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frankenfreak posted:All I know about Scott Steiner in TNA: there used to be a video on youtube called "scott steiner is the greatest wrestler of all time" and it is gone and it was wonderful
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Feb 25, 2022 14:59
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16-bit Butt-Head posted:steroids and head trauma OP MAYBE IT'S RIGHT, MAYBE IT AIN'T, BUT IT'S WHAT I DO I can't remember who it was with or what it was called, therefore I'm sitting here on youtube feeling like an idiot because I can't find it, but he did a backstage fight promo with TNA where he threw a bunch of napkins in the air as a smokescreen and then got his rear end kicked super hard, that one is pretty lol
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Feb 25, 2022 15:23
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My favorite post-nWo Scott Steiner bit was when WWE wanted him to take a drug test, which he most assuredly would have failed because his piss was pure steroid juice at that point. And he replied with "sure, I'll take it as long as Triple H stands right next to me and takes one at the same time", because HHH was obviously just as much on the gas as he was. IIRC, the subject was quietly dropped and then they released him shortly afterwards.
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Feb 25, 2022 15:42
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WoodrowSkillson posted:there used to be a video on youtube called "scott steiner is the greatest wrestler of all time" and it is gone and it was wonderful
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Feb 25, 2022 15:47
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frankenfreak posted:Huh? HUH
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Feb 25, 2022 15:51
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YOU GONNA SUCK MY DICK OR WHAT?
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Feb 25, 2022 16:38
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Every week, WCW would hire some new girl to do backstage interviews and Scott Steiner would legitimately tell them that he had too many girls keeping him busy already, and they wouldn't get a chance to sleep with him and the girl would look really disgusted and then quit so they would have to hire a new girl the next week. Also, I randomly remembered the Scott Hall mini-doc that ESPN did some years ago and if you are a fan of backstage stuff then this is a must watch. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xs3w2g
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Feb 25, 2022 17:15
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WoodrowSkillson posted:there used to be a video on youtube called "scott steiner is the greatest wrestler of all time" and it is gone and it was wonderful This isn't it but it still owns a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YVNP1G0KSA
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Feb 25, 2022 17:28
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In regards to stuff that also involved steroid abusers, present and to come... When last we left off the Triple H story, the legendary stable D-Generation X had just been formed. But, before we continue, a brief aside. This is Ron Simmons.  (No, he is not the steroid abuser. Or at least, not to the degree of the actual abusers in this thread) Simmons was an all-star athlete for Florida State University football and, at the time period this writing is focused on, was one of only two athletes to have their numbers (50, in Simmons’ case) retired by the school, the other being Deon Sanders (or maybe he was the third…in any case he was in the first three; there’s eight now). Simmons tried following Sanders into professional football, but for whatever reason, it didn’t work out, so he switched to pro wrestling. Not the first and certainly not the last to have done that. Ron was generally good, in ring and on the mike, and at one point in WCW was over enough that WCW put their world title on him; depending on how you classify ‘world titles’, some rundowns say this makes him the very first black wrestling world champion ever. His reign was fairly short though, and by 1996, Simmons had decided to head to the ‘greener pastures’ of the WWF. To really grasp what’s you’re about to see (if you don’t know), this was not only a big tough black man in performance, he was also renowned backstage as not only legitimately tough, but one of the toughest men there was, alongside the likes of Meng and Fit Finley. If you hosed with him, he would gently caress back 50x as hard: there’s a story where in-story and in real life rival Anthony Norris, who performed under the name of Ahmed Johnson, injured Summons due to being a sloppy, unsafe worker, putting Simmons on the shelf for months. Not only that, but Norris apparently didn’t apologize and was horrible to work with in every aspect. This was unfortunate, because there was a period during 1995 and 1996 when Norris was legitimately over with the fans and could have been pushed all the way to world champion. When Simmons returned, he legitimately kicked Norris’ rear end in a Madison Square Garden house show, breaking several ribs and so thoroughly destroying his image before the fans and backstage that not only was Simmons not punished, but Norris would be gone from the company within six months, never to come close to any degree of wrestling stardom again. Simmons, in essence, killed Norris’ career. Now, would he have done that if Norris had legitimately apologized? The general vibe I get is no, he would not have, but Norris not only did not, he was so far up his own rear end that it never occurred to him. Idiot. Oh, and speaking of idiocy, so what do they do with this big tough black man?  Why, put him in a powder blue outfit with a foam eggshell helmet and pretend like he was some kind of modern gladiator. Oh, and he claimed to have converted to Islam, so his name was now Faarooq Asad. It went about as well as you’d expect: even being given the popular Tammy “Sunny” Lynn Synch as a manager didn’t help. Fortunately, a few months after this this gimmick was erased completely and Simmons, now just going by Faarooq, debuted a new gimmick where he was basically the leader of a ‘black power’ group themed after the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, the second of which would provide his group’s name, the Nation of Domination.  