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It’s me. The guy who’s first match he ever watched was Jake the Snake v. Yokozuna (with Macho Man as guest commentator) and I marked the gently caress out for Bryan Danielson.
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Feb 12, 2022 00:57
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Vince sucks
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Feb 12, 2022 00:57
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Elephant Ambush posted:After reading all this it just blows my mind that after Bryan Danielson joined AEW he made sure to say multiple times in interviews and in a blog article he wrote that he enjoyed his time in WWE. And I have no reason not to believe him because it's not like him to lie or work people that way. I don't think he's lying. I think AEW was just able to provide him with "enough" pay to have him keep up his lifestyle as it is now with a far lighter schedule. Signing with a competitor doesn't necessarily mean animosity.
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Feb 12, 2022 00:57
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I realized that I don't really have much in the way of talking about The Spirit Squad in a way that connects with Vince's insanity, and the only decent clips I can find of them are on WWE.com. So it's not really a big story to tell here in this thread. All you need to know is that The Spirit Squad was a faction of 5 guys whose gimmick was that they were male cheerleaders. Terrible male cheerleaders.  They would do chants completely out of sync. Their cheerleader moves were ridiculously goofy dances (Remember Mitch scooting his rear end on the mat like a dog? That became a signature move for him) and jumping up and down. They were designed to be grating as hell to the audience. And it was GLORIOUS. These guys put their all into the gimmick and sold everything that was asked of them. They had airhorns to distract their opponents. They would form a human pyramid for one of them to air off up to attack the opponent. They even had a goddamn trampoline to jump off of. And the entire time they would be screaming and acting like the absolute biggest douchebags and just wear their opponent down with sheer assholery before ganging up on them.  They even had a neat hook of collectively becoming the Tag Team Champions, sharing and defending the belts as a group instead of a duo. Any two members could be booked for a match, but all five of them were gonna come out and do their thing. They would eventually be taken in as Vince's henchmen as he dealt with a feud against Shawn Michaels, beating the absolute poo poo out of him. Soon though, Triple H would defect from under Vince and rejoin his old friend to bring back Degeneration-X. From there, the Spirit Squad would get clowned on and squashed, literally being stuffed into a box that was addressed to Ohio Valley Wrestling (WWE's developmental/retooling division). Kenny would go on to singles competition for a brief time, I think two of the other guys remained as the Spirit Squad for one or two shows, one was released, and the other would become Dolph Ziggler. But I loving loved The Spirit Squad. I loved them so much I even bought the action figures of them.
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Feb 12, 2022 01:25
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it's kinda cool that wrestlemania 10, 20, and 30 all ended with a popular, accomplished technical wrestler that was small (by wrestling standards) and wwe didn't seem to like winning the big belt in the main event there's also weird little parallels, like how bret and bryan both also wrestled a match earlier in the night, 20 and 30 both ended in a triple threat with triple h and/or triple h's friends, and bryan and benoit won with almost the exact same move (lebell lock/crossface crippler... brownie points if anyone can even explain what the difference is) also... now that I've typed that, I'm realizing each of them had a name that started with a B. but sure tell me Wrasslor the God of wrestling isn't real, athetits
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Feb 12, 2022 01:30
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Don’t forget that crazy plastic brain Vince now hates the word “wrestlemania”, the word/cornerstone that literally built his empire, and would change it to just “mania”or something even worse if he could.
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Feb 12, 2022 01:43
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Sportsentertainemania
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Feb 12, 2022 01:56
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Elephant Ambush posted:After reading all this it just blows my mind that after Bryan Danielson joined AEW he made sure to say multiple times in interviews and in a blog article he wrote that he enjoyed his time in WWE. And I have no reason not to believe him because it's not like him to lie or work people that way. Remember, a big part of wrestling is tricking the audience, and blending actual drama with stage drama to do so.  Wrestling terms 101: Work & Shoot. A Work is something that is a part of the show, it is intentional. A Shoot is a legitimate harm or unscripted event, this is unintentional (by management). How much of anything is anything in wrestling?? You'll never know....now get in line and buy a shirt, Mark. Did Bryan Danielson have a good time in WWE? Maybe, he never left and it undoubtedly made him a millionaire. Would he just say that because his wife might want to still work there or he may come back when AEW runs out of money? Maybe. After all, how many co-stars have ever spoken ill of people like Kevin Spacey or Harvey Weinstein? See, this whole bullshit is why I don't watch wrestling anymore.
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Feb 12, 2022 02:13
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Trollologist posted:See, this whole bullshit is why I don't watch wrestling anymore. AEW is owned by billionaires who have more money than vince mcmahon, it's pretty much gonna be around as long as the khan family have money. its not perfect but the great moments own and it never makes you feel bitter about wrestling in the way WWE actively punishes you for caring danielson comes off to me as a professional who doesnt engage in dirtshirts - if you watch 5 seconds of him in any AEW match he's very clearly infinitely happier and freer there. hence him having two 5 star rated matches back to back after 10 years in WWE Hefty Leftist fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Feb 12, 2022 |
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Feb 12, 2022 02:32
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To contrast the WWE career of Bryan Danielson, who I'm also very fond of, let's again go completely off course with the whole 'Hey why did TNA fail so hard' by talking in depth about the past deeds of one of the main reasons: Terry "Hulk Hogan" Bollea. If there’s a phrase that comes to mind with Terry Bollea, it’s “Be careful who you pretend to be, because you are who you pretend to be.” Let’s be honest. I don’t know Terry Bollea, nee Hulk Hogan, at all. I have never met the man. I don’t know what goes on his head, or what drives him to do what he did, and does. All I can do is guess and make assessments based on them; they could be completely and utterly wrong. It’s not 2+2 equals 4 here; it’s more ‘this, this, and this definitely happened, and people say how this, this, this, this, and this happened, and other people say this and this about the first people saying those this, ergo we can try and make a rough calculation that I think the story is this.’ Hulk Hogan was not the first man to let the fact that the entire thing was a staged show corrupt him; in actual sports, the best naturally win, barring certain things of course, but wrestling follows the rules of fiction, where nothing happens unless the writer wants it to happen, and too often, there’s bleedover between who’s doing the performing and who’s directing the writing. It’s not always bad, but the failings often sink deeper than the successes, like Dusty Rhodes getting a finish named after him, or Verne Gagne playing a part in Hogan’s design by basically using his own wrestling company, the AWA, as his personal ego feeding vanity projecting, ensuring its title was either always around his waist or on his ‘favourite.’ Which we'll get to, in a moment. Neither was Hogan the only one who let the character completely overwrite the man; hell, it happened to a lot of his 80’s peers. It has been said that Jim Hellwig, who you might know better as the Ultimate Warrior, when he started out in the business was backstage a quiet, almost shy man who utilized an extraordinarily over the top character to get around that, only for the fact that he grew to spend more and more time in that character to ultimately supplant his actual personality entirely; there was no more Jim Hellwig, only ‘The Warrior’, and to paraphrase one of Warrior’s most unfortunate statements, “Warrioring don’t make the world work.” Likewise, while I suspect that Randall Poffo, nee Macho Man Randy Savage, probably would have been an aggressive and paranoid sort even if he’d spent his life being a baseball catcher instead of a wrestler, but wrestling sure as poo poo turned up those negative aspects of his personality and probably ensured he went through a lot of pain he could have otherwise avoided. And Ric Flair so utterly lived his gimmick of being a “limousine riding, jet flying, kiss stealing, wheeling and dealing son of a gun.” that it ended up destroying his finances, repeated marriages, drove him to alcoholism, MIGHT have played a part in his son’s premature death, and as of recently has gotten him erased because of his sex pest behavior being re-examined in the light of the post MeToo era; the man literally could not function not being ‘Ric Flair’, Richard Felair having long withered away to nearly nothing. Hogan is well known as a liar, if one uses a blunt term; in fact, he lies and exaggerates so much that it almost comes off as brain damage delusion. He’s claimed things like having been scouted as a guitar player for Metallica, doing a proto version of MMA in the 70’s, that he was also scouted to be the star of “The Wrestler”, and even stuff like that Elvis Presley was a huge fan of his work (Presley had been dead for several years before Hogan had even stepped into a ring for his first match). He would also exaggerate his famous Wrestlemania III moment repeatedly until it had become that he had slammed Andre the Giant’s 1500 pound body in front of 700,000 fans and Andre had died a few days later, which you can read almost as something that starts as comical exaggeration but ended up being another case of Hogan gaslighting himself. As a result of this, it can be very hard to parse out any exact reason for why he would choose to have the career he had; one can only make some educated guesses. So here’s mine. Terry Bollea was defined by three events in his life, which would led to him being one of the fulcrums that WCW’s demise and TNA’s near utter ruin would swing on. Number 1: How he was trained. As he tells it, the very first training session he had resulted in his trainer intentionally breaking his leg to ‘show him his place’ and ‘see if he wanted it’. This is somewhat true. What might not be mentioned is that Hogan, who came to wrestling because while he was playing band gigs around in Florida, and worked out at the same gym that many wrestlers in Florida frequented, where he was noticed by the Brisco Brothers, who initially pitched to him the idea of becoming a wrestler himself, came in full of himself, and at best horrendously erred in projecting confidence by saying he could and would become the biggest wrestling star ever etc etc. Hence, his leg was broken to ‘humble’ him, and even so, that’s too much an overreaction, but wrestling, despite shedding the carny money theft angle, had never and still has never shed the carny roots it came from. As the Dave Schultz story (told by Trollologist back on Page 15) said, it used to be that you always protected the business, and you did it by trying to utterly break your trainees and then, if they stuck around, ‘smartening them up’ that this was not a pure combat competition like boxing. (And despite stories like Schultz and Hogan giving the impression that they had no clue that ‘wrestling was fake’, I really do think they and most anyone else who aimed to get into the business from the 60's onward knew more than they realized, even if just subconsciously. Because if you take wrestling completely at face value, this is a sport where you are engaging in vicious, painful, damaging combat, often night after night, risking all sorts of injuries up to including death, and lacking even the protective rules that sports like football and boxing have. Wrestling, once it had evolved out of being more than ‘sort of like actual wrestling, with maybe a little more color and a few more bells and whistles’ and was ‘smashing people violently into the ground over and over, fighting them in steel cages, and actively trying to cripple them by doing stuff like jumping on their neck from an extended height via the ring corner’, taken at face value that it was ‘all real’, was basically gladitorial combat, and there were very few actual, willing gladiators; they were nearly all slaves being forced to kill each other for other people’s amusement. You look at the sort of man that Terry Bollea and many other wrestlers are, and then look at this concept, and you tell me that they didn’t know on SOME level it was primarily a show. But who knows. People are stupid and weird.) So, according to Hogan, he went through several months of hard training where he was stretched and abused and basically taught things like joint locks instead of how to 'take bumps', and then one day someone else finally pulled him aside and went “Terry, it’s actually all a show.” Which to Hogan, meant that his trainers had been abusing him and not teaching him what he really needed to learn, all for the sake of a lie. To ‘protect the business’. Who knows how true this is, but if we assume there’s SOME truth to it, and Hogan got fed a line on just how much reality there was in this show, he came away with it with the same lesson that Vince did from his possible abusive childhood: no. This is unacceptable. I will not allow people to have this much control over me. I will have the control. Though this was just seeds, ones that were shared by many. For Hogan, the second defining thing was his second lesson in not having control and how those who did have the control abused him with it. Hogan wasn’t an immediate explosive success when he broke into the business, but his size, look, and charisma did pay dividends, and back in his starting days, he actually could wrestle semi decently (check one of his early 80’s Japan matches for an example). So he began moving his way up the cards of the various promotions he worked with, but what REALLY did it for him was getting cast in a minor role as the wrestler ‘Thunderlips’ in Rocky III. Between the exposure from the film and his charisma making the fans ‘override’ his tended to be heel character by cheering wildly for him despite him returning to the States acting like a heel, which led to him swiftly jettisoning that and leaning into it, it seemed like it was time for him to climb to the top. The problem was, he was in the AWA. Run by Verne Gagne. Who was incredibly old school, and, as said, had more or less used the company as an ego stroke. While Verne HAD been popular in his day, he had complete control of the company and hence he made sure the world title was almost always around his waist. Once again, the audience changed, but Verne didn’t. He thought the old school way of wrestling matches all being an hour plus with 30 minutes spent lying around in a headlock was still the true blue heart of the performance, and that big charismatic men like Hogan were at best a side show to led to this ‘actual valid wrestling’. Between that, and stuff like winning the AWA title in 1968 for the NINTH time (having won the title the first time in 1960), and then holding the belt for SEVEN YEARS, only losing it in 1975 to his ‘favourite’, Nick Bockwinkel, who would proceed to hold the title for five years himself…before losing it himself…back to Verne Gagne. Who was by now, 64 years old and looked it...  