Robert S

That smile though, god, that smile.

Give me Corey & Rosenberg back, if that gets Steph away from my screen.

I did not realize until now that AJ Styles is starting to look like Chris Jericho (while Chris Jericho is starting to look like Greg Valentine).

Same for me, on PS4 the "Continue Watching" bar is also gone (I can still access it via my profile, but still). That pre-show has being going on for 25 minutes and I already feel like I have been watching a 4 hour show.

Jeremy Borash being in WWE is what gives people hope that those two matches might be on the plus side.

That's two minutes of my life I will never get back.

In which region, if I may ask?

Today is the first day of a lax curfew over here (Austria). I prepared as well as possible to start with home office tomorrow. Actually, two people of my group or currently under quarantine. One was skiing in a resort that is now a Corona red zone a week ago and the other ten days ago had contact to someone who eventually tested positive for Corona. Currently, my state has got 72 confirmed cases (in approx. 400k people), though there are something like 450 open cases, where test results are not yet in. Though there geographically close regions, that are much harder effected (Lombardy for example, maybe a three hour drive away, yesterday had something like 13k cases in a population of 10 Million; but looking at the death rate they have, the real numbers are higher by probably a factor of 10).

Depends on where you are, here in Europe, we had an extraordinary warm winter here in Europe (nature is almost one month ahead, here in Austria, for example), so I am not sure we will see a huge effect for that reason, at least not until May or so.

Consider that we are looking at 2-3 months duration of this crisis in a best-case-scenario (even in China, where they have a strict curfew (which no western country has done yet to that level), it took close to two months to get it under control - that is if you believe the number announced by the Chinese government), June, 7th looks to be too soon.

Fire Ant, not Worker Ant Tony got the line of the night: "I have said it before, I identify with Orange Cassidy because, he doesn't seem to give a rats ass and many days I don't either, so... I'm with you, man." The Cody vs. MJF match was hit-and-miss. It had the right direction as long as MJF was in control, when Cody was, not so much. Why did he go for a roll-up pinfall within the first two minutes of the match? Why did he do that Orton pose? Etc. With MJF winning, maybe you could spin it that Cody after all still did not take MJF seriously enough, but I am sure that was not the intention. I don't know if the fault is on Cody's side or it was bad agenting, probably a bit of both. The timing of MJF's blade job also seemed weird. Disaster Kick -> halt of the match due to Wardlow interference and AA shenanigans -> MJF stands up with the crimson mask.

This. For someone like me, who does not care a bit about the more is less (or whatever) style that is currently predominant in US mainstream wrestling, the perfect way to watch AEW is to jump from angle/interview segment to angle/interview segment and skip the matches, except if it has someone in it who still takes at least a bit of time (like one of the Runnels boys or Jericho).

His son-in-law calling himself the King of Kings... Though the Brother Love thing is not really mocking religion, just mocking televangelists.

Wouldn't the same thing apply for The Sheik as well? He was a regular opponent of Bruno in the late 60ies / early 70ies.

I think the format and layout stuff is just because that is what you got when creating your homepage with FrontPage or whatever, i.e. html-only etc. (in those days you were lucky when people were not experimenting with Flash or whatever because that made the sites almost unusable performance-wise). From the classic sites I just checked and solie.org is still up. Other early favorites of mine include Kayfabe Memories (which still is up) and Narbosa (which is long dead; a site I think hosted on AOL that had some Japanese matches in realmedia format downloadable).

I am pretty sure he had a trainer contract with WWE (though if you would have asked me before looking up any results from him, I would have said it was Heartland), but was let go pretty quickly as it turned out the wrestling was too natural for him to be able to explain (teach) what and how to do.

As I was interested about that, I went over the WON Hall of Fame and looked at guys who fulfill the following criteria: (1) fully active in the 1960ies or later (I know that Capitol Sports is older, though the results from the 50ies are so spotty, that I would rely even less on them) (2) in the Hall of Fame mainly for his (her) wrestling career (i.e. no Jerry Jarrett or Gary Hart) (3) were based in the US or Canada for a significant portion of their career (i.e. no Japanese, Mexican or British wrestlers, except people Billy Robinson or Masa Saito, but not a Keiji Muto who was basically in the US as learning excursion) (4) source is cagematch.net (which obviously is neither complete nor fully accurate, if you consider the uncertainty about some co-promoted shows or similar) That left me with the following wrestlers, who are not listed as having wrestled for Capitol Sports, WWWF, WWF or WWE: Danny Hodge, Fritz von Erich, Bobby Eaton, Stan Lane, Dennis Condrey, Tom Renesto and the Sharpe Brothers. Though there are some people, that only have wrestled there at the very beginning of their career (e.g. Jody Hamilton long before he became The Assassin) or only did something like the legends battle royal in 1987 (like Lou Thesz or Nick Bockwinkel).

I watched the first two matches and the women's title match. Even ignoring that the WWE Network currently tries to fuck with me (or rather the PS4 app that gets more and more broken as time goes on), I have no desire to watch the rest. The Nox vs. Kai match was by far my favorite. For most of the match they at least tried to do a heel vs. face streetfight instead of just going for big spots and getting pops. As someone has already posted here: why do they continue trying to do table spots with these 140 lbs women? These have at best a breakage rate of 50%, and if they do not break, the spots end up looking shitty and (2) they end up in very dangerous situations. The opening match had lot of what I hate about current wrestling. A couple of years ago I listened to a WALTER interview where he complained about small guys doing power spots and big guys doing flying spots, as it means that in the end everybody is the same. If you are 300 pounds and want to do flying spots, do one or two per match, but not 20. Doing lots of those spots (1) make them in total look less impressive while it (2) puts way more stress on your body.

I also got Stevie Ray and I am sure not all the Von Erichs wrestled for Capitol Wrestling/WWWF/WWF (obviously Mike and Chris did not; did Fritz ever work Capitol or WWWF? cagematch has no results for him there) Jimmy Garvin might also be a tricky one, cagematch only has two results on co-promoted Montreal shows for him.

How do you get through a 30+ minutes Taichi match?

I haven't watched NXT in two months or so, but did Duke & Shafir suddenly become not horrible in the ring? I'll put the over/under by when he becomes "just another guy" at 4 weeks.

From a kayfabe point-of-view the ending was strange. The match was titles vs. masks and the Steiners won basically by unmasking Reed. I suppose the idea was that the mask should have gone of "accidentally" at the headlock and when it did not Rick called an audible and removed it manually.

Using that Churchill "we shall fight them on the beaches" speech in the opening montage of the show did not help to change that image. Wolfe has some bad luck on these shows, he also got his face rearranged on the first NXT War Games show.

There were also a bunch of WCW-NJPW co-promoted events: the Tokyo Dome show in March 91 and the 1/4 Tokyo Dome shows in 92 and 93 plus the North Korea shows in 95. The first of these shows had Steiner vs. Hase & Sasaki, for example.

Tommy Cairo? Ironman Tommy Cairo wrestled in UWFi? That has to be the strangest gaijin booking in the history of gaijin bookings.