Though, unlike the Nation of Islam, the NOD was at first somewhat mixed race; in fact, for the first few months of its existence, it’s only two wrestlers were the black Simmons and the white Brian “Crush” Adams, at the time in the 4th (and last) version of his WWF Crush gimmick, and brought in by his storyline manager Clarence Mason (who was black, which is probably how Crush got in). The rest of the group would be a rotating cast of nameless (though usually black) minions and followers, though one would end up being future Attitude mid card star D’lo Brown. As well as that, the Nation, once formed, would often be led to the ring by (white) wrestling tag team slash rappers PG-13, who would rap along to Simmons’ theme song to hype him up ("We are the Nation coming live and in color! Don't diss the man or we'll bum rush your mother!" Or maybe sometimes it was "And we won't diss your mother!", I swear they sang that as well). When the group finally got a third member, it would be the Puerto Rican Juan Rivera, who wrestled under the name “Savio Vega” and turned heel to join the Nation. So, pretty mixed all around.  (Not pictured: Savio, this was before he joined) The Nation kicked around for the first half of 1997, their biggest showing being a Street Fight with Simmons, Crush, and Savio vs the Legion of Doom and Ahmed Johnson at Wrestlemania 13. A few months later, Simmons would be picked to be the ‘monthly challenger’ for then WWF Champion the Undertaker, but by now, Crush and Savio were having severe disagreements in storyline, and Simmons/Faarooq would end up having the match cost from him when he was distracted by the pair fighting outside the ring during his June PPV title shot. Furious all around, Simmons would fire Crush and Savio from the Nation (and Clarence, keeping only D’Lo, who was by now more or less the only official Nation member left, with PG-13 having left the group before said June PPV) and declare he was going to rebuild it as bigger, better, badder, and blacker. He’d keep his word, first by bringing back Charles Wright, who had wrestled under the names and gimmicks of “Papa Shango” (a voodoo priest) and “Kama, The Supreme Fighting Machine”, whose gimmick in retrospect was almost a prototype for what the concept of an average MMA fighter would become, and now returned as “Kama Mustafa”, his supposed full name, with his gimmick now being ‘big angry black man who is a fighter and fights for blackness’. The forth member would be a heel turned Ahmed Johnson, though Norris would swiftly get injured and be removed from the group, and considering the trouble between him and Simmons, probably best. To replace him, a new young dark skinned wrestler also heel turned, tired of the fans booing him and chanting mean things, a guy called Rocky Maivia. Who, after a few months of being a heel with the Nation, declared that his name was now “The Rock”. But that’s another story. THIS other story relates to what happened with Crush and Savio. And what happened was the classic “Fine, I’ll start my own, with blackjack and hookers!” Crush would return as the head of a group of bikers who called themselves the Disciples of Apocalypse, and Savio would return leading three new Puerto Rican wrestlers under the group name of Los Boricuas. Thus would kick off a background storyline over the latter half of 1997: the GANG WARZ, as the Nation, DOA, and L-B would fight on and on in numerous TV show and PPV matches for…well, nothing, really. Pride and bragging rights; there were never any title shots or the like in the mix that could be won. On one hand, this showed one of Vince Russo’s strengths, in trying to give everyone something to do, but it also showed the terrible weakness of such immature and not-right-for-such-a-job writers to do a storyline based around black supremacists, bikers (with what that implies), and Puerto Rican supremacists all fighting to see who was top dog. As far as I know, the GANG WARZ storyline basically petered out with no ending: the Disciples would shrink, first losing Crush and then the other member known as Chainz, leaving just the Harris Twins, who blighted wrestling for too long under a bunch of gimmicks and are known, proud Nazis so gently caress them (see what I mean about what that implies?). Los Boricuas and Savio basically slowly disappeared off TV, with the only real notable thing one of them did was competing against, and getting injured right at the start of, a debuting Adam "Edge" Copeland's first televised WWF match and hence making it a dud, and only the Nation persisted as a faction, though it itself would go through drastic change. But that is, again, another story. Because one aspect of this ‘faction warfare’ was that the top heels of the WWE at the time were another faction, the Hart Foundation. And by virtue of being another group with a ‘supremacy’ theme (Canada rulez, USA droolz), they would sometimes get into a scuffle or two with the other members of the GANG WARZ. — And then, in October, along came D-Generation X. A lot of things have odd starts, and DX is no exception. The group initially consisted of Shawn Michaels, Hunter, Chyna, and for some reason, wrestler Rick Rude , who by then had retired from wrestling due to back injuries. He was supposedly their ‘insurance policy’, but the man, dressed in a suit with a briefcase, looked very out of place among the other three: even Chyna would get into the DX nonsense while Rude would just stand there, holding his briefcase. Fittingly, Rude would leave the company at the time of the Montreal Screwjob, and while for a while Chyna was erased from the group’s history due to the whole ‘getting involved in hardcore pornography’ thing, she did eventually get acknowledged as part of the group’s start again, whereas Rude was/is more or less forgotten completely and never mentioned. The other thing was that while eventually DX would be wholly defined by frat boy nonsense, sex jokes, and general immature pranks, the group did actually have a VERY nasty edge at the start of their existence. The kind of edge that an organization like the WWF was not set up to explore in any proper way, yet of course, they did it anyway. So between stuff like Shawn mooning the camera while Chyna covered his butt with a sign, or Shawn and Hunter confronting on-screen commissioner Robert “Sgt. Slaughter” Remus by first wearing helmets with facial screens, and then putting mini wipers on them to mock his supposed excess spitting, there were bits where DX tried to spark a fight between the Nation of Domination and the Hart Foundation by breaking into the Nation’s locker room and defacing it.  