Yeah. Gagne proceeded to retire as champion, so he never actually lost it the last time, and handed the title back to Bockwinkel. No match, no tournament, he just handed it back over like it was a book he'd borrowed instead of the supposed symbol of the best in wrestling. This happened right around the same time as Hogan arriving in AWA and becoming a face through sheer presence, and not only that, a top face. The logical thing would be to ride it. To make money. But Gagne did things his way. And to him, the giant muscleman was not the person who should hold a federation’s top title. Let’s leave out that the one who ‘should’ was inevitably whatever he wanted. Hogan began working his way through the company’s top heels, led by the late great Bobby Heenan, and then began a lengthy chase for Bockwinkel’s title, as Gagne tried to have his cake and eat it too. He would draw the crowds with Hogan, but have him come up short, and after a while of that, began doing Dusty finishes where Hogan would seemingly win the title, but then someone would come out and say something like “The ref got knocked out so that didn’t count.” “His feet were under the ropes so it didn’t count.” “Hogan didn’t read the fine print in his contract so it didn’t count.” and so on. In a vacuum, this isn’t necessarily wrong; one of the reasons that Kevin Nash failed as WWE champion was likely that the WWE jumped him past several steps of ‘growth’ that would have given him credibility. But eventually, they should have let Hogan actually win, and hold the title. And Gagne wouldn’t budge on that. Hogan’s accounts of talking to Gagne made it clear that Gagne was never going to change. Perhaps worse (and this is pure hearsay, I have zero proof it actually happened, so take it with a whole salt pile, but it is, as the saying goes, juicy), Gagne may have floated the implication that Gagne might make Hogan the champion if Hogan married his daughter, acting like an old school European monarch attempting to form loyalty bonds through marriage. But even if that last one is nonsense, to Hogan, it was just like when was trained. He had no control. And the ones with control were loving him over. Even worse, this time he had support that he was in the right, in the form of the large crowds he was drawing. It didn’t change squat. He was the headline attraction for Gagne, and he wouldn’t even put his fake title on him for a week. He had no control. Then, even as he was going through this long period of being jerked around, Vince actually purchased the WWF from his father (and then promptly leveraged him out) and, having seized on Hogan as just who he could make his prime musclebound golden god, did his best to get Hogan out of Gagne’s employ and into his own. It wasn’t that hard a get. Gagne, despite it all, let Hogan go thinking he was a flash in the pan, just a brief hot thing. He was wrong. Vince promptly put the WWF Title on Hogan when he arrived in the company, Hulkamania was born, the WWF rode the rocket into the third boom period of wrestling, and the AWA spent the 80’s falling apart until it went out of business entirely in 1990. And that was the third and final step in the ‘damnation’ of Terry Bollea. He’d gotten what he wanted, and more. Not only was he the champion, the top star, but he was ascending heights that only the biggest wrestling stars had ever climbed, if not further. Everything was bigger in the 80’s, after all. It was all him, and he was the greatest. He’d gotten his control…and he’d learned his lesson. Never give it up. Never let anyone get anything or take anything from him. gently caress absolutely everything and everyone else. There was one thing that was important, and that was Hulk Hogan. In normal sports, the very essence of time would have forced Hogan out of the top spot. It was inevitable. Muhammad Ali was the greatest, but eventually, he wasn’t. Wayne Gretzky was a man you could win Stanley Cups off the back of, but eventually, he wasn’t. Tiger Woods didn’t spend his whole career winning victories like the one he won the 1997 Masters with, and neither did Michael Jordon take every team he played basketball for straight to the championship whenever he was on a team and playing. But wrestling is all prearranged. In theory, the fans will tell you who they want to see, but it’s ultimately decided by the writers, the show runners, and those that have control. Being on such a height and making the sheer amount of money Hogan was making hardwired him to do his damndest to get as much control as he could and hang onto it even if it meant he rode it right into the ground and then straight down six feet. All that mattered was that HE had it. Everything else, all the consequences, even the fact that he was ultimately kneecapping himself? gently caress all that. They broke his leg. They tortured him for a lie. They used him for money and tried to bind him to their ‘service’ via a marriage. gently caress that. Never again. Again, all very dramatic and possibly a complete load of poo poo. But piece together the accounts of Hogan and many others, along with actual historical events, and it certainly rings true. Hogan’s life once Hulkamania was born was basically doing everything to ensure Hulkamania never ended, even if no one else cared. He would refuse to work with and put over wrestlers like Curt Hennig and Bret Hart, constantly claim he was going to retire and then come back and force his way into the main event again, and sabotage, if just subconsciously, the pushes of others by doing his best to get the attention the crowd was supposed to pay to them (if you want a strong example, watch Hogan's performance in the 1990 Survivor Series, when the Ultimate Warrior was champion and hence the main spotlight should have been on him, and see all the little things Hogan does to grab that attention) This was not helped by the fact that while Hogan had become the biggest superface in decades in the mid 80’s, in a lot of ways he never stopped wrestling like a heel, being fully willing to interfere in matches, use dirty tactics, do heelish moves like back rakes (does a noble sort strike you as the type who would hurt an opponent by clawing at their back with his nails?) and in general, being a sore loser, even if said loss came through treachery. By the time the 90’s rolled around, even the fans were noticing; when Hogan was tossed out of the 1992 Royal Rumble by Sid Eudy, nee Sid Vicious/Psycho Sid, the crowd cheered, and when Hogan threw a tantrum over the (perfectly fair, yes he struck while Hogan’s back was turned but THAT WAS FULLY OKAY WITHIN THE RULES OF THE RUMBLE) elimination and yanked Sid out, costing him the match and getting into a brawl, the fans in the live feed clearly sided with Sid, only for re-shows to dub in cheers for Hogan and boos for Sid instead. By 1993, with the steroid trial forcing Bollea to give up the roids and causing him to shrink, and Hogan politicking his way into winning the WWF title for the fifth time in the main event of Wrestlemania 9, then basically taking three months off and playing more games with Vince and Bret Hart over Hogan first agreeing to put Bret over and pass the torch to him in Summerslam 1993 and then going back on his word, and eventually even Vince had had enough; Hogan dropped the belt instead in June to the giant sumo wrestler-pro wrestler Yokozuna, who was actually Samoan instead of Japanese, and Vince, depending on who you ask, did anything from just ending his business relationship with Hogan to firing him and his two main friends Ed Leslie and Jimmy Hart and basically telling them “Don’t come back. Ever.” That might have let Hogan have time to come to a realization about his choices…and then along came Eric Bischoff, reinforcing all of Hogan’s worst traits, willingly paying him an utterly absurd contract and giving him complete creative control, and letting him romp all over WCW just like his glory days. Except this time, it wasn’t being wholly supported by giant crowds selling out arenas night after night or in front of nearly 80,000 fans facing another legend in Andre the Giant. Hogan was, more or less, tolerated, and that toleration vanished fast, with the fans going to sour to outright hostile and booing Hogan so bad that even WCW’s attempts to cover it by giving away free merchandise and editing crowd noise couldn’t cover it. Maybe, MAYBE, if Hogan had been allowed to fail, maybe he would have come to a realization. Become a better person. But then Eric Bischoff had the mother of all broken clock ideas, and tapped Hogan to be the third man and heel turn in the NWO angle, an angle wholly based around the illusion that this was a WWE vs WCW war. Hogan was suddenly back on top with a rocket, again. That was it. There was no going back. What ‘Hulk Hogan’ was was set in stone. There was no learning any lessons after being so enabled, once more. As his later TV show said, Hogan Knows Best. And what was best for Hogan was the same way that Milo from Catch-22’s businesses were best for the army. You remember how that ended? If you absolutely had to pick a sole singular reason that WCW failed, you wouldn’t lose any money hanging it all on Terry Bollea. And TNA, much like WCW, completely refused to learn that fact. Though we still need to cover a bit more of WCW. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Feb 19, 2022 |
