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13 hours ago, IronSheik said:

I always felt Fit Finlay was boring as shit visually, on the mic and work wise and never quite understood where he developed this almost legendary status with fans? His tenure in WWE was a period where I didn't watch much WWE TV, so what did I miss? Or was it another part of his career where he was at his best?

I had a letter published in Fighting Spirit magazine around 2007 where I said I thought Finlay was shite and overrated by the magazine. One line said something like "his repertoire consists of basic strikes, and rest holds which he uses to drag out his dull matches" if i remember correctly.

I still feel the same despite having grown up a lot since then as a wrestling fan.

14 hours ago, SaitoRyo said:

I was there too and I thought it was actually a really good house show overall. 

There was some dross there (Jordan/Burchill and Tatanka/Animal), but most of it was solid! In particular Benoit/JBL, Finlay/Regal, Booker/Lashley and MNM/Londrick (who were definitely there). I'm sure Helms/Hardy would have been decent as well, but I really can't remember any of it. The Angle/Mysterio/Henry main was pretty short and uneventful IIRC, but when you consider how knackered everyone in the match was at that time, it's hardly surprising. 

JBL cut a great pre-match promo and got the crowd very riled up (who didn't just respond with 'Eddie' chants), while Finlay also got a lot of heat for his match (which was class). 

I went to a WWE show in Newcastle every year from 2003-09 and I think this one might have been one of the better ones. Lacking in true star power, but everyone put a shift in.

I was at the Newcastle 2006 house show too and remember JBL getting extraordinary heat on his pre-match promo.  He was revelling in it, literally lying in the ring and rolling around at the crowd response.  It was also just before the 2006 World Cup, and he was taking shots at England, and the crowd were firing back with the Eng-er-land chant.

12 hours ago, air_raid said:

This month they only run, apparently, two house shows, after a busy couple of weeks of TVs and two PPVs. There’s two weeks off before Christmas

This really stood out for me.  You're so conditioned about hearing about the brutal WWF schedules of the 80's and 90's, the idea of a couple of weeks off and only two house shows in a month must have made December 1998 feel like a cakewalk for the roster. 

I guess the timeframe within the year might make sense in that people may be less likely to spend money on wrestling shows immediately before Christmas, the timeframe more broadly makes it a bit more surprising as the business was so hot that only doing two house shows in a month feels like leaving a load of money on the table.  But perhaps by this point WWF really did care about burnout of its wrestlers and decided this was something that was really needed?

16 hours ago, air_raid said:

A PERSONAL REPORT
So, I went to Telford's leg of the European tour, the Friday after Mania X, in Telford, which is such a nowhere town it makes me wonder why they didn't just go to the NEC again. This was my first time seeing the WWF live having seen no adverts and not having Sky, so Papa Raid told me not to get my hopes up and that I probably wouldn't see anyone I know from TV. I hadn't seen Mania yet and made the mistake while queuing of telling my dad that we hate Owen, and another child heard me and turned around saying "Yeah, what a fluke." So I immediately knew my hero had lost to his little brother. My variants of the undercard were Koko vs Kwang, Earthquake vs IRS, Kid vs Diesel, Tatanka vs Bam Bam, Doink vs Double J followed by the Quebecers vs MOM for the tag belts, before being informed the main event was for (iconic words).... "the World Wrestling Federation Championship!" Of course, I knew that whichever heel came out as challenger would give away straight away as to which babyface had left WrestleMania as the WWF Champion. And I lost my tiny mind when Owen's music started. Papa had already bought me Bret's t-shirt at intermission and sure enough my hero came out with the belt, for what I learn today was literally his first title defence, anywhere in the world. The program for the tour gives glorious full pages to various wrestlers where it’s obvious they’re opposite the guys they’re wrestling, in many cases repeats from Mania - Bret vs Owen, Lex vs Yoko, Razor vs Shawn, Savage vs Crush. Then in the back, quarter page photos and bios of the rest. It was fairly straightforward to piece together most of what the German cards would have been, but for years I wondered who Adam Bomb or The Model wrestled, until eventually learning… each other. It was an unbelievable experience all in all for an 11 year old.