Yeah. American History X, the WWE is not and should not try to be. And hell, even American History X wasn’t exactly American History X, if the stories of star Edward Norton fiddling with the film in the editing room are true. Anyway, this note aside, Shawn was very much the main focus and star of DX when it formed: Hunter and Chyna were his aides who helped him and did stuff in secondary storylines. While Shawn was having world title matches and generally being in the main event, Hunter would be feuding with Slaughter, and then Owen Hart as he took the name of “The Black Hart” and tried to avenge the fallen Hart Foundation post Montreal. If Hunter had any involvement or knowledge of the Montreal Screwjob, it’s so small to be essentially meaningless; while Shawn denied knowledge at first, and even faked outrage backstage after the match according to Mick Foley’s first book, yelling that there was no way he was going to accept McMahon’s belt under the circumstances he’d ‘won’ it in, he would eventually reveal years later to have been in on the whole thing. In the documentary Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows, there is a bit backstage of Bret Hart’s then wife confronting Hunter if he knew anything; Hunter denied it. Maybe he was being honest, maybe not, it’s just noted for completion’s sake. Hunter continued being the side character as 1998 began, but his chance would be coming. At the Royal Rumble, the January 1998 PPV, Shawn would face the Undertaker in a Casket Match, a match where you had to push your opponent into a casket outside the ring and shut the lid to win. During the match, Shawn would be tossed out of the ring and hit the edge of the casket at the base of his spine the wrong way, though while high on adrenaline and match hype he wouldn’t realize just how bad the injury was until he woke up the next morning unable to move. Shawn would spend the next two months solely being a talker while taking large amounts of painkillers to be able to move, and then in one final effort, would drop the title to Steve Austin at Wrestlemania 14, before seemingly having to retire from the business from the spinal injury he’d suffered, as seeming karma for being one of the biggest POS in the history of the business. If you want to know the kind of man Shawn was (is?), despite being near crippled he supposedly was going around before the match saying he WOULDN’T drop the title to Austin, because he didn’t do jobs, never mind that he was barely able to walk and Austin was the hottest thing in the business. And despite that, he indicated he would do something screwy in the actual match, and enough people took it seriously that according to more than a few, The Undertaker sat at the ring entrance with his fists taped when the match started, basically waiting to see if Shawn did his job, and if he hosed Austin over, to beat the living poo poo out of Shawn when he came backstage, quite possibly putting him in a wheelchair for life considering the bad state of Shawn’s spine. But whether he changed his mind or he never meant it, Shawn did the job and dropped the title, and once the pin was counted Undertaker stood up and went to shower. With Shawn seemingly first out for months with the back injury, and then later seemingly retired for good, Hunter would seize his chance, taking over as the leader of DX. Which wasn’t hard, as at this point the group now consisted of 1) Him, 2) Chyna. But Hunter knew that, and introduced the returning Sean Waltman as the newest member, X-Pac. Shortly thereafter, rising heel tag team The New Age Outlaws would also reveal they had joined the pair, and DX was reborn as a hellraising foursome that would swiftly end up faces due to their sheer entertainment. At the time, it seemed like Hunter might eventually ride this to being a top star. And he did. Unfortunately, no one could have guessed the finer points of it, nor what would happen afterwards. ---- One last little thing from the tail end of 1997. Shawn, at the time the newly created European Champion, and having also won the WWF title in Montreal recently, is confronted by "Commissioner Slaughter" over not defending his European Title, and since he's being such a pain in Slaughter's butt, Slaughter decides to punish him by having him face his friend and DX ally Hunter for the title. It does not go according to plan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVPe5VPLCac And then WCW a year and change later goes "That was a great idea! Let's do that with our main title except play it completely seriously!" and I already talked about how THAT went. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Feb 25, 2022 |
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Feb 25, 2022 18:57
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Needs nationofdominationKid.gif for historical context.
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Feb 25, 2022 19:28
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Cornwind Evil posted:To really grasp what’s you’re about to see (if you don’t know), this was not only a big tough black man in performance, he was also renowned backstage as not only legitimately tough, but one of the toughest men there was, alongside the likes of Meng and Fit Finley. If you hosed with him, he would gently caress back 50x as hard: there’s a story where in-story and in real life rival Anthony Norris, who performed under the name of Ahmed Johnson, injured Summons due to being a sloppy, unsafe worker, putting Simmons on the shelf for months. Not only that, but Norris apparently didn’t apologize and was horrible to work with in every aspect. This was unfortunate, because there was a period during 1995 and 1996 when Norris was legitimately over with the fans and could have been pushed all the way to world champion. When Simmons returned, he legitimately kicked Norris’ rear end in a Madison Square Garden house show, breaking several ribs and so thoroughly destroying his image before the fans and backstage that not only was Simmons not punished, but Norris would be gone from the company within six months, never to come close to any degree of wrestling stardom again. Simmons, in essence, killed Norris’ career. Now, would he have done that if Norris had legitimately apologized? The general vibe I get is no, he would not have, but Norris not only did not, he was so far up his own rear end that it never occurred to him. Idiot. Ah, Ahmed Johnson. That's a guy who I'd love to write an effortpost on, but too much of it would be "and then he got injured and it sidelined him."
