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Free Market Gravy posted:I never understood the tendency some of the more legit dirtsheets have to hint at Wellness cover-ups when it's completely unrealistic. Until half the company starts failing, the WWE suspending violators is good PR for them. If they would have covered up anyone's failure, it would have been Batista's, but no one has surgery to cover-up a drug test failure. It makes sense if you consider that most of their information probably comes from the workers who are lower on the food chain. Experience has shown us that pro wrestlers tend to be lying/paranoid/backstabbing/jealous/full of poo poo/all of the above. Guys who are mid-card or lower probably feel the most pressure with the wellness program (they probably feel like they have the most to lose if they don't have a good look or spend too much time on the shelf for injuries) and so they come up with these theories, report them to their sources at the dirt sheets, and the dirt sheets run with the stories because they come from an inside source and are kind of juicy and scandalous.
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Aug 6, 2009 19:06
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tzirean posted:From The Death of WCW, which really every wrestling fan should own: Just reading about the booking of late-period WCW makes my head hurt.
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Aug 13, 2009 23:37
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LividLiquid posted:A lot of people felt he'd lost his love of the business and was phoning it in. That was true for pretty much 95% of WCW's locker room post-1997, so I don't see why they would hold that against Sting.
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Aug 28, 2009 00:59
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Karmine posted:OK here's something I've been thinking about, and this might actually deserve its own thread, but whatever. What wrestlers who aren't in the Hall of Fame already should be, and who would you pick to induct them? Biggest in a historical sense is probably Bruno Sammartino. I have no idea who would induct him since it's so far before my time, and most of the people he feuded with are dead. I guess Zbyszko would be as good a guy as any.
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Sep 7, 2009 06:51
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Also they've done a pisspoor job of inducting tag teams. I'd say the Road Warriors, Rock and Roll Express, Midnight Express, and British Bulldogs all deserve spots at the very least. e: Cornette should induct the Midnight Express in the classic way everyone else does it, then induct the R&R Express in total heel manager mode.
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Sep 7, 2009 07:00
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Wasn't Rock a face at WM 17? If so, I guess that would count with Austin's heel turn at the end of the match.
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Sep 23, 2009 06:06
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I'm not saying Austin's heel turn was a good idea or that it even worked, just that it would count for a role-reversal from their WM 15 match.
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Sep 23, 2009 18:34
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Alan_Shore posted:I've been thinking about selling. Is it a good thing if a wrestler can sell really well? Sure, it makes them a better wrestler and gives us a better show, but does it make it more likely that the awesome seller will lose more and not go up the card? On the other hand, guys who can sell really well have a good chance of sticking around the business longer and floating to the top of the card because they can make other talent look like a million bucks.
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Nov 6, 2009 20:52
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dusty udder smoker posted:And most people who were not in Hogan's inner circle of friends (bischoff, nasty boys, duggan, etc) don't exactly care for the guy considering how many careers he's stunted and how many angles and such had been killed because "that doesn't work for the Hulkster, brother!". To be fair, I think a lot of guys who were primarily around during Hogan's heyday in the '80s think relatively highly of him, since he was making them lots of money. I think I've heard at least a few guys from that era say that the locker room generally liked Hogan a lot because they knew most of the audience was tuning in/buying tickets to see him, and so a large part of their cut of the gate was coming from Hogan. I've also heard Bobby Heenan say some really nice things about Hogan and how nice he generally was to the fans. It's once you get to guys who mostly started to peak after Hogan's drawing power declined sharply in the '90s that he becomes much less popular.
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Nov 19, 2009 16:20
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SamuraiFoochs posted:See the Bret Hart promo in Canada. God drat, the heat. That's a pretty special circumstance though...Michaels can get heel heat in Canada without much effort. I also remember the MSG crowd booing him pretty heavily at WM 20. Other than that, he's been a pretty permanent face since he came back from his back injury. It's just hard to boo a guy who is still the best overall performer in the company even after he had a near-career ending injury.
