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The Viceland Wrestling Documentaries


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They worked WAR tags with each other so it's not that weird, and this is wrestling after all... but still. Dude threatened to gouge your eyes out! In public!

Big John would've been super duper over if he'd shown up to join the BWO. You know it.

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23 hours ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

He disappeared from WCW after the Big Bubba stuff. That was summer heading into fall 1996. The Oddities thing was mid 1998 to 1999. There was almost full two years where he could have popped back up somewhere. 

Wasn't he supposed to be apart of Team Piper around Starcade 96 after Piper came in? I vaguely remember him being aligned with Piper during a segment after he came in. I remember they used his real name. I was new to WCW in 96 so I hadn't seen his run as the Shark in real time.

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36 minutes ago, Ziggy said:

Wasn't he supposed to be apart of Team Piper around Starcade 96 after Piper came in? I vaguely remember him being aligned with Piper during a segment after he came in. I remember they used his real name. I was new to WCW in 96 so I hadn't seen his run as the Shark in real time.

No, you're right. He was in the infamous segment from the 3/3/1997 Nitro and then he also on the Spring Break episode the next week where they reverse course. Man, so he's literally gone for months and then randomly (and I mean randomly) shows up for that. Rough, rough stuff.

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I think this was about as "wholesome" as a Dark Side episode could be.  There was no negative comments on his character, nothing about him as a father that was negative.  He was just a great human being in a sawmill of a business.  I watched him as a kid and it didn't really register so much, but seeing this, i retroactively remember so much of his stuff.  

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I was at the Dallas RAW the night after No Way Out in Feb 1998. The dark match had Earthquake return to a HUGE pop. Apparently it was a tryout. He came back later that year as Golga. In retrospect, I can see the logic of putting him in a mask…poor John aged badly in a short time frame by then. He looked old, even though he was still relatively young.

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one thing about when Tenta was released by the WWF that i've suspected but I haven't read confirmation of is that the WWF cut several large-ish guys right around the time that they brought in Paul Wight

Wight debuts on February 14th, 1999

Giant Silva didn't work a WWE match after February 16th

Tenta's last Golga match was February 21st

Kurrgan was gone on February 28th

1999 WWF wasn't exactly known for deep precise planning, but I think there might be a reason why they decided to just drop the stable of giant dudes not doing much in order to not overshadow Big Show

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Hell, I am not sure it was as much intentional as much it (Paul Wight being hired) gave them a good reason to get rid of them. I am a couple weeks behind in my 1999 rewatch so I am right in line with the timeline you mentioned. Having finished 1998, I can add the context of them never really being on Raw. I believe they got relegated to Heat and the barely existent Shotgun Saturday Night/WWF NY. They've broken off Luna to do the Sable/Tori thing. The last segment I saw on Raw with them, The Rock or somebody kicked them out of the ring and....they just left. So yeah, those guys were on borrowed time already.

ICP leaving and the fact none of those guys outside maybe Tenta being able to work pretty much put a kibosh on the group.

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And as for the age: It's crazy but Ottoman and Saggs for that matter look pretty damn amazing. Maybe Tenta was just one of those that always looked older than what he was. 

Tracy Smothers was another one of those guys. He was considered "old" when he was like 33 or 34. 

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The Nintendo 64 version of the Shockmaster segment that just showed up on the Botchamania Facebook page is a riot. I realized that I'd never seen the whole thing before, and the subtitles allowed me to pick out all of the background muttering, which is the funniest part next to Ole's terrible voiceover. How did he not just start laughing? Was he really that humorless? 

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42 minutes ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

And as for the age: It's crazy but Ottoman and Saggs for that matter look pretty damn amazing. Maybe Tenta was just one of those that always looked older than what he was. 

Tracy Smothers was another one of those guys. He was considered "old" when he was like 33 or 34. 

