Matt D

I tend to see her more with one guy than with a whole stable (Though I know she was with Chavo, Edge, Ryder/Hawkins at one point but did she actually come out with the Edgeheads for their matches?). I also think Cole would be somehow fresher and it'd get him out of the booth which is desperately needed.

Well the the problem becomes a reluctance to use managers, no? 2011 could be centered around Cena vs Cole and his stable of disposable heels, but I feel like they'll never pull the trigger on that and take him out of the booth.

I'm dubious about this. Rock'll be gone in a month and Cena will still be here to carry the company, albeit in a terribly damaged form. If this is the way they finally turn him (or really create a Bret situation where he's a heel to any male over 14 and a face to anyone under, explicitly), then that's one thing, but it's like bringing in the travelling NWA champ in the 70s-80s and having him make all your local guys look like worthless chumps instead of contenders that JUST missed the goal.

That's why I like my explanation better. It hurts my head less. The Bischoff turn was over Piper and just a short while away, right?

He's also a guy who put a TON of work into his craft. That was obvious. I think Randy "30 page faxes to Steamboat and the Ultimate Warrior" Savage was in some ways the PERFECT opponent for him. I also love the idea that the Outsiders were the MYSTERIOUS BENEFACTOR.

I thought this made sense storyline wise as Bischoff, secretly part of the NWO, wanting to make Piper look like an ass.

Dave made a typo, it was UFO. Thanks. There are obviously mysterious hints to the future in Dave's Observer typos.

How about "Signature Spots" instead?

From THE LAST OBSERVER EVER: The April 85 one where he announced that he was done and talked about Mania: "Northwest Champ Karl Steiner wrestled throughout Europe and East Canada as Bob "UFC" Dellaserra." So what did the UFC stand for?

I still think the match ought to be Taker/Sting vs Kane/Barrett which ties up all the loose ends from last year nicely. If they want to give Jackson a rub too they can add Nash in as the third guy. Have Sting work FIP. Or hell. They could just have a supermatch with Taker/Sting/Nash/Show vs all of Corre and Kane. Just a feel good thing.

It says something about the FORMAT. Trying to get ratings every week twice a week and giving away all the matches seven times over on monthly PPVs means that anything different is appealing on some level.

It's the schemey promoter going "Neeehhhh, all the marks root for an underdog just like them! Nehhhhh." while stroking his handlebar mustache and counting the cash. And it's a sucker bet from the promoter's POV because no lower-card guy has ever won it. In my head, Kayfabe Vince (MR. McMahon) was sweating bullets for a second when Santino came out of nowhere. Granted, they could just do to him what they (Was it Bock in 96?) did to DDP after he won Battlebowl.

I feel like I'm stuck in 1993 right now. That and 1985.

I would have loved this just to hear Bryan and Dave's reaction, after they complained that WWE may f*ck with the integrity of the Royal Rumble gimmick by having some jobber win it and then get screwed out of the title shot in their Rumble preview. The integrity of the Royal Rumble? It's already ridiculous enough that the act of throwing someone out of the ring makes you good enough to face the world champion on the biggest show of the year, as opposed to, you know, beating several top contenders for several months. If we're going to talk Kayfabe, then I think the fact that it's the #2 PPV draw of the year, most years, and usually by a large margin at that, is more than partially based on the "Anyone can win" element. Even if everything was real (or in this case logical), Vince calls his wrestlers entertainers. The object isn't to have a fair athletic competition. It's to make money by forcing modern day gladiators to compete with one another in a relatively (and admittedly) corrupt environment. Within the "WWE UNIVERSE" logic, what draws is more important than what's fair, and the anyone can win element of the Rumble draws.

Whenever I disagree with a Brit about anything, I just shake my head sadly and blame Maggie Thatcher. I doubt that applies here though.

Poor Chris Masters didn't even get on that list of 20underrated WWE guys.

Am I the only one that feels sort of weird when I'm watching old NWA and see him with that belt?

I never understood that mindset, even a little. I wonder how much of a role Miz's success played into that. He's clearly a huge fan and used that as part of his motivation. Also seeing how the wrestlers who were hired during the "no fans" period clearly had no passion for the business, and either quit or just gave up until they got endeavored probably played a part too. It's probably a little harder to find people who want to get into wrestling who aren't fans these days. During the boom it had to be a lot easier, no? Now you sort of have to be a mark for the business for wanting to head that way instead of doing something with MMA or what have you. Or at least that's my generalization for today.

I think there is room for different sorts of heels on different parts of the card. On that same show that Macho came in to USWA, Scotty Flamingo came in too and did a little rap about what he was going to do with Jarrett that wasn't very respectful but it still made the crowd want to see Jarrett crush him. A much better example is chickenshit Brian Christopher who would call out Lawler and say that he was old and washed up and useless and that he'd crush him and then the second that they both got in the ring, Christopher bailed. That's effective too, because it proves things through actions, ones that contradict the words.

I realize that they weren't ever going to do this, but for some reason I really wish we had gotten to see a Four Horsemen of Ric, Hennig, Mongo, and Benoit with Arn in the 93 Ole role and Dibiase in the J.J. Dillon role.

What a difference two months make. After all the doomsaying and really LAUGHING at WWF in the January 85 issue, the early March 85 one starts off the WWF section with: "The WWF is riding the crest of about the biggest wrestling wave in more than a decade and for the most part drawing exceptionally well." He then calls the 3/31 MSG show (Wrestlemania) a "farce," says the MTV thing went off AMAZINGLY, and then, finally finally makes the statement that Hogan is an awful wrestler. It gets better. In talking about WWF's new videos (and the Best of series), he wonders how they can do it without Slaughter or Backlund matches. "In retrospect, Bob really wasn't a disgrace to the title, at least compared to the current champ." Ouch all around.