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Feb 25, 2022 20:59
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Gavok posted:Ah, Ahmed Johnson. That's a guy who I'd love to write an effortpost on, but too much of it would be "and then he got injured and it sidelined him." I mean, do that. Just keep count for humors sake or make jokes about how his arm exploded or whatever
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Feb 25, 2022 21:08
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Gavok posted:Ah, Ahmed Johnson. That's a guy who I'd love to write an effortpost on, but too much of it would be "and then he got injured and it sidelined him." Are you kidding? That would be loving hilarious. Format it like an epic poem and make that line the refrain.
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Feb 25, 2022 21:12
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Fair enough. I'll get on that later. In the meantime, here's one of the great videos of early YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bGErn95VGQ
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Feb 25, 2022 21:21
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Gavok posted:Fair enough. I'll get on that later. This was always a classic for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFoC3TR5rzI God drat, TNA had the best promos. It doesn't make me want to watch sacrifice. But it does make want to pay $40 to see Scott Steiner give a math lecture and see how long he can go like this. Trollologist fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Feb 25, 2022 |
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Feb 25, 2022 21:50
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One of my favorite Steiner promos is from this brief time he and Bully Ray (Bubba Ray Dudley) were a tag team. They were thinking of getting Abyss off their back by getting him laid. Steiner: "Listen, I got freaks nine days out of a week. I can--" Bully: "There's only seven days in a week." Steiner: ".....LISTENYOU'RENOTBIGPOPPABUMPI'MABIGBOOTYDADDYI'MUNSTOPPABLE!" Bully: "ENGLISH!!"
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Feb 25, 2022 22:57
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Gavok posted:Ah, Ahmed Johnson. That's a guy who I'd love to write an effortpost on, but too much of it would be "and then he got injured and it sidelined him." Gavok will cover "Ahmed Johnson", but I have some personal knowledge about Tony Norris he might not have, which I'll talk about here. The Attitude Era came about in mini steps over a few years; one WWF Magazine article argued it started all the way back at the main event of Wrestlemania 10. In any case, the mid 90's were still chasing the family friendly market that the 80's boom was built on, and the official WWF Magazine became more and more kiddy as a result. To counter that, the WWE started putting out another magazine, WWF Raw, which was aimed to cater to the older crowd and had stories about bloody matches, spreads with the women in bikinis, and generally talking about more 'real' things like Vince giving an interview over Kevin Nash's departure. And one of the things in those first issues was a two part interview with Norris, albeit under his kayfabe name, which supposedly was talking about his real life experiences. Now, I have absolutely no idea how true his stories were. Just because they were 'real' didn't mean they were being honest. The next interviewed person was Marc Mero, whose account on how he met his then-wife Rena slash Sable is said to be bullshit purposely concocted by the pair. Why? Well, according to the ones supposedly telling 'the truth' (and again, who knows where the honesty lies here), the real story is Mero met Rena when she was a stripper and he decided to take her on 'the road' with him so he'd have 'a piece' at easy access and not have to chance things with 'rats' (ring rats, women who hang around wrestling events to try and score with the male wrestlers), as well as potentially having her to 'trade' for things. Then she got pregnant, so Mero did the 'honorable' thing and married her. So yeah, super sleazy and scummy, no idea how true it is. Same with Norris, but if we're being very not-polite, you could say it's mostly true because Norris was too 'thuggishly stupid' to make stuff up for sympathy. Believe me, even if half of what he said wasn't true, it was so beyond appalling that you wish he'd have been making it all up, as Norris told stories of a horrifically abusive father who, among other things, poured boiling water on Norris' torso when Norris got into 'his' food to feed his hungry siblings (hot dogs, his dad caught them and used the water being used to cook them), whipped him with an extension cord until blood was splattered all over the walls, and at one point beat him so bad that when Norris woke up all he remembers is being in a 'sea of blood' as he'd been dumped in a bathtub as a substitute for medical care. It was so bad that at the end of the interview Norris explicitly talked about how twice, as an adult, he'd gone back to kill his father in his sleep, only for circumstances to stop him. When you're outright confessing to intended first degree murder, well... If there's truth in those stories, sadly I see what it did to Norris. He learned the wrong lessons: don't be the abused, be the abuser. Be selfish. Be a bastard (another 'who knows if it's remotely true' story about Norris is that he bragged about being a pimp in his youth and that he'd had his 'girls' 'so pimped' that he could 'use their tongues as toilet paper.' Again, no proof, but ugh all the same). Make it all about you. And be strong. No matter what. Unfortunately for Norris, he decided that that strength meant abusing steroids. Between that and other things, well, Gavok will cover it. Including what happened when his cycle of abuse trauma crashed into an actual legitimately strong man. To paraphrase a Law and Order episode, as a child, my heart weeps for him. As an adult? He made his bed. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Feb 26, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 03:25
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dang, the effort posts in this thread  
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Feb 26, 2022 12:14
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I feel like the trajectory of every WWE mid carder always goes like this: Goofy loser -> serious heel turn -> just formidable enough to feed to main eventers while occasionally touching mid card gold to stay relevant.