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Feb 12, 2022 02:41
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Cornwind Evil posted:there were very few actual, willing gladiators; they were nearly all slaves being forced to kill each other for other people’s amusement. nah
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Feb 12, 2022 02:50
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Cornwind Evil posted:Sid Eudy, nee Sid Vicious/Psycho Sid Sid is delightful because he was physically the most impossibly perfect physical specimen of a human being if you were to design a professional wrestler up from the basic cells and amino sequences, unequalled across all space and time, but given a brain that only wanted one thing and that was to play slightly better than beer league Softball with slouches and mopes against hasbeens and dopes.
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Feb 12, 2022 02:57
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Jamesman posted:I realized that I don't really have much in the way of talking about The Spirit Squad in a way that connects with Vince's insanity, and the only decent clips I can find of them are on WWE.com. So it's not really a big story to tell here in this thread. Just so you know, a couple of the Spirit Squad guys made a comeback a few years ago back when Smackdown was awesome. It was part of a Ziggler vs. Miz feud. The Headbangers also made a comeback around then. It was a strange, but fun era.
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Feb 12, 2022 03:19
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Elephant Ambush posted:Anyone who is interested in Chikara should just go watch all the King of Trios tournaments and not worry about the lore or backstories or any of that. Just go watch awesome trios matches and have fun. Didn't that have a trio who are basically the Ginyu Force? Complete with cosplay-accurate costumes? Cubone posted:but sure tell me Wrasslor the God of wrestling isn't real, athetits He is totally real, and appeared on an episode of Dexter's Lab, as a shockingly close homage to a Marvel comics story. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks had a god of wrestling. Possibly Heracles. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Feb 12, 2022 |
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Feb 12, 2022 08:36
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Danielson losing his belt in 18 seconds was such fuckin horseshit that I turned it off mid-show and never watched a vince product ever again. Yes I know he came back from it and won big at wrestlemania 30, yes I know nxt was good for a while after that, no I don't care. glad he's free
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Feb 12, 2022 09:17
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Put on Smackdown for the hell of it and it opened with some dude in a suit carrying cardboard cutouts to the ring so I went back to watching Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.
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Feb 12, 2022 10:43
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HHH is weird cause for a while public perception was that he was becoming a better person, and at the very least better at identifying and using peoples talents like in NXT. but now its clear that that was just kind of like how a rollercoaster climbs back up after a deep plunge just so it can go back down again. he has a juuust different enough kind of madness from vince that from a certain angle it can resemble sanity. i guess the story kind of initially resembled the classical pattern of the 'good prince and the mad king' archetype so people were keen to try and view the reality like that. people were willing to kind of fluff away all the bad poo poo he had done as like 'youthful indescretion' or something (despite the fact he was like 30s for the bulk of his reported misdeeds) and look at his better business acumen compared to vince as the sign of him also being a better person. idk. i dont know that someone whose formative years were embedded in that era of wrestling stands much of a chance of being a great guy. SatansOnion posted:say, mister or ms juggalo baby coffin, are you familiar with the in-ring career of one Sonny Kiss? You might be pleasantly surprised (or less so because you might agree with me that we need more of the Concrete Rose on our tv screens) and given the conflation in society between something being homoerotic and something being homosexual, wrestlers are pretty defensive about being seen as gay, which most often manifests as homophobia. and that ends up with stuff like the chris kanyon situation where a man was basically bullied to death by the wrestling industry for being (openly) gay. i guess the indie scene is less sexualised in general because you don't have vince's weird fixations dictating body type and costuming so much. I don't know if AEW counts as indie any more, i feel like half the time indie just means 'not WWE'. i have complicated feelings about Goldust because i really love dustin rhodes and where he took the character, and i think the really horrendous gay panic part of his act was before i started watching. edit: also wrt bryan danielson i want to say that his like leap off the turnbuckle onto bray wyatt outside the ring who somehow reversed it into the sister abigail is maybe my favourite wrestling move i've ever seen. juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Feb 12, 2022 |
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Feb 12, 2022 15:49
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Ghost Leviathan posted:He is totally real, and appeared on an episode of Dexter's Lab, as a shockingly close homage to a Marvel comics story. JBL claimed to be a wrestling god, but not necessarily the wrestling god.
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Feb 12, 2022 21:47
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juggalo baby coffin posted:HHH is weird cause for a while public perception was that he was becoming a better person, and at the very least better at identifying and using peoples talents like in NXT. but now its clear that that was just kind of like how a rollercoaster climbs back up after a deep plunge just so it can go back down again. he has a juuust different enough kind of madness from vince that from a certain angle it can resemble sanity. I can see this. I never thought HHH was a good person (either in or out of the ring; I hated him in the ring because he was very good at playing the rear end in a top hat), but out of the ring he presented himself as sort of a normal(ish) dude and the anti-Vince in some respects He never came across in interviews as completely unhinged and psychotic, and sometimes even a bit goofy, but man has his star fallen
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Feb 12, 2022 22:11
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Animal-Mother posted:JBL claimed to be a wrestling god, but not necessarily the wrestling god. 