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Nov 25, 2009 21:56
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Von Linus posted:There's that story about him and Triple H at a trade Expo or something, and Goldberg (who was in WCW at the time) went up and challenged Tripe H, who just laughed at him. The version of the story I had heard was that Triple H had made some comments about Goldberg in an interview or something, and their confrontation at a convention was about that. Still probably dumb and a case of a guy taking himself too seriously, but a little more understandable than the way some people tell it like Goldberg came out and cut a promo on Triple H. Also, his opinion may not be worth much around here, but I remember Bret Hart saying it was kind of unfortunate that Goldberg ended his career because Goldberg was actually a really nice guy. It always stuck in my mind that he still had something nice to say about Goldberg since Bret seems to hold a grudge against anyone and everyone. And for what it's worth, I'm in the "Goldberg didn't need to be told how to sell" camp. Granted, his act probably would have gotten old sooner rather than later, but he was basically the Ultimate Warrior of the Attitude era. He was supposed to come out, steamroll guys in 5 minutes, and look unstoppable doing it.
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Nov 28, 2009 19:58
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BizarroAzrael posted:Why is he coming out to the Taz's/Stryker's Stupid Comment of the Week song? Kind of funny that people can reduce Beethoven's Ninth to "the song from Die Hard." That Bret/HHH clip reminds me of a questions I've had for years because I stopped watching wrestling until Austin won the title: who, if anyone, was supposed to be the face in the Hart Foundation/DX feud? I know the Harts were mega-faces in Canada, but it seems like in the U.S. both were heels, which is really weird for WWF booking.
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Dec 17, 2009 01:27
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AKA Driver posted:What year exactly did Flair's look fall off the cliff into "old man" territory? Was it the jump to HD that caused this? He looks great in 2001. With Evolution in 2004, he's looking good. Older, but not terrible. Then he just plummets quickly over the next few years, and looks like death when he came back to the Jericho build-up for Wrestlemania this year. Sure, he's been out of action since the previous Wrestlemania, but he looked pretty rugged then, too. It's not "just" 8 years...that's almost a whole decade, which means a hell of a lot. Especially when you go from 52-60. Flair spent the next 8 years of his life working pretty much a full WWE road schedule, which he really shouldn't have, and it took its toll on his body. There's not really a year you can pinpoint, but I do remember him starting to look really haggard when I came back to watching wrestling in 2003 or 2004.
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Dec 25, 2009 08:24
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LividLiquid posted:Were he to join the company now in his prime, he wouldn't last nearly as long. He just happened to join when the worst booker in history was having his only good ideas. Assuming we're talking about Russo here, Holly was in the WWF well before Russo started booking.
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Dec 27, 2009 00:58
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Minidust posted:Heck, may as well just make that a question of my own then. Did Bret lose clean to anybody else in WWF? He lost to Lawler at the first In Your House (though I think the angle was that Hart came into that match injured after a match with Hakushi earlier in the show). Off the top of my head, all the rest of his losses after winning the title involved interference or something similar. Of course he was a face up until the year he left the company, and it really wasn't all that common in the WWF at that time for main event-level faces to lose clean, so it's hard to know if it was due to the booking of the era as opposed to him refusing to job or something.
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Jan 7, 2010 11:11
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Jerusalem posted:I've never seen it, but I think Foley considers (or considered) it his favorite match of all time even though there really wasn't anything "special" about it, because he just thought that everything clicked perfectly. Now finding out that HBK pitched a fit during it cracks me up. If I recall correctly, Shawn also got into a visible argument in the ring with Earl Hebner a couple months before during his match with Vader at Summerslam. I've heard conflicting stories on the Mind Games match, either that Vince switched the ending up on them, or that he just told them to go home because the match was running long. The match itself is excellent--Shawn and Foley's styles worked really well together (no surprise I guess since Shawn is arguably the best of all time at complementing the routine of whoever he faces). It's really only hampered by the DQ ending. TL posted:Speaking of the HBK-Foley match (my favorite match of all times, for the record), there's a bit in there where it looks like Mick legit slaps Michaels in the face, leading to a very real looking roll-around-and-hit-each-other sequence. Was this planned? It's such an odd spot. I'm going by second hand information I read a few years ago (and may be misremembering) but I think that stuff was all a worked shoot Shawn and Foley decided to put on for some reason. It's very obvious at one point where Shawn is whipped into the corner and appears to be expecting a certain spot, and Foley doesn't cooperate, so Shawn looks visibly pissed off and delivers some stiff punches and kicks. Not sure why they wanted to work people like that.
