Loss

Check your Twitter DMs. I have an idea, but I can't talk about it on the air.

Seeing the reaction to her, all I can think is how much Sakura Hirota doing her HHH parodies would get over now.

Until wrestlers start advocating for themselves, nothing will change. WWE pulls this stuff because they know they can. It has been a buyer's market for wrestlers for the last 20 years. It still is in a lot of ways, but not nearly as much as it has been.

It was awesome when both the WWF and WCW would allow wrestlers to appear on his show in 1999-2000. After the WWF purchased WCW, that came to a screeching halt.

WWE also blamed it on the Iraq war just starting, which always felt pretty valid to me.

Disappointed that I can't make a humorous observation without it being interpreted as criticism.

Here is an absolutely hilarious thread on The Rock and what we're talking about:

I laugh at how vapid his social media presence is. He has almost no opinions, other than that Not Working Hard is bad and Going For Your Dreams is good. I don't mean that as a major insult as much as it just makes me laugh. It's impressive how long he's been able to get away with that.

Hard for me to get into, in part because it wasn't very good, in part because Rock's public persona is so carefully controlled that it turns me off because of the lack of authenticity.

Louisville.

Being amazing for a long time > Being amazing at times + Being great for a long time > Having a short but amazing career > Being great at times + Being good for a long time > Having a short but great career > Having a short but good career > Being amazing at times + Being mostly bad > Being great at times + Being mostly bad > Being good at times + Being mostly bad > Being bad for a long time + Being good at times > Never being any good

I see this episode of Dynamite being praised a lot on Twitter, but I'm just not seeing it. So Page brought out a mascot with plans for the mascot to turn on him? Jack Evans and Angelico also had a really rough night in the ring. FTR vs Sydals didn't really hook me like FTR matches usually do, probably because Mike Sydal seemed pretty green. Orange Cassidy hasn't done much since the Jericho feud. The feud got him over, but it feels like they had no ideas for him after that. It's weird that last week he broke up a wedding and there was no real follow-up this week. Not even an appearance from Miro and Sabian. I'm not a fan of production-assisted run-ins like Jurassic Express did either, with the lights going out and everyone pausing what they're doing. That's too WWE. Plus the babyfaces have a 3-2 advantage? On the plus side, Moxley and Kingston should do every wrestling promo. And Riho vs Deeb was very good. I usually enjoy Dynamite as a way to pass the time, but wasn't feeling it this week.

As I go through and try to curate everything, I've made it a point to keep every Buzz Sawyer squash. I think he's still really good after 1983 or so, but to me, that's the end of every single thing he does being must-see. He still has a lot of must-see stuff after that, of course, but I'd call 1981-1983 amazing, 1984-1986 great, and after that good. The Funk video is PWUSA, yes. I love the car speeding into the Lone Ranger theme so much I can't tell you!

I'm not 100% sure how this fits in here but just want to point out that when the revenue model for wrestling was house shows (and later PPVs, where you'd go to a bar or invite people over), appealing to the types of fans most likely to bring someone (or several someones) with them made sense. Generally speaking, I think people have a lot more interests that they pursue by themselves now than they did in past generations because of the Internet. I think wrestling still has working class appeal, but the working class looks nothing like it did even 20 years ago. It's more diverse and the types of day jobs people have are very different too. At some point, someone smarter than me should do a thread somewhere (and probably not here because Pro Wrestling Only) about how the death of domestic manufacturing reshaped the American fanbase.

If you look at the build to Starrcade '84 or various angles he did with Piper in 1982, he was a heel at times. But it was more heelish tendencies than a full blown heel. Dave has made the comment in larger terms about Flair in other cases. It wasn't just St. Louis.

No. In fact, 1981-1985 Flair was the biggest drawing NWA champion ever, and 1986-1989 was the worst drawing NWA champion ever. Flair still headlined some big and successful shows in 1986 and 1987, but not as many. I wouldn't put that all on Flair. Wrestling changed a ton during that time. But I think it would also be wrong to dismiss it entirely -- one group had a champion who beat everyone he wrestled and the other couldn't seem to win a match.

A side note that one of my favorite Vince stories is from that year when people around him argued that Tyson wasn't worth the price tag because it could make WM a money-losing show. Vince's response was that it would be much better for their business to lose money on 750K buys than make money on 450K buys.

To be clear, I'm not saying he's wrong, just saying that someone is. The people who were dialed into JCP at the time always said that wasn't the plan.

That's not even true, though, at least not according to what has always been out there. It's a romantic story that has taken a life of its own, but people in JCP in the past have said the plan was for him to regain the U.S. title from Nikita Koloff at Starrcade. Flair was going to do a title vs career match with Ron Garvin in the main event, and 1987 would be Garvin basically doing a longer, serious version of the midcard fodder storyline he did as a WWF referee to build to his return.

I'm not sure, but that's a good question. I think he created a template as more musclemen entered wrestling who weren't as physically talented or seasoned as a lot of talent he was used to working with on top. He developed a template to accommodate that. He did a lot more *wrestling* in the ring in 1982-1983, and every two years or so after that, you'd see him slowly remove things from his repertoire unless he was truly in with someone he believed was a top-level opponent like a Windham or a Steamboat. If he wasn't overly familiar with the opponent or if it was a big stiff he was working around, he was executing the template. I've heard wrestlers talk about how much they're being moved from place to place working with Flair during that time, almost like they're not doing much because he's constantly just maneuvering them from position to position and then just wrestling around them. The plus to that approach was that it ensured a good match most of the time. The minus was that even when the match wasn't "bad", there were one-off capable opponents he probably could have had better matches with.