Pro Wrestling

I thought this would be a good topic for discussion. With WWE's ridiculous number of multi-generational stars this is probably a tougher debate than it was ten or fifteen years ago. I'm not sure how many members a family needs to have in order to be the true first family of wrestling. There are a number of families that only go as far as parent/offspring (you gotta keep em separated???) but that might be enough for some fans. The Hart Family seems to have been taken down a few pegs over the last decade. Bret/Owen/Davey/TJ/Dynamite/Teddy/Anvil/Natalya has a good top three with number four being wildly bipolar as far as an online consensus goes. Is there an…

Since I've been reviewing a ton of Memphis and I know alot of you guys saw the Best of Memphis 1980's set, I think it'd be perfect for an All-Memphis thread. I've been slowing working through the 1982 Memphis that I have and man has it been awesome. In about 10 shows, I already saw three all time classics. Today, I saw the 3/27/1982 edition of Memphis TV. This one featured Dutch vs Lawler in a Loser Leaves Town match. Lawler and Mantel had been 1-1 in the previous weeks with tensions slowly rising. Well this week, it exploded. Dutch lost it and demanded a Loser Leaves Town match. Dutch got off to a hot start but then started going down. He ran to the announce tabl…

Yeah, those damn wrestlers lie their ass off all the time, especially when talking about the good ol'days when they were selling out everywhere and going sixty every night. So there it goes.

Hey guys. Lonnnnng time lurker and formerly semi-frequent poster back in the day. I love this board. Its like the very best of A1, Smarkschoice, tOA, and dvdvr in one place without the bullshit. So many familiar names. Anyway, I haven't watched a ton of wrestling lately (about to get back in the game I hope), but I've seen a lot of the major WWE matches from the last couple years. I was wondering how yall would rank them. Brock vs Cena Extreme Rules Brock vs Punk Summer Slam Cena vs Bryan Summer Slam Cena vs Punk Money in the Bank Bryan vs Sheamus 2/3 falls extreme rules Taker vs HBK first WrestelMania Punk vs Bryan Over the Edge Matt Hardy vs E…

Interested to know what you think given the current TNA / AJ Styles situation. I for one would. I'd like to see what WWE would do with him, and I'd like to see what he'd do in the WWE. How he'd be packaged and presented. In the ring, the prospect of matches with the likes of Punk, Bryan, Shield, Orton and Cena sounds pretty damn good to me, and a far stretch better than any TNA scenario he could find himself in after 12 years of constant employment there. Go on AJ, take the plunge!

Despite Vader being praised as one of the best wrestlers ever by a lot of people, I remember Harley Race saying that of all the people he worked with, Vader was the one who didn't have a single clue. That always stuck with me. Everyone else seems to disagree. I think Race said Lawler couldn't wrestle either. Dory Funk gets a lot of praise from other wrestlers, but from what I've seen (and read on this board from people who would know better than me), there isn't really any proof of that. I know some fans assume he was better than Terry simply because he held the NWA title longer, but I don't see any real reason to think he was anywhere near as good as Terry. O…

Dolph Ziggler vs. Fandango Goldust & Cody Rhodes vs. Rey Mysterio & Big Show vs. Ryback & Curtis Axel vs. The Real Americans (Fatal 4-Way Match) Intercontinental Champion Big E Langston vs. Damien Sandow Divas Champion AJ Lee vs. Natalya CM Punk vs. The Shield (3-on-1 Handicap Match) Daniel Bryan vs. The Wyatt Family (3-on-1 Handicap Match) World Heavyweight Champion John Cena vs. WWE Champion Randy Orton (Tables, Ladders & Chairs Match)

I've decided that I want to compile a list of the best matches centered around the participants beating the holy hell out of each other. I don't mean brawls or deathmatches, I mean straight wrestling matches centered around stiff strikes with stuff like matwork kept to a minimum. Off the top of my head, I'd say that Hansen/Kawada and Vader/Takada would certainly fit the bill. What else? Bonus points for matches without endless strike exchanges because I hate that shit.

I am looking to buy all the wcw nwa Saturday show. So what year should is the best. I want to start out hot.

http://imgur.com/a/tvdGe Dreadful spelling aside, I'm surprised (or rather, not) that it all has such a last minute feel about it. The long scripted segments are awfully formatted, and amazingly prescriptive. It's also mildly amusing that the matches have no notes.

WWE now produces eight hours of first-run TV a week: Raw, Smackdown, Main Event, NXT and Superstars. I think everyone agrees that it is too much and causes a lot of problems for the product like overexposure of stars, constant rematches and guys doing far too many jobs. But in the current era and the setup of WWE's business being based on TV rights fees (looming Network aside), this structure is inevitable. My question is, from a creative and booking standpoint, what can be done about it? If you're Vince, short of cancelling half of your TV shows, how do you address the problems that too much TV causes? How do you fill the hours in a way that maximises interes…

Well?