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Feb 26, 2022 18:56
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all wwe careers end with being fed to brock lesnar and then later being released from the company to pursue future endeavors UNLESS you are Mustafa Ali who Vince is holding hostage for daring to ask for his release on twitter first lol
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Feb 26, 2022 19:37
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Despite that lead-in by Cornwind Evil, I don’t know too many stories about Ahmed Johnson being a total rear end in a top hat. Then again, I cannot for the life of me remember anyone in wrestling ever having anything nice to say about the man. He remains a near-forgotten footnote who almost became one of the biggest names in the business. The era roughly in-between Bret Hart winning the WWF Championship for the first time in 1992 and Bret being screwed out of the WWF Championship in 1997 is the New Generation. It was a disastrous time for WWF and nearly ended the company, only to fix itself when it transitioned into the Attitude Era. There are certain people from the New Generation who were being pushed as potential future stars, only to be an overlooked shell of themselves by the Attitude Era. Guys like Vader, Marc Mero, Henry O. Godwinn, Savio Vega, and Ahmed Johnson. Ahmed first showed up in late 1995 with one of the all-time coolest debuts. If you’ve been following the retro Raw posts, you would have seen the whole Lex Luger/Yokozuna bodyslam incident. Yokozuna made a big challenge for somebody to bodyslam him and American hero Luger came and did it. Sort of. Yokozuna more ran and jumped into Luger’s arms as Luger awkwardly held him for a second, then dropped him. It took muscle, but calling it a bodyslam was a real stretch. With Survivor Series coming up, WWF tossed in a unique “Wild Card” match. It was your usual 4-on-4 Survivor Series elimination match, but with all the names mixed up. Faces and heels would take on faces and heels. Ahmed was set to make his in-ring debut there. He had shown up in a few hype segments that were just him sitting down and calmly talking about himself, but the first time he was in the ring was during a big brawl between people involved in the upcoming Wild Card match. As Yokozuna was standing tall, Ahmed appeared in the ring behind him. Yokozuna turned around and Ahmed BODYSLAMMED the poo poo out of him. Unlike Luger’s attempt, this one looked absolutely impressive. Ahmed’s team ended up winning with Ahmed and Michaels celebrating in the ring together. Vince tried putting the two together when possible for the sake of getting fans to accept Ahmed as a big deal. Not that they needed much help. The dude was huge, had a great look, was crazy agile for a guy his size while doing high-flying moves that you really didn’t see in mid-90s WWF. He had the Ultimate Warrior problem where he had awesome charisma, even though you couldn’t understand what he was saying a lot of the time. With Warrior it was because of his content. With Ahmed it was because his promos sounded like the Incredible Hulk transformed because Banner accidentally bit his tongue really hard. When he wasn’t teaming up with other major faces, Ahmed was gaining steam in the midcard and it seemed like it was only a matter of time before he hit the main event. He was put in a King of the Ring qualifying match against Vader, which came off as one of those “irresistible force vs. immovable object” matches where neither guy should lose. Owen Hart interfered on Vader’s behalf and knocked Ahmed out with an arm cast to the skull. This led to an early Attitude Era-type moment where Ahmed was wheeled out backstage and Goldust ran to his “rescue” and gave him mouth-to-mouth. Ahmed woke up from the sexual assault and went into a gay panic rage, just angrily beating the poo poo out of Goldust backstage. This led to a PPV match that Ahmed won and became the first black Intercontinental Champion. In the weeks leading up to SummerSlam, Ahmed was attacked by a debuting Faarooq. I don’t know the details of exactly what was being planned, but huge things were being set up for Ahmed. He had won a battle royal to become #1 contender for the WWF Championship and was supposed to defend the Intercontinental Championship against Faarooq at SummerSlam. Unfortunately, Ahmed’s kidneys basically exploded and forced him to vacate both his title and his #1 contender spot. Presumably, he was going to drop it to Faarooq at the PPV, Vader was going to beat Michaels for the WWF title, and we’d get Ahmed vs. Vader as a main event title program. Instead, they changed it to, “Faarooq attacked Ahmed and beat him so badly, Ahmed’s kidneys got destroyed. Ahmed entered and won that battle royal against doctor’s orders.” While Ahmed was recovering, Faarooq changed his gimmick to the more successful Nation of Domination one