sek69

I think MMA is a convenient excuse for an indy group that has threatened to shut down several times in the past, and with a few exceptions have put on a horrible product.

Wait, Spike is pushing TNA to hire Heyman? I thought they had a messy breakup over Heyman mocking them on ECW TV back when they were on the Nashville Network.

"World Wide Wrestling Entertainment".....on one hand, an inexcusable goof for a major news outlet. on the other, it's a hilarious amalgam of 40 years of wrestling history.

(because Loss is probably sick of all the MMA=wrestling talk) So it was a pretty good show, all things considered. All the matches delivered (well ok, I missed the Divas title match but no one died so I'll assume that it was uneventful), as WWE seems to be continuing the "push new guys" environment that they have had going on recently. I know that sounds odd on a show where Kane won and cashed in the Money in the Bank, but I have a feeling that one day we'll look back at the Miz in the Raw match like we do for HBK in the ladder match with Razor. I've thought for a while he has that elusive "it" that you need to succeed in wrestling, and it looks like this will be his chance to run with the ball. I always think that they'll run out of creative things to do with the ladders in the MITB matches, but watching Morrison create a Rube Goldberg device to climb from one ladder to another had me marking out. I was surprised how little heat the Sheamus/Cena match had. I wonder how much of that was the Nexus creating the nWo Effect where the crowd knows a run in is coming at some point and don't bother getting excited about the match. Also I noticed a rare oversight in production. After Sheamus escaped the cage, they showed him running through the crowd but you didn't see (or at least I didn't see) any of the Nexus guys chasing him, nor did the announcers mention it. Then when Cena was beating up Young and Tarver I spent the whole time thinking "what happened to the rest of the Nexus?" Normally WWE is better at making things like that clear to the viewer. Also I'm not sure how well they sold the "Cena won the battle but lost the war" part of the match when we were supposed to believe Nexus "won" by screwing Cena out of the title but the closing shots were 3 of them laid out. The tag match was nice too, I hope they didn't lose faith in the Usos and Tamina already by how much the angle was depushed after their initial awesome debut.

I know they've acknowledged the victory before, I thought it was odd they would want to remind anyone directly of events that took place in Kansas City in 1999 considering the lawsuits that are flying around. By that I mean Over the Edge is like a reverse Benoit deal, individually the matches are acknowledged but the show itself is on the list of Things That Shall Not Be Mentioned.

Anyone else hear Matt Striker on the ppv mentioning the WWE title changed hands twice in Kansas City, the most memorable being the Undertaker in 1999? Kind of an odd thing to mention considering the lawsuit.

Thanks. If there are comments, are they included in the HOF issue when talking about that particular person? Or does Dave do an issue in effect saying "These guys are in; here's a short bio of their careers?" He does a capsule of the guys that make it, sometimes he gets a little more involved if they were from a long ago era or that guy who was basically the El Santo of Argentina.

I'm surprised TNA didn't have Jay Lethal do an impression of it.

As far as the draw thing, didn't Smackdown's ratings stay basically the same after Rey got moved to Raw? Also, again, I'm not saying Rey isn't a great worker. I am saying we can all come up with dozens of guys who were great workers yet are not considered HOF worthy. There's also the matter of him being probably the worst booked champion WWE has had since Jericho was picking up dog poop for Steph.

I'm not doubting Rey didn't have good to great matches, I just thought there was more to it than that in terms of being considered HOF worthy. Doesn't it go by if the person was the top draw or was considered the best worker in the company they were in? I don't think you could ever say that about Rey in any company he was in. Or is this more of a case of someone Dave wants in so the usual excuses when excluding someone don't apply?

I'm not trying to be contrarian when I say I don't get why everyone thinks Rey is a shoo-in. He did help usher in the era of crusierweight style wrestling in ECW, but he was never really a top star in WCW (most people still remember him being lawn darted by Kevin Nash more than anything else), and his time on top in WWE was more or less him taking Eddie's place than anything else. He's been a draw among Hispanic viewers, but is that HOF worthy? I guess you could say he sells a lot of merch to kids, but so does John Cena and I could just imagine the flip outs if people used that as justification for Cena in the HOF.

