caley

I was at this show and it was totally baffling as Russo came out shouting before the show actually started and shouted phrases like "Oh sure, cheer for your hero Goldberg!" and you could see people looking at each other and going "Wait, is he supposed to be a face now? I thought we were supposed to hate him." I have to tell my little Nitro story here. A friend of mine had boxseats for the show and invited me along. My cousin was in town and really wanted to go but I couldn't very well invite him along to box seats that weren't my own, so he ended up buying tickets for himself and my brother up in the nosebleed section. So we get there early trying to find wrestlers (Followed David Penzer around for a while) and this guy comes up to my cousin and brother and asks if they're going to the show tonight, they say yeah and he says "Here you go, compliments of Mr. Goldberg", so we laugh about that, part ways for the night. So I'm up in the boxseats, at a terrible angle where I can't see the Tron, and I look down to see if I can find my brother and cousin (This is in the pre-cellphone days) and I spot them: dead-centre behind the announce team. Throughout the night, my cousin and brother are constantly on camera, almost get run over by the Harris Bros., my cousin does the RVD point repeatedly on live TV. Going to bed that night, my cousin, who'd been having a rough time in school says to my mom "Auntie Liz, that was the greatest night of my life." He still talks about it to this day. So, it was a completely terrible show, but I have nothing but goodwill for it!

I was wondering the same thing, him saying "boy" to Jones doesn't make him a racist and didn't seem like that big of a deal, more likely that he called everyone 'boy' as a sign of disrespect/machismo. Then I looked up the comments he made about Anderson Silva leading up to their fight (Saying that the Brazilian Silva grew up "playing in the mud" and that Silva's father's career consisted of shooting animals in the jungle with a blow-gun) and suddenly it makes him calling Jones "boy" that much more likely to generate from a center of racism. It pretty much taints everything he says.

I think he was trying to make a heart-attack joke and when Cole and JBL took it to be about being dumped he fell back on and old line of his that he could've gotten away with in the 80s (maybe early 90s) that basically implies he punched out a woman.

BTW, I wasn't the only one who caught the long awkward silence last night after Jerry Lawler said he'd his heart broken once and JBL and Cole laughed and said "Only once!?" to which Lawler, not as quick on his feet anymore, responded "I wrote a country song about it: 'You Broke My Heart so I Broke Your Jaw'." and it just went deathly quiet. You could practically hear Vince McMahon screaming through the headset!

Is anybody else surprised at what a good promo Ryback is?! Like, last week, he delivers this perfect promo, hitting all the key points about his problems with Cena, making him bad without being whiny, being kinda cool, not screwing up his lines or anything. Just solid. You go back a couple months when he was a face and everything was a tie-in to the 'Feed me more' lines about food and eating and the like and it really shows how WWE is completely incapable of understanding/delivering a face you can root for. There's just a genuine gap between what they think a face should act and sound like and what your average fan wants a face to act and sound like. I mean, take Sheamus for instance. Tonight, Mark Henry comes out and wants to prove he's the strongest man alive with a tug-of-war (And WHO thought that was something they should book on Raw?!). He soundly defeats Tensai and Brodus, then Sheamus comes out and says he wants to challenge him. He is about to be soundly defeated, so he lets go of the rope to make Henry fall down, then kicks him in the face. How is that the actions of a good guy?! Or the Miz! How can anyone think Miz looks/acts like someone the crowd should want to cheer. And that's not even tackling the whole Cenastuff where the crowd has just completely turned on him and they're having to resort to stuff like "Look at the Make-A-Wish stuff, he's a really good guy!" booking (Admittedly, that whole scene was really awesome stuff) but with a guy like Cena, they shouldn't have to have to do stuff like that, but they don't know how to script promos for him that don't make him sound like an unlikable douche. It's really bizarre.

Psychosis defended three titles on WCW TV that year. He actually won only one of those titles, never once pinned the champion, and had no successful defenses. All in all, he won one title that year and lost three, one of which he isn't recognized as ever holding. That's amazing. He lost all.the.time, too. He had more losses than guys like the Armstrongs, IIRC.

No mention of Regal? Great strikes. Good, crisp moves (butterfly suplex, that Regal Cutter thing he was using). Hurt-y submissions.

