SirSmUgly

Fantastic idea. Plus, Punk and Bryan have good chemistry and would have a good match at WM together. I'd rather see it for the gold with Bryan as champ this time around, but yeah, that would be great to just utterly conflict the crowd. I doubt it will happen, but who knows? I'm kinda hoping that Ben shows up and somehow injects Bunkhouse Buck into the Elimination Chamber because I always end up watching Bunkhouse Buck matches from Worldwide and Saturday Night and thinking, "Hey, yeah...this could work."

Yeah, if Punk showed up and somehow got into the Chamber, then won, that would definitely make up for it for the crowd and a number of the fans. That's about the only guy I can think of that isn't currently in the Chamber and is a plausible substitute that would work.

I think it's going to be hard to produce a finish that the arena crowd wants to see, to be honest. Cesaro and Christian aren't winning. Would the crowd be fine with a Sheamus victory? I feel like the answer to that is "no." I like Cena a ton, but no one really wants to see him as champ, nor Orton. Now, if they did something nutty like had the Wyatts attack Cena and have Bray take his place, then win the thing, that would be so weird no one would crap on it...but I don't see how they would even go on from there unless they had a Corporate Ministry-redux with HHH and Stephanie teaming with cult leader Bray Wyatt. Or they could just have Bryan win, but that is not going to happen either. At least the match itself is going to be really good.

Jeff Jarrett as a babyface is super-awesome to me. I naturally want to root for him. When he turned face in TNA for the first time and those angles involved his daughters, I was totally into "What a good dad, trying his best with three girls!" mode. His sad/resigned faces were so damn pitiful. Jeff Jarrett as a heel is a channel-changer for me. It's a shame that the '80s babyface went out of style for a decade because for that decade, Jarrett was mostly a heel or a tweener and those roles do not play to his strengths in my view.

...and did that Unforgiven (?) match the next month suck, too. Long, plodding, and had the issue of 2/3 of the match being HHH poking along on offense and Goldberg trying to sell, which are the things that both of these guys respectively sort of stink at. That singles match should have been Goldberg killing HHH until HHH used a thumb to the eye or kick to the balls to run away and bait Goldberg into more mistakes, putting HHH on short control segments that Goldberg would counter and go back to rag-dolling HHH again. Also, it should have been 10-12 minutes shorter.

I'm not going to argue that it is objectively the best, but my favorite Elimination Chamber match is probably the World Heavyweight Championship match from the 2012 Elimination Chamber PPV. I particularly enjoyed Barrett and Rhodes temporarily becoming a team-up of doom for a couple of those eliminations. They were awesome in there. Then, the finishing run with Bryan and Santino was great, with the added effect of the crowd also being hyped for Santino almost winning.

OK, here's my "What if," which approaches a discussion going on right now from a slightly different angle: What if Jamie Kellner could see into the future: a future where live programming is at a premium because it is the only thing that can get a viewer to actually watch live television and avoid DVR, going online to view, etc? Because of this, he keeps WCW Nitro and Thunder on the schedule and Eric Bischoff and Fusient complete the sale and take possession of the promotion. What does the wrestling landscape look like right now?

I'm gonna look that up because it sounds wonderful. It was, as were Bret Hart and Macho Man cutting ridiculous heel promos on Jerry Lawler/the people of Memphis.

That three-way ladder match for the contract is already on a couple releases and isn't that good anyway. If they wanted to add a good cruiserweight bout from near the end of the company, they should have chosen a Chavo/Helms match instead. I think they wrestled twice, and I remember at least one being very good.

I do apologize if someone else has posted this. I did run a search: http://thebiglead.com/2014/02/11/supposed-hot-mic-before-wwe-raw-reveals-announcers-purported-disdain-for-cm-punk-fans/ I don't think it's a work, but the corny "Go A-Way" crack sounds like something that would be in an actual script, which is enough to cause debate.

I don't know if it would be a mistake IF (big if) WWE just lets Roman Reigns act like he does right now without changing at all because he's turned face. I see Reigns loading up Superman punches (should be his finisher instead of the spear) and dropkicking guys by jumping from the floor to the apron and I really, really, REALLY want to cheer him. I also think a Rollins/Ambrose tag team still has lots of potential. I hope that if Reigns splits, he and the other two guys in the Shield go their separate ways and don't end up embroiled in a poorly-booked midcard feud.

Geez, I have been reading this board since maybe 2004/2005 or so, so I remember much of this even though I only signed up at the last re-start. This is why I try to post with purpose at least most of the time; I found this place to just have a higher quality of discussion, and I would prefer to not bring it down too much. I have learned a ton from everyone who posts here, especially about Lucha and Puro. Even some of the stuff that I wanted to get into, but didn't know where to start, some of the lists that guys like Goodhelmet put up gave me a place to begin. For example, I used to watch AWA as a very young kid, but I came in with the Midnight Rockers. KHawk, who I think is the guy that posted here that knows everything about AWA, had these great posts that helped point me to stuff like the High Flyers and Rick Martel as AWA champ and all that. I don't know as much about wrestling as a ton of guys here, but I tried to lurk and just learn so that I could at least talk to most of the posters here on somewhat consistent ground. Even now, I read all the wrestling boards, but I only post on topics that I feel comfortable talking about.

I love me some Barry Windham, but he was sort of painful to listen to in terms of cutting promos. He doesn't have the oversized personality that Hogan does.

Honestly, I would enjoy two months of that happening on every RAW (and the occasional Smackdown). Maybe I'm just too easily entertained.

