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So what is "the truth about" Dixie? John I'll have to plug my former Cageside Seats colleague Sharon Glencross' pieces on Dixie Carter and TNA management here: A Closer Look At TNA President Dixie Carter Nightmares in Nashville: A look at TNA/Impact Wrestling management From the first link:

Not to beat the "Dave thinks wrestling and MMA are the same thing" dead horse yet again, but he correctly attributes WWE's sagging PPV numbers to them running too many shows and not having interesting matchups. Yet somehow when it comes to UFC it can only be due to people watching streams. To be fair, a lot of it was out of the company's control with so many main events being scrapped at the last minute due to injuries, but you can't discount the WWE effect of each show losing some luster when there's a new PPV nearly every month.

Things I Learned from WO Radio: UFC is losing 100k buys per PPV from piracy because Dave has friends who watch on illegal streams. Even Bryan was all "uhh, I don't think so", but Dave was still "I HAVE SEVERAL FRIENDS WHO WATCH STREAMS!"

I've been watching CMLL every week (well until recently when their US TV schedule went to shit) and Averno is by far the biggest star they have. It's even more impressive considering everyone thought he was screwed after WWE put off calling him up when Mistico started fucking up. The only down side is that the idea apparently was to build La Mascara up as a big star, but Averno's continued availability kept delaying the blowoff and now it looks like Mascara has been officially Lex Luger'd.

Dave's review of the Shawn vs Bret DVD is fascinating, he's blown away at how little bullshit was included in both guys' accounts. I don't know if I was just late on this, but the tidbit where he mentioned that getting KTFO by Bret (on one punch) was the motivation for Vince to go balls-out with his bodybuilding and/or roid use was something I never heard before. I can only imagine how much of a mindfuck it was for someone with Vince's mentality to get owned by a so called "little guy".

That works on several levels when you include the crazy factor.

I don't know about Gagne-Robinson, but a lot of the complaints I see about guys like Cena is how terrible he is at times in the ring. I don't think I'm speaking out of turn by suggesting most of the popular wrestlers among Internet fans tend to be toward the Bryan Danielson/Samoa Joe (when he gave a shit) variety. Unless you're talking about the segment of DVDVR type folks who will occasionally like bad workers ironically in what sometimes seems like an attempt to troll the board into liking someone they normally wouldn't. Let's take a look at huge draws in the WWF/E in the last 20 years or so. 1991-2011. Who would you consider as huge draws who were great workers? Certainly guys like Shawn, Bret, Angle, Lesnar. I would argue that Randy Orton may be close if he isn't there already (but I still remember all the "Blandy Orton" complaints not that long ago). Who were draws that were terrible? Hogan, Taker (not always his fault, but still), Warrior, Austin (tricky since he was a great worker but when he was a huge draw he was primarily a brawler), Kane, Big Show, Cena. Then there are guys like HHH and Rock who did improve but were largely not that great wrestling wise the majority of their time as a top draw. Now you can make an argument that the difference in length between lists isn't as big as Hunter contends, and I wouldn't disagree with that, but I don't really think there's an argument that there were considerably more guys with tons of charisma who didn't light the world on fire in the ring on top than there were guys who tore the house down wrestling wise.

The way I read it, HHH was pointing out that great workers =/= main event drawing power and vice versa. Dave was quibbling on who would qualify as a great worker, but more or less was agreeing with the premise. Key quote: Other than overestimating the percentage of people who like Cena (this was an interview with WWE Magazine after all, can't expect them to be all SHOOTY~! in that regard), Hunter's dead right in this regard. This has been something that always upsets the technical wrestling enthusiasts who make up a majority of the internet scene, and hearing it come from their Public Enemy #1 will only cause more OUTRAGE.

I think the Briscos (well Jack at least) were pretty much done with wrestling at that point and just wanted to cash out and go home. Getting to stick it to Ole was probably just a bonus.

Anyone listen to Bryan's interview with Court Bauer? Pretty interesting look at how toxic the culture is at WWE, especially how he pointed out that Vince Russo is the wrestling equivalent of a cockroach who could survive nuclear holocaust and in Court's words "even he left that fucking company". Also the impending Kevin Dunn vs Steph/HHH war should be interesting as well. Say what you will about a guy who has teeth like billboards deciding if someone is attractive enough for TV, but no one seems to argue how large a part Dunn played in getting their TV production to the point where it's the gold standard in wrestling. Will it stay that way after he's gone?

From what I gathered from people I've talked to who are/have been involved in the indy scene, that guy's actually pretty eloquent. Also for a visual aid, I found his page at HollywoodAuditions.com right here.

Agreed with the slideshows. I kind of feel bad for the author since it's obviously not their choice, but when sites do such an obvious and blatant attempt to maximize pageviews with shit like slideshows and multiple (and often unnecessary) page breaks, it's a huge demotivator to keep reading a site.

Gary Spivey I just assumed it was another dumb WCW gimmick. Imagine my surprise to find out he actually offers his services as a self help guru/psychic, AND the wig is part of his gimmick.

The brief mention of lucha reminded me how amazing it is that guys like Mil, Canek, and Dos Caras Sr. all still pop up from time to time and don't seem to look nearly as deteriorated/horrible as oldtimers in the US or Japan. Granted, lucha has the advantage of being able to hide older guys in multiple man tag matches, but it doesn't seem their legends fall apart at the same rate.

