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gbs but from 2004 posted:Didnt Vince McMahon finally publicly admit in the 80s (as part of some legal hearing) that it was fixed and therefore not a sport so that he could pay less taxes or something? Yeah it was a dodge to avoid the regulations and requirements put forward by state boxing and wrestling commissions
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Feb 9, 2022 23:47
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TNA was the "then as farce" for WCW But WCW was also a farce so it's pretty much farce all the way down
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Feb 10, 2022 21:01
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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? Yes. Pick up where you left off. I need more Lex Express.
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Feb 11, 2022 00:07
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Honestly "getting into business with Jimmy Hart and Brian Knobbs" is about as winning a proposition as buying NFTs but with a way more entertaining slide into destitution.
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Feb 11, 2022 03:44
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I don't have an effortpost in me but "Stand up for WWE" was a pretty low point if anyone effortposting
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Feb 11, 2022 04:48
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That time he tanked the stock by running a storyline that he sold the WWE to Donald Trump
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Feb 11, 2022 05:13
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That time he just let people say whatever right after 9/11 and his daughter compared the terrorist attacks to the government prosecuting him for steroids and a future fox news contributor said it was time to turn the middle east into a parking lot
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Feb 11, 2022 05:20
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That time he appeared on his show in spite of not being involved in any storyline to just drop the N word and leave
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Feb 11, 2022 05:22
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There was that time with the quasi hostage situation when there was some kind of pay dispute with Saudi Arabia and the roster wasn't allowed to leave until it was resolved
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Feb 11, 2022 20:17
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My memory's hazy but I didn't watch TNA but didn't they literally run a storyline where they basically threatened to hire Hoganfare recipient Brian Knobbs because Hogan showed up and it was rightly portrayed as a bad thing? They hired Brian Knobbs for this story.
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Feb 11, 2022 20:26
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Wondering what Brutus The Barber Beefcake's up to...quote:In February 2004, Leslie caused an anthrax scare at one of Boston's MBTA stations, Downtown Crossing, where he was working at the time. He had left a bag of cocaine in his booth, which a subway rider spotted and assumed to be anthrax. The building was evacuated as a precaution. Leslie checked into a drug rehabilitation facility after admitting that the cocaine was his.[15]
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Feb 11, 2022 22:20
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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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Feb 17, 2022 02:10
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Elephant Ambush posted:The Great Khali is still around and he's on weird twitter https://twitter.com/greatkhali/status/1452236643365183490?s=20&t=HNcamvywg3Z3oHg5nnhMOA
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Feb 20, 2022 07:22
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Cubone posted:yes Legit lmao glad you posted that
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Feb 20, 2022 20:57
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Jamesman posted:Hornswoggle has been brought up in this thread before, but I don't think it's really been stressed enough that WWE introduced a magical ring imp into their world and we were just supposed to... accept it? I don't know if this was a punishment or just one of Vince's Great Ideas, but they took Hard Irish Badass and felt they needed to refine that gimmick by having this become part of it. Finlay owned hard and to me is up with my all time-favorites with Regal Hornswoggle attacking (as accurately described) as a rabid badger owned Hornswoggle was actually pretty darn good in the ring, but you can only do so much with the size differential with a mini vs big guy situation outside of said rabid badger attacks, but he did that very well. Replying from the previous page but I'm sure you'll get to H-Swaggle's horrible feud with Chavo eventually, which did irreparable damage to both of them. Edit since I got the chickens peckin: RoboChrist 9000 posted:So, Cornwind Evil, I have some questions about heels and faces, if you don't mind? I mean, there's cool heels, like, "love to hate" or "straight up villains who are fun to watch", then there's "cool heels" like Hall and Nash were doing. They were booked like heels, they did heelish things like cheating/run ins/beating up faces, but they still acted like faces at the same time, doing "sing along" catchphrase promos, interacting positively with fans who were "down" with the nWo, etc. It's not necessarily a bad thing in the short term, but you need to book around it. Steve Austin in '97's character acting like a heel and that was kept pretty consistent, but they booked him away from being a "cool heel" by booking him like a face. The crowd responded to him like a face although the character was a heel, but the booking kept him from making their intended babyfaces looking like dinguses. Hall and Nash though? Booked as heels, acted like heels, got face reactions, worked the crowd as faces, ended up undermining the babyfaces they were trying to build. TheSwizzler fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Feb 23, 2022 |
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Feb 23, 2022 02:22
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Right, I worked for an indie for a few years up here in  and have some lore that's insignifcant but "new" about WCW, but also kinda illustrates how weird WCW gotSome may remember a strange squash match on the August 16, 2000 Thunder episode from Kamloops, BC (couldn't find footage, but if you can there are some neat bumps and botches involved), 4 indie guys vs Kronik, where they cut a strange, stilted promo that "the office" was sending these guys to teach them a lesson and proceeded to demolish them in under 2 minutes, including a guy who was over 500 pounds. This was a favor from Terry Taylor to a local indie promoter to get his guys some work. This isn't anything unheard of, you see that fairly often in WWE with "security" or "police" who take bumps being cast from local indies, or give them dark matches/squashes for syndication, in fact, one of the "orderlies" who detained Kane in a 1998 Raw is among the jobbers in this segment. What's quintessentially WCW is that they just decided to put this bizarre segment on the main show. It'd be less weird if they didn't give it an explanation, just literally "Kronik vs 4 guys", but they had to try to make a nonsensical story about it.
