Robert S

Besides the stupidity of the angle at the end, is there any rationality of doing this gimmick besides "wrestling fans are white trash, what does white trash love besides wrestling? monster trucks!"?

Are there any indications on how big the crowds at the Iraqi shows with Adnan Al-Kaissie were?

Gunther? 0.0 (outside of the people watching WWE right now). Wanz was a pretty good self promoter. While CWA did not have any TV deal or anything and mostly ran in Vienna, Graz, Linz and a couple of shows in smaller towns, i.e. you only got "Catchen" when you lived in those cities, at least in the 1980ies Wanz was present quite a bit on TV like on game shows, variety shows etc. You have to realize that at that time there were only two Austrian TV channels. If you lived close to the German or Swiss border (like I do), you might have got three more German and/or a Swiss channel. So if you got on TV, that was a pretty big deal. I knew who Otto Wanz was long before I knew what professional wrestling was. He was using the tearing-apart-phone-book act and that's what I knew him as. Among the people let's say 45 and older I would assume he has a pretty good name recognition. The big name before him was Georg "Schurli" Blemenschütz who at least in Vienna might have been a bigger name than Wanz ever was. I don't have exact numbers but allegedly in the 1950s, he drew a lot of 10.000+ gates at the Heumarkt. Blemenschütz wrestled well past his peak (he wrestled until he was 66), towards the end of his career he was known as the "mummy from the Heumarkt".

I am about as far through the book as you are and am actually a bit disappointed. The stuff about Vince's childhood is really good, but apart from that it is really shallow wrt Vince's stuff. It jumps over from Vince's highschool time to the Ende of the 1970ies within a couple of pages and afterwards it is basically retreading the ground of Hornbaker's book about the death of the territory system than being a real biography. I the author did his own investigations about the NC time while afterwards he was relying on other sources. The Dr. D stuff for example, relies a lot on the corresponding Dark Side episode.

The Funks are 3 for 3 w.r.t. WON Hall of Fame, hard to beat IMO.

If it goal is Jey, I would think they would have gone a different route with the Sami - Uso resolution (something like having Jimmy + Sikoa turn on Jey at Elimination Chamber). At this point, the only internal options I can see them having are Breakker and Sikoa - and both I have a hard time seeing as being ready within a year or so. Maybe they will go the ROH 2004 route and do a suprise title switch with a random guy that just happens to be hot. Of course, they will probably go the most boring route and have Lesnar or Rollins stop Roman's reign. EDIT: BTW, am I a bad person for laughing at Shane blowing out his knee?

I assume this will take up to a year to become final, like the Microsoft acquistion of Activision-Blizzard?

Almost forgot to say: I planned to watch at least parts of the Saturday part of Mania live. The show started at 2 AM my local time. To stay awake, I bought a bag of peanut snacks (150 g - about 5 oz; those things don't really seem to exist in the US, Wikipedia calls them "Bamba" - cheese puffs but with peanuts instead of cheese) and a bottle of some Sprite-like soda (1.5 l). I should note that nowadays I drink maybe two glasses of soda per month and 2-3 bags of snacks a year (and than never a full bag at once). The result was that my body forced me to tap out at 2:30 AM - I barely made it through the Cena match. Another sign that I am getting old... At least I did not make the mistake to drink Coke instead of Sprite, this way my body had not to deal with the caffeine in addition to the fat and the sugar.

Also: fuck all those commercials. I am paying for the service (twice as much as the US people) and somewhat I am still the product?

At the very least, they had to work very hard to get the crowd into the match. Probably they could have gotten close to the same crowd reaction without the whole "Sami Uso" storyline doing mostly the same match (minus the HBK-style in-ring dialogs), i.e. they got much less out of probably their hottest storyline in years than they could have. Not saying that the Mania main event should have been Sami defeating Roman for the gold, but this was also not the way to go.

I am sure the production guy who forgot to switch off the ring-post microphone after the Sami-Jey dialog got an earful. That (we resulted in the Owens-Jimmy(?) spot calling dialog close to the end being as loud as the announcers) was an untypical screw-up for the WWE production team. And @EricR comparison between Charlotte and early 2000s Takayama is spot-on.