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Jan 11, 2010 08:59
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Fallon posted:Was Bret ever considered a truly big draw? Bret's run as the true top dog in the company coincided with one of the worst periods in business in WWF history. The company had a lot of other problems during that time period, so the downturn in business wasn't entirely or even mostly his fault, but that's really all we have to go on because at other points in his career he wasn't the main focus of whatever company he worked for. Bret was always really over, and probably was even considered a big draw in Canada and Europe, but not so much in the U.S. Basically between Hogan's decline in popularity in the early '90s and Austin's rise in '97, no one was drawing much money for the WWF. Bret was kind of in the Shawn Michaels state of being really over, but not selling out stadiums.
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Jan 16, 2010 22:17
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Bearnt! posted:With Miz & MVP facing each other at the Rumble and then each being in the actual Rumble match itself it got me thinking what other times has this happened? Bret Hart lost the tag title match at the 1994 Rumble (where Owen turned on him), and then went on to co-win the Rumble later that night. Also, looking up that Rumble, Bam Bam Bigelow and Tatanka had a match on the card and then both were in the Rumble too.
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Feb 2, 2010 20:59
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maniacripper posted:It's to distinguish each hour in ratings. The first hour would be "raw is war" or whatever it is then the second hour would be "war zone". I think it was half ego (so they could claim to have two highly rated shows every week instead of just one) and half economics (because the second hour probably drew higher ratings, so they could charge more for the ad time).
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Feb 3, 2010 07:01
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LightsGameraAction posted:What's everyone's opinions of the split-brand PPV's when WWE still did that? I didn't watch at the time, but it seemed like a pretty dumb decision to me, like you'd lose half the ppv viewership you'd normally have and having both brands one one pay per view is like advertising for each brand to the people who watch the other. In theory it wasn't a bad idea because a) only having to do one PPV every other month meant that they could take time to build feuds and would end up repeating main events less, and b) they could put more of their mid-to-lower card on PPV. In practice it didn't really work because they still did a lot of the stuff they do today (feuds would still carry on for multiple PPVs) and one brand was always way more interesting than another, so no one wanted to see half the cards anyway.
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Feb 13, 2010 01:24
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Seemingly the only people who really know what happened are Vince and Savage (and maybe Vince's closest inner circle), and none of them are willing to talk, nor could you necessarily believe what any of them said if they did talk. The Slim Jim explanation seems like a really petty thing, which makes it seem all the more possible with the way Vince is sometimes. There's also a few secondhand stories out there that lend some credence to the Steph story, or some version of it. Then again wrestlers are generally idiots and liars, so who knows what parts of those stories, if any, are true. The real answer when this comes up is that no one knows and pretty much everything is speculation.
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Feb 19, 2010 07:21
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LightsGameraAction posted:What's the general consensus on the truthfulness of the Ultimate Warrior documentary WWE put out? Most of the actual facts discussed in the doc are accurate, though they weren't able or willing to give Warrior's side to anything so the story you get is pretty biased (as you noticed). The problem is the entire thing is full of editorializing so it's hard to separate the factual information from the speaker's, any by extension the WWE's, opinion on stuff. In particular, half the stuff Hogan says during the doc is bullshit.
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Mar 8, 2010 09:52
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dusty udder smoker posted:they posted a public invitation for him to give his side of the story on their own website. True. But once he refused to participate, they apparently weren't able to bring in anyone sympathetic to his side of the story to talk on the DVD. Of course, I'm not even sure if there are any people in the industry who are sympathetic to Warrior at this point. At any rate, in the end the WWE wasn't really interested in making a positive documentary about him.
