NintendoLogic

Why would they do that? Sticking Rusev in a feud with another non-American would probably cool him off greatly. Anyway, I live in Texas now, so I briefly considered attending until I saw the ticket prices, which were absolutely insane for a B-PPV.

I have no problem with watching Benoit matches, though I will admit that it took me a while to get to that point. The problem with drawing a line is that the wrestling business has been populated throughout its history almost exclusively by moral reprobates. In the wake of the Zumhofe trial, Dave made the point that sleeping with underage girls was as common among 80s wrestlers as steroid abuse.

If you're great when you want to be, you're great.

The list is more a reflection of the politics of the time than anything else. If it had come out a couple of years earlier, Flair almost certainly would have been #1. But since he was in TNA at the time, they couldn't put him over to any real degree. On the flip side, Bret would have gotten the mid-20s consolation prize as someone who was too big a deal to ignore but still had to be punished for disloyalty. But since he was back in WWE's good graces at that point, he was right at the top. As for Undertaker, I think his status in WWE can be chalked up mainly to two things. One, he's never been on the outs politically. Two, he's still technically active, so putting him over also puts over the modern product.

And if Sting was actually a great worker.

Another way Stephanie would try to play the cool heel is when she would put lesser heels like Miz in their place during backstage segments.

The finish to the Cena/Batista LMS match was fucking awful. The whole point of the stipulation is that you have to physically dominate your opponent, not fucking MacGyver your way to a fluke win. Completely killed the gimmick dead. Amazingly, the I Quit match had an even stupider spot. Batista passed out in the STF, but since he didn't say I quit, it didn't mean anything, so Cena splashed some water on him to revive him. It was positively Russo-esque.

Let's remember that the Invasion PPV did more buys than any non-Mania PPV in history, and that was with WCW's B-team. The idea of WWF vs. WCW was enough of a draw that it could've been the biggest money angle in history even with the guys they had.

He probably forgot to shake someone's hand backstage or something.

WWE hasn't broken 4 million total PPV buys since 2009. The big three still do good numbers, but business for B-shows has completely collapsed. WWE hasn't broken 2 million total worldwide attendance since 2010. Not quite. There will always be an audience that will watch and pay for wrestling in some form, and WWE has the advantage of being the only game in town. It would take TNA-level incompetence to drive those fans away en masse.

The discussion seems to have shifted from shortest great matches to greatest short matches.

Technically yes, but they were all slip-on-a-banana-peel fluke finishes.

Even assuming for the sake of argument a perfect correlation between strong booking and strong business (a highly dubious proposition), the numbers don't shake out in WWE's favor. It's easy to cherry-pick individual successes, but if you look at the big picture, the overall trend is down, down, down. It's not falling off a cliff like 2000 WCW, but it's a slow steady decline. Other than rights fees, what aspects of WWE's business are stronger now than they were five years ago? Not attendance. Not ratings. Not PPV buys even before they blew up the PPV model with the Network. When the business press is openly questioning whether the McMahons should still be running things, that's not a good sign.

Vince clearly has a blind spot when it comes to booking outside invaders (like Flair in 1991 and Lesnar in 2012), but he's far from the only promoter with that issue. Look at how Crockett treated the UWF and how New Japan treated UWFi.

I do think that matches generally need at least ten minutes to really get cooking. Off the top of my head, the shortest match I can think of that I would consider great is Luger/Windham vs. Arn/Tully from the first Clash, which was 9:35.

The people who are constantly down on WWE booking are far less exhausting, and far more consistently correct, than the dead-enders who continually insist that WWE never makes booking mistakes.

Davey Richards vs. Eddie Edwards at Best in the World is by far the worst match I've ever seen that's been pimped as great. Just comically bad on every level. MST3K-worthy. And I hear that their match at Final Battle (which I believe is where the infamous superplex gif comes from) is even worse. Someone should upload it for the lulz.

I don't know if it's possible to condition fans to the extent it was in the past. We live in an era of instant gratification, and I'm not sure fans have the patience to be re-educated. Then again, with the way promotions these days change course at the first sign of a headwind, maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Wasn't that Stevie Richards' gimmick in TNA?

So HHH likes really big matches because he's compensating? That explains a lot, actually. Anyway, I don't think there's any reason for a match to go longer than 30 minutes. With that said, my three favorite matches of all time are all longer than 35 minutes, and two of them are longer than 40. So who knows.

*raises hand* Sorry, small men doing gymnastics does nothing for me. Funny you should mention that. I was watching Dean Malenko vs. Norman Smiley the other day, and I don't know what you could call it other than a mat-based spotfest. I don't think matwork for its own sake has any more merit than high spots for their own sake.

I am. Spotfests without any real psychology are just athletic exhibitions, and if I want to see that, I'll watch Olympic gymnastics or something.

Nick Bockwinkel had his own way of dealing with the "boring" chants that started to appear in the 80s. If he was getting them, he'd lock in a chinlock and show them what boring really looked like. He felt that if he sped up because of fan chants, he was letting the fans call the match, and that was supposed to be his job. Oh, and fuck realism in wrestling. Real fights are boring. Wrestling is great precisely because it's fake.

I'm not seeing it. By my reckoning, he's had one really good year (2012) and a few solid but unspectacular ones while apparently producing nothing of note during his pre-WWE career.

Wrestling was a lot better back when the goal was to work the fans rather than entertain them.