Matt D

Have you seen the TNA note?

Dustin is the one guy on the roster who consistently gets an otherwise apathetic crowd to chant for him when he's in a chinlock.

It's not like the announcing can get all that much worse.

Caught up to last week's show. The Vaudevillians are my favorite thing in wrestling. Aiden's gold right now because he basically had two gimmicks that will get him onto the roster. I don't know about Becky's crazy daffney scream though. I think she was better off riverdancing.

Of course he is, but he's OUR psychopath.

I think one of the interesting things in this was how much ass Hunter let himself show; by that I mean, he really made himself look very insecure and humble during his early career, which isn't necessarily something I think we would have seen just a few years ago (I could be wrong). But there was a real sense of human vulnerability there.

I thought he was going to be huge. Absolutely huge. The next Santino. He was everything I thought the WWE looked for and just had personality and charisma like you wouldn't believe. I don't get what happened, really. Even if he was just okay in the ring, it wouldn't have mattered because he was just an ideal family friendly comedy character with an easy merch gimmick to boot. There are very few wrestlers I see in developmental and think "This is exactly what WWE wants," but he was one. No idea what happened here.

I wanted to highlight Trips given his great podcast appearance but most of his gifs are just ridiculous. This is all I have.

Children.

Yeah, everyone needs to go listen to today's podcast. Jericho was absolutely the right guy to do the interview. It was great. I can't wait for part 2. I also can't wait til these guys get Vince. Hunter had great stories. It almost makes me want to go back and watch his documentary on the Network. Was that half as good as this?

I kind of hope that all the bullshit hoops they're going through to get Sting means that they're going to reweigh things a little bit and give more credence to the early 90s stuff.

I'm looking forward to that ten man. It should be great.

The Earl of Trios.

Vince is so fun to analyze, between the Junior thing and the Bastard thing.

Would you like to talk about peanuts or orbitz gum?

Brian Pillman was my favorite wrestler as a kid. I joked about Jim Ross and the courage award because JR saw football as this holy pillar, but there really was something to it. I was a scrawny little kid as a pre-teen, around 1991-92, and Pillman was my hero in wrestling. He was the underdog who could stand up to anyone. He had the chops, just like Flair, and the dropkick and the Air Pillman springboard and that flying body press which meant as much to me as it did to fans of Ricky Steamboat five or six years before or similarly, Snuka's Superfly Splash a few years before that. I couldn't do Lex's Torture Rack or Davey Boy's running power slam but I could climb something high and put my arms out and take a leap of faith. I could try to never say die in life or on the playground. I didn't care about football, but for a year, when they were the worst team in the league, I rooted for the Bengals. He came from nothing, from a life that was supposed to be weak and tiny and afflicted, doomed from birth to be a near cripple, and he became my hero as a kid. I hung up on my best friend in wrestling when he called me in 91 and told me he thought that Pillman was going to go bad and join the horseman some day. I hung up on the kid. I was never someone who BELIEVED in wrestling, not even as a ten year old. Maybe it's because I came in at 9 or 10 instead of 6 or 7, but I was invested enough in Brian Pillman that I hung up on a friend of mine over a spurious comment. There was nowhere I would have rather been in the entire world during Christmastime 1991, than in the Omni to see Pillman vs Jushin Liger. The only problem was that I lived in a small suburb of Boston and that definitely wasn't happening. I never saw him live. I had his action figure, with the outstretched fingers and those damn Bengal pants, but I never saw him live. I could only imagine that match that night but it sounded like the coolest thing in the world, Pillman finally getting to face someone that was his aerial equal, this mysterious being from Japan. I know people, a few years before, bought into the mythos of Muta or even before that, Kabuki, but to me Liger was that great unknown, something larger than life and more than human and he was the ultimate rival for my hero. The light heavyweight title was, for six months, the most important thing in all of wrestling to me, and I still hold a bit of a grudge against both Scotty Flamingo and Bill Watts, one for taking it away and the other for screwing it up. I missed most of 93-97 because I just wasn't into wrestling anymore, but the Hollywood Blonds were always this legendary team to me. Stunning Steve was another huge important part of the few years I was a wrestling fanatic as a kid, and while I was tuned out, the idea of them together as heels was something I'd get behind, sight unseen, for really the decade to come. It was okay he was a heel somehow, cool even. I was a few years older and hey, at least he wasn't a horseman. I don't remember even knowing he became one, to be honest. All the loose cannon stuff I missed. His WWF run, I missed, until I turned on randomly one night and found out he'd just died. When I bought my first comps a few years later, it was a team that had no bearing on my youth, the Midnight Express, then two entities that did, the WWF version, the Rockers, and the WCW version, Pillman. He carried a few traits now that I don't care a ton about in wrestling anymore, and while I'll always go back and watch a match of his and most of the time enjoy it, though I've seen very little of his 97 still (and I'm not sure I want to), I don't think he'd make a top ten of my favorite wrestlers of all times. He, more than anyone else, however, was the wrestler I believed in the most as a kid. Maybe he was the only wrestler I ever believed in. I know too much about the guy now. He was a Meltzer friend and contact so I think he had one of the more measured bios in the WON. Yes, he had severe personal challenges; yes he was flawed; yes he drove himself to terrible things, but it was all tempered by how much he tried and how deeply he cared, and how much it all meant to him, and you know what? For this one person, unlike anyone else in wrestling, I'm okay looking past the bad, to try to understand it, to give, if not the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of empathy. I break things down and tear them apart and piece them together and and look at wrestling on every level but the emotional these days, but when it comes to Pillman, maybe I still let myself be a bit of a kid.

Then why don't you find someplace else to go?

Probably because talking about TNA isn't very interesting and hasn't been for years, if ever, but poking at the crazy guy who has tied his own self-worth to this dysfunctional shitstorm of a wrestling promotion for years and years can at least be a little amusing?

It's on the 1/5/91 WCW SN, if I'm not mistaken, but I don't see it online. It did make me want to watch this Lanny Poffo vs Rip Rogers steel cage match though, but I don't have time for that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEZvNihYPq4 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1kjxg_hollywood-blonds-vs-2-cold-bagwell_sport

Eaton patting him on the back is what makes that for me.

Hey, did you know that he won the Cincinnati Bengal's courage award?

I really hope we get a Sting based HOF this year. Vader, Rude (or Bossman), Nikita and Ivan, Luger, Steiners, Meng.

Which really says something about TNA, doesn't it? That's not something to be proud of. It's basically the proverbial nugget of the DX/Nation parody.

Exercise bike. The indignity.