Robert S

Bolivia played against (and beat) Venezuela yesterday in El Alto, at an altitude of about 4.150 m / 13.500 ft. That's just insane, the human body needs at least a week to acclimate to that altitude, probably more. That's not even considering that due to reduced air pressure, the ball is probably behaving differently than at sealevel (in tennis even 1.000 m / 3.300 ft have a noticable impact on the trajectory of the ball, not sure how big the impact in football is compared to that).

With Hogan, Cena, Rock, Austin, HHH and Jimmy Hart as talking heads, I am sure they will cover wrestling history completely unbiased.

I am not sure if I buy the versatility argument. Both knew how to work face and heel, though did it very differently. Both had relatively fixed styles of how they worked their roles and changed it only slighty over the years (I mean when Owen wrestled as face in 97 against Vader, he apparently did basically the same match that he did with Makhan Singh a decade earlier). I guess Bret's heel and face did not differ that much as it did for Owen, but I am not sure if I would call that "versatility". I guess the best argument you could make here is that Owen had a more prolific run in Japan than Bret did. Anyway: my answer to the posed question would have to be Kurt Angle and Homicide. I think everyone knows the arguments against Angle and regarding Homicide, I think he wrestled too long self-trained that by the time he got proper training it was too late to get rid of a lot of things that he did wrong. Anyway, a lot of this stuff just looked off execution wise, like you see things being done on backyard clips not as being done by a properly trained professional. He got how to do matches psychology wise and knew how to portray his character in the ring, but his execution was always a dealbreaker for me.

There were multiple people wrestling under the name Johnny Rotten at one point or another, cagematch lists five different wrestlers you did at least one match as "Johnny Rotten" (though Van Hammer is not on that list).

Reg. the latest crossword puzzle: The name of Mongo McMichael's chihuahua has to be the most useless fact that I seem to know (remember).

The crowd did a couple of generic chants during the main event. The chant they repeated three times is basically the "this is awesome" of German football (i.e. being that annoying and unimaginative). The chant goes something like "Oh, wie ist das schön. (:) So was hat man lange nicht gesehen, so schön (:).", approx. translation: "Oh, how great is that. Something like that didn't happen for quite some time, so great." When Gunther was selling they did once a "Auf geht's Gunther, kämpfen und siegen." chant - "Let's go Gunther, fight and win." (also a generic football chant) At the start they chanted "Auf die Fresse" - "(hit him) in the face" (I think that's a wXw chant).

The worst offender:

I just clicked a bit through cagematch to confirm that Sid really never faced Handsome and stumbled over the following match: https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=185061 "Johnny Rotten besiegt Sid Vicious durch DQ". I would assume that this is not Johnny Grunge but another guy using the Johnny Rotten name. Cagematch also has them team twice (once in 93 GWF against the future Harlem Heat and the other time in 96 USWA against Bill & Jamie Dundee). (just for those who don't get what makes this funny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Pistols)

I thought it was Dave Mysterio?

Man, the Mendoza's don't seem to have the genes to get old. I realize that wrestlers have a lower life expectancy but none of the brothers (so far - IV is still 11 years off) have made it to 70.

I just watched that KOTR 95 tag match (Nash & Bigelow vs. Sid & Tatanka) a couple of days ago. Bigelow actually was the FIP twice in that match because they blew a false hot-tag: Sid had Bigelow in a headlock and Bigelow was slowly pushing Sid towards his own corner, you know that spot. Anyway, when Tatanka entered the ring to distract ref Hebner, Hebner reacted to late and looked straight at Bigelow tagging out. Nash covered up the screw up pretty well by throwing an elbow drop and selling that arm (the story was that Nash injured his elbow against Sid at the first In your House and had surgery on that elbow a couple of week before the tag match) and tagging out. Bigelow went almost straight back to selling. In general Bigelow felt lost after the turn. They did nothing with him besides giving him new entrance gear that shot lame looking pyro. HBK turned basically at the same time and the whole focus went to him. WWF was creatively at a low anyway. They have started to bring in a lot of new guys since the beginning of 95 (without order just looking at some random house shows in the middle of the year: the Harris twins, PCO as "Jean-Pierre Lafitte", Ronda Singh as "Bertha Faye", Hakushi, Kama, Man Mountain Rock, Chris Candido as "Skip", Louie Spicolli as "Rad Radford", HHH, Henry Godwin, Mantaur, Sid, Danny Spivey as "Waylon Mercy", Road Dogg), including quite some people that should have had potential, but barely did anything with them (that seems to be typical for WWF at that time, there is *some* talent there, but they either didn't care or didn't know how to use them better). I guess that was a bit the MO of the "New Generation" era - bring in people, just book them on random matches on house shows, at best give them a single interview on a King's Court.