and so started a never-ending feud. Granted, the feud was fine at first. Ahmed and Faarooq were treated as relative equals, but Faarooq had henchmen in Crush and Savio Vega, along with an entourage of nameless goons who would get in the way (including D’Lo Brown). Ahmed would face them alone until teaming up with the Legion of Doom, who helped him get his big high-profile WrestleMania win over the Nation. This is also the same match where Ahmed injured the hell out of Faarooq. Ahmed was NOT a safe worker by any means and lots of people hated having to work with him because of how reckless he was. Somehow, this feud just kept going. Ahmed was put in a gauntlet match against Savio, Crush, and Faarooq, where he lost to Faarooq in the end. Sometime after, Faarooq was fed up with Savio and Crush and kicked them out of the Nation. He said that he would introduce two new members. On Raw, the main event was Ahmed and Undertaker (champ at the time) vs. Faarooq and a mystery partner. Said mystery partner turned out to be Kama, AKA the Godfather, AKA Papa Shango. As he and the Nation beat down the Undertaker, Ahmed ran in to chase them away...then hit his finisher on the Undertaker. Raw ended with Ahmed posing with the Nation after feuding with them for nearly a year. But hey, you know what? That’s fine. It puts Ahmed in a position to challenge the Undertaker for the title on PPV. That was absolutely the plan. So what happened? The very next week, in the segment where Ahmed was badly explaining his heel turn (something about not respecting the Undertaker due to how Paul Bearer treated him as a slave), the Disciples of the Apocalypse showed up and a big brawl commenced. During said brawl, Ahmed blew out his knee. loving WHOOPS! Months later, Ahmed came back to Raw, had a match against one of the DOA guys, won, and the Nation just beat him down. I don’t know if they ever explained why. So in review, Ahmed feuded with a faction for about a year, joined them for little reason, got injured before he could do anything, came back, won a match, and got kicked out of the faction. At least it worked out for the Nation as a week later, they would induct Rocky Maivia, who would start calling himself the Rock. Ahmed healed up from some nagging injuries, came back, and went after the Rock. As the two battled it out, Ahmed INJURED HIMSELF AGAIN by hitting his hand on a nearby table the wrong way and cutting up his hand. He continued to be active during this time, but he had his hand bandaged up to the point that he looked like he was part Q-tip. Ahmed continued feuding with the Nation, even though he didn’t really matter anymore. The story was more about the civil war brewing between Faarooq and the Rock. Ahmed’s final WWF match was being on the winning side of a ten-man tag match. The following night on Raw, he was involved in a gigantic brawl and that was it for him. At the time, WWE was trying to get behind Kurrgan, a new, super-tall heel monster. Ahmed was going to get beat down by Kurrgan and dragged up the ramp via his skull. Ahmed did not want to do that and walked out, later citing that his sister was on her deathbed and he didn’t want her to see him getting beat up like that. Either way, he was done. It was kind of nuts how close Ahmed was to reaching the top. During the Attitude Era, the intro to Raw was iconic, showing Steve Austin marching through a chaotic warehouse with explosions going off. Originally, Ahmed Johnson was the co-star of that intro, shown kicking fences while carrying a two-by-four and later brawling with Austin inside a burning wrestling ring. Then, at some point, he was dropped from it because nobody cared about Ahmed anymore. That wasn’t the end for him, though. As WCW was starting to collapse under its own weight, they brought Ahmed in in late 1999. The tag team Harlem Heat (Booker T and Stevie Ray) had broken up and Stevie brought in his new partner: Big T. “Big” was right as in the nearly two years since we had last seen him, Ahmed had gained a LOT of weight and was no longer the agile muscleman of yesteryear. Big T feuded with Booker T over the rights to Harlem Heat and the right to have the letter T in your name. His run was a fairly short one filled with extremely short matches, usually under four minutes. WCW couldn’t get him to drop weight and finally just cut him loose. At least he would go on to play Suge Knight in a TV movie about the life of MC Hammer. That's something!
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Feb 26, 2022 20:53
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Gavok. If there's a midcard title for wrestling effort posting, you are the reigning champ. Until you blow out your quads, then we're gonna stick the belt on Leatherjacket. Also, as much as I don't want to believe that there was a feud over the use of the letter T, this was end game WCW. gently caress I'll believe anything you claim they wrote.
