clintthecrippler

There's no way in hell he should have been a long-term champ, but man, that couple weeks that Rob Van Dam was WWE Champion was awesome. Outside of the first few months of the Invasion Angle, it really was the closest he ever got to being back to that lovely arrogant bastard he was when he was ECW TV Champion and running down Sabu in promos...while he was held the ECW Tag Team Championship with Sabu.

Probably some poor schmuck who got asked by Virgil to help him with his log-in information and then got charged 80 bucks for it.

I honestly think Rusev may be the best seller in the entire company right now. There's a lot of time where I legitimately don't know if he's selling or jacked something up for real, and I love it. And the way last night's scenario ended, I actually have it in my head that maybe his performance in the Ziggler/Lana angle is giving them ideas of turning Rusev himself face and running a sleazy dickhead Owens defending the US Title against Rusev, a man who lost everything but stoically claws his way back to it, winning back the US Title, winning back Lana, and winning over the hearts of American wrestling fans to the point where it is the evil Russian that ends up delivering the "maybe we can all change" speech from the end of Rocky IV. Or someone will show Vince a YouTube clip of Zangief destroying the Bonus Level of Street Fighter II and he becomes "Russian that smashes cars with his bare hands" leading to a Lesnar vs. Rusev feud where they see how many cars they can each destroy with their bare hands. Either way, America wins.

Man, watching The Tazmaniac just squash both of these guys with suplexes on the tape of this one of of my favorite "guilty pleasure" watches during my '90s tape-trading days!

Estimating around July/August 1987. I was nine years old living in small-town Northern Michigan at the time, a few hours drive from any town that WWF or NWA was coming to. But I still remained glued to the TV on Saturdays for WWF Wrestling Challenge, NWA Worldwide, NWA World Championship Wrestling, and more. When my father wanted to talk to me about serious stuff, or just needed to get out of the house to sort some things out, he would go for a drive and take me with him. The slang term he used to describe these drives was "going crazy". One Sunday evening he pulled me out of my bedroom to go for one of these drives, and he picked up a couple of his drinking buddies that lived down the street. He drove to a town that was about an hour away from ours. The drive seemed like nothing out of the ordinary, until he pulls into the parking lot of Ogemaw Heights High School in West Branch, MI, a school off of Michigan Highway #33 surrounded by nothing but trees and fields. The letters on the sign of the high school simply said "WRESTLING". I got super-excited, and at first my father and his friends tried to rib me by saying "nah, that's tomorrow night, we're going to bingo tonight!" But sure enough, once we're inside the school we head into the gym and there's a wrestling ring in there. My dad frigging surprised me on a random summer night by taking me to a wrestling show. I don't remember a lot of specifics. I think the league was called Michigan Championship Wrestling. It had some of the guys that I found out years later were part of the final days of the Sheik's Detroit territory, guys like Irish Micky Doyle and Ricky Cortez. And a young Al Snow was part of a heel tag team calling itself the Fantastics (which confused me a little since I had seen the Fulton/Rogers version on World Class TV by that point) against a tag team called The Flying Tigers. The Fantastics cheated to win their match, but sure enough there was a battle royal at the end of the night, with the final four being the Al Snow version of the Fantastics and The Flying Tigers, and the Tigers got their revenge by winning the battle royale. But the biggest actual name of the show was a very long in the tooth by that point Bobo Brazil, once again defending a belt that was billed as "The United States Championship." Bobo was into his sixties by then, but I had read his name in grocery store magazines as a legend of the sport enough to know that he used to be something back in the day and that I was seeing a legend in the ring that night. But the major punchline of the night came when Bobo Brazil came down to the ring. My dad never watched WWF wrestling with me, and would always talk about how phony Hulk Hogan was. He never did it in a mean way because he knew it was something I loved watching, would always be more in a joking manner. But that night, when Bobo came to the ring, my Dad pulled me aside and said the following words..."I used to watch him wrestle when it was real!" It would be ten years before I would witness another wrestling show live again (that would be the ECW debut in Detroit where Pee Wee Moore offered to sell me ECW tickets for weed, but that's another story for another thread), but thank you Dad for that awesome night.