Apros pos Suikoden: has anyone else here played Eiyuden Chronicles: Rising? I thought that was a very underwhelming experience (I quit that game maybe 10 hours in).

It was a 10-year-contract and in this case it seems to have been a real binding contract (unless most contracts in wrestling history where people can be cut at seemingly any time).

plus Piper (Wrestlemania I & Starrcade 96) and Savage (Wrestlemania IV & V & Starrcade 95)

I knew something felt wrong when I typed that Mr. Pogo part.

I'm not sure, hazing is a "time honored tradition" in a lot of sports. There are stories I have read over the years that I don't even want to think about right now because, well, "don't stare too deeply into the abyss or it will stare back".

What a main event, Onita (66) & Raijin Yaguchi (61 - I have to admit, I have never heard of that guy, he seems to be an early Animal Hamaguchi trainee who started on indy scum shows before settling for some time with slightly less scummy SPWF & early BJPW; in the aughts he wrestled basically everywhere) vs. Dory Funk Jr. (83) & Osamu Nishimura (52, who is fighting cancer again). The undercard had guys like Tiger Toguchi (Kim Duk, 76), Mr. Pogo (55), Ricky Fuji (58), Masahiko Takasugi (69) and everbodies favorite zombie Onyro (53).

I tried to play (Re:)Chain of Memories a couple of years back but that is just not a very good game. Even for a JRPG, there is a lot of text without saying anything to just click through while getting more and more bored, all stages are just cheap reuses from Kingdom Hearts 1, and the gameplay itself is nothing to write home about. If you want to try a non-mainline game in the collection, give Birth by Sleep a chance. It has an interesting fighting system, mostly new stages and a pretty interesting story ark.

Vince was wearing a neckbrace during the steroid trial. Here are two pictures from a courtroom sketch artist that I found via Googling: I suppose the following picture is him leaving the courthouse after sentencing: Vince got real neck surgery around that time, but the timing still seems conspicuous.

Let me introduce you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestrian_vaulting

The Luigi having longer jumps while being sluggish to control started with Lost Levels (which came on the market two years before SMB2 in the US did).

The games were also quite fine for Austria, 2 gold medals (both in sailing) and 3 bronze medals (one in Judo and two in sports climbing) is a bit above the average - even though the games again have shown the lack of talent depth in summer sports over here. Well, we will always have the winter games, I guess. And as the 2026 games were mentioned: while I skipped Paris (even though the games were in sensible range from here (8 to 9 hours by car)) I will try to catch the 2026 Games in person (all locations are within 4.5 hours by car; though I still hope that the Italian plans to build their own luge (+ bobsleigh + skeleton) track will fail (which I think is pretty likely, they have only decided to do so this February and I can't image that they will finish that project in well under two years) which will mean that they likely have to switch to Innsbruck (Innsbruck is a chill two our train ride away)).

Within a month + 15 years; also it would not be a real Japanese but Matt Bloom using his Tensai gimmick.

The prize for "most stupid decision" at this Olympics has to go to French handball player Dika Mem. France was up 29-28 with 6 seconds to go and had ball possession. Mem got the ball with 5 seconds left to play and could have done literally anything like just held the ball for a couple of seconds or thrown the ball anywhere. He tried to go for a pass with three German players standing between him and his target. Somehow Germany managed to score within the three seconds that were left to play. An honorable mention goes to the French coach who called a timeout with 6 seconds to go and apparently failed to give his players instructions how to safely survive those six seconds. Germany went on to win in overtime BTW. I assume the video in the tweet below might work for the US-based people here (it's geoblocked for me): I can't find a non-geoblocked video on youtube right now.

Granny is still alive and even still doing podcasts? She has got to be in her mid 90ies by now (94, I think if my memory serves me right).