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Mar 8, 2010 09:59
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Hogan seems to be really nice to fans and a real shithead when it comes to his personal life, which I think describes most of the guys from his era outside of absolute psychopaths like Warrior.
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Mar 16, 2010 01:55
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They started to decline in popularity while they were still ostensibly pushing the "edgier" Attitude content so there wasn't really a direct correlation. In addition to Linda running for the Senate, there's also the probability that they realized a large portion of their remaining audience was younger kids, so they toned things down to keep it acceptable enough for them to watch. Ironically I think most of that Attitude era stuff appeals more to kids and teenagers than adults. I thought it was great when I was in junior high and high school, but looking back a lot of it was boring and crude just for the sake of being crude. Not that I don't miss aspects of it sometimes now, but lazy writing is lazy writing whether or not there's a dick joke included in it.
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Mar 16, 2010 03:19
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The Vince/Savage thing is weird and the only people who seem to know the whole story are Vince, Savage, and probably Vince's inner circle, none of whom are willing to talk about it. All anyone has to go on are really unreliable rumors.cucka posted:First, At the end of the url put #t=??m??s to go to a specific time in the video (in this case, #t=1m20s).
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Mar 30, 2010 02:04
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AsInHowe posted:It's the Slim Jim thing. Vince doesn't like people going outside the WWE umbrella for endorsement deals or other appearances...and Randy's SJ deal personifies it. I don't totally buy it since Vince has been willing to work with other guys who have had outside endorsement deals.
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Mar 30, 2010 06:01
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Brickhouse Betty posted:But Savage was the first big one (at least that I remember, I was pretty young back then) and it kinda paved the way for everyone after him to get the Vinceless endorsements. It's conceivable that Vince blames Savage for not just the Slim Jim deal, but every deal every guy after him got. Basically that's all any of these theories are. I personally think if it were something as simple as the Slim Jim deal, that more guys would know about it because I think it's the kind of thing Vince would air out as a warning to others. The fact that almost anyone who is ever asked about it admits to not knowing what the real story is makes me think it was something more personal that Vince kept private. Again, all rampant speculation though and I admit it's not out of the question that Vince is petty enough to hold a Slim Jim deal against Savage for 15 years.
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Mar 30, 2010 06:20
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The Rise and Fall of ECW was extremely (no pun intended) entertaining in addition to the ones listed above. Like all WWE DVDs, it has some selective history going on, but it's less overtly biased than some of their other documentaries. In fact, it even has some really funny parts where Heyman, Bischoff, and McMahon all openly contradict each other. The documentary on Bret Hart's DVD is pretty good too, though it doesn't really go into any of the backstage politics and kinda skims over his WCW tenure.
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Apr 13, 2010 05:02
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Von Dozier posted:Sent an email to a personal friend that basically showed all his shoot and rant stuff is actual truth, and not just being batshit crazy for the sake of being batshit crazy and entertaining smarks. It's not so much just saying he wants to kill Russo, because pretty much everyone says poo poo like "Man I could kill that rear end in a top hat" on occasion. It's saying in a creepy specific way like "If I could figure out a way to murder him without going to prison, I would consider it the greatest accomplishment of my life" and "I regularly wake up from dreams in which I am in the act of murdering him" that should raise alarms in any prudent person's head. I know Cornette is a funny guy probably given to hyperbole, but if the story is true then even his own friend that he made these comments to thought they were far enough beyond the pale for Cornette that they needed to be brought to someone's attention. There's also the possibility Cornette is working everyone, so who knows.
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Apr 15, 2010 06:02
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Skinty McEdger posted:Thats a texas deathmatch. Crush/Savage at WMX was fought under those rules, all last man standing matches since then have had the standing ten count from a knockdown. The Savage/Crush match was under weirder rules where falls counted anywhere and the person who was pinned had one minute to get back to the ring.