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Feb 23, 2022 03:40
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Got a few in-person takes on different guys from a guy who had a cup of coffee in the indies as a ref/road agent and has no chance of working again so I don't have to worry about pissing anyone off: Honky Tonk Man: Workman. Toured constantly, showed up, did his schtick, had a drink at the bar to be friendly, shake some fans hands and tell a few stories, then back to his hotel room to go to bed, on to the next town. Deeply professional when it came to the indie guest star schtick, gave it his best even if there were 20 people in attendance. Leatherface (Rick Patterson): REALLY nice guy. Told me up front that he'd be doing an out of control monster schtick when I refereed his match and that I'd take a hit if I let him corner me. Lo and behold, accidentally let him corner me while he had a chair. I nodded to accept my fate, he said "duck" and let me roll out of the ring. Got hosed over on my payout that night and he covered my dinner tab, shared his weed with me too. Luther: Current AEW guy, worked with him a few times. Found him a bit unfriendly outside the ring, myself being a manlet referee/hilariously skinny trainee, but we worked an in-ring angle for a match and he was really excited to get in-depth with the acting and performance side of things, wanting to rehearse reactions and such. So basically he was kinda a dick until we had a scene together, then he was game as gently caress to make it look as good as possible. Bryan Danielson: Nice enough, bit of a perfectionist, wanted to make triply sure I wasn't going to gently caress up the ref spot by making absolutely sure I knew what was going to happen. Due diligence and all that but I was experienced enough at the time to know not how to botch a basic ref spot. Christopher Daniels: Same as Danielson. Polite but perfectionist. All business. The Bushwhackers: loving awesome guys. I was green as hell refereeing when I worked with them, and we were doing a tour. They told me they were going to teach me tag team formula on the trip, and they did exactly that. They told me where to stand, which way to face, on which side of the wrestlers to count, told me the universal old school "cues" used in tag team wrestling to work the basic formula. Like the real "technical" side of things like "this guy will always kick out to the left and turn for the hot tag, count from the right" They took the time and effort to teach, even though they were just doing indie dates for a payday, and they were good teachers at that. I even accidentally gave Luke a black eye with a doorknob being chased by a heel and they took it in good humor. Kings Among Men. Matt Borne (Doink): loving. Psycho. Not only did he punch someone out that I knew just for thinking he stole his pack of smokes (it was actually between the couch cushions), he got a very talented friend of mine into cocaine, which (while keeping that friend's confidentality) ended up derailing a very promising career. He was a good worker and did a lot of crowd pleasing stuff, but he was unstable and did a lot of damage by dragging others into his whole drugged up nonsense. Tony Kozina (mentioned upthread): Mixed feelings on this guy. Talented as hell, smart, and good to work with in the ring. But on the other hand, he was a bully, and he wasn't the kinda guy who'd be a bully on his own. He'd pile on with others bullying someone else. Never personally had a problem with him, but when I heard about some of the pretty horrendous poo poo he pulled later, I wasn't at all surprised.
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Feb 23, 2022 05:52
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The Rabbi T. White posted:gently caress yes. Yeah man, they really put in the work, showed patience and kindness. I didn't have the best experience in the business, but there are some pretty great people there, and it'd have been a lot better of a place for everyone if everyone acted like the Bushwhackers.
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Feb 23, 2022 06:02
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Jonny Nox posted:Having watched a fair amount of Chaos Project, your Luther story is the least surprising thing to hear. Luther is creative as hell. Here is some input into the sausage making of how he made a creative finish: The original booking had him bump me in a no-DQ match, then wake me up to make the count after a run-in and get the win on the face (this was the title match of the night). Basic requirements are that the face loses after interference and cheating. Luther thought that was boring/cliche, so he came up with a spin on the same idea that over the course of the match, he'd try to intimidate me repeatedly. The face would keep kicking out of power moves, weapon shots, etc, and he'd keep getting angrier at the ref, screaming (as Luther is very good at) and as the ref I would slowly start counting faster/tolerating more cheap interference without chiding his buddies and generally letting him get away with poo poo. The climax of the match had him hit two finishers on the face, who'd kick out, and he straight up lost it. Backed me into a corner, screamed and gave me a hard slap. The difference here is that the idea was that unlike the usual "hit the ref" spot, I didn't go down, I was just completely terrified. That's when his buddies jumped in and beat the face down while he held me by the lapels and screamed that he'd kill me if I DQ'd him. Then onto the pin, fast count, title win, crowd's mad. Basically taking an overdone finish and making something new out of it. Pretty clever poo poo.