Around 1998, I started doing a running, kayfabed Top 30 for each week. I'd watch every bit of WWE and WCW I could see, made notes of who beat whom and would shuffle the deck accordingly (With Saturday Night you'd have guys like Mike Enos winning each week until you had no choice but to lift him into the Top 10, then he'd come out on Nitro, lose to the NWO and drop all the way, way back down). I think this might have been the week I gave up, because I had no idea how to give Psychosis points for a belt he didn't win, nor give Disco the points for winning the title, when he never really beat the champion. BTW, if you have problems with Disco being too heavy for the title, wait until you see what's coming! Oh God, this angle! My sister, who put up with my brother and I watching wrestling for a few years and would often watch along just to see what we were talking about, still, to this day, will occasionally lift her hands in the air and go "Goldberg! Why me!?" Even by pro wrestling standards, Sid was an awful actor. The only person I can think of, off the top of my head, who might be a worse actor in wrestling, is Mike Awesome. I like how when Russo becomes an off-camera voice named 'The Powers That Be'. Also you have the absolute worst shoot moment coming up

Doesn't Cena's dad own an indy fed? Seems like a family that loves wrestling, even if he only bought it in 2007, it's not something he'd buy with an eye to making money, one would think.

He's also a legitimately fascinating individual. I remember reading the Hardyz biography (Shaddup! I only paid a dollar for it!) and there was a section where Jeff no-showed a show, I believe it might have been Raw, because his kota mundi got out of the house and he was freaking out trying to find it.

This brings back terrible memories for me. I remember - and I wasn't all that concerned with psychology or ringwork, or star ratings or anything like that back then, and was just becoming aware of internet wrestling discussion - that every week I would dread when Rick Steiner's music would hit because I was in for another boring, slow, pointless, uninteresting match. That said, even excepting all his bland ringwork, the saddest thing was you had Scott Steiner come out and run his mouth and just about everything he said was gold, then Rick would come out and say "You want some? Come get some. You don't like me? Bite me." and he would say it EVERY DAMN WEEK.

I often found with the poor sound in many arenas, that Goldberg's Megadeth theme, if one wasn't paying a lot attention, sounded a lot like The Bodydonnas exercise theme and I used to often break out laughing as I'd heard the music and expected the Bodydonnas and only to see Goldberg come out looking ANGRY, it was great in an absurdist way. Don't despair too much DO despair, though, because

I know nothing of McGuiness' work (Save a handful of TNA matches) or private life, haven't seen the documentary, but I read the Deadspin piece and something about it nagged at me, that the author was being worked, that the reader was being worked. I had meant to delve into this a little deeper, but forgot all about it until I saw this thread and Bix pretty much clarified some of my problems and some ideas I hadn't even considered. When the writer/McGuinness kept going on about WWE dropping him, I thought "Wait, you work your whole life to get to WWE? You get the chance to do it with the caveat that you get your bicep operated on and you turn it down?!" Like, the part where he said he couldn't afford to pay for his surgery and not be able to work for a while it just seemed like a BS excuse. Like, if I'd worked my whole life to be a WWE wrestler, I would make this one last sacrifice (get the surgery) and do whatever it takes (get a loan, borrow money from family, mooch off friends, work another job) to finally get some financial and career stability and accomplish my lifelong dream? I wouldn't just go "Well my doctor says I'm okay so I'm not going to do it, take it or leave it", I'd be going "You want me to wash your car with my one good arm after paying for the surgery? Sure thing, Vince!" The steroids example makes a lot of sense, actually; that WWE wanted him to get surgery but had other misgivings (Steroids? concussions?). Because, as much as I can't imagine McGuinness refusing to get surgery to make the WWE, I also can't imagine WWE seeing a guy they wanted, offering him a deal then walking away from him because he won't get an operation, they'd probably do something (a loan? advance? job?) to make sure a guy they actually want doesn't get away. Wasn't there something amiss when they signed Cesaro, too? I seem to remember he was definitely signing, then the deal was off, then it was back on again? What as that one about?

A bunch of the WWE Docs have been added to Canadian Netflix so now I've been watching some of them. Was watching the Ladder Match one and there is nothing funnier and obviously out-of-touch than the set for the NWO Souled Out PPV with motorcycles all over and bored-looking middle-aged soccer moms dancing to NWO music and Bischoff and DiBiase trying to do "cool" commentary (DiBiase said "As I said before" so much that Bischoff finally went "Then don't say it again!" then pretended it was a joke). But, it's the shot of those women sashaying to the music that just kills me, literally having made me pause the playback because I was laughing so hard.

I don't think so (Though I could be wrong), because I remember Bischoff's character was being presented as the face in the situation and Hak didn't do much afterwards.