NintendoLogic

I realize that I'm a distinct minority, but I really wish we could go back to brawls centered around dudes punching each other in the mouth rather than dudes doing stunt spots involving tables and chairs.

Regarding creative control, it was defined as no booking decision over the last 30 days of the contract could be made without the agreement of both parties. People have been trying to hang onto the word reasonable as a defense, and forgetting there was a definition given of the word. -Dave Meltzer

I'm rather amused by the folks who think "A contract is a contract is a contract" is an argument in Vince's favor. Also, Vince always had the option of not putting the belt on a guy whose contract he was about to breach.

Related question: have the heels ever dominated a WWE PPV so thoroughly before?

I think HHH sold Brie's offense more than Stephanie did.

Cool ending aside, that match was pretty pedestrian. I'm still not sold on Bray as a worker.

Between the crowd brawling, outside interference, and finisher theft, that felt like an Attitude Era main event. I liked it a lot, though.

That match was really good, but the postmatch was five stars.

I'm watching on Roku. It glitched a bit during Cesaro's entrance but has been fine otherwise. The match was forgettable overall, but I really liked the sequence where they fought with RVD on the top rope.

Here's the real deal on Brock/Cena courtesy of some jabroni on Scott Keith's website: According to David Bixenspan of the Figure Four Weekly Newsletter, he reported that even if Lesnar doesn't hold the title until WrestleMania, that does not mean he will not be going into WrestleMania as the champion and to not expect several months of the WWE Champion not being at house shows.

I suppose I'd agree that Gorilla sucked relative to some Platonic ideal of what an announcer should sound like. But when you compare him to other actually existing announcers, he looks a lot better. If presented with the choice between Gorilla and Vince, who was basically his polar opposite, I'll take Gorilla any day of the week

There was a period in 2011 when Miz was WWE champion and Mr. Anderson was TNA champion. It doesn't get much worse than that.

A while back, I watched all the Goldberg matches that are generally considered his best (vs. DDP at Havoc, vs. Rock at Backlash, vs. Jericho at Bad Blood), and they all tell the same basic story: Goldberg dominates in the opening minutes, misses a spear and rams his shoulder into the post, gets his arm worked over, hits a spear but can't capitalize because of his injury, ends up winning with the Jackhammer. The Steiner match is an exception.

The contract for "creative control" was written and agreed to in the spirit that Bret would have direction with his character. I don't believe this should have given him the right to decide if and when he could lose the title. What, if he didn't want to lose it, could have left the Federation and gone to WCW without dropping the title? No fucking way. The "creative control" contract was written so Vince didn't dress him up like a fucking clown and make him come out on Raw and wrestle in a slop pit with Henry Godwin. If Vince asked him to drop the company championship at Survivor Series, he should have. He could have had control of how it happened (pinfall after interference, clean, etc), but the belt has to change when the boss says. Bret owns his character with that contract, but not the belt. Reasonable creative control meant that both sides had to agree, as opposed to absolute creative control like Hogan had in WCW where he could simply dictate what was going to happen. And there was zero chance of Bret showing up on Nitro with the belt because the WWF had a lawsuit pending against WCW over the Madusa incident.

For what it's worth, I was more inclined to take the pro-Vince side of the argument until this board convinced me otherwise.

There is no argument. Bret was 100% in the right and Vince and Shawn were 100% in the wrong.

I'm just saying that it was supposedly at that point that the RSPW types stopped reflexively attributing his push to nepotism and conceded that he could work. Kind of like what the hour-long Raw match with HBK did for a lot of people regarding John Cena. You can disagree if you want, but not having been there, it strikes me as plausible.

The third hour of RAW usually dips no matter what is on. Sure, but the drop has been even more pronounced in recent weeks.

Hasn't the Brie/Stephanie storyline been a ratings albatross?

So is anyone else even remotely troubled by the fact that two guys with Confederate flags on their asses were presented as heroic babyfaces? Whenever I watch this match, I root for Lane and Eaton to beat them within an inch of their lives.

Scott Keith has claimed that the Vader match marked the point where smart fans finally accepted Dustin. Is there any basis to that?

There's actually some hopeful precedent. Recall the shockingly great Steph/Trish match from NWO 2001.

I had thought my list was pretty well set in stone, but I've gone and made another semi-major revision. Specifically, I've dropped the more technical/mat-based matches in favor of more straightforward hard-hitting wrestling. New to the list are Duggan/DiBiase, Luger/Steamboat, Steamboat/Douglas vs. Windham/Pillman, Windham/Scorpio, Hash/Yamazaki, and Akiyama/Misawa, replacing Baba/Robinson, Satanico/Cochisse, Savage/Steamboat, Dandy/Casas, Bret/Owen, and Kong/Toyota. My initial plan was to try to expand my list to 100, but in the end I felt better whittling it down again.

That was directed at me? Dude, why would you want to dump that project on me? I thought we were bros.

I think it's the exact opposite. My theory is that a lot of heel fans grew up watching promotions where the heels never really got their comeuppance.