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Feb 23, 2022 06:50
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I think a more apt comparison would be if taco bell just suddenly decided "we make baby food now, eat another taco if you don't like it" (there are no other tacos). OTOH expecting anything approaching creative integrity or an interest in product quality from Vince is pretty lolworthy WWE was public by then, so they had shareholders to please and sponsorships, product licensing and merch moved better with a family friendly product, which was bad tv and good business.
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Feb 27, 2022 23:52
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Trollologist posted:The going rate in the PNW for gorilla men to give each other concussions is $35. Or was when I was last in the bullpen. Can confirm Edit for content: I got a small soft spot for Cornette because he does tell some pretty cool stories, and has some pretty valuable insights some of the time. The "uncle who's fun but should shut the gently caress up about politics" comparison seems about right OTOH he's pretty out there if he's objecting to his gimmick not being comedy. His character was literally a weaselly little gently caress who'd call his mother to get him out of jams. Yes, that's heel heat, but that's comedy heel heat as well. He's having tuxedo matches with other managers where the whole draw is that these two non-wrestler schlubs are going to claw at each other until someone's naked, that's comedy. I know the guy took some hellacious bumps and for a non-athlete that takes some steel in the junk, but that doesn't mean the character isn't comedy. It'd be one thing for him to say "Well it's different, I'm just a manager, a side character, nobody's putting me in the main event, so comedy is okay there" but yeah, he seems to be going all in on "all comedy is bad, get it out of my wrasslemans". Though I'd guess that his blinding hatred of Russo figures into his position there. TheSwizzler fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Mar 1, 2022 |
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Mar 1, 2022 23:43
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That match has more actual wrestling in it than like, 90% of what's on TV
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Mar 2, 2022 04:02
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It honestly wouldn't have been so bad if they'd have switched up the writing a bit. They basically had two modes: Cena vs Monster of the Month (who often was big and intimidating, but didn't make for the most entertaining matches and by their very nature had to be 1-2 month feuds) Cena/Batista/Orton in some combination They let the bench get pretty shallow going all in on 3 guys (with a bit of guest main eventing from the upper-card of Michaels/Edge) for so long and it got pretty stale. The "Cena wins with his 5 moves" was some power rangers stuff that works for syndicated children's TV, but the shelf life for a live show is pretty short. They eventually backed off that, but it had long wore out its welcome by that point. If anything it was an even more stringent version of the Hogan booking, trying to run a lot more shows (as mentioned) with a lot more repeat stories, and not a lot of interest in trying to build up a deeper undercard to let some fresh matches happen. OTOH, they sold shirts and made money, so by those metrics everything was fine, TV ratings only matter when there's competition.
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Mar 7, 2022 19:45
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I definitely don't know enough about it to post, but does anyone have an effortpost in them explaining the bizarre final season of NXT that just kinda...never ended?
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Mar 8, 2022 05:08
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GokuGoesSSJ3 posted:If anyone has knowledge about the super early days, like when it went from people legitimately wrestling at the local carnival to "hey we can make more money if we fix the outcome" and on to "hey we can fix every move so we don't get hurt and add theatrics to draw more people" I'd be interested in reading about that. I saw a documentary about Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion awhile ago and it turns out old timey fighting is really interesting to me, the style of boxing they used back then was very different from what you would expect from a boxing match today. I think the short version is that they started scripting matches where they had a big, bad tough wrestler (a "hooker", a guy with very strong legitimate skill) who'd take open challengers from the crowd and utterly kick their rear end, and then they'd have a planted guy who would challenge him and win to make sure the crowd left on a happy note Gambling was almost certainly involved Edit: Apparently Abe Lincoln did a fair bit of wrestling in the carny sense
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Mar 8, 2022 23:33
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IIRC the carnival wrestling tradition survived quite a while in the UK, I think William Regal came up in it
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Mar 8, 2022 23:54
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That term always bugs me. All sports are entertainment!