Saggs looks no more than maybe five years older than he did in his early 90s heyday. He did a recent shoot interview in which he seemed really decent and grounded too. Even back in the day I always got the impression that his partner was probably a bit of a millstone around his neck, like (to make a wholly inappropriate literary reference) Knobbs was Lennie to Saggs' good-natured and tolerant George.

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5 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

The Nintendo 64 version of the Shockmaster segment that just showed up on the Botchamania Facebook page is a riot. I realized that I'd never seen the whole thing before, and the subtitles allowed me to pick out all of the background muttering, which is the funniest part next to Ole's terrible voiceover. How did he not just start laughing? Was he really that humorless? 

I've always assumed the voiceover was pretaped, but who knows?

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44 minutes ago, No Point Stance said:

Saggs looks no more than maybe five years older than he did in his early 90s heyday. He did a recent shoot interview in which he seemed really decent and grounded too. Even back in the day I always got the impression that his partner was probably a bit of a millstone around his neck, like (to make a wholly inappropriate literary reference) Knobbs was Lennie to Saggs' good-natured and tolerant George.

I am guessing this is 100% accurate. Other than the Scott Hall incident, which seemed to be all Scott's fault, I don't remember Saggs individually getting into much craziness. It was either both of them or just Knobbs.

An aside: One of my favorite New Jack shoot interview lines is regarding what he said to Brian Knobbs before they got into a fight/he decked Knobbs: "Hey, your partner is cool but you?....You can't wrestle for shit.".

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1 hour ago, Curt McGirt said:

The Nintendo 64 version of the Shockmaster segment that just showed up on the Botchamania Facebook page is a riot. I realized that I'd never seen the whole thing before, and the subtitles allowed me to pick out all of the background muttering, which is the funniest part next to Ole's terrible voiceover. How did he not just start laughing? Was he really that humorless? 

On the pod, Beau said Ole started laughing right after the segment was over. Beau said he was more humorous than you’d expect based on his persona. 

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I still don’t like how the show has settled into the formula of using the family as a contrast to the business. There’s no Dark Side to agents in this one, so it makes sense.

its too niche a deep dive, but it would have been interesting to talk about Watts name dropping him on Mid South TV when he was at LSU. I’d love to know, maybe from JR, why the Cowboy didn’t try to sign him when he left college

 

Edited by odessasteps
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52 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

Jack bitching at somebody for not being a good wrestler is one serious clash of pot and kettle

No, that just makes it funnier.

And to be fair, watching it now, pre ECW New Jack wasn't that bad. If he actually had focused on wrestling and didn't become weapon obsessed as ECW mandated, he probably would have been solid. Mustapha? Yeah, he was always no good but then again they were basically the black Sheepherders or Moondogs. Actual wrestling wasn't suppose to be their forte.

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9 minutes ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

No, that just makes it funnier.

And to be fair, watching it now, pre ECW New Jack wasn't that bad. If he actually had focused on wrestling and didn't become weapon obsessed as ECW mandated, he probably would have been solid. Mustapha? Yeah, he was  always no good but then again they were basically the black Sheepherders or Moondogs. Actual wrestling wasn't suppose to be their forte.

I remember watching a Chris Hammrick shoot where he talked about how New Jack was actually a good worker. They were actually very close friends and I think Ricky Morton said the same thing about Jack. 

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Just now, odessasteps said:

I mean, do you want to see Kamala or The Missing Link exchanging holds with guys? No. 

Oh, I saw an old Sugar Bear Harris match over the weekend. God bless Jim Harris especially since he is not only black like me but from basically the same part of Mississippi as me. However....Sugar Bear Harris wrestling and Kamala wrestling is same same. If someone charged him for more than a week's worth of wrestling training, they should be locked up.

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Harris could bump athletically. I've seen him bump a handful of times in Mid-South and Dallas where I was surprised at how cool it looked.

I forget that by the time he was reasonably high-profile, he was already in his mid-30s. He aged like milk, but he was also well past his athletic peak by the time he was a notable worker. 

I think the first time I saw him, I was very, very young and he was wrestling Hogan in 1987 or whenever it was, and he was already physically shot. 

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