because of "irregularities with prop bets" about him.
Incredibly funny scandal brewing. Massive betting on all the unders on his prop bets. Dude also has a subscription service to his Discord where you can get financial tips from him. Perfection.
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Also: The bridge is going to really make supply chains on the east coast interesting. Baltimore is the biggest hub of auto imports and exports and parts in the country, one of the biggest two terminals for coal exports, a port where we ship liquified natural gas out of, and a big intake for sugar. (The Domino Sugar refinery is a Baltimore landmark.)
One interesting thing about the Baltimore Port I did not know — it does not handle a lot of containers. It’s more of a “roll on and roll off” port.
I read a few places that it’s going to be a messy few days to try and reroute everything, but the rest of the east coast ports are big enough to handle the loads, but they might have some logistical issues to figure out because they handle container ships more. Plus, there will also have to be a lot more trucks rerouted from Baltimore to those ports.
An economist in an article I read said that the Baltimore bridge collapse meant America’s ocean shipping industry now essentially had no room for error in terms of capacity.
Also interesting — shipping insurance might not change too much. The stuff in the Red Sea already jacked up those rates, and the shipping insurance industry is more of a collective pool than how homeowner’s insurance or something like that works just to handle things like this.
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2 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:
We have some examples on the bullshit people are Tweeting out over in the Discord, but I got it straight from the horse's mouth today. I went to a local Chinese buffet for lunch and they had CNN playing on their TV set. An old lady eating (who somehow did so while talking to her friend non-stop the entire meal) piped up "I wonder what happened. The driver probably couldn't speak English."
This, in a restaurant owned and staffed by people who have English as a second language and definitely heard what you blurted out at full volume in a half-empty open-air room with nobody else talking.
Making it better — I don’t know if this 100 percent true since I saw it on social media somewhere. But it was mentioned that it’s required for local harbor pilots to steer vessels in and out of the harbor directly. I used to write about oil tankers — Baltimore doesn’t have an oil refinery, so I never wrote about that port specifically. But other ports have those kinds of requirements or something similar logistically.
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1 hour ago, The Natural said:
I hope you're okay, NikoBaltimore. Hoping there's no casualties. It's leading the news channels in the UK.
It’s a really important highway, too. I-95 is the big interstate along the east coast of America. It goes under Baltimore as a tunnel. There’s a “beltway” that is essentially a loop road around the city for vehicles too big for the tunnel/people who want to avoid city traffic and for locals in that area. That’s what the bridge is on. Going to be pretty disruptive for moving cargo around the US for a while.
The video is absolutely wild.
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Man, the Rock is a legitimate movie star being the single biggest asshole heel imaginable. Dude has absolutely nothing to gain from being in WrestleMania at all. It’s all downside risk for his career and real easy to see some studio exec taking a big role from him. The payday he’s getting from this is relatively nothing. Dwayne is just an artist and it is incredible.
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Man, that ending tonight was so so so so awesome. I loved that just a bit ago they had Cody come off the bus and tap his dog he has painted on it. Great foreshadowing they set up with that. Absolutely perfect that is was in the rain. Rock looked twisted as hell throughout. All-time heel show ending.
I was absolutely not into the Punk stuff. I love Drew in this current form. But it’s so corny when Punk reacts to comments like doing a three-count with his other hand. If you want played out shoot stuff to work, then everyone has to take the insults. Why do I care if Punk is going to do commentary for Rollins/Drew if he’s just going to be sarcastic and above it all? A bitter Punk calling a match between two of his biggest enemies is a good twist. Punk just no-selling insults like he’s Kevin Nash in the ring against La Parka in 1997 WCW is lame.
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I only got to see the Last Woman Standing match and that was a damn good garbage match brawl. Thought they did a good job at going from spot to spot and plunder to plunder. Nia has become a really good bully and Becky is at her best selling and selling and selling and then firing up. Loved that Becky had to use her resiliency to get the win (as highlighted by the announcers) and find a way to put Nia down after the Manhandle Slam through the table didn’t work. The leg drop from the ladder was pretty gnarly. Fun match.
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Nia has been so fucking good during this latest run. What an awesome bully cheapshot artist. She’s had a bunch of banger matches. (I actually didn’t see her against Ripley yet either.) Becky is always at her best when she gets to be defiant in her matches — I’m not a fan of Becky as the world beater best in the world, but she’s fantastic having to work from underneath. She’s been positioned this way during the past few months and it has really clicked for me. I think the match tonight is going to be a really fun brawl. Becky vs. Rhea absolutely could main event WM but understandably isn’t because of the absolute star power in the main events.