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Apr 26, 2010 17:14
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Minidust posted:Sure he was pretty bad in the ring but I really marked out for him as a kid. Without the injuries I think he could have been at least as big as Batista. The other issue besides him being injury-prone was that he was also prone to injuring other people in the ring, so I think that would have stalled out his career eventually too.
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May 27, 2010 18:14
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Shitty_Wok posted:Every time I see him do that I think "Welp, his spine just broke/knees exploded," especially when he did it to both Big Show and Edge. It's a pretty safe move for the most part - holding the guys on his shoulders isn't much worse than doing a barbell squat, which is pretty biomechanically sound. If anything it will be the little things about it that gently caress him up in the long run, like landing on his knees or some freak muscle tear.
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May 29, 2010 00:12
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Theshby posted:Anything where you land straight down on your coccyx is going to mess you up in the long run. Even super-smart Hogan hosed himself up good that way. Well as you indirectly point out, even being a really smart worker will probably gently caress you up if you do it for long enough, Hogan being the best evidence. Yeah The Rock got out pretty injury-free, but he was an active wrestler for less than 10 years and really only was full-time for like 7 or 8 years.
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May 29, 2010 20:08
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I think Shamrock might have gotten a short run with the title if the WWE had a brand split and two weekly primetime shows back then. But he was never above being like the 6th or 7th most popular guy on the show, so there wasn't much room for him to be a real main eventer at the time when there was just one weekly show to build around. And as others said, he was terrible at promos compared to other pro wrestlers (though he was above average at talking up a match when he was a star in MMA) and was mediocre at best as a worker.
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Jun 14, 2010 01:49
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Bigass Moth posted:JBL was very boring to me as a late teen/early 20s internet smark because the WWE had Lesnar, Angle, Benoit, Guerrero, Edge, Austin(?), Rock, et al and you put the freaking title on Bradshaw? Even now it doesn't make a lot of sense as others have said - I figured Bradshaw had to have some serious dirt on Vince. Lesnar, Austin, and the Rock were all gone by the time JBL got the title, and Angle was sidelined with a neck injury after Wrestlemania XX. They were really spread thin at the top of the card at that point, especially on Smackdown.
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Nov 15, 2013 16:09
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LividLiquid posted:Nash never needs to work again. He saved his cash and owns a lot of rental properties. He just likes showing up and making easy money. He also loves the business, despite popular opinion. Yeah, Nash is a pretty smart guy and has all sorts of investments. There was a good interview with him on Grantland last year that went a little bit into his mindset. He's really preoccupied with money (to an almost unhealthy extent), so he takes easy checks when he can get them. quote:Still, it's hard for Kevin Nash to turn down a paycheck. "I'm a Detroit kid who grew up with that assembly line mentality: You go to work to make money," he says. "My wife is like, 'Why do you still wrestle?' If you go to an ATM for a hundred dollars and it keeps spitting twenties, when would you walk away? When it wasn't spitting twenties no more. As long as you can take the money out, you'd stay there. That's what the wrestling business is like."
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Dec 9, 2013 14:18
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Manwithastick posted:Has any two wrestlers just gone off script and had an amazing/horrid match on live tv? Regal's match with Goldberg in WCW comes to mind. He was supposed to get the usual squash treatment, but was uncooperative and stiff during the match. The match didn't really turn out amazing or horrid, just kind of awkward, though you can tell it's not going as planned. Supposedly it's what caused Regal to be fired from WCW, but I don't know if that's actually true or not.
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Dec 9, 2013 21:51
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Max Overthruster posted:How exactly is the Hell's Gate submission supposed to work? It looks like a triangle choke that's not actually choking the victim because Undertaker isn't pulling on his foot with his hand to cinch it in. Am I just overthinking this? It's supposed to be a gogoplata, not a triangle choke.
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Feb 26, 2014 23:24
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VogeGandire posted:Kane's was pretty drat memorable. This gets my vote also, a memorable end to the best match the company had in years. I also liked Big Show's debut in WWE--coming out from under the ring during the Austin/McMahon cage match and throwing Austin through the cage for the win.
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Mar 7, 2014 19:35
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