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Feb 12, 2022 22:21
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Dang these effort posts are great write ups, thanks. Just put these on the new sa front page as a series of articles
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Feb 12, 2022 23:15
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gbs but from 2004 posted:Dang these effort posts are great write ups, thanks. Just put these on the new sa front page as a series of articles 
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Feb 12, 2022 23:52
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Hefty Leftist posted:AEW is owned by billionaires who have more money than vince mcmahon, it's pretty much gonna be around as long as the khan family have money. Ted Turner was a Billionaire with more money than Vince: Where's WCW? Panda Energy is a billion dollar company with more money than Vince: Where's TNA? How many Millionaires / Billionaires have burned how much money "competing with WWE" before ultimately losing? The sad and terrible reality of Wrestling "as a business" is that it's horrifyingly unsustainable and every competitor's market position is essentially: We're like WWE, but better. The last bit of Wrestling Terminology before my effort post: Money Mark. We learned what a Mark was, someone that the wrestler or promoter is conning with the ruse of wrestling. A Money Mark is someone with a lot of money that wants to be a wrestling promoter, and as a result to get into "the wrestling business" . Once a person is labeled a "Money Mark" Wrestlers will work to take as much of that person's money as they can before the promotion inevitably crumbles.
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Feb 13, 2022 01:09
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they think im a mark but i can imagine them kissing in my head (rent free)
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Feb 13, 2022 01:23
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Bryan Danielson is my absolute favorite wrestler. I was lucky enough to see him wrestle in Ring of Honor and in the WWE. He's just the absolute best and the most stereotypical PNW guy out there.
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Feb 13, 2022 02:23
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Trollologist posted:Ted Turner was a Billionaire with more money than Vince: Where's WCW? I feel like this is a very common pattern, especially with anything like showbiz. 
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Feb 13, 2022 02:33
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Trollologist posted:Panda Energy is a billion dollar company with more money than Vince: Where's TNA? TNA is fine and out-lived ROH
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Feb 13, 2022 02:40
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Also WCW died in part because when AOL and Time Warner merged, it basically forced Ted Turner out of any role of authority he had, so he no longer had any say in what programming went on the networks he no longer ran. The new people in charge of TBS and TNT didn't want wrestling on their networks because it was seen as lowbrow, the Monday Night Wars were pretty much over, and WCW's ratings had declined sharply, so they decided to cancel it. None of them had any interest in keeping it around just to spite Vince like Turner would have had. Since WCW no longer had a network to air its programming on, all they had was the WCW name and tape library, which they eventually ended up selling to Vince for peanuts. So I'd say that it's arguable that WCW might had aired for a while longer had Turner not been elbowed out.
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Feb 13, 2022 03:35
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Eclipse12 posted:I used to do reviews of old Raws and was thinking of starting up again. Cool if I post them here? BRING BACK THE RAW REVIEWS ALREADY.
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Feb 13, 2022 04:10
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Was it Monday Night RAW where the WCW announcer was like "Well I guess Mankind is the WWF champ now lol" and then Turner Broadcasting heard the sound of 65% of their audience hit the PREVIOUS button on their remotes to see it?
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Feb 13, 2022 04:17
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FilthyImp posted:Was it Monday Night RAW where the WCW announcer was like "Well I guess Mankind is the WWF champ now lol" and then Turner Broadcasting heard the sound of 65% of their audience hit the PREVIOUS button on their remotes to see it? Yup. IIRC that was also the turning point where WCW never won the weekly ratings war again.
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Feb 13, 2022 04:19
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Now the last part of the Bryan Danielson/Daniel Bryan in WWE thing. After main-eventing WrestleMania 30, Daniel Bryan said that his goal was to main event the PPV again. Keep that in mind. With his huge, character-defining WrestleMania story arc finished, WWE put him in a feud with Kane that pretty much everyone hated. WWE had plans for Bryan and they weren’t good. See, they finally broke up the Shield and were intent on turning Roman Reigns into the next huge star. The goal was to make Roman the top guy by WrestleMania. He just needed the perfect heel champ to defeat. Enter Brock Lesnar, who was going to completely obliterate Bryan at SummerSlam, setting up his eventual downfall at Roman’s hands. Two problems kicked in. First, Bryan’s neck was pretty messed up as breaking the glass ceiling did a number on his body. He had to drop the title and step away to recuperate. John Cena became champion afterwards and took his spot in the story. At SummerSlam, Brock crushed Cena into paste in the most shocking turn of events. Afraid that Cena looked too weak, Vince tried to help him save face by having Cena beat up the Wyatt Family single-handedly the next night, complete with Bray Wyatt crying and begging for mercy. So anyway, Roman's ascent was basically accepted by the fans at the time. That is, until he had to take several months off due to a nasty hernia. It would have been fine letting him heal up and return to cheers, but WWE was too antsy about it. They started getting too into Roman’s health updates, including interviews via satellite that added nothing. They were overselling Roman and it was getting rough. Roman and Bryan both returned from their injuries in time to hype up the 2015 Royal Rumble. To the fans, this was WWE’s chance to right last year’s wrong and have Bryan win. It seemed likely that it would go to Roman, but Bryan would surely at least make the final four or something, right? At the Royal Rumble, Bryan lasted about ten minutes before being unceremoniously dumped out of the ring. The plan was to just get the negative reaction out of the way before Roman showed up. Then Kane and Big Show would beat up all the other popular, young acts from that time (Dolph Ziggler, Bray Wyatt, Dean Ambrose) and Roman would seem like a big hero for defeating them. Then the Rock himself would show up to bask in his cousin’s success. Everyone would love Roman. The moment Bryan hit the floor, the crowd lost their poo poo and did not relent. They knew exactly what was going on and they were not having it. They booed the everloving poo poo out of the rest of the match. Even the Rock got booed! He looked so confused! This time, WWE was not going to play ball or cave in. Bryan was not going to be added to the WrestleMania main event. They gave people hope with a Bryan vs. Roman PPV match where the winner would be #1 contender, but Roman won. This was part of WWE’s never-ending desperation to get people to like Roman by having him defeat top stars, followed by them raising his hand in respect. Between this and the "hip" "badass" promos written by Vince McMahon himself (they’re loving atrocious), the fans could not take how much WWE was trying to make Roman happen. Bryan instead was entered into a ladder match for the Intercontinental Championship. He won, but after a few weeks, he had to step down yet again. This time, he had to let everyone know that his was too banged up and had to retire. It was heartbreaking. Bryan returned a few years later as the SmackDown GM during one of the show’s most entertaining stretches. He also co-hosted Talking Smack, an online post-show where wrestlers got to do unscripted interviews and show more character than they got to on TV. People really enjoyed Talking Smack...except Vince McMahon, because he didn’t have full control of it. He had the show dropped. With his contract coming up, Bryan was ready to let it lapse so he could go elsewhere and hopefully be allowed to wrestle. WWE’s doctors suddenly realized, whoa, wait! You are actually cleared to wrestle now! Turns out you didn’t need to retire after all! Sign with us for another few years and we'll let you wrestle! Bryan returned to action and was immediately put into a feud with Big Cass, a mediocre wrestler with the gimmick that he was very tall and that’s something that can’t be taught. While Bryan probably would have taken his licks in this feud, he instead won two straight PPV matches and Cass was then fired. Why? Because he did a segment with a little person dressed as Bryan and was explicitly told NOT to beat him up and did anyway. Bryan turned heel down the line and became WWE Champion. His whole persona was that he was against pollution, which of course made him a bad guy. What was awesome was that he changed his belt into one made out of hemp. He ended up losing the title to Kofi Kingston, another example of a popular, but small wrestler finally getting their big title win, only to get a lovely run afterwards. A hilarious thing to come out of this time was that Bryan’s bodyguard was former Wyatt Family member Erick Rowan. There was a segment where somebody tried to murder Roman Reigns backstage via dropping a wall on him or something like that. Random wrestler Buddy Murphy was accidentally in the shot for this, so they made it part of the story and had Roman attack him while demanding he tell him who was behind the murder attempt. Murphy claimed it was Rowan himself. Bryan and Rowan both claimed it was a lie. A couple weeks later, Bryan said he found out the truth. At the end of an episode of SmackDown, Roman was brought into a room backstage where they unmasked the assailant and it was just some unnamed guy who looked an awful lot like Rowan. The two Rowans quietly stared at each other, Roman looked confused, and Bryan tried his hardest not to crack up. This poo poo was never mentioned ever again. Bryan stuck around WWE for a few years and at least had the political sway to get himself booked against wrestlers like him on the roster like Drew Gulak and Chad Gable. In early 2021, they built up a WrestleMania main event of Edge vs. Roman Reigns for the WWE Universal Championship. Realizing that the match needed a bit more pepper, they came up with a story reason for it to be a triple threat with Bryan thrown in there. The match ended with Roman pinning both opponents at the same time. Bryan would later admit that even though he was in the main event of WWE’s biggest annual show...it felt empty. He felt nothing. His contract was coming up and he just wasn’t interested in sticking around anymore. He lost one more high-profile match to Roman and moved on. Months later, he appeared at the very end of AEW’s All Out PPV. Since then, he’s done nothing but have awesome matches against a big variety of wrestlers. It rules.
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Feb 13, 2022 04:23
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Okay, Let's talk about 2 things: The Wrestling Business, The Wrestling Business. And How Vince Mcmahon defines both. /cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/50506659/Vince-McMahon-money.0.0.jpg) Professional Wrestling, as an industry, is for all intents and purposes, a scam. The grey of what is a work or a shoot or how much of any shoot is a work or any work a shoot is what wrestling feels defines it. In America at least. Mexico, having Luchadores wear masks, creates a figurative 4th wall in the assumption that if the mask is on, so is "the show". America does not have this. When I said that is what wrestling feels defines it, well that's emblematic of how The Wrestling Business operates. What is The Wrestling Business? In short, it's a con. On the one hand, Wrestlers view their role as one of tricking the audience into believing the act portrayed is legitimate, not just the fight, but also the characters and story. On the other, it's an attempt at least on some level to provide entertainment through the shared ruse. However the idea that average consumers know the production is just that is still viewed as dangerous or heretical in some capacity to most of the existing trainers, promoters, owners, and creatives. Can you think of a single performer that wrestles under a pseudonym but conducts all their promotion under their real name (like every actor that's ever existed)? Maintaining the illusion outside of the ring is called kayfabe and while it's not widely practiced anymore, you still see it's influence everywhere. What is The Wrestling Business? Wrestling is for lack of a better definition: Episodic Theater. A continuing story told through stage productions on a regular basis. Heroes rise, Villains fall, Redemption is found, and characters you love fall from grace. Revenue is mostly generated through the sale of tickets(Or pay-per-view buys) to and merchandise at the event, sometimes supplemented with sales of recording of previous events or access to an online archive of previous materials. Most promotion for the actual revenue is generated through TV deals or media streaming. Can't they just be a tv show, you know like tv shows are? More on this later. Keep in mind, for what it costs to film 1 episode of a pretty solid action-drama, you can fund like, a YEAR of pro wrestling content How does Vince Mcmahon define The Wrestling Business? In short, he's the only one to succeed. Every promotion, every attempt, every competitor, everyone that's ever stepped to the plate against him in this arena of entertainment has failed. Or never even rose to challenge him in the first place. I can't stress enough how little success everyone that has ever tried this has had. So, when starting up a promotion everyone looks to Vince and the WWE,. How they run shop, what they do, their style of production, all of it. Even revenue sources are the same. No one, NO ONE deviates from Vince's Formula. Which is in part why they fail. You can pick out a dozen indy or historic promotions that have been around or have success here or there, but how many Billionaires have they made? Where's their John Cena? Is there a single Household named wrestler that hasn't done a stint in or mainly contribute their fame to the WWE? (Sting....maybe) And even of the ones you like to heave around (AEW, WCW, etc) how many are in whole or in part funded by some other company just burning cash to keep up? Business needs competition. Ford has Toyota, Adidas had Nike, Nintendo had Sega (and now Sony). But in every realm of competition you have to position yourself against the market to explain why you. Since everyone is just a carbon copy of the WWE, the main reason to watch not WWE is usually some variant of "We're not WWE". This can kind of work (See Coke v Pepsi), but you have to be about the same size to pull it off. Now before you start going off about "ECW! AND BLAHblah" Keep in mind you're selling a distinction that the average viewer just doesn't really care about. If you were trying to compete with Netflix, do you market "Tigerr Kiing (with MORE boobs)" or do you make