Pro Wrestling

Welp a Top 100 matches on the WWE Network is coming out today on WWE.com. If the Women's PWI 50 didn't cause enough arguments yesterday.

I've been thinking about writing about how wrestling discussion has grown in recent years. And by grown I mean become much better than it used to be in the early 2000s. However, today I got to thinking, has it really grown and gotten better? Am I insulated in the PWO (sometimes DVDVR/VoW/TWF) bubble and don't see that things haven't really changed? Is it just that I've chosen to surround myself with people like Charles, Dylan, Sam, Lee, Kris, Tim, Pocket Vampire, the VoW crew, the PWP crew, and so on and so forth that is truly making the difference? I'd love to think that discussing wrestling online has gotten much better in 2014 when compared to 2004, but has it really?

I was watching Randy Savage vs Lex Luger from Souled Out 1997 and I enjoyed the match as a sort of sprint main event with great heeling and just that constant motion from Savage. He was just suffocating Luger. Luger was great at selling especially verbally. The Luger comeback in the ring was cliche, but the end of the show the last image is Savage getting racked and Sting putting Hogan in the Scorpion Deathlock. WCW sending the fans home happy coupled with the great chemistry that Savage and Luger had I found the match to be pretty enjoyable. So I figure given the names and timeframes I am sure the reviewers shit on this match because of their blind dislike for these two …

A big blindspot for me in my watching is Japanese wrestling post-1999. Where do I start looking for recommendations as far as what I NEED to see? Has anyone put together good promotional compilations for the 2000s? Or, since I know you kids love to watch shit on your computer these days, a list of youtube links? Or even just a list I can search for? I know there's a ton of stuff on Youtube, but I don't see much rhyme or reason to what some of these channels are uploading. Who's put together the modern history of NJPW? Or the entire history of NOAH? Or wherever flippy dudes are working these days? Sorry if this is a weird request. I know there's a ton of stuff out ther…

We often hear about wrestlers talk about how, when they jumped from WCW to WWF, they had to spend some time learning the WWF style. So, what was the difference between WWF style and WCW style? 2 things I can think of are the side bumping deal, and the pinball bumping style. What else were the differences?

Even having seen it repeated ad nauseam, I always cringe watching Foley's accidental second cell fall at KotR 98. It's an incredibly perilous moment and I've long been grimly fascinated by Foley's contention that if he had taken the chokeslam correctly, he likely would have come down on his head instead of landing on his back. Watching the footage, it seems like a pretty reasonable notion. So, I'd like to throw out a counterfactual exercise based on just that - what if Foley lands on his head/neck that night and dies or is paralyzed? What happens to the WWF and the wrestling industry as a whole? I find it to be an interesting question because a few degrees of rotation…

So, for this week's Squared Circle Gazette Radio, we're returning to our "Court Case" format that we did in the past for one of our most popular shows (The Trial of Triple H), and this time putting Eric Bischoff under the gun. We have a prosecution, a defence and a judge in place - the charge against Bischoff is that he's the person most responsible for the death of WCW (via malpractice and negligence). So in terms of feedback it's simple - where do you stand on that specific question, and why? As always, the best feedback will be read on the show and become part of the debate. So whaddya think - is Bischoff most responsible?

Now that the show's on a better night (with more competition), I wonder if that will mean WWE will put more effort into making it more than a two hour Raw Rewind.

This came up particularly in the thread for Invader 1, and has been mentioned with less vitriol in the Benoit thread, but how are people planning on dealing with the, shall we say, more personally reprehensible people who were otherwise great wrestlers? Follow up to this point - where does the line get drawn? I would imagine a large number of candidates have some questionable behaviour in their pasts (Austin's spousal abuse allegations, Murdoch's racism, Lawler's penchant for (too?) young girls, the mess that is Flair, etc....). Personally, I can separate it all. I don't watch the first season of Sons of Anarchy and think about Half Sack killing an old lady, and …

Bob Geigel has apparently passed away.

I've become quite interested in, for lack of a better phrase, the history of the suplex. On the Chicago footage, it seems like once in a while the guys would do a throw. Thesz even did a powerbomb sometimes. But 90%+ of those matches are worked on the mat or with strikes. In the early 70s, in the US, in Japan and in Britain, you still mostly have predominently matwork. In fact, there is not a huge amount of difference (in my view) between the style in the 50s footage and what we see in the early 70s. In the US and Japan, we start seeing more things like hiptosses and bodyslams, and depending on the workers involved, you might get some suplex variations. But for all i…

I have become fascinated in this promotion due to the action of Tamura, Han, Yamamota and Kohsaka. My question lies in whether there has been a set lineage of when the promotion became complete shoots? Was this gradual over time or something that happened overnight. Also, has there ever been a definitive understanding of which matches are a shoot and which are a work? Kohsaka vs. Ilioukhine from 9/98 feels like a complete work to me but others feel it may be a shoot. My final question is once the transition took place, did Tamura and Yamamoa compete in any works for other promotions. What was the origin of U-Style starting up? Thanks