I'd think if Big Daddy gets overlooked again, Dave will never be able to go to those English UFC shows without being harassed. Is it just a matter of him not "getting" British wrestling or does he not understand how a big fat guy could be his country's version of Hulk Hogan? Also, these would be my picks: 1. The Assassins (do tag teams count as one pick?) 2. Carlos Colon 3. Rock n Roll Express 4. Sgt. Slaughter (gets overlooked, but there's a lot of footage of his peak available now) 5. Sting (he was WCW for a long time, the fact that WCW ended the way it did probably hurts him) 6. Steve Williams 7. Perro Aguyao Jr. 8. Cien Caras 9. Big Daddy 10. Johnny Saint Non wrestlers: 1. Bill Apter (his magazines did more to promote wrestling than some promoters did) 2. Gorilla Monsoon (Dave seems to still be sour on him, but he seems to have left a huge impact on everyone he worked with)

Was Ryan Genesis in WWE developmental at one point? It might have been someone else I'm thinking of since 75% of people that have been in their system look exactly like him.

I always had the feeling his death was similar to Gino Hernandez, they both seemed to have pissed off some bad people and then died of overdoses.

I just found a show on The Comcast Network here called Showtime Allstar Wrestling and it's so southern indy it's awesome. It's apparently booked/owned by Reno Riggins and they run out of Tennessee. The show itself takes place in a bar/billiard room and is sponsored by a bail bond company that runs ads during the show. They have a guy doing what could probably be best described as a junior Ric Flair gimmick where he's brash and cocky but since he's Teen Excitement the bouncers won't let him in the bar the show is being taped at. They did a great bit where he had a Flair style spaz out in front of the bar, then still was able to hit the catchphrase at the end of his segment. The wrestling was pretty good too, considering most of the guys are people you've never heard of. It's like a weird time warp to southern territory wrestling that somehow got transported to 2010. I've already set a series recording on my DVR based on tonight's show alone. I'd post a link to their website, but they're so indy the address they kept pimping on the show brings up a 404 error.

Considering he really hasn't made much of a defense for it beyond "because I said so" I'd be inclined to believe he knows it's a card he can play to rile people up.

Maybe I'm just dense, but I still don't understand why he seems to think the only two things in the world that operate that way are MMA and wrestling. Every sport that ever got popular on any level did so based on the personalities of their athletes. Football became huge in the 70s when the AFL made games more exciting by opening up the passing game and by introducing guys with personality to the audience. Wrestling sure seemed to notice since a lot of those guys either moonlighted as wrestlers or made the full transition like Wahoo or Ernie Ladd. I guess if the Observer existed back then, we'd be hearing about how football is the new pro wrestling and the NWA better start changing it's business to be like the NFL. In all, this is what is so infuriating about the whole argument as he plainly states MMA took what boxing did for a hundred years and did it better. MMA doesn't have a guy like Don King keeping all the good fighters apart, when someone tries to play hardball with UFC, Dana tells them (sometimes literally) to go fuck themselves. I guess that makes him more Vince McMahon than Vince? Also another huge part of the discussion that gets glossed over is that when UFC started really gaining, there was no more Monday Night War going on. How many of those lapsed wrestling fans would have started watching UFC in 2005 if they still had Raw and Nitro to choose from? If you really want to make the MMA = wrestling argument, you have to as well admit that the conditions were ripe for them to strike when they did since WWE was getting stagnant from no real competition which bored a lot of the longtime fans.

LOL @ Dave pointing out in the last WON that Alberto Del Rio's gimmick of being more educated and richer than everyone is basically a shoot Mil Mascaras gimmick. Guess that would explain why he's been so good at it the last few weeks.

As much as Cena would probably benefit from a heel turn in terms of freshening his character, I don't see how making him the leader of the group that has spent its existence so far kicking his ass would make much sense.

