sek69

Based on the snippets posted on the front page of WO.com, we should have a "Davey Richards is a Grouchy Hateful Vile Human Being" thread next. The highlights: He's glad he didn't get the call from WWE after doing the NXT tryout, said he didn't want to take away from his time going to med school/being an EMT to go to "wrestling school". Said everyone in NXT seems to be on eggshells afraid for their jobs (probably the truest statement) and not enjoying their time there. He did put over the Performance Center as a great facility. He said his bridge with ROH is completely burnt and he buried Delirious as only getting the booking job because he's spineless (?) and not because of any talents in that regard. Also buried Joe Koff as being more interested in TV business than wrestling. He did wish everyone there the best of luck, so there's that. He seems happy with TNA, which makes me wonder if they have some kind of special arrangement since it seems everyone being paid a living wage there is in danger of getting cut when their deals end.

So they mention the Bro-mans won the tag titles back from the Wolves in Japan, but Austin Aries still has the X title he lost on that same show. That Wrestle-1 show is now the Schroedinger's Cat of wrestling events now where it both exists and doesn't at the same time. They've been running Willow the Wisp videos for the last few weeks, but announce Jeff Hardy is returning at Lockdown. Is he doing a Mick Foley split personality gimmick or is he just going to show up for the main event in the Willow mask? The Sam Shaw/Anderson angle is like every bad Attitude Era WWF mid carder angle with 10% the production values. I think by the end of the show I had a nosebleed trying to figure everything out.

Hogan's had numerous back surgeries, and WWE is especially sensitive to neck/back problems.

It also doesn't give me much faith in HHH being able to put personal feelings aside for business. Vince has his issues for sure, but he never had a problem doing business with a guy he had problems with if he felt it would make money.

I used to love how Tommy Young would dive in to make a count if he was out of position. Charles Robinson sometimes sells people's moves better than the guy taking them, but not in a way that takes attention away from the match.

I was watching the showing of WM 25 on the live feed a few days back and I noticed the twitter scroll at the bottom was just saying "twitter handle tweet" over and over again for a few passes before someone caught it and it stopped.

This is going to sound like I'm an apologist, but all things considered the WWE Network launch was amazingly successful. Yeah, some things didn't work from the start, but the biggest mess arguably wasn't 100% their fault (Xbox 360 app being broken). Considering the amount of people hammering the service the first few days, I don't think they could have had it gone too much better. Their biggest hurdle to overcome probably won't be anything service related, but the impatience of the ADD Generation who expect large undertakings like this to work flawlessly from the jump. I didn't see too much of it here, but the WON board was flooded with threads full of people whining over the slightest bump in the road as if it was their birthright for this to be flawless. Protip: the free trial was more or less the beta test to see how well things held up when the floodgates opened. Clearly their biggest concern was the live feed since that's where PPVs will be shown, once that showed to be running smoothly (save for the hiccup during the NXT show) the VOD stuff started working better as well.

If people who read DA SHEETZ are such a tiny minority according to WWE, then why would they think leaking Punk being on Raw would mean anything?

Someone should tell Cena that mentioning he's doing the same thing now he did in 2002 is kind of the reason 75% of the audience is sick of him.

HHH probably has such a huge boner while doing this promo.

Oh my, HHH and Steph coming out.

The internet turning on crowds is a real snake-eating-its own-tail phenomenon.

Or it could be that they've done that match a million times in the last two weeks or so, and it's two characters fans have zero reason to give a shit about.

Knowing JBL is the mouthpiece, maybe Vince is pissed JR is doing good business with his speaking shows. Or that there's a lot of people on tweeting about how the WWE Network made them miss JR on commentary.

You think if Punk turns heel in front of this crowd, we get the whole Bash at the Beach 96 treatment with trash being thrown?

I don't see how Punk did anything wrong other than leaving minutes before Raw, and even that was because Vince was holed up doing rewrites all day. He mentioned in the interview he did with Ariel Helwani that he's been trying to get an answer for months on how payoffs would work in the post-WWE Network era and no one had any answers. I know if my boss was changing a major metric I was being paid on right before the biggest payday of the year, I'd get pretty pissy if I couldn't get any answers.

Wonder if the crowd sound was tweaked. Fast turn around! When is the DVD scheduled? Just finished watching, the sound doesn't seem to be tweaked at all.

Yes, it's definitely some sort of Indian/South Asian based call center. They're also using some preschool level troubleshooting scripts as well. I guess that's probably fine for 95% of their calls, but since I already cleared my cache they seem stumped.

So WWE advised me to call in to tech support for the videos still not playing on my mac mini, and I lol'd mightily at the hold music being the Real Americans theme.

Televised matches in the 80s tended to have inconclusive and/or bullshit finishes since the money was in the house shows in those days, but I think a lot of people these days don't seem to realize that (present company excluded of course).

Putting Punk in the title match would send a strong message that they aren't interested in listening to the fans, which could lead to a bigger negative reaction than Orton-Batista alone would have got.

With recent current events being what they are, we could be on the verge of my favorite wrestling stereotype coming back in vogue: evil Russians!

They tend to ignore PPV buys/TV ratings when it shows someone they have a hard on over isn't working, but seem to be quick to use them as an excuse to torpedo a guy they didn't intend to get behind.

From a kayfabe perspective it works better when you have a main roster heel show up and be all "you young kids aren't on my level yet". Then you can have the NXT babyface prove him wrong and at the same time you're telling the fans that this guy can hang with the main roster.

It's amazing that in a family that includes Bray Wyatt, Bo looks most like the creepy guy who probably has bodies in the basement. Something about the way he does the babyface smiling gimmick as a heel gives off a better American Psycho vibe than Sam Shaw could ever hope for.