I think the card looks solid from a match point of view. Booking may damper the enthusiasm but it looks good on paper. The Usos vs. Goldust & Stardust Brie Bella vs. Nikki Bella Sheamus vs. The Miz Cesaro vs. Dolph Ziggler (2/3 Falls) AJ Lee vs. Paige Rusev vs. Big Show Randy Orton vs. John Cena (Hell In A Cell) Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins (Hell In A Cell)

This week's SCG podcast is going be a little different, as we are going to do a timeline of the Invasion angle - from the WCW purchase to the bitter end at Survivor Series, with the addition of notes from Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alverez's newsletters from 2001 of what was going on behind the scenes on a week to week basis, and I think it will be a very interesting show to see the breakdown. as it happened, with the overarching theme being whether or not it was doomed from the beginning. I'm looking to get some of your opinions to chime in throughout the show, and as always feedback will be credited to your fine selves on the air, So, I'd like your thoughts on: a) W…

I'm watching PPVs from the late 2000s-early 2010s, and watching the performances of LayCool and something struck me as funny. OF COURSE I know they are just characters, but considering how much of the real Mark Calaway has been in the Undertaker character since the American Badass days, it seems odd to picture Undertaker with Michelle McCool's WWE "mean cool girls" personae. Another seemingly incongruous IRL couple of wrestling characters that comes to mind would be Beth Phoenix and Edge from his Christian tag team days up to his turn and change towards The Rated R Superstar in 2004. But then again, Beth's on screen character was connected to Santino, so who knows!

There is a lot of talk about since this person took nights off, they won't get my vote. Do you, personally, penalize someone for that? Is a peak or how they work when motivated less important than how they are on each and every show?

Lawler (and others) posted on twitter that Ox Baker passed away.

Is anyone really writing off spotfests? It's a legit question and has become sort of a PWO talking point. I'm very confident that if we took a poll about the amazing Michinoku Pro 10 man tags from 1996, they would be close to universally praised on this board. Schneider started on the internet with his AU MPro blog and featured those matches prominently on his early comps (as well as his later one's when it shifted to Toryumon). Loss, Ditch, myself, Stomper, TomK, Childs, and numerous others that I'm just forgetting to list have all spoken very highly of these style matches before. But context is also important. I never got the DG ROH trios match from March 20…

Posted this on Voices of Wrestling's new forum but might not get traction there. Might not get traction here. Actually I didn't post here first because I figured most would be working on GWE stuff but hey, you never know. Feel free to post your own little lists.

I was watching Verne Gagne versus Red Bastien from the Chicago Film Archives today and I got to thinking about match length and a match being great. I'm not the biggest great match guy, it's not something I hold as vital to my perception of a wrestler. But, I made my blog about great matches because that's what I want to write about and I feel it will help keep my blog fairly positive which is a big deal to me for reasons related to my other writing. Either way, the reason I bring up match length is because I've always had this idea that a match has to be at least over ten minutes to truly be a great match. A sub ten minute match can be really good and have great work con…

So, we're doing another podcast this week, and for a change of pace we're looking at matches, pushes and angles in wrestling history where you could debate that somebody else should have gotten a certain spot, and things would have gone better than they did - should be a fun look back over different time periods. Think somebody else should have run over Austin? Think somebody else should have beaten Goldberg? Think somebody else should have won King Of The Ring 95? Think somebody else should have main evented a WrestleMania rather than the guy that did? Think WCW should have built around somebody different? Etc.... Give us the one you always felt strongest about, whatev…

With the network numbers being released at the end of the month, I am curious on the PWO network numbers.

So, with recent talk about how this board is Indy Unfriendly, I wanted to create a topic on the biggest Indy of all. Before, Loss, Tim Cooke and myself started going crazy with bulk buys, creating collector boards, and amassing huge amounts of old school goodness, it was ROH in 2004 that kept my interest in wrestling alive. I was fascinated by the entire Feinstein fallout but it was around the same time that the product really picked up and they started dropping all of these awesome match-ups out of the blue. Samoa Joe was on fire as champ. Joe-Punk still held up for me a couple of years ago when I watched some stuff with Johnny P. The Joe-Aries match felt like a big deal…

Years back people talked about what wrestling should do to be more like sports. For some reason, today, that came back to me and I started to wonder about schedules. If a wrestling promotion started up with a 32 man roster and put together a full season with a schedule at the start of the year would that work? After that schedule you can have some sort of playoff post season and award the champion for that year. It would be different, but I think there could be a lot of positives coming out of that. For one, you could have two guys face on the first week and something happens that starts a rivalry. Then you know they will face again in 7 weeks on this date and ge…

This might get more eyeballs here... On Best of WWF Vol 20 - Just before Hogan v Rude, that's Kevin Dunn in the skit arguing with Sean Mooney over the 'party', isn't it?