your own market and sell it (Come see what we have, our shows are good and different)? It's the latter, you do the latter. How do you Innovate in the Wrestling Business to compete in the marketplace? Honestly, I don't know. But my finger goes towards innovating The Wrestling Business. How does Vince McMahon define The Wrestling Business? So, the way stories are told and presented is aped here. Take for example: The Pay-per-view(PPV). Because WWE has big event pay-per-view events, every smaller promotion also chases them. How do you get people to watch your PPV? Well, you put all your biggest matches on it! All your story lines build up to it and end there! and you have every show before be about how important the PPV is! Yes. This is the obvious answer. Here's why it's a terrible idea: The storytelling is immediately predictable. An analogy: Let's apply this logic to any other show, how about...Breaking Bad. Well with the WWE model of narrative flow Breaking Bad looks like this: Walter White is disgruntled that he has cancer and wants to start cooking meth! he meets Jesse and the two plan to buy an RV to start the cook. But the RV and first cook can't happen, for 3 weeks. So for the next 3 episodes Walter and Jesse, talk about plans for the cook, shop for the right RV, discuss where they're going to cook and what to do with the RV afterwards. The episode that they buy the RV and cook meth is $60. After the RVPPV, Walt and Jesse discuss how Emilio and Krazy-8 have to be dealt with. So they plan an acid bath. But they can't get the acid, for 3 weeks. The acid Episode is also $60. Can you imagine how loving stale any other show would be if told that way? That's every wrestling promotion ever. (outside of like Lucha Underground and a few Narrative-driven promotions). Oh, also every time Bryan Cranston goes out to promote Breaking Bad, everyone has to call him "Walter" and ask about what it's like Cooking meth and hiding it from your family. It's loving stupid. It's insulting. But Vince does it, and Vince is successful. So everyone else does it too. But also, everything else the WWE does is aped as well: No pre-production, no (or VERY minimal) post effects or editing, Light scripting (or heavy for promos), weekly live shows, the Promo -> match -> Post match Promo cadence of loving every feud ever. Blurring the lines of "fake" and "real" to make wrestlers feel "authentic". Everything the WWE does, everyone else does too. So, Wrestling has no competition, is run by dumb regularly concussed scam artists and is locked in a cycle of follow the leader that has stagnated the industry for decades. Competing can't be that hard.....right? Enter: The Money Mark. This is where Wrestling gets hosed. Trollologist fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Feb 13, 2022 |
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Feb 13, 2022 04:24
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Ahhhh, The Money Mark. Is it possible to self sabotage harder I wonder? Since Wrestling is a scam, and the business is about (on some level) protecting that scam, what do you do with someone that wants to run a promotion and compete as a business? Do you: a) Try to help them, using your experience and talent to build their business into a success and succeed yourself as a result? b) Take their money, but just try to do the best job you can, knowing that you don't have a lot of success in the business realm and hope they know what they're doing while being a team player? c) negotiate for as much money as you can get and then mock them behind their back for being a gullible fool The term is Money Mark, you know the answer here. Everyone that tries to get into wrestling (or wrasslin') by, like, having a passion and wanting to invest in a new idea is mocked either openly, or quietly by old-school wrestlers and promoters for being a "Money Mark". Vince Mcmahon escapes this by being, on some level, in on the ruse. Having grown up in the industry and found success in business he is widely respected by performers and since his promotion is not only HUGE but also lasted the longest it's viewed as a "real promotion" not like those stooges over at Wrestlicious or the deep pocket dummies in WCW. I once watched a local guy spend $20,000 on 1 show he put on. I can't tell you where this money went or how it could have been recouped, just that it got spent. In the Entertainment (as a whole) industry, putting up money for a production makes you a "producer" and everyone that you hire to work on your production knows that you're all working together to make...like a thing. The crew (usually) isn't openly trying to fleece you for every cent while mocking your attempt to make a movie or a play or a whatever. Also you can make a movie or a show that's not a weak imitation of a larger budget film. But not Wrestling. And this is the Issue at heart. Vince Mcmahon is an ancient, racist, creep so obsessed with men's physiques that he wants to surround himself with roided out muscle freaks wearing almost nothing. But he's the only game in town. Well, either Vince, or knock-off Vince with less money. Or more money, but you're going to fleece it off them. Wrestling is tied to old traditions, and is dying (slowly) right along with Cable. And this trend will continue until someone can find a way to sell wrestling back to general audiences without saying "we're trying to con you but just have fun and go along with it " But I don't know if anyone is ready for that.
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Feb 13, 2022 05:13
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tony khan is technically a money mark but he made the hottest wrestling promotion in the world in 2022 so sometimes it works out you mighta mentioned him in your gigantic posts I dunno
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Feb 13, 2022 06:11
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Trollologist posted:And this is the Issue at heart. Vince Mcmahon is an ancient, racist, creep so obsessed with men's physiques that he wants to surround himself with roided out muscle freaks wearing almost nothing. But he's the only game in town. Well, either Vince, or knock-off Vince with less money. Or more money, but you're going to fleece it off them. Not exactly the only game in town unless you are wholly dismissing notable non-obsessed with muscled father-figure men enthusiast and bachelor heading into his forties Tony Khan.  Just a perfectly normal boss lovingly clinging to his contract hire employee he lavished with so much money that he managed to pull him away from retirement and a job owning an absurd amount of commercial real estate. The true story of AEW behind the scenes will be one of the greatest ever told. The inevitable ending is going to be so ugly once Tony's natural richkid resentment overtakes the high he gets off hugging Sting.
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Feb 13, 2022 06:16
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33Wp-8QLES0
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Feb 13, 2022 06:17
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Ad by Khad posted:tony khan is technically a money mark but he made the hottest wrestling promotion in the world in 2022 so sometimes it works out AEW is after my time. I hope it goes well, I really do. But I don't see the sell to anyone other than existing wrestling fans. I hope I'm wrong and they loving blow up though.
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Feb 13, 2022 06:19
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I'll just point out that a big reason Hogan got a major push from Vince is cause when other wrestlers were making noise about starting a union, Hogan went and dobbed them in. They all got fired, Hogan got made to be the main man. gently caress them both. I AM STILL UPSET ABOUT DAMIEN SANDOW. I stopped watching WWE the second he lost his MITB cash-in. gently caress that. Dude ruled.
