joseph2112

It probably would have been cooler to have the belt slowly morph week after week into something deranged but hey, subtlety is not WWE's middle name.

Speaking of hair, I am trying to stay out of the heavy stuff for the rest of the month so I'm not going to bring up whether the mullet was an awesome thing in pro wrestling or the most awesome thing in pro wrestling history.

If, and I say if again because I don't know, what was reported is what I wrote above there is no "story". What is Graves going to say? He didn't make those Tweets? Mauro is lying?

I didn't hear what Dave said so I could be missing something here. If he hears directly from Mauro's camp that he missed the PPV due to the stuff Graves tweeted and he reported that, what's the point in contacting him?

Maybe, but telling your "independent contractors" to not go to an event is petty BS. Why? TNA might show them on a PPV watched by 6000 people? Maybe WWE will sell 5 less t-shirts and Aurora Rose will have to use commercial air to go on her second European summer vacation? Was Bill Watts in charge at that time? The whole thing is disgusting.

I agree and hopefully it shows that AEW respects their workers. What a petty, gross WWE/pro wrestling thing for them to do that time.

Didn't WALTER pretty much play hardball with WWE where he got some contract concessions about only working in Europe, etc? If so, that's probably the answer.

And to reiterate a point I made a few weeks ago, all in the name of RATINGZ WARZ. Let's hotshot everything and do whatever we can to get a better tv rating when it really didn't matter at all.

I was in my hunting stand all day so I listened to the whole thing. It was like 32 matches plus a dark main event on a school night with the matches in random order in front of a bunch of casual fans. It sounded brutal. Although I used to go to the Hamburg TV tapings back in the day and it was like 4 hours with everybody wrestling multiple times, including squash matches. I'm guessing my buddy's dad who took us got tired of it but I was a kid and I do not remember ever being bored.

Remember that time people thought Moxley would never work with WWE again?

It's an interesting thought, because although he may not be able to wrestle they can't stop him from say, being a personal trainer or something.

Ok, Dave.

Barefoot on an airplane is some quality, long lasting heel work.

Anything said by the parties afterword can be discarded, IMO. Mauro disappears, comes back with a cush job that he wanted and JBL is "retired" several weeks later. No lawsuits at all. That's how big corporations do business.

Cool, it's not for everyone, click it off and go find wrestling that you enjoy. From lurking here for years you probably know most of the posters on this board try to watch stuff with an open mind and discuss their likes and dislikes of what they saw. For the anger and vitriol hawt takes I think you'll find twitter.com is much more receptive to such things.

I've often thought it would be an interesting science experiment to take someone who is a "smark" and have that person turn off everything wrestling related except the shows for six weeks or so and see if that persons enjoyment would go up or down.

Wrestlers are in this weird spot where they want to be public, big time paid performers without any of the scrutiny that comes with being a public, big time paid performer. So instead of coming out and refuting it professionally, he tweets and sounds like the head girl trying to boost up a load of sixth-formers(I'm guessing this is a foreign english word I'm not aware of but I get the point). Rollins knows his current run is falling apart fast and the only rallying point he has left is to stir up all the anti Meltzer types.

Because Meltzer said Seth made a speech but it was actually AJ? Wrestlers live in some kind of bubble. Good grief.

The last Arn podcast was about Flair's return in 98. It was mostly about the feud between Flair and Bischoff and the weeks leading up to the return. It started by Arn telling Conrad that since he was close to Flair and an employee working for Bischoff they kept him out of it. So you can guess how that goes, not a great show to catch.

It's not even a small stretch to think that this is an "inconvenience" from a section of the Saudi government for them running the women's match. At least let's just hope that is all that it is.

You can hate on me all you want, but are Y'all really sure this isn't a short term ratings grab for Raw?

I don't have the network but I am not going to lie, I cry myself to sleep every week when I see the content getting added to the Hidden Gems section.

The thing about "ratings warz" is that it is an outdated concept that was kind of a dumb dick waving contest in the first place. I guess you could make an argument that in the 90's, the more people that watched your show, the more people might buy your PPV's. WCW went out of business in part because they were obsessed by the ratings which at the end of the day meant nothing. Move that to today, it's completely irrelevant except for message board fodder. WWE has two masters they have to satisfy by delivering ratings, and there could be 20 other companies running TV and that would not matter one bit. The money they have gotten from Fox and USA has basically rendered the network an afterthought at this point. When AEW's contract comes due, nobody will want to hear that they beat NXT this many weeks in a row, they will want to know what they delivered. And based on all this I really think that the TNA move to Mondays is one of the underrated all time dumb business decisions in wrestling history.

I guess lots of people are living the "stopped watching wwe" gimmick.

I hear @Craig H about it being a disappointment because these shows are the best two of the week. But I really think AEW's ratings are really good and I am sort of shocked they didn't drop more going up against the NBA. I think they are hovering around their core audience and for a start-up company four weeks in that is better than anyone could reasonably expect. As far as NXT, they decided to do Wednesday night and they got paid for doing so. As long as their broadcast partner is happy with the rating, they should be too.