Always happy to see the Ernie Ladd jobber gifs again. I like to pretend that was the jobber's way of saying "Yes sir, Mr. Ladd. I do not deserve to be inside a wrestling ring with you. I'll kindly show myself out please." Man, I would kill to know what was going on inside Ernie Ladd's head when he saw that. Because it looked like a lot was going on in there when he realized what he just saw. The audio is great too. The guy takes a nice hearty thump when he lands on the floor, so it's not like he was afraid to bump. He just kind of froze when he got to those ropes.

Random Russo-era WCW story for you. Went to college during the time of the Monday Night Wars. I became known in my dorm hall as "the wrestling guy", and inevitably on Monday nights I would host a room full of people watching Raw and/or Nitro - gradually more RAW as time went on. Some of these people were there every week, some of these people popped in here and there. One night in September 2000, we're watching Raw in my dorm room, while occasionally flipping over to Nitro during commercial breaks. There is a knock on my door. It was someone that was a huge WCW fan during the glory days of the nWo, but had drifted out of watching wrestling after going home and working nights during the final summer of 99 when Bischoff was in charge, so by then he had been mostly checked out of wrestling completely for over a year. The following words come out of his mouth: "Hey guys, I know I haven't really been paying attention to WCW much, but I was flipping through the channels and....so....what's up with the retarded guy?" All of us in the room were confused. This visitor continued... "I was just flipping through the channels and came across Nitro for a minute. And the show ended with this retarded guy wearing a helmet holding the WCW belt over his head and falling down all over the place." I slowly put together what he had just seen. He flipped across Nitro randomly the night that Vince Russo walked out of the cage with the WCW Championship. He had no idea what a Vince Russo was, just that he saw a disheveled looking man wearing a helmet falling down all over the place holding the WCW Championship, and put together in his head that they were doing a full-blown mentally-handicapped gimmick, and put the belt on him. This lapsed fan, the "casual viewer" that Russo always said he was aiming his writing at, came across Nitro and thought THIS was where WCW had gone with its television show. All of us in the room laughed our asses off, but also none of us had the patience to explain what a Vince Russo was, so we told him, "you know what, you're not missing anything by not watching WCW."

It looked like the interior of the car door flew out into the crowd but a fan caught it instead of getting hit. It definitely looked like a fan in the background was holding it up like a trophy.

Meltzer squashed the Piper rumor today.

Man, there has been a major breakdown in communication lately between the agents laying out the matches and Vince/the announce team. First, there was the Sheamus jammed the Elimination Chamber door until he was ready to come in storyline that got completely missed on announcing, and now last might Jack Swagger and Wade Barrett re-enacted the barricade spot where Barrett suffered his last injury and that got missed completely by the announcers too. I know it was a nothing "10:40" death slot match, but I still feel like until recently someone would have made a huge deal about it on commentary - or at least it would be the type of detail someone like Jim Ross would have remembered and called on the fly.

This is stupid.

Wrestling Classics board is losing their shit also since it looks like they are going to be stretching the image on the original Houston footage to 16:9 widescreen instead of preserving the original aspect ratio, so NWA Classics has already managed to alienate a portion of the crowd most likely to actually support it otherwise.

Looking like this is getting a big push across the entire NBC Universal chain, at least the first week. Went to set the DVR for the premiere and the program guide was showing a flood of repeat showings for the season premiere all week across E!, Bravo, and Oxygen.

Every time I saw Gunner pop up on my TV the last few years I would laugh because I will forever associate him with that time Ric Flair was in TNA cutting a promo on someone hyping up heels he has as backup screaming about "i've got Gunner...and his PAL!" because in the midst of the promo Flair forgot Murphy's name. I think Gunner was the opponent in Chris Lewie's TNA Gut Check match that was one of the worst nationally televised wrestling performances in recent memory. And thats about all I remember Gunner bringing to the table.