My copy of Foley's first book says that the hardcover was published by HarperCollins. The Rock's book (which came out in 2000) and Angle's book are also HarperCollins. So I guess no. EDIT: it seems Simon & Schuster were the WWE publisher in the mid to late 00s. On their page, they list for example Eddie's autobiography: https://www.simonandschuster.com/search/books/Imprint-World-Wrestling-Entertainment/Series-WWE/_/N-1z13mruZ1z13ivn/Ne-ph4

When I read NintendoLogic's post I feared that there was some racism involved and not that Troy got into a fight and lost - the Bill Watts way.

They are selling tickets to this, a combined show with a live Smackdown, apparently - either that or the Smackdown show will be the HOF ceremony.

I think Russia / the Soviets were quite successful with retreats, both against Napoleon in 1812 as well as against the Nazis in 1942. But yes, it's easy to retreat if you have 10.000+ km of Hinterlands...

It's about being able to suspend your disbelief. A ref lying down for ten minutes motionless without anyone checking on him, a ref not hearing a chairshot happening behind his back, an Irish whip, that's stuff you are conditioned to simply accept. But a ref not seeing (or ignoring) what is happening right in front of him, I don't know, that's as bad as imaginary handgrenades or instantaneous hypnosis.

There were a bunch of huge fuck-ups in the layout of the match re. basic logic: (1) The second ref ran if while Jimmy Uso was beating up Sami (i.e. he had to see Jimmy doing stuff while he was running) and still counted the pin and did not throw Jimmy out of the arena. (2) After the second ref was knocked out no further ref ran even after something like five minutes have passed. Did all the other referees already go home? (3) Why did KO wait UNTIL the match was over to run in? I realize that the third thing is just a normal post-2000 wrestling thing (i.e. the faces have no friends) but with the fans shouting for Owens after both ref bumps, it got put really into the spotlight here. Re. the result: I agree with Matt, they completely booked themselves into a corner (though in addition to having the hometown guy lose in the main event, having two big screwjobs is something that could have killed a town a couple of decades back). I think there were ways to get to where to want to (Roman vs. Cody at Mania with Cody - I guess - ending Roman's reign) and still somewhat resolve the Sami angle without shitting on the fans for believing in the face. One example would have been a six man tag in Montreal (Sami, KO & Jey vs. Roman, Jimmy & Sikoa) with Sami pinning Jimmy, a version of that tag at Mania without Roman and Sami vs. Roman at whatever the next PPV is after Mania. Or Sami & KO vs. Usos in Montreal and the six man with Roman on Mania night 1. Alternatively, they could have dragged out the turn until the Raw after Mania (with Roman somehow blaming Sami for the title loss).

Yes, considering that people were looking for Traci Lords video all the time in the reader's section of the WON.

How did all the guys who wanted to kill Jerry in the 80ies because he was the worst paying promoter of his time react? Overwhelming praise and sorrow about his death I pressume?

I am sure everybody has already seen it but just in case: those AI generated Gorilla Monsoon podcasts are great.

Cornette mentioned the last time he talked with Poffo was in 2019 when Lanny called him to ask if it would be okay if he passed on Cornette's contact info to Fries.

I am still puzzled what "p**f" stands for.

I don't think it was Schultz. Thinking about it, I am probably thinking about New Jack who definitely made such claims.

He had a long rap sheet before he got into wrestling, spent 9 months in a youth detention center and six months in a prison (in Mexico). He was working as a bounty hunter before wrestling which I can only assume contained some pretty dark shit (besides the prison stint) - didn't he claim that he had to shoot three people in total at this job or am I mistaking him with another wrestler who worked as a bounty hunter? Also Bigelow apparently was a long-time addict of oxies and died of a drug overdose so you could also talk about how lots of wrestlers were (are) part of the opioid epidemic and just were "early adopters".

So 5 minutes AWA & NWA, 30 minutes polka dots, 25 minutes FCW?