I'm sad that they aren't putting all the Clashes up along with PPVs. I wasn't expecting all the B-shows, as much as I would have wanted them, because I get that there is a lot of secondary and tertiary material they aren't rushing to post. I mean, I did not have real hope to see every Worldwide be up at the beginning of the service (though I would LOOOOOOOVE to see every Worldwide from '88 to about '94), but Clashes are PPV-level shows.

I REALLY hate to say it, but WCW wouldn't have took off like it did. It would've remained a Southern wrestling company that would've died out like the territories before it. Schiavone and Ross would've stuck to what made NWA/WCW great no doubt, but let's be real- Bischoff had the business savvy and acumen that neither of those two did, and I doubt either of those two would've had the mitigated gall to do half the shit that Bischoff did during the Monday Night Wars. Hell, the Monday Night Wars might not even have existed, they would've probably stuck with WCW Saturday Night as the flagship show. Except Bischoff's business savvy has since been exposed as a fraud. He did what he did because Turner got a bug up his ass and wanted to be a legit competitor to Vince and opened the checkbook. Its what ended uo killing WCW in the long run. That and no one expected the nWo to be as big as it was. Shit, until that angle, Nitro was workinh about as well as Monday Night Impact did. And Bischoff's new format removed jobber matches, which isn't really a good thing long run. I would also argue that there's a market for a Southern-style promotion. The same market that likes Duck Dynasty would probably cotton to a promotion that looked like WCW in 1992. WCW might not ever get as big as it did, but I do think there is a large, untapped market that would absolutely love something that was still booked like '92 WCW or, if a promoter wanted to go a slightly different direction in running a Southern-style promotion, Memphis in the '80s. This is what has always confused me about TNA. Instead of being a far worse late '90s WWE, they should try to be a mid '80s JCP or Memphis tribute promotion.

I attribute the weird booking in '02 to cooling off creatively after a hot period, not to HHH burying guys. I'm sure that he did no more or less jockeying to keep his spot than other wrestlers in his position.

This is a great point, but to counterpoint, they didn't put the gold on Goldberg until October, if I recall correctly. Just for how the feud was about a bad guy basically saying black guys are fuckups, to have the heel win and prove that is a bad move. They should have either changed the focus of the feud or had Booker go over and drop it back to HHH in a couple of months. Back to HHH in general, I think he would have been a more well-received heel ace if he did more stuff like in early '00, where he was kind of a chickenshit that took shortcuts, but sometimes was able to tough it out and surprise everyone by winning a brawl. In '02/'03, he was pretty much King Badass with these terrible control segments that went on and on in each match much like his typical promo of the time. I honestly don't ever think I've enjoyed HHH as a promo, though. However, in the ring, had HHH been more of the dude that got his ass kicked and sold a beating until needing Evolution to come save his ass, he would have been more watchable to me.

HHH's "methodical" beatdowns don't work for me. His knee-based offense doesn't do much for me. And when he's on offense as a heel, there is just no one I'd rather watch less. His control segments are bland and never-ending. HHH is best when he's a heel that is eating offense and showing fear/taking shortcuts to escape with his life, in my opinion. However, I respect that you feel differently.

I very much disagree. The Rock is better at selling a beatdown (if a bit cartoonish, but hey, it's the WWF) and is so much better on offense that it isn't even close. The only place where HHH matches The Rock is in facial expressions, which I think both guys are awesome at.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! IT ONLY TOOK 31 YEARS OF MY LIFE, BUT THEY DID IT! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I think this is a big problem with wrestling as a whole. Wrestlers need some mic time and some footage with them outside of the ring to really grasp what they are all about. As they said last year in CMLL, "you can't get over unless you get mic time". It doesn't even have to be much. 1 minute a week or less would honestly be enough. They brought back those pre-recorded promos that they'd inset during a match in the top-left or top-right corner. Then they went away again. That's a nice tool to have because you can let dudes cut promos on one another to advance feuds while also getting a glorified squash match done and kill two birds with one stone. You can also just let a guy you're pushing (say Big E) share his motivation for winning/keeping the belt and what he plans to do next during one of his matches. They should take a look at doing those again.

I think the Authority storyline has purposely conflated the two to a point that they might as well be the same thing. We're in a post-Russo Worked Shoot era, just as we were with the CM Punk "Pipebomb" thing and the Rock/Cena feud where insults were partly catered to "You are a part-timer who doesn't love the business/Your gimmick sucks and only kids like it." I don't know how I feel about this era, but I think I preferred the focus being on winning titles to a) be the best and to b) make money. For example, most folks here have this criticism, but if Cole would even mention the "pay windah" in a meaningless Kofi/Swagger match or what have you, we get some motivation for the wrestlers and might invest ourselves in a wrestler in the hopes that they actually have something to gain or lose by winning or losing. On the other hand, maybe the illusion wouldn't work anymore because too many fans know about downside guarantees and that wrestlers get paid a cut of their merch, and this is WWE's response to a more cynical audience. A magician's act stops being effective when you know how the tricks work, after all. I'm not sure.

I do enjoy Varsity Club Rotunda, definitely. He was a really fun TV Champ at the time, too. However, I think I enjoy him even more in U.S. Express. I need to figure out why, though. I might watch a couple matches from both those periods and try to understand more concretely why I feel that way.

1985 maybe. Is the U.S. Express the peak of Mike Rotunda's in-ring work? It seems like it probably might be, now that I'm thinking about it. Man, he peaked early.