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Feb 26, 2022 21:11
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I know this isn't really the story crafting thread so maybe I can let this slide if I muse in the form of a question: Has there even been a time where someone with NO business winning the world title, won as kind of a fluke and then the promotion used that title run to build them as a main eventer? (Excluding obvious joke wins like Vince Russo and David Arquette)
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Feb 26, 2022 21:20
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Miz in 2011 was kind of an attempt to do that, winning the title off mitb and then defending it against cena in the WM main event (which ended with Rock standing tall over both of them) but the entire series of matches was absolutely wretched and involved a lot of extremely dumb stuff like the Laptop General Manager and The Corre and Alex Riley and Heel Michael Cole at his absolute worst. The Miz vs Cena match that ended that feud, at Over The Limit rather than mania, is to this day a legendarily bad match that people refer to as "The Passion of the Cena" because Miz and Riley beat the absolute poo poo out of Cena for 20 minutes and then Cena woke up and just beat them both just like that. lol cena wins They tried to use the fluke title win to build Miz as a main eventer but it failed. Miz loving sucks edit: at the time the main event scene was so stale that Miz's fluke title win won him Wrestler of the Year in these very forums, an accolade that we sometimes bring up to highlight how loving stupid we are
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Feb 26, 2022 21:42
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I hate Miz so loving much. edit: It also bugged the poo poo out of me when Coral, who was awesome, forgave him for being a giant douche
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Feb 26, 2022 22:43
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Trollologist posted:I know this isn't really the story crafting thread so maybe I can let this slide if I muse in the form of a question: Oooh boy. This one got memory-holed so loving hard that it happened four years ago and people have already forgotten it ever happened. Those of you who got out of wrestling in the early 2010s may remember a young man by the name of Jinder Mahal. Now, Jinder was a Canadian wrestler of Sikh descent, and nephew of Gama Singh, who was a big deal once upon a time somewhere. I think he's said openly that what they wanted him to do on TV was to wear a turban and to lose a lot, and what he did was wear a turban and lose a lot. He was one of those wrestlers that seemingly had a job because he was quite tall, but not tall enough that you'd be excited to meet him. He was then eventually repacked as part of the 3 Man Band with Heath Slater and Drew McIntyre, as three dudes who played air guitar and wore eye-liner. Naturally they lost a lot. And then got released. Jinder spent a couple of years on the independent circuit (but not the good ROH independent circuit, he just showed up at the circuit of places in Canada you could go if you wanted to see Jinder Mahal), before getting hired back to WWE since they needed a tall man to lose a lot, and he got to work exciting programmes against Darren Young and Mojo Rawley on the C-show and occasionally on a pay-per-view pre-show. A pre-show which you would think would be an exciting hour of free television to encourage people to buy the pay-per-view, and not a cosmic prison in which to keep Dolph Ziggler from interacting with anyone who draws money, but the business plan is the business plan and we're sticking to it. Anyway, it's not entirely clear what happened, but presumably one day someone in WWE management was doing bumps of coke off a breakdown of the Youtube numbers, and they noticed that there were big numbers from India. And they said, "boy, we'd sure make a fuckton of money if we could find a big Indian star who wasn't the Great Khali and who could therefore do moves that involved walking or communicating clearly in any language" and (again, presumably) looked out to the ring where Jinder Mahal was currently being beaten by Mojo Rawley, the Brooklyn Brawler and a King Charles spaniel that had jumped out of the crowd, and, well.... he had an idea. And, to be fair, there are a couple of ways you could have done this and had it be fun. You could spend a year or so rebuilding Jinder Mahal as a serious threat. You could have done it so that he was a plucky babyface underdog who somehow fluked himself into a main event. But they didn't want to be fussed with all of that. What we actually got was Jinder Mahal disappearing off TV for a couple of months and presumably being given access to Vince McMahon's personal stash of dat dere Celltech, coming back looking like prime Mark Coleman (apparently WWE's piss-testing is remarkably similar to PRIDE's piss-testing), now being billed as from the Punjab (and not, you know, Calgary), and then immediately being put into a number one contender's six-way, which he wins to the complete confusion of the crowd. At no point do the commentators remark on it being surprising that the Washington Generals are now in the NBA Finals, maybe it's just your memory that's bad. The match at the pay-per-view is Randy Orton vs Jinder Mahal for the WWE Championship. gently caress you, send money. And that little boy who nobody liked, and who'd lost on television for approximately seven years straight, went on to beat Randy Orton for the title. In a wrestling match that actually happened. There then followed a six-month title reign that can't particularly be described as "memorable", other than the time he built a programme with Shinsuke Nakamura (another match that actually happened in real life) by doing the lovely Wok voice for an uncomfortable length of time, or possibly when he brought back the Punjabi Prison match, an absolutely terrible gimmick match from the Khali era, and where Khali would actually show up to help him before then never being seen again. It ended randomly on an episode of Smackdown where he would drop the belt to AJ Styles, after WWE booked themselves into a corner where otherwise they'd have to do Brock Lesnar vs Jinder Mahal as a pay-per-view main event, which is the sort of match they would show you in Brazilian prison. On the other hand, he got to have one of the coolest entrances they've ever done for anyone: https://youtu.be/mIjtQz-9nuI By this point, WWE management had figured out that what Indian viewers actually want on Youtube is blonde women falling about or doing cuckold angles (seriously, those are the metrics, I'm not just stereotyping), or possibly that there's zero actual money in having five million hits from the Indian market, or possibly just got distracted by a big dog going by, and so that was forever the end of the Jinder Mahal starmaking run. He would fall back through the card and become one of the various jobbers who would chase the 24/7 Champion (imagine the old Crash Holly gimmick if you ran that poo poo into the ground from day one) around the ring as a comedy spot. Drew McIntyre (who was always too good for a comedy gimmick) would later also come back the size of a small house and win the WWE title, which objectively makes 3MB a more successful stable than the entirety of the Nexus. And that's the story of how to fall upwards.