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Mar 11, 2022 21:58
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I remember being a fan during the monday night wars, and I remember the WWF always made a big deal about how WCW would confiscate signs/pipe in cheers etc, but since the wars ended WWE definitely leaned into that kinda undermining of the audience's preferences. Now they have sign police, weird vincespeak ("superstars and divas" is/was dumb as hell), and they literally use the same "crowd pop" audio file repeatedly, over and over again. It's not at all weird that Vince is a hypocrite, but it is kinda weird how they did away so strongly with the fan-oriented presentation given how well it worked out for them when they made it a point to do that. Not that I expect the post-Vince company to be much better
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Mar 11, 2022 22:09
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16-bit Butt-Head posted:you can't say diva on WWE television anymore Not entirely against that, it was weird phrasing to start with, a Diva is a female entertainer who's difficult to deal with Were they trying to say that Lita would slap some poor PA in the face because she got the wrong bottled water?
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Mar 11, 2022 22:59
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Also its kinda a shame that Michelle McCool retired before they fixed women's wrestling. She was okay in the ring but a pretty fantastic heel
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Mar 11, 2022 23:01
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16-bit Butt-Head posted:its good they dont call the female performers divas anymore but most wrestlers, male and female, are divas and should be called that imo From experience, I'd say psychopaths
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Mar 11, 2022 23:10
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16-bit Butt-Head posted:you have to be a pyschopath, stupid or both to want to be a wrestler in the first place What's odd is that I did some production work for a small promotion recently and the workers were actually p. cool/chill people you could play board games with But when I actually was full timing in the late 90s-early 00s, yeah no it was rife with violent lunatics who'd down a fifth of vodka and talk about how it was bullshit you weren't allowed to rape rookies any more like Ronnie Garvin used to
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Mar 11, 2022 23:17
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It was some cargo-cult poo poo about "paying your dues" and "respect for the business", but there was really only a couple real "old timers" there, the guys beating that drum usually had a 2-5 years in the business but they were going all-in on some extreme (I'd say criminal) levels of hazing. There was a big rush of people trying to be wrestlers around that time, and they ran the gamut from actual athletes to tough rednecks, with some spindly nerds mixed in, so anyone who had a hint of "seniority" was trying to force any possible competitor to their "spot" out. It might have been the most toxic work environment I have ever seen. I actually managed to have a short chat with Jim Cornette about the region, and how literally nobody from that era in the territory made it big, and even his old school, old man yells at cloud self called the place a toxic snake pit, and that he knew it was operating with the same culture as a maximum security prison
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Mar 12, 2022 01:18
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SirPhoebos posted:like yeah, turning a part of a company into your own personal fiefdom is bad on principal, but when you put it next to The Clique or Hulk Hogan or The Plane Ride from Hell it just doesn't raise any hairs. Difference being that the above mentioned are considered exceptional instances of bad behavior or someone abusing the hell out of the hooks they have in the company, while wrestler's court is considered the "good and right" culture
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Mar 15, 2022 21:10
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Gavok posted:There’s a story that Luger was heard at a bar boasting about how he was going to end the night as champion and the story got changed, but that’s just an urban legend. It was always going to be Bret’s night. I think that was for the Summerslam match, they'd done some TV tapings where he came out as champ and they brushed it off to the crowd by saying he was trying to annoy Yokozuna
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Mar 16, 2022 03:23
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After he lost his job as an agent for WWF in 2000, Jim Neidhardt was pretty out of control. I remember being present when he was driving everyone nuts after an indy show trying to score coke, eventually got it, got blackout drunk/wolverine high, then had to be dragged back into his room (it took like 5 very large wrestlers to do this) after he got naked and tried wandering around the hotel hallway. The hotel was a sponsor that gave free rooms for the shows in exchange for advertising so it was considered a pretty big deal to get him under control
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Mar 16, 2022 20:15
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Sid stories are always weird as hell but here's a few of the well known ones (accuracy debatable) -Got in a fight with Arn Anderson, ended up stabbing him with scissors leading to some serious hand injuries -Got in a fight with Brian Pillman, started losing and ran around looking for a weapon, eventually brandishing a squeegee -Received multiple groin injuries from putting a squirrel down his pants -Was punished by WCW for malingering so he could take time off to play softball -Complained to Vince that fans booed him for the 1992 Royal Rumble elimination of Hogan that resulted in his heel turn -Got annoyed by a child Windham Rotunda (Bray Wyatt) playing in the locker room and being noisy, broke his Rocketeer action figure Then there's the horrible broken leg incident where he tried to do a big boot off the top rope, ended up shattering his tibia live on PPV. The clip is widely available online but is  as hell, his leg just folds over halfway up his shin
TheSwizzler fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Mar 17, 2022 |
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Mar 17, 2022 20:38
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I am not posting the leg break
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Mar 17, 2022 22:11
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Cubone posted:I'm gonna do it... I'm gonna post the leg break Don't you dare do it
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Mar 17, 2022 22:32
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