I am also really intrigued by the Sami/Gunther/Gable angle. They have to get Gable involved. Sami getting the win was such a great and intriguing choice. What a great three years Sami has had with WrestleMania — the big (and pretty incredible) celebrity match, a Night One main event in the angle of the century (and just an all-time banger match, too), and now in the show stealing position against Gunther and very likely Chad Gable with him playing as “the other guy.”
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My son has entered the Bluey age of entertainment. Bluey is absolutely fantastic. It’s awesome that a show this well-made is so popular. There are so many episodes that make me tear up. The episode about cricket Is the standout for me and generates a lot of allergies.
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Dear god The Rock’s promo once we got past the concert was all-time despicable heeling, Nothing quite like referencing the kids movie you starred in when saying you are going to beat a man with a belt and then hand his mom said belt. Incredible.
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I just watched the Iron Woman. It’s a perfect wrestling match. I don’t know what else can be said about it. Ironman matches are my favorite gimmick. One of the pet peeves with an Ironman is when and how a first fall comes. An Ironman always comes at the end of a feud, and by that time you’ve seen the participants have these long matches and then the first fall comes like six minutes into it. The Brooklyn classic went just about 20 minutes. The first fall in this one comes with nine minutes gone, but these two had so many NXT TV matches that went about that length, so it does not feel egregious.
Another thing with Ironman matches is that the matches can get driven by when the falls come. But this match is driven by the characters and their motivations first — just like any good wrestling match or, frankly, any narrative in ant art form. This is an absolute masterpiece in character work in any kind of performance art. It is really transcendent.
The big pivot of the story takes place before the first fall. Ahead of that, it’s a whole “these two women respect each other” vibe. Bayley goes to respectfully lift Sasha up out of the corner, and Sasha does this awesome “I really appreciate this and respect you too” face before snatching Bayley’s wig and throwing her onto the mat.
That just starts Sasha putting on an all-time great hammy villainess performances. I say hammy as a compliment, because wrestling should always be over-the-top. It’s why we love it. And the motivation is clear. Sasha does not think she can beat Bayley without being even more despicable than the Brooklyn match, and she’s not wrong.
The first fall comes soon after. There is a switcheroo that ends with Sasha in the corner blocking the ref’s vision, followed by an awesome looking eye poke (Bayley is the absolute best at selling those types of things) before a roll-up. Perfect — the villain takes the lead by being diabolical, and now our beloved hero has to fight from underneath.
The whole rest of the match, Sasha either cheats or usually does something heinous but within the rules. One of my favorite spots — Bayley went to the well too often with her corner dropkick on the floor. Sasha caught her legs and then swung Bayley’s head and back into the steps (actually catching more of the corner, which I doubt was intentional, but it is NASTY.) This happens right in front of Bayley’s family and Bayley Superfan (and audience proxy Izzy.) Sasha of course has to taunt them.
This leads to one of the truly iconic moments in wrestling heeldom. Sasha gets her second fall by marching Bayley (selling like she’s endured major head trauma) up to the ramp where she throws Bayley head first into the LED countdown clock that flickers in and off, which is such great wrestling nonsense. Sasha then on her way back snatches Izzy’s headband, crawls into the ring to beat the count, mocks Bayley, does a fake cry taunt, and then snaps the headband before whipping it back to a now sobbing Izzy. Sasha gets some massive heel heat for this and it is truly a chef’s kiss of wrestling.
There are a lot of callbacks and reversals from the Brooklyn match. My favorite: Bayley goes for the top rope poison rana like in Brooklyn, but Sasha rolls through (the agility to do that is unreal) and then Bayley adjusts her ponytail as the visual cue for her finisher, only to eat the Belly to Bayley from Sasha for a great near fall.
But the ultimate callback comes from Bayley realizing she has to fight fire with fire to win — like some kind of action movie hero who starts of innocent but then knows he/she has to do what the bad guys do to save the day. Bayley is on the floor and does some really good and nasty looking work on Sasha’s left hand, just like what Sasha did so viciously to Bayley in Brooklyn. Bayley smashes Sasha’s hands into the ringsteps, she does an arm breaker thing through the ropes, etc. This first leads to Sasha not being able to fully hook the Bank Statement (procured after a reversal of a reversal, another evolution from the Brooklyn match.) Bayley then reverses it into her own submission, wrenching on the fingers she attacked earlier, while stomping away on Sasha’s face with her boot like Sasha did to her in Brooklyn, And like all good villains, Sasha does not have the guts to hold on and reveals her ultimate cowardice and verbally taps out with just a few seconds left.
(They also avoided the dumb ‘overtime’ Ironman gimmick that happens so much. I know Bryan/MJF’s Ironman was fantastic, but the overtime addendum and confusion from it was so bad.)
Afterwards, the locker room pours out, and the other Horsewomen and HHH are there. They literally give them both their flowers. The emotion is absolutely real. And fully earned. Painting one masterpiece is hard enough. They then had to do so in one of the most anticipated matches in WWE history (it really was) and with a gimmick that can really get tripped up.