I've decided that it's time to expand my US wrestling horizons beyond WWE. As far as WWE's biggest competition goes, TNA is a dumpster fire and ROH has been strip-mined of anything of value, so they're out of the question. Fortunately, there are plenty of indy promotions with TV that upload their shows onto Youtube or whatever. The only problem is that there are so many, I don't quite know where to begin. I've heard good things about Traditional Championship Wrestling and Championship Wrestling From Hollywood. What else is worth checking out? Again, I'm looking for complete episodes, not just clips of matches and promos.

I brought this up in another thread and some thought this would make a good topic, so here we go. Every now and then you have a transition year on the WWE roster where you look at January and December and it's like a completely different company. 1996 is a good example. TONS of new talent brought in at the beginning of the year and a lot of the "New Generation" stalwarts were phased out. 1997 probably would have been really weird if you still had Tatanka, Bigelow, Hakushi, Mabel, etc still around. A more recent example is in 2010 when you got rid of a lot of the mid-2000's guys like Shelton, Mickie James, Carlito, even Batista to make way for all the NXT kids. I was watch…

When writing about matches and breaking down common elements, we, as a community, have a lot of terms that are useful. Face-in-peril, heat segment, hot tag, shine, transition, cut-off, etc. These are all various narrative tools that we've found used in multiple matches, enough so that we decided to use terms to classify them. They help us understand what we're watching and portray it to others. One of these is "hope spot," namely being when a babyface who is getting dominated by a heel (either in a standard heat segment or a face-in-peril scenario) fights back to the point where the crowd experiences hope that he'll be able to gain the advantage or make the tag. This…

I am thinking of doing a regular match review thread on here would like ideas for matches to review that people will read so please feel free to send me matches. The only requirement is that it must be on either youtube or dailymotion.

Hard to tell how much Stevens & Patterson ruled the roost as a tag team in SF. Stevens spent twice as much time as the dominant US champ, along with some time out on the shelf with injuries. Shibuya held the tag title longer with a couple of partners bookending the long stretch Stevens & Patterson had with the belt. As far as Patterson as a worker, I think most people would bet their houses that if you asked Pat who the better worker was, he'd point to Stevens. We're still on the eternal quest for Stevens looking terrific in a match... but since Stevens was something of a mentor to Pat, he's likely not blowing smoke. On Pat as a top 3 worker in the 70…

Seems like they were moving into a big program but Sting got hurt at clash 10. Was wondering what the plan was.

Over at Classics Yohe mentioned how he disagrees with the way Meltzer has the Sharpes categorized for the WON HoF while also mentioning that he thought they would fit in any tag team Hall of Fame. The idea of a tag team HoF has come up a ton of times in the past, so I started thinking about who the teams and candidates would be if you applied the traditional WON criteria to tag teams. This is the list I came up with. I left off Japanese teams, not because there are none that are deserving (Kawada/Taue are no worse than my third favorite team of all time, and possibly number one), but because I wanted to see what other people could come up with from Japan since my perce…

My excitement for Survivor Series peaked when I first found out it was in Boston. I was really looking forward to the direction of the company post-Summerslam. However, in November I have found the storyline direction to be lackluster to say the least. I feel like all the heat from Summerslam and September has dissipated. First, Boston needs to bring our A-game to match that raucous Nashville crowd. I have not heard a crowd so pro-babyface in forever. They were even doing Uso callback chant. I was digging it. I think Boston crowds are in the top 5 WWE crowds and we definitely be there in force. Like I said in a post in the Current WWE thread, if I was not goin…

Just broken, more info here: http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/2013/11/21/21283811.html RIP

To my shame, I never really got into WCW. I've seen a handful of matches, but never sat down and watched a year, a wrestler or even a whole PPV. I bought a set of WCW PPVs, Clashes and Nitros, which are currently sitting on my hard drivel but I have too much choice of where to start. Just go with the first PPVs (dated 1983)? I could, but I suspect there's a lot of filler and not much fun. There's plenty of "top WCW matches" articles and posts out there, but they tend to be too subjective to be reliable. So, I turn it over to the assembled masses - give me something to begin on, please. I don't even really know what I want. I'm good with cherry picking matches, bu…

I figured this would be a fun question to ask given all the matwork fans on this board. If you were to create a matwork primer, what matches would you include? I'm not necessarily talking about the best grappling you've ever seen, more like textbook examples of fairly basic stuff executed at a high level. Off the top of my head, I'd say something like El Dandy/Black Warrior would be a good example.

There are two parts to this. The first part is your physical dvds. Are they in cases? Spindles? How do you know where to find things? The second is more about your thoughts on matches. I see guys like Loss and Chad pull out star ratings all the time. Do you have amazing memory skills or some kind of spreadsheet? I am kind of curious as I am trying to get my stuff more in order. I will explain what I do when I get home, because I don't like typing from my phone.

Just came to me today out of the blue and wanted to ask the folks here- We all know the WWE structure is built for a takeover by Triple H and Stephanie McMahon, but we also all know that Triple H has had a career aided by... enhancements. So what happens to that plan if say... Triple H dropped dead of an enlarged heart or something, like next month? Do Stephanie proceed as a owner-in-waiting or does Vince McMahon make a play for Shane McMahon to return or what do you guys envision here?