Childs

The booking for this PPV is fucking awful.

And another belt with another shitty tourney attached? Could the first 30 minutes of this show have gone much worse?

Bleh

I don't think negativity toward the MJF promo is going to be the common reaction in AEW fan world. I've already seen a bunch of people on Twitter talk about it as an all-time great segment.

Really? He was an integral part of the best match of the night and one of the best of the year, and it left him with multiple possibilities going forward.

Meanwhile, we're headed for a 1 a.m. finish.

Oh, I agree. But he said it was a factor in planning out the card, per WON.

TK wants to start the main event after the NBA game, so I'm sure he's fine with some filler. But yeah, nothing about that was ppv-worthy.

You're correct of course that the worker has every right to try to exercise leverage if he thinks he has it. And I understand the lens through which you're looking at it, but you can't expect the average consumer to view it in than context, especially in the absence of any explanation from MJF. Shit, it's hard enough to garner sympathy for labor when you have union leaders laying out clear reasons for their actions. It's fine to say "if the consumer suffers, so be it," but there is risk in that viewpoint because consumer sympathy is part of the worker's leverage. It's muddled all the more by wrestling's strange relationship to reality.

Sure, but do we have any indication this speaks to a broader labor vs. management issue? I would love to see wrestlers establish some collective bargaining power, but there are still going to be individual situations in which the worker behaves like an asshole.

He's in Japan for BOSJ, I think.

Is anyone else getting Big Bang Theory instead of Dynamite?

That Regal segment made my heart sing. Beautiful.

That was weird all the way around. Didn't do anything for Dante or Hangman. Not a world champ segment.

This is such a stupid tempest in teapot. For those of us who understood the gesture, it was neat. For everyone else, he'll come out to "Cult of Personality" again on Wednesday. There, settled.

Couldn't agree more. People seemed weirdly lukewarm on that match, maybe because the crowd popped so much louder for the car crash stuff on the rest of the card? But it was MOTN for me, even above Punk-MJF, which was 95-percent perfect.

Did you think that last segment felt like the setup for a hot title match on top of a loaded card? I just didn't get that from it at all. You're right about the general perception of Cole, and I can't deny that he's gotten over in multiple places. But he is at the top of the "I don't get it" list. With Omega, I get why he irritates people, but he's hit some incredible peaks over the last 5-6 years. Same thing for the Young Bucks, especially as heels. But with Cole, I just don't see it. Unimpressive athlete, unremarkable mechanic, given to the worst excesses of modern wrestling. I'm at a loss for why anyone finds him captivating while acknowledging that is a niche opinion.

That was a pretty meh go-home show aside from Punk-MJF. The main event sure didn't do anything to raise expectations for Cole-Hangman.

I take this as a clear move toward going onto a streaming platform, and in that sense, it's cool. ROH as a current entity doesn't mean much. I wasn't thrilled with the tone of that Danielson-Moxley confrontation. They went more generic and made no reference to the partnership proposal.

The title match isn't even the second hottest on the show. But it would be fine not to have it close given that there's a special grudge match involving the company's biggest star. The PPV I went to in Baltimore in 2019 had Omega-Mox on top over the Cody-Jericho title match, and it didn't feel awkward.

If we're getting Bryan vs. Mox and Punk-MJF dog collar, I don't even care that Adam Cole will be ruining the title match.

It's odd because it means you're treating the nineties as Fujinami's most meaningful period (he turned 36 on 12/28/89) when he had been a great, featured worker since 1977. It feels like a rhetorical trick that works in Bret's favor while miscasting the nature of Fujinami's career arc. I think your broad take - Fujinami early vs. Bret late - is reasonable, but pre-36 Fujinami is a huge chunk of excellent work. He could have left his boots in the ring on his 36th birthday and he'd still be a top-20 wrestler of all time.

Looking forward to reading this because Buzz has always struck me as amazing in theory but lacking substance in practice.

It seems odd to me to zero in on post-36 output as a measure of peak performance, because that would ignore Fujinami's massive advantage in pre-36 output. Now, you can argue that Bret caught up with his work from '93-'97'. That's where a lot of his case would flow from, and I agree that he outperformed Fujinami in the nineties. But they didn't peak in the same age range or in the same time period. Anyhow, I will have Bret in the top half of my ballot, but Fujinami beats him soundly on both input and output.

Fujinami's prime was long, which gives him a boost over your more traditional peak candidates. He really hit two peaks - junior ace beginning in 1977 and heavyweight in the '80s. He also had a legitimately great match in 2006, which is another unusual data point. I find that I care less now about volume of "great" matches or length of career (not that I'll ignore those things when we get to list time) and more about a simple question: How much do I enjoy watching this person wrestle? There's almost no one I'd rather watch than a young Fujinami.