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Feb 26, 2022 23:19
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So, is X-Pac dead? Last time I looked him up, years ago, it was him fighting like 50 lbs fatter then when he was in DX and he tore open his rear end in a top hat when charging at a ring post who's chain protector pads had slipped off.
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Feb 26, 2022 23:31
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pentyne posted:Last time I looked him up, years ago, it was him fighting like 50 lbs fatter then when he was in DX and he tore open his rear end in a top hat when charging at a ring post who's chain protector pads had slipped off. It wasn't a fight, that was his sextape with Chyna but your description is still apropos.
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Feb 26, 2022 23:33
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pentyne posted:So, is X-Pac dead? He actually got himself back in shape, lost a ton of weight, went to rehab and got off drugs, the whole nine yards. He actually looks great now.
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Feb 26, 2022 23:37
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Ad by Khad posted:Miz in 2011 was kind of an attempt to do that, winning the title off mitb and then defending it against cena in the WM main event (which ended with Rock standing tall over both of them) but the entire series of matches was absolutely wretched and involved a lot of extremely dumb stuff like the Laptop General Manager and The Corre and Alex Riley and Heel Michael Cole at his absolute worst. fun/kinda sad fact: miz can't remember any of that match if you watch it back, there's a spot where cena clotheslines him over the barrier onto the concrete, and miz just lands right on the back of his fuckin' skull like it''s that matt hardy spot where he concusses the gently caress out of himself three moves into a match i can't find the footage of him backstage afterwards, but he clearly just has no goddamn idea where he is and just keeps asking rock and cena if he did ok
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Feb 26, 2022 23:38
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FullLeatherJacket posted:Jinder Mahal This is about as close as I think the WWE is going to get with this. I was more hoping for like, an elimination chamber but Joey Rookie gets the lucky bingo card that opens his cell last and when he comes out every one's all tired so he blasts a couple finishers and just takes the belt. Then for the next 4-8 months this guy goes from being someone that "shouldn't have that loving title" to being a guy that's earned it by just, winning against all the people that come for him and proving himself. gently caress. Isn't that how Randy Orton did it? Ad by Khad posted:The Miz gently caress you The Miz rules hard and he's one of my favorite "Cena" era Talent. He's got all that Ric Flair energy of being a complete douche and just reveling in it. I hope I live long enough to watch a crazy eyed leather skinned elderly Miz come out of semi-retirement to cut lunatic promos and do slow, laborious matches where he hits his finisher, but it's all lazy.
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Feb 26, 2022 23:53
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the miz is a good upper mid-card heel and i wish him the best
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Feb 27, 2022 00:21
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Trollologist posted:This is about as close as I think the WWE is going to get with this. I was more hoping for like, an elimination chamber but Joey Rookie gets the lucky bingo card that opens his cell last and when he comes out every one's all tired so he blasts a couple finishers and just takes the belt. Then for the next 4-8 months this guy goes from being someone that "shouldn't have that loving title" to being a guy that's earned it by just, winning against all the people that come for him and proving himself. I remember Mikey Whipwreck having a run with the ECW Television Title where he'd try to give the belt back before each match and then win by some form of elaborate fluke WWE kinda did it (and still do) with the whole guaranteed title match briefcase gimmick, but that was mostly because they could just be incredibly lazy with it and save making any effort to build up new stars - just give a guy the briefcase, get a pop from him cashing in and either he looks like a star with the belt or he gets bumped back down to the midcard and it never really counted Or if you're Baron Corbin, lose embarrassingly because you asked actual questions about the concussion protocol instead of sitting there and not making waves
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Feb 27, 2022 00:36
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Miz is fine when he's doing lower midcard poo poo with Sandow. don't blame me that his first shot at the main event was terrible. he had more terrible shots after that.
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Feb 27, 2022 00:44
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Mizz is good for telling American Dragon to gently caress off back to the bingo halls and welp there he went.
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Feb 27, 2022 01:19
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Gavok posted:Big T feuded with Booker T over the rights to Harlem Heat and the right to have the letter T in your name. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJnX9uZm9FY
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Feb 27, 2022 01:40
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Vince was personally writing roman reign's promos at one point and this led to a very embarrassed Roman Reigns having to say Suffering succotash, son! on live tv lmao
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Feb 27, 2022 01:50
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So, I got back into watching the WWE briefly in 2017-18 and Asuka seemed like a pretty big deal at the time, and she just kinda disappeared. What happened with that? I thought this exchange was hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR59TQW77TU
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Feb 27, 2022 01:55
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asuka is not a tall blonde white woman with fake breasts and so vince has no interest in making her a big star or face of the company
16-bit Butt-Head fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Feb 27, 2022 |
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Feb 27, 2022 02:00
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16-bit Butt-Head posted:asuka is not a tall blonde white woman with fake breasts and so vince has no interest in making her a big star or face of the company You're right. And I hate you for it. I'm real curious if someone could do long form post about not Roman reigns shield tenure, but his failed face push by Vince Trollologist fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Feb 27, 2022 |
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Feb 27, 2022 02:05
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