Once again the Toru Yano sig gif makes an already legit comment even more legit.

Not to mention that if the Commandos were identified by WWE as being involved with a specific indy fed or trainer, now everyone associated with that group is going to have an even bigger uphill battle for getting looked at.

I would laugh my ass off if WWE has spent all of these years and all of this effort trying to become a peer of the mainstream entertainment industry and Lucha Underground manages to win an Emmy in year one. Also, Antiques Roadshow is a frigging awesome show and totally deserving of an Emmy as well.

Did Owens and Cesaro ever have a one-on-one with each other on the indies? I am legit having trouble recalling.

Not enough dildo blenders being bashed into Robert Gibson's lazy eye. May as well just close this thread and shit down the site now.

Looking like I'm in the minority, as I loved the main event. Possibly one of my favorite ladder matches of all time, mainly because to me it felt more like a streetfight that happened to have ladder match stipulations. I loved Rollins targeting the leg early on, and also loved Rollins leaving Ambrose for dead out in the aisleway and the crowd to try to sneak getting up the ladder with Ambrose somewhere further away. I got really sucked into the storyline of Rollins basically realizing that he would need to kill Ambrose in order to escape with his championship. Finish was a little screwy but it played great into Triple H motivating Rollins to be a real champion and find a way to do it on his own, which he ended up doing.

That clip of Vince gleefully spraying JR in the ass over and over again with the fire extinguisher was so cringeworthy, maybe even more uncomfortable than his JR impersonation.

She was also in that dreadful segment where Steph brought out Daniel Bryan's "physical therapist" to accuse Daniel of cheating on Brie with her.

Out of all the places I could have possibly seen the match of One Man Gang vs. Tommy Rogers live, it was a frigging ECW show in Lansing, MI: January 1999. And my memory is that it was a really fun match.

Yeah, I've definitely been getting a "Hall and Nash" vibe out of Reigns and Ambrose these last few weeks. They definitely seem like they enjoy being linked back together again, and Reigns is way more likable as "bro dude supportive of his bro". loved Owens vs. Cena, started slowly but figured it was building to a hot finish, which it did. I was the only one in the room with familiarity with Owens outside of NXT and judging by my friends' reactions to the match and promo they definitely made a new star tonight. During the tag match it definitely felt like Kalisto was trying to attempt spots that he just didn't have the core strength to pull off, it looked like he was seriously struggling hard to navigate the chain link fence. IC Title match was a frigging disaster, saved only by the feelgood finish they did with Ryback. I did get a kick out of that, and the presentation of the title to him. I am 100 positive that the Mark Henry entry was either a botch or an audible they called. Mark definitely stepped back into the pod and lingered for about 10-15 seconds before finally heading in.

Had some friends over for EC, and they hung around afterwards while I showed them some LU, of the seven friends that came over, two of them had been following it, but others in the room were virgin eyes. Showed them the Aerostar-Jack Evans match (a few of them were WSX fans so a Jack Evans match was a good entry point for them), the trios ladder match which all of them loved even before the big Angelico spot, and then this week's full episode which I hadn't watched yet. All of them ended up pretty blown away by the fact that both the wrestling itself and the production had a different feel, and many of them wishing some of the WWE production looked like this, at least for the backstage/Dario's office spots. A couple WCW fans in the room lamented at how old and broken down both Vampiro and Konnan looked, but at least appreciated that they are booked on the sidelines and not as old-man ass-kickers despite them looking in mostly terrible shape, especially Konnan. Mil Muertes was definitely seen as an Undertaker analog character, and I am now unable to see Catrina/Maxine without the phrase "sexy Paul Bearer" running through my head thanks to one of my friends using that phrase to describe her. Overall, this definitely seems like a show that really could build a bigger following if enough people currently watching force their friends to "stay and watch THIS!" on a night of WWE viewing.