I haven't seen this for a while now but I remember that Hogan was having the time of his life doing the stalling heel thing at the beginning. He seemed to be just having a blast.

My favorite thing was Rotunda getting upset because he wanted to use the mini ladder in the Raw MITB match but they had already used it in the Smackdown one. I didn't even realize he was a Raw agent. I thought he was training the kids down at FCW.

Nothing says "hey this is legit" more than a guy overselling Ted Jr. like that.

So every Hogan match had the same opening gambit? Same finish? Or did he have a few different basic types depending on which match in the series it was, what they planned on doing for the rematch, whether Hogan wanted to open hot kicking the shit out of the heel, or wanted the heel to go out on top to set up some early payback spots? By template I don't mean a rigid form where all using the same template are identical. Simply that you get the sense you're watching the Square or the Circle or the Rectangle, and while some of the coloring inside the form are different depending on the opponent, it's a pretty simple form they're filling out. Hell, I'm not even talking just about his big matches. I'm more talking about house show match after house show match after house show match that I've watched over the past few years. His 1984 matches, especially those that are a bit longer, tend to meander around a bit. They're not yet the tighter Hogan Match that we see by 1986. His longer matches after that, such as Mania '89 against Savage and Mania '90 against Warrior, aren't really Hogan Matches. It's one reason I don't think the 1989 match is very good relative to some of the better Hogan-Savage matches in the WWF: it's not tight, tends to ramble around and lose focus, and is pretty flat in stretches. The match with Warrior kind of worked by being something different. But neither was remotely close to a typical Hogan house show match you can pop in from 1986-90, or really even a SNME match. John I was mainly poking fun at the dire consequences of babbling about Andre before, BUT... We're really talking about different things here. For the sake of my previous comments, I'm only interested in 89-92 Big Match Hogan. That was the time frame I was thinking about and I was thinking how much effort was seemingly put into laying those matches out and the fact that I really do feel an evolutionary strand running through everything from WM V on. So we're really talking about different things. I actually tend to agree with you when it comes to circa-86 house shows, depending on who he was up against and what part of the feud they were in. To me, 89 with Savage is a turning point because that's when the kicking out of the opponent's finisher really became part of the Hulk Up. I know he did it before but rarely on TV like that or in so big a venue. By the way, the only section of that Savage match I actively love relative to the earlier matches, is Savage's offense on the outside on Hogan. There's a real sense of desperation and almost paranoia, even though he was on top at that point in the match. Anyway, after Wrestlemania V, I feel like you can't judge Hogan's matches easily against the rest of the card. It becomes comparing tennis to badminton. Same basic goal, different rules, different tools, different feel. The narrative issue that they had to over come was that even the illusion of drama was sucked out of Hogan's matches. He kicked out of Savage's elbowdrop. They had to figure out where to go from there. And the answers that they came up with were pretty interesting. For the PPVs, at least, the storyline of the feud was always a key component of the match, and generally where the artificial vulnerability came from. They had Zeus be impervious to chairshots and take Hogan out with the multiple net-wringers. Quake injured him (and everyone else) with the sitdown splash, which meant they could basically rerun the Andre bodyslam psychology AND have Hogan kick out of a built-up finisher. Slaughter for WM was built up as being willing to do anything to keep the belt, basically that he was going to cheat and use chemical warfare and what not, since a DQ wouldn't cost him it, which played out in the match, along with Hogan's righteous patriotic fury (which has him far more aggressive than usual). The two feuds in this era where Hogan was NOT in some sort of storyline based peril, Perfect and Flair, both of which were about ego-driven revenge and putting a loudmouth in his place, actually feel out of place and off, probably because they are lacking that element. If you watch the PPV matches, they're interesting because they each have to deal with the problem raised by Hogan kicking out of the elbowdrop. Moreover, I do feel like there's some evolution between them (which was my point to begin with). I'm not sure who's putting them together, Lanza or Patterson or Strongbow or Vince and Hogan, but I think there are lessons learned between the matches and they're aware of what they're doing with them. It's why you do sort of get escalation, whether it be the table spot being introduced for Summerslam 90, or Hogan going up to the top turnbuckle at Wrestlemania VII. And it really culminates with the two Taker matches in Fall of 91. There wasn't much storyline build here. It just had a name (The Gravest Challenge) and the general aura of the Undertaker. They could have cycled Taker in to Summerslam 91 easily enough to set it up (He was feuding with Warrior after all and I want to say there was even some interaction with Slaughter at one point in the build), but they didn't, and without that sort of storyline weakness for Hogan, they had to lay the match out differently. And they did. Taker cuts Hogan off at EVERY point just by goozling him to end every hope spot. It's one of those brilliant matches that I would have hated as a kid because it's so simple and so little actually happens but it's so effective. And Hogan puts on a great performance at This Tuesday in Texas, where he's so fearful of the choke and spends the whole match desperately trying to avoid it. Obviously the exception here is the Warrior match which is really its own animal. Anyway, I'm not sure if evolution is really the word, but "escalation of threat" might fit. I do feel that they were well aware of the PPV audience's preconceptions and factored in previous matches when laying out the next feud/match. I didn't feel that way as a kid living through it but looking back and watching this stuff in context, I don't think I'm reading too much into it. It's just a case where I'm not sure to give the credit to Hogan or Vince or Patterson or what.