They more than delivered. This is one of the best matches in WWE history. My all-time favorite match was the epic Shield/Wyatts from 2014… but man, I might need to change that.
Mercedes absolutely friggin’ rules. I hope the rest of the division can get elevated because she is a generational talent. I just hope Tony does not get wonky with it and Sasha ends up like the BCC where they’re sometimes heels and sometimes badass faces and it never really makes sense. Face Sasha aligned with Willow to go after Julia and Sky Blue is fine enough. The two witches will get better by being in the ring with a maestro. But the real storytelling magic awaits when The CEO backstabs Willow because if anyone in AEW can be a breakout babyface once they have a proper evil foil to overcome, it’s Willow.
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April 2024 Wrestling Talk
in The PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING
Posted
This is what I write about professionally. I am sleep deprived so bare with me if I mix anything up.
There is something called a private equity fund. Basically, a private equity firm says: “We would like to raise, say, $1 billion. We will go out and ask investors for this money. But we do not mean the general public. We mean pension plans that manage money so teachers are firefighters can retire, college endowment funds, various charitable foundations and incredibly rich people. Then we will take the $1 billion we raise from these investors, buy privately held business, and hopefully sell them for a profit 5 to 7 or 10 years later and we will split those proceeds with our investors.” (Literally — I write about how pensions and endowments and etc. invest in private equity.)
Some of the bigger private equity managers you may have heard of are BlackRock and Apollo and KKR. And private equity is this incredible amount of the global economy. There are only 3,000 or so publicly traded (as you can own a portion of the company by buying shares of it on a stock exchange) and there are probably 3,000 privately held businesses within 10 miles of my house. Literally, private equity managers own trillions of dollars in assets (and are then indirectly held by government employees with a pension plan.)
Silver Lake is a really big private equity manager. They raised $20 billion for their last investment fund. Silver Lake largely focused on buying and selling technology and tech adjacent companies. (It’s all sort of nebulous.) Or they buy large stakes in these companies. The term used for these are “portfolio companies.” Silver Lake is or was a big investor in AirBnB and Expedia and SoFi and Twitter and Ancestry.Com and Skype and Dell Technologies and a lot of other companies. Silver Lake is really big time.
Silver Lake has branched out into sports and entertainment recently. They own/own large stakes in AMC and Fanatics and the Australian professional soccer league and Manchester City (and its sister teams around the globe.) They have also been buying assets from Endeavor like a bunch of minor league baseball teams before just deciding to buy Endeavor outright. (Which is today’s news.)
Endeavor was a publicly traded company (and still will be until all the technicalities of this sort of merger and acquisition are completed.) You can buy shares of Endeavor. At the same time, Endeavor owns 51 percent of TKO (WWE and UFC combined) and people like us can buy shares of TKO. (Endeavor is what is referred to as a parent company.)
Private equity firms do something called a “take private” where they will buy a publicly traded company (or like a division of a publicly traded company) and own all of almost all of its shares. Silver Lake just bought Endeavor and now owns it as a private company. But Endeavor still owns over half of the WWE.
So, what does this mean for the WWE? This from here is just speculation. Silver Lake has to sell Endeavor over the next few years (they are contractually obligated almost certainly) and give their share of the proceeds back to its investors (pension funds, college endowments, etc.) There are all kinds of technqiues private equity managers can use to hopefully make a company more profitable. Sometimes, they will put in place their own leadership team. Other times, they will use their own expertise to help a company they acquired grow the business. Or other times they will, say, lay off 25 percent of the company to “save expenses.”
In this case, it’s probably highly likely that Silver Lake will give Endeavor’s current leadership team some degree of autonomy in how they run the company. Ari Emmanuel is the Endeavor CEO and he’s a power broker in entertainment so Silver Lake is likely saying “Hey, Ari Emmanuel and your team. We bought your company because we like you, now go make us more money.” But there could easily be a time where Silver Lake does not like what Endeavor is doing and will decide to put their own people in place.
As far as TKO itself goes: Who really knows. No one who works in this space would Be surprised at all if Silver Lake was to buy TKO or the WWE separate from that. I have no insider knowledge of this — just that Silver Lake owns Endeavor, which owns just over half of TKO, so why wouldn’t Silver Lake just buy TKO outright? Or someone like Comcast or Disney could approach Silver Lake and say “hey, we really want to buy TKO” or even “We really just want to buy the WWE half of TKO.” None of that would really surprise anyone.
But Silver Lake now owns Endeavor. And it has to sell Endeavor at some point over the next 7-10 years so it can give money back to its investors so people who work for your state’s public works department can have a monthly check sent to them when they retire.