NintendoLogic

His Observer obit notes that New Japan wouldn't clear him to return due to heart issues, which they believed were steroid-related. He had also been banned from amateur wrestling for testing positive for steroids, which he claimed was due to a tainted supplement. Sadly, it looks like the obvious explanation is the likeliest one. 36 is way too young.

On the other hand, he also did his best Michael Cole impression when he called for Snyder to sell the team, a line that had to have been fed to him by someone high up in the NFL food chain. Of course the league would love for Snyder to just go away on his own and not have to get their hands dirty taking action against him. Snyder vs. the NFL is the biggest heel/heel feud in pro sports today.

The Good Brothers returning blew the roof off the building. We are clearly in an era where any kind of happening will pop the crowd.

There was an issue a few years ago with Manami Toyota being upset at Bea Priestley for using the Japanese Ocean Cyclone Suplex without her permission. Just about everyone else thought she was being ridiculous, though.

You mean the famous song about how great it is to be born in the USA?

I'd say the best Rude match of 1993 was against The Boss (man, is he big) on the 12/18 WCWSN. I'd also suggest checking out the Thundercage match from SBIV.

Or all the people who read Watchmen and saw Rorschach as the hero, which is the opposite of what Alan Moore intended.

Razor Ramon was a ripoff of Tony Montana that Vince supposedly thought was a genius original creation of Scott Hall because he had never seen Scarface. In addition, you have have Sting ripping off The Crow and Waylon Mercy ripping off Max Cady from Cape Fear.

A TV title for a company that hasn't had prime time TV in nearly four decades is certainly a choice. Also, the belt looks like an Apple Watch.

Hopefully it leads to a reprise of one of the all-time classic moments in the history of our sport.

I was greatly amused by the fact that Bray Wyatt being Sister Abigail was immediately dropped and never mentioned again because it was universally regarded as lame as hell even by the standards of Wyatt lore.

Bray Wyatt has always sucked, but I think the degree to which he hurts the people he feuds with is a bit overstated. The only ones who were damaged to the point where they had to turn were Seth Rollins and Miz, who are garbage babyfaces to begin with.

Last night was the first time they mentioned that Matt Riddle beat Jon Jones in high school. The coming months should make clear which of WWE's recent issues are endemic to the company culture and which ones were simply Vince's brain worms.

Well, NJPW vs. UWFi was biggest money-drawing feud in history up to that point. NJPW technically acquire UWFi, but it called all the shots in the feud since the other company was in such dire financial straits.

This whole discussion is such disingenuous bullshit. The vast majority of anti-AEW dead-enders clearly don't give a shit about the rights of labor (at least as pertains to pro wrestling) and are just using whataboutism as a club to beat the company with. You know you're not listening to a serious person when you hear the claim that the executives should help their workers unionize, which the National Labor Relations Act explicitly prohibits.

A lot of the top guys have agents. Chris Jericho and Kenny Omega are both represented by Barry Bloom.

The middle ground is wrestlers not signing deals that lock them down for multiple years. The bidding war has given talent the most leverage they've had in years. They'd be fools not to take advantage of it.

I'm envisioning Tony telling the locker room you can't just punch your problems away like Diddy on the Making the Band episode of Chappelle's Show.

I have a feeling Roxanne Perez will be a mainstay in Booker's Fave Five.

The key difference is that WWE treats contracts as a one-way street that only impose binding obligations on the other party. Tony has always held up his end and only terminated people for cause, so it's not unreasonable to expect the wrestlers he signs to do likewise. Plus, granting releases to everyone to asks for one would effectively reward WWE for contract tampering. The bigger takeaway is that wrestlers should never sign multi-year deals unless they're certain it's the last one they'll ever sign.

Maybe Tony ended up being convinced by all the criticism of running mask vs. career with hardly any build.

Someone on Reddit suggested that he and Hangman form a Wild West gunslinger tag team, which is actually brilliant.

Pretty much everybody in Mexico wrestles for peanuts relative to top stars in the US and Japan, which is why foreign bookings are such a precious commodity. One of CMLL's big advantages in that regard was the New Japan connection, but that's largely dried up due to COVID. Also, there's still a strong mentality (or at least there was a decade or so ago) that Arena Mexico is the cathedral of lucha libre and you haven't really made it until you've worked there.

If nothing else, bringing in guys whose only loyalty is to a paycheck makes it likely that some of them will try to undermine the company from within, like when Bobby Fish tried to convince Adam Cole and Kyle O'Reilly to ask for their releases so they could all go back to WWE.

Hey, at least you don't live in Florida. Speaking of which...