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Feb 13, 2022 07:24
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In this post, I proceed to ignore pro wrestling and talk about something else entirely. But there's a purpose! Pro wrestling is, at its heart, no matter what you do with it, very basic. Two people (usually men) don’t like each other, people pay to watch them (pretend) fight. That’s hardly unique to it, hell, it’s the basis of all sports. Plenty of real sports have their rivalries;, the Pistons vs the Bulls (Side Note: The makers of NBA Jam, a popular arcade/other platforms basketball game in the mid 90's, were all giant Pistons fans, and actually put in programming so that if the Bulls faced the Pistons and the Pistons were being controlled by the CPU, after halfway through the match the AI would go right into maximum overdrive cheat like a mofo mode to do its damndest that the Bulls playing player lost), the Canadians vs the Maple Leafs, the Yankees vs the Red Sox, Arnold Palmer vs Jack Nicholaus, and I could surely look up a lot more. And they’re ‘real’. What does pro wrestling have that they don’t? Well, for one, there’s no way to cheat in wrestling. It kind of sours a sport’s big accomplishments when the doers of said accomplishments have stuff like getting all their bike race wins taken away for blood doping, or breaking the home run record and then basically disappearing because by then it was an open secret he did it by roiding himself to the gills, doesn't it? But the main thing is that just because real sports has rivalries, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get a quality product out of it. That’s the downside of it being real; reality just is, there’s no surefire pattern, and you have no control over whether you’ll get a good competition, a bad one, an average one, a great one, or something like the Red Sox coming back from a 3 game deficit to beat the Yankees before finally winning their first World Series in decades in 2004. Or something utterly terrible, though I don’t know the sport equivalent of that. Maybe that World Cup game where Brazil lost 7-1? However, the strongest example of the ‘strength’ pro wrestling has, in my personal experience, comes from pro wrestling’s brother from another mother, mixed martial arts. Now, my MMA knowledge is fairly limited, and I’m sure there’s people who could come in and tell me I got all the details wrong, but going solely off my memory and some wiki-ing, and assuming there are people here who know even less… UFC, as most people would probably think was the ‘start’ of modern MMA, was a very different beast from what it would become, even within five years, let alone now: if modern MMA is a FN MAG 58 machine gun, that very first show is someone who tried to attach a slingshot to a crossbow and managed to not wreck both, but that was about it. Presented as an eight man elimination tournament between singular fighting styles, with very different rules that encouraged bloodshed, and details were so vague that Ken Shamrock didn’t realize it was going to be a legit fight until he’d arrived, the event had begun, and he’d seen the first matchup. That, and it was basically a platform so that the Gracie family could show off the ‘superiority’ of their particular style of ju-jitsu; it had, according to Wikipedia, developed out of a more local ‘open challenge’ system from California. Despite being promoted as a clash of styles, several things immediately became apparent in this no weight limits, no holds barred (save biting, groin kicks, or eye gouges) start of UFC/MMA. One was that grappling in this style of combat was far superior to striking, and that size didn’t matter if you couldn’t properly use whatever you were trained in, as the very first match had a sumo wrestler who weighed twice as much as his opponent get flattened by a kick to the face within 30 seconds. The Gracie entrant of the tournament, Royce, ended up fulfilling ‘his part’ and won the tournament, beating Ken Shamrock in the second round. Why do I bring this up when it happened in the second round, not the final round? Well, in the next event, the second UFC, Royce Gracie would again win the whole tournament, while Shamrock did not compete. The first time I ever heard of UFC? Was seeing a PPV ad of Shamrock cutting a pro wrestling style promo about how he lost to Royce in tournament 1 and watched him win tournament 2, but he was entering again in the upcoming UFC 3, and he was going to DESTROY him. Followed by Royce Gracie introducing himself and saying “Some people never learn.” UFC was going to learn that if you insist on ‘reality’ for your ‘pro wrestling grudge matches’, reality would have other ideas. Royce and Shamrock would be in the UFC 3 tournament, but things would end up a giant mess; Royce would win his first round, then withdraw due to ‘fatigue’, and Shamrock would win his first and second matches, making the finals…only to have to withdraw because he’d injured himself. The final of UFC 3 ended up being the guy who got a bye because Royce withdrew, and a guy who replaced Ken Shamrock for the final round, an alternate who hadn’t fought at all that night, and hence, being fresher, won swiftly. The grudge match refused to happen, but Royce continued to show off his skills by winning UFC 4, though he had a harder time of it (and ironically, the guy who won UFC 3 because Shamrock got injured entered as well, won his first match…and then HIMSELF had to withdraw due to injury). So UFC went “Screw it” and arranged their first personal one on one match for UFC 5 alongside the tournament that was their ‘tradition’: Shamrock vs Gracie, a harbinger of the format that would eventually replace the tournament and become MMA’s staple. Except…as said, this was a very different creature than what UFC would become. There were no rounds, no judges, and for the first time, a time limit of 30 minutes. You’ll pay for your whole seat but you’ll only need the edge, and so on. And so the match occurred. My memory is fuzzy, but I remember the gist of it. The fight barely started before Ken Shamrock got Royce Gracie pinned to the ground…and that’s where they stayed. For the whole fight. There were no ref stops in those days, no ‘okay the fighters have been on the ground too long, break them up and stand them up again’. Shamrock had Royce down, and the two ended up in a defensive deadlock, neither one wanting to risk even the slightest opening. What had been promised to be a grudge superfight ended up being, in essence, a softcore exhibition on seeming homoeroticism. The only offensive move I can remember is Royce trying to kick Shamrock’s side with his ankle. The whole 30 minutes went by, with Shamrock pinning Royce down, until the time limit expired. Annoyed, the fight runners declared a five minute overtime period. Within seconds of it started, we were right back to Shamrock on top of Gracie. The five minutes passed, and the fight runners were forced to declare it a draw. People used to poo poo on Mike Tyson’s super short boxing matches not being ‘worth the PPV money’, but I’ll take a vicious knockout in 35 seconds instead of two men laying around doing nothing except staring at each other and trying to get the other person to blink first, with neither doing so, for 35 minutes. As far as I know, Shamrock and Gracie never did have a proper grudge match, and it ended up as one of the what ifs of the sport. That’s the thing with reality. You’re tossing a dice on whether you’ll be entertained or get something entertaining (as that can be very eye of the beholder. I'm sure plenty of people would give very strong opinions for both sides of say, Superbowl LI between the Patriots and the Falcons, and just how 'entertaining' the events of that game were). With wrestling? Oh sure, you’re tossing a similar die…but at least if it comes up snake eyes, you can blame someone for it, rather than a whole bunch of nebulous factors causing something to come out the total drizzling shits. Of course, pro wrestling has its own issue that the people who are allowed to arrange the results. The usual bad one is that the people who can do it are working counterproductively to what the fans want to see. Like Hulk Hogan. And the Clique. And that’s yet ANOTHER story. My god, there are so many moving parts to why a wrestling company I haven’t even talked about failed, isn’t there? Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 05:57 on May 24, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2022 09:12
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