NintendoLogic

He was involved in a pretty wild brawl against Hiro Saito on 6/12/86. It consists largely of Saito punching Fuchi's bloody ear, so it should be right up your alley. And his 3/28/89 match against Mitsuo Momota is probably the best junior title match in All Japan history.

He's part of the amazing 6/26/90 ten-man, but New Japan multi-mans are basically a cheat code.

Replace "music" with "wrestling" and you've got me in a nutshell.

The only Alexa matches I liked were the ones against Ronda. Having her gain some momentary heat by cheating or stalling before being thoroughly destroyed is the best possible use for her. The fact that she was pushed as a dominant heel for so long is an atrocity. And the notion that she could be considered one of the 100 greatest wrestlers who ever lived is preposterous.

Dave said a while back that Terry Funk has an incredibly high opinion of himself, as well he should. And I know you're taking the piss with Bob Holly, but he said in his book that he considers Shawn Michaels the greatest of all time. He buries the shit out of HBK in every other respect, so you know he's sincere. Bret has said that when he calls himself the best there is, was, ever will be, it's based on three things. One, he never injured an opponent in the ring. Two, he only missed one scheduled booking, and that was due to a cancelled flight. Three, he never refused to put anyone over (other than...you know). He's always said that he considers Dynamite Kid the greatest in-ring worker, though. As for Hogan, he called Flair the greatest of all time in an interview a few months ago.

I rewatched Brock/Punk, and the only table spot is when Brock biels Punk onto the announce table. Still an amazing match, probably the best match of either man's career.

The 2/28/92 hair match against Masakre.

He did say he never wants to fully retire, but he also said his career as a full-timer is winding down. Meltzer once said that Bryan actually enjoys being on the road and traveling with the boys. However, Bob Sapp once said something to the effect that the richer he was, the more getting punched in the face hurt. By the same token, being on the road constantly isn't nearly as appealing when you're financially secure and have two small children.

Allow me to join in wishing you the best. And don't feel like you owe us an explanation. Like we said in the very beginning, you should walk away as soon as recapping starts to feel like a job or an obligation. Even more so if real life is getting in the way.

Isn't the limp handshake supposed to be a way of letting people know you aren't stiff in the ring and they can trust you with their body? Of course he ain't doing that.

It wasn't quite based on nothing. Nick Khan said a couple of weeks ago that Becky would be returning in the not-too-distant future and Ronda would also be returning at some point. Some people took that to mean both would be returning soon.

It was a video of Ronda announcing that she was pregnant. It looks like she took it down for some reason, though.

Well, so much for her coming back any time soon.

The main problem with Tessa in Impact as far as drawing goes is that there's no market for intergender wrestling outside of low-rent indies. In fact, it's an active anti-draw to the public as a whole. See also, Lucha Underground.

Good brother @KinchStalker reviewed a bunch of Kimura's IWE matches over at Cagematch. It looks like he gave the highest rating to the 1976 cage match against Gypsy Joe. It should be noted that the cage match was Kimura's signature match.

Look at the Ki/Aries thread. We have ample evidence that being an unprofessional shithead in pro wrestling strongly correlates with shitheadedness in other areas.

Tessa was scheduled to drop the title at Slammiversary on July 18. The problem was that her contract expired on June 30. They tried to get her to drop the title several times beforehand, but they couldn't reach an agreement. She also refused to send it taped promos, which forced them to re-edit several episodes of Impact. I get where she was coming from, but the reality of the situation is that when you have the kind of baggage she does, you have to play ball.

According to the book (or at least the PDF version), Jim Barnett was working on a deal where Hart would manage Ivan Koloff when he beat Bruno for the title. Then, after Koloff dropped the belt to Pedro, he'd bring them both to Australia with a big push as "the duo that beat Bruno." But Bruno shut down any attempts to bring Hart to New York because a WWWF prelim guy who had worked Amarillo told him that Hart had badmouthed him. I can't imagine Vince the Elder putting the heat from ending Bruno's title reign on a fly-in manager, so the story sounds fishy to me.

I'm a huge fan of the Hart Foundation's matches against the British Bulldogs (9/23/85) and the Killer Bees (2/17/86). I'd put them up against any 80s US tag outside of Midnight Rockers vs. Rose/Somers.

Look, all I know about soccer is that UEFA and FIFA are corrupt as fuck and anything that shafts them is likely an unqualified good.

I never would have guessed that someone who thinks he can prove his toughness by stiffing the shit out of people in fake fights might be susceptible to idiotic ideas. And it's not even a case of plausible deniability where maybe he thought "Save the Children" was an innocuous-sounding slogan. He straight-up posted a video of Lin Wood ranting about the House of Windsor and the Vatican. Luckily for me, I never liked the guy even before I knew he was a Trump-supporting anti-masker. If you haven't seen it before, check out this match where he knocks his opponent out legit right at the beginning and then picks him up so he can get his shit in rather than just taking the pin. Looking back, the highlight of his career was when LayCool was making him wear pink shirts.

According to Observers from that period, the WWF seriously considered having Vince manage Doc and William Regal since they both started with the company around the same time, the idea being that he was bringing in two shooters to destroy Austin. I don't know how well that would have worked, but it would've been a million times better than what they eventually did.

I saw Kane in an airport a few years ago. I didn't approach him since he was in the middle of a conversation, but he only looked to be a few inches taller than me. I'd peg him at about 6'5. Certainly nowhere near 7 feet tall.

As others have noted, pro wrestling for much of its history has been a wretched hive of scum and villainy. I decided some time ago that if I wanted to institute a morals clause in my viewing, it would serve me better to simply stop watching altogether. I'd rather not do that because I believe wrestling has enough intrinsic merit to be worth trying to clean up. I also believe that the enjoyable aspects can be decoupled from the problematic ones. In the meantime, I cope by maintaining complete emotional detachment so that it hardly fazes me when a wrestler dies prematurely or is revealed to be a garbage human being. I will say that it took me years before I could bring myself to watch Benoit's matches again. In fact, I stopped watching wrestling entirely for two and a half years following the murders. I don't particularly enjoy watching him these days, but that's because my tastes have shifted significantly over the past decade and a half. It's an aesthetic judgment, not a moral one. I should note that Benoit was my favorite wrestler in the world, possibly of all time, in the mid-2000s. As such, he's still catalogued in my brain primarily as a wrestler I loved to watch rather than a family annihilator. There's a good chance I'd have a different perspective if I'd never seen any of his matches prior to June 2007. The idea of separating art from the artist goes back to the New Criticism school of literary studies, which tried to cast literary criticism as a scientific endeavor. For them, a work of art was self-contained and independent of the world as a whole. Just as a scientist's personal life and views have no bearing on the validity of a scientific theory, neither do a poet's have any impact on the literary merit of a poem. That approach might be questionable for art and literature, but I think it works pretty well for wrestling. For one thing, wrestling matches really are self-contained and outside of everything other than other matches and match builds. More importantly, matches are devoid of any real content, so there's no issue with the creator's worldview seeping into the creation. It's not as if there's a pro-child rape subtext in Lawler's matches or a pro-child murder subtext in Benoit's. In that respect, it's a lot closer to sport than art. Like, the fact that so many of Woody Allen's films are about middle-aged men lusting after much younger women surely has to weigh on the viewer, but OJ Simpson's crimes are irrelevant to how good of a running back he was. In the end, though, where to draw the line and whether the line should be drawn in the first place are emotional decisions rather than intellectual ones.

I don't remember that spot in the Punk match. I'll keep an eye out for it the next time I watch it. It definitely happened in the Balor match. In fact, the story of the match was Brock getting his abdomen worked over after going into the table.