Judging by the ace bandage he had wrapped around his upper thigh, it looked like Kobashi had some sort of hamstring injury. That would certainly explain him walking like that. Not to mention guys with bad knees like his usually end up with pulled hammies from trying to compensate.

I didn't think it was gloom and doom at all, I personally like territory style wrestling. I get SAW wrestling from Tennessee on TV here and I DVR it every week because it's so old-school awesome. I like when it's more or less "two guys don't like each other/want to see who's better and have a match to settle things". Wrestling really isn't all that difficult, and I'm looking forward to watching a show where the oldest guy in the promotion is in his upper 30s.

Listening to Jim Cornette on with Bryan and Dave today, I can't help but get the impression that the new ROH TV show is modeled after what an NWA territory TV show would be if it happened in 2011. Even down to taping in the Davis Arena of OVW fame since it's very much the modern equivalent to the kind of TV studio Crockett would tape in. I kind of hope they go all out with it down to having guys do promos hyping local events. "DAVEY RICHARDS, I WILL BE COMING FOR YOU JANUARY 23rd IN J.L. CORPORATECO ENTERTAINMENTPLEX IN ITHACA NY!"

post-stroke Bret is still in better shape than Flair, Hogan, or even Nash for that matter. The sad truth is most wrestlers are junkies for the pop and won't quit unless they have a doctor tell them "one more match might kill you" like Edge had.

Bryan mentioned it on the latest Bryan and Vinny show without going into detail ("there's a story on the internet about Melina") and pretty much said he was calling shenanigans on it being an actual story.

Lucha Libre USA is coming back to MTV2 for another season on Oct. 1 at 10am, set your DVRs. Also I just now realized that Rebecca Reyes from here is Matt Hardy's girlfriend working under her SHOOT NAME~! Bet now she's wishing she stayed with Mini Halloween (referring to the last season of LLUSA which I'm sure no one here watched). The promo photo on their website is fucking fantastic btw:

Didn't they kind of already have this sort of situation with Hogan vs Rock? Hogan was over huge with the Toronto crowd, and didn't really want to see him lose, but after the fall there was just a slight moment of "aww poop, he lost" which was quickly followed by "wow that was a great fucking match". The only way I see the Miami crowd completely shitting on this is if the match itself is lousy, which may be why they want the Rock to have a few matches beforehand to make sure there's no glitches.

Pretty sure WWE doesn't want anyone outside of the local area seeing the developmental guys, so they can repackage them when they get to WWE and no one will be "Hey, that's X from FCW!". I know OVW used to sell DVDs of their TV show on their website until WWE made them stop (they stream episodes now, but they aren't affiliated anymore). I seem to recall they purposely put FCW on local affiliates instead of the Fox Sports station (Sun Sports? I forget what they call the Florida channel) so only the local market would see it. Also another point to consider: WWE was pretty tight with the NBC family of networks due to the long association with USA. Comcast now owns NBC/Universal so they have a pretty big "in" to carriage on the largest cable company in the US. If they clear that, it pretty much would make the channel a success just for that. Television is very much a monkey-see, monkey-do kind of business and if one of the big boys picks up a channel, the others will follow suit.

(It's in all caps because he is making fun of Sniper, who's "gimmick" is that he is a rude unfunny asshole who always posts in all caps) Greatest Dave'ing of all time. Anyways, Dave seems like a really nice guy but the trolls on the board are really getting to him (personally I think the board is sometimes funny, and the MMA section is alright, but I can definitely see how some people can hate it). It's too bad because it would be awesome to have Dave posting even occasionally on a good board. I don't know which one started it, Dave or Bryan (they both do it now), but it's really fucking annoying when they cherry pick the one douchebag who makes a point that a lot of their fanbase agrees with and paints everyone who might feel that way like said douchebag. It's not like this DC Sniper guy was breaking any new ground in pointing out that Dave seems more interested in MMA these days by a wide margin and a lot of times the wrestling coverage feels like a vestigial organ from a bygone era. It's not like the wrestling news in most issues isn't mostly overviews of CMLL/AAA (provided by Steve Sims/KrisZ/Konnan's secretary) and the Smackdown reviews usually written by Bryan. The WWE blurb at the end is usually most of the wrestling news penned by Dave, and a lot of that is just results from that week's house shows which are mostly the same matches repeated. So in weeks where no BIG NEWZ~! or PPVs take place, you're basically getting 2 or 3 paragraphs of Dave insight in terms of wrestling content and he's got the nerve to act like anyone who points this out is some kind of ingrate. I'm sure years of dealing with assholes on the board has probably caused his opinion of his readership to dive off a cliff, but once again he's showing the same attitude toward his audience he chastises WWE for all the fucking time.

Isn't Karen a heel, though? Yes, but it was jarring for her to tell a (relatively) healthy looking woman to lose some weight, and then have your main women's program feature someone who looks like they are literally starving to death before our eyes.

Watching Impact on the dvr, holy shit Angelina Love is scary right now. Like, "jesus christ why doesn't someone do something" scary. Oh yeah, almost forgot, earlier on the same show Karen Jarrett told Velvet Sky she was fat and needed to lay off the cupcakes. Guess when your head writer is 50 years old and still working through getting rejected by the pretty girls in high school there's no hope.