I guess my main point is when Dave and Co say things like "MMA is doing pro wrestling better than WWE", when what really is happening is that MMA is doing boxing better than boxing does in terms of building both guys in a fight in order to maximize their earning potential no matter who wins. Case in point is that Dave (and a lot of people he talks to) think the Mayweather/De La Hoya 24/7 shows were the best "pro wrestling" shows ever done because of how they hyped people to want to see the fight. The truth is boxing used to do that shit all the time, look at how Ali more or less cribbed from the pro wrestling heel textbook to become the star he did. He and Frazier had an equally brutal verbal battle as they did in the ring. I don't want to diminish what UFC/MMA has done in such a relatively short period of time, they've made a sport like boxing (which has been around for over 100 years and at one time was the biggest sport in the US) almost completely redundant. To me, the only damaging effect MMA will have on pro wrestling would be that amateur wrestling guys will now go to MMA instead of to pro wrestling. Considering how little that most MMA fighters get paid, I have to wonder if that's because there's no other choice in pro wrestling but WWE. You'd have to think if there were still territories, a solid college wrestler would probably stand to make more money working for say a Bill Watts in Mid South, or even for Verne in the AWA, than he would in MMA.

Brock's MMA appeal comes from him being a scary ass legit bad dude with freakish strength and cardio for someone his size. Yes there was the segment who wanted to see a fake pro wres fighter get schooled in real fighting, but I don't think there's that many people who bought his last UFC fight based on his WWE experience. Just because UFC has high production value doesn't mean they copied them from WWE any more than the NFL or any other pro sport that cares about not looking cheap on TV. As far as them booking matches, they book much more similar to boxing where they build up the personalities involved since they don't have any control over the outcome. That way, if both guys are built up prior to a fight, then they have an equal chance to make money on whoever wins. Wrestling on the other hand usually only builds up the person they are booking to win. If anything, wrestling should copy how UFC builds fights. There's no debate MMA can be considered an offshoot of wrestling, especially with how it evolved in Japan from shootstyle wrestling groups and whatnot. On that point, I believe I mentioned before that no one makes the argument that soccer, rugby, and American football are all the same thing just because they all share similar roots. Finally, of course it's a business decision to cover UFC, he gets paid to do that - possibly more than he makes from doing the WON. He only used to devote a paragraph, maybe a page at most to MMA before it became a regular gig for him. As he spends more and more time doing work for Yahoo Sports, he becomes more involved in the MMA world. I think that is kind of putting him in a similar bubble you see so many people who spend their life in wrestling trapped in. He seems to think MMA/UFC is on the verge of becoming the #1 sport in the world, but to be honest the only thing you can say it's beating is boxing which has been dying a slow death since Tyson got KO'd.

My only question on the whole MMA=wrestling deal is this: boxing and pro wrestling co-existed for about a hundred years, and there were more than a few times where pro wrestling came across as the less-staged sport of the two. MMA has pretty much replaced boxing in the sports public's eyes so why can't MMA and pro wrestling exist in the same dual space? I mean I know the real answer (Dave sees MMA as his bread and butter for the future and wants to convince the WON base he built to follow him), but it really is mind boggling to see so many people who should know better complementing the Emperor on his new clothes.

They have been showing a lot of his AWA stuff on demand lately, I think Heenan in that period was at least as good as Hart was in Memphis. Not to mention Heenan was involved in a lot of tag team/six man matches during that period where he did a lot of his crazy bumping as opposed to Hart who's big spot was running like Usain Bolt. Again, not saying Hart wasn't great but I think Heenan was at least as good if not better since he was actually capable of working a decent match.

Two things I'll always remember from Taker's debut at Survivor Series: 1. The hush over the crowd as they were trying to figure out what they were seeing since this was like nothing they were used to. 2. Piper on commentary doing his goofy schtick as if he was trying to bury the gimmick right out of the box.

Exactly. Apparently it was Todd's idea to do a SMW-centric show and he did a fine job. I don't listen to his other shows either, but I have no problem with this. Maybe Todd should be reviewing old SMW shows on the site instead of RAW, because the "make a tired dig at the current WWE creative team" is his gimmick.