Cristobal

At some point someone gave Travis Scott the advice a lot of young wrestlers get and that's to slow down in big moments, and unfortunately that was NOT the advice Scott needed to be given.

Seriously can Cole and Graves kiss and make up now? Every so often McAfee still comes up with a good one but my god he was insufferable tonight.

Anyone watching the post-show for Cena waited through 20 minutes of HHH talking just to see Cena drop the mic and walk out without saying a word.

I thought this scenario was a long shot because now this turn maybe takes a lot of the feelgood factor out of the rest of Cena's farewell year but they did it, and honestly I kinda dig it because it leaves the outcome of the Mania main event in doubt. We could get a run with Cena as heel champ finally overcome at the end of the year by whichever babyface they want or it could be another mountain for Cody to summit and then Cena tries to find redemption for the rest of 2025. Also Bianca/Rhea will be a good Mania match.

The opening promo by HHH was good, though I could do without terms like "face", "heel", "work", and "shoot" being thrown around. Yeah I get most of the audience knows it but that doesn't mean you've got to hit them over the head with it. The Rock's promo was less like a Rock promo and more like Dwayne Johnson accepting a Nickelodeon Kid's Choice Award. Opening match was alright before the inevitable clusterfuck. Owens and Cody felt really shoehorned into this. Rhea/Liv just felt like a normal Raw match except for Taker coming out at the end, which, uh, ok, I guess. I liked the finish of Jey and Drew right up until the finish of Punk and Rollins because it had that same "slightly overwhelmed babyface catches a lucky break to win" element to it. Echoes of the previous match's finish aside, I thought Punk and Rollins was a really good match. Even with the extended injury time, I think you can make a case for Punk as WWE MVP of 2024. Seeing Hogan get booed, especially when the crowd realized he was just out there to shill a product, was so satisfying. Four matches, five babyface wins (I'm counting Hogan being booed as one of these) was an interesting choice. Might be worth investing in a VPN so I can miss the commercials in the future.

I do not understand what Shane even offers to AEW. They already have plenty of people who can't throw a decent working punch but are willing to kill themselves doing huge dives that make little or no sense.

Ok who knows the story about Cody's mom beating up an undercover cop at a Willie Nelson concert cuz I gotta hear that one.

I have to assume by the sheer volume of Punk-related trolling the Elite did that everyone involved in Brawl Out is working with each other again otherwise that was just a complete waste of time.

They were gonna do that but the guy they brought in was only two inches shorter than Matt so they nixed that idea. I'm not even sorry. If everyone else gets to be petty, I get to be petty.

This bit mostly encompasses where I'm at re the BCC. I was all in on them at the start. Danielson was fresh off his almost-but-not-quite heel run where he'd had a bunch of great matches bookended by good programs with Kenny and Hangman. The Yuta stuff made sense to try and elevate a younger guy and also give the group someone who can drop falls without getting hurt. And even though Danielson got hurt at a bad time, Claudio's arrival seemed like it was gonna kick-start things back up. Instead we got the endless Garcia shit (the matches were good, the angle wasn't) and Danielson drops all the falls. No one's benefitted. Yuta's still just a midcard guy, Mox is where he is because he's Mox (and because of Punk's assorted issues) and Regal has, until now, just been around to do commentary during assorted BCC matches. And look at where Danielson is now compared to where he was before.

If this is the end of the Blackpool Combat Club then good riddance. Moxley and Regal don't need it, it's done nothing for Claudio, they put all that work into getting Yuta over at the beginning and now he's doing nothing of note again, and the way Danielson has become a complete afterthought in AEW is borderline criminally negligent

I still think this would be better as a two hour show, but that's a huge improvement from where I was a few months ago, when I thought it would be better as a no hour show. I loved the KO/Drew match and I can live with the finish since Drew's gonna be taking the belt off Roman and the company is gonna be in dire need of top heels when he goes. Women's tag, US title match and main event were also standouts.

It's not Vince's age that prevents him from cutting an on-air promo on the WSJ, it's modern sensibilities and the fact that Mushnick's gripe with wrestling and the WWF in particular is just apples-to-oranges with what's currently going on. If he did it, the stock would (hopefully) be tanking and board members would openly be calling for his head. Was wrestling television, especially attitude-ERA WWF, kinda trashy? Yeah. But the solution to that is not to watch it, and if you're a parent, keep your kid(s) from watching it. This is the highly-visible chief executive of a publicly-traded company abusing his position and power to coerce sexual favors from women in his employ, and compel their silence afterward. It's also a PG era and the company openly markets to children. Vince going up and acting the heel and saying "those sluts all wanted a taste of the grapefruits" or whatever the fuck would go over like a lead balloon. And we saw with Sasha/Naomi what happens when he tries to make himself and WWE the babyfaces.

I love how after a quarter-century of heel authority figures representing WWE and the McMahon family specifically, Vince himself certainly not least among them, Vince still thinks he can issue statements like this, shitting on popular talent, and be the babyface with fans. He learned absolutely nothing from Montreal.

Ok I was wondering if I'd seen the same match cuz I thought Jade vs Shafir was a terrible mesh that really highlighted both wrestlers' weaknesses. Jade couldn't sell the limbwork well enough and wasn't good enough at mat wrestling to make it look like she was doing anything but laying there while Marina worked holds, and Marina's too green to take Jade by the hand at anything else so it was a clash of styles that just fell flat. Also didn't help that the crowd was dead at the end of four hours of show.

no there's also cute animal pictures

Wrestling Twitter is a floating dumpster fire composed of 90% WWE and AEW loyalists shouting the dumbest shit imaginable at each other, 5% personal beefs that people absolutely will not let die, and 5% dudes being creepy af towards women wrestlers.

Settle down, Kayla Braxtonetico

We got possibly the best and worst stunner-sells in history like two minutes apart.

This show was good and I was pondering why, given what unwatchable dreck their TV shows have been leading up to this, and I'm thinking it's because I haven't been watching those shows. Instead of weeks and months of terrible scripted promos, nonsensical BS angles, and the same people wrestling each other seventeen times on the "Road to Wrestlemania", I just dropped in to watch the wrestlers wrestle matches and it turns out WWE's roster is by and large pretty good at that.

This really did feel like an old school NXT Takeover in that it was a tight show in a very watchable (under 3 hours) period in front of a hot crowd where everything on the card was at least good with one or two real standouts (usually featuring The Revival, now that I think back...)

and Ryback

Somehow I managed to, without noticing, drop a ketchup packet on the floor, and step on that ketchup packet with my shoes on. I heard and felt it pop under my foot and I'm like "aw man" as I look down to see how much cleanup this is going to entail. The packet is empty, but there's only a tiny bit of ketchup on it, and none on the carpet around it. From the pop it sounded full, but maybe I got lucky and it was an empty packet? Nope. I find a red spot about 3 inches wide nearly four feet up a wall on the opposite side of the room. Not only had the ketchup flown 15 feet across the room, it had arced OVER the computer monitors on my desk (which had no ketchup at all on it)

Throwback to 2016, my crewmate CetrolBP (name changed to protect the guilty) and I are doing a mission, and Cetrol notices a lack of traffic in the mission. Cetrol: "It's so empty in here, it's like Nuremberg." Me: "...Huh?" Him: "It's this race track that you can drive street cars on." Me: "...You mean the Nurburgring?" Him: "Yeah that." Me: *spends the next ten minutes cracking up*