One of the most intriguing towns/cities the WWF has ever ran a show at.  A few questions, if you can remember or know:

1. Any idea what the attendance was, and was it a sell out?

2. Was there any tiered seating, or all just floor seats?

3. Would the demographic of the fans (age, "smartness") have been different to an average UK house show during the Attitude era boom, or the Cena era?

4. How over was Bret with the people of Telford?

5. Did anyone else stand out as being especially popular with the crowd?

Brock (and hopefully anyone else) never breaks the streak.

16 hours ago, CAREBEAR LUVVA said:

Similarly, someone doing a top rope dive onto a prone opponent who moves out of the way, then the lad doing the dive lands miles away from where their opponent originally was so they would've missed regardless of whether the other lad had moved or not.

I've noticed this happening more and more in the past few years and it really gets on my nerves.  Don't know if the reason is something to do with safety, or just laziness on the part of the performer coming off the top (not being arsed to even try and hit where the target should be).

9 hours ago, mim731 said:

He was on Smackdown on Friday, but doesn't seem to be involved in anything on Raw currently. 

I only watch the PPVs these days so lose track easily, but have WWE essentially given up on the brand split having any integrity again?

2 hours ago, AshC said:

It's the 30th (!) anniversary of the 1992 Royal Rumble tonight.

What a cast of characters in this - and for all the marbles too!

I wonder how many here were hooked for life by this match...

 

 

 

Was the third VHS I ever got, after a Hogan compilation and Summerslam 92.  Watched the three of them to death as a kid, and absolutely gave me the platform to be hooked for life (especially this Rumble match and the Bulldog match at Summerslam).

When a big move, often a finisher, is delivered in a contrived way to make sure its near the ropes, inevitably followed up by a pin attempt where the near leg is hooked instead of the far leg, so that the wrestler getting pinned can break the count on two by putting their leg on the rope.

You can see from a mile out that these situations will never lead to a three count.

It may as well have been Dolph Ziggler entering the match, such was Michael Cole's robot like response to Christian's surprise return in the 2021 Rumble.

On 12/17/2021 at 4:44 PM, Uncle Zeb said:

My lasting memory of this era was Mike Tenay as a supposedly high ranking heel, "spontaneously ordering" the run-in we were about to see from the Magnificent Seven in whatever match from Nitro he was dubbing fresh commentary over.

Although I've never seen the clip myself, I remember reading somewhere a few years ago that on one of the WCW Worldwide episodes on C5, Larry Zbyszko was doing the (dubbed) commentary on a match which involved a run in from himself, which he somehow had to pretend to ignore when commentating.  

2 hours ago, unfitfinlay said:

Even NJPW stuff on Eurosport was pretty wank. I remember watching a Junior Heavyweight match and one of the Commentators spent the whole time just taking the piss. I'm sure it was Liger and Ultimo Dragon as well. It wasn't like it was some shitarses.

Eurosport briefly showed matches from TNA Impact around 2005 timeframe.  They presented it as a legitimate sport:  only matches were shown (no backstage skits etc), and Eurosport superimposed their own graphics with the wrestlers names and a few details before the bout got started.  They also had this atrocious commentator who had clearly never watched wrestling before, so was just making the names up of the moves as he went along.  I vividly remember Jeff Hardy winning a match with a Swanton bomb and him calling the move as "a spin and a drop".

I bought probably around 50% of the DVDs released each year pre the Network arriving in the UK.  Since I got the Network in 2015, I haven't bought a single one, and have only ever watched DVDs from my collection on maybe a couple of occasions when my internet was broken.

Convivence and cost of the Network killed any need of mine for DVDs (especially as most that I bought were PPVs).

I still can't bear to throw out my collection of VHSs and DVDs despite the space they take up and the fact I know I won't ever watch them again.

Great memories of wasting many a day during the school summer holidays of 2004-2006 lying on the sofa watching TWC.  Introduced me to many companies, but oddly the one show besides TNA that I watched every week for years until it stopped airing was the weekly (not classic) Memphis wrestling show from the their tiny TV studio.

Echo the gratitude towards Herbie for making the dream of so many fans at that time a reality.

What hot-shotted matches, feuds, angles, turns, returns, or anything else stand out to you as some of the worse, either from a business, storyline, or personal perspective?

A couple to get the ball rolling.

Goldberg v Hogan 1998: This has been discussed to death on so many platforms, so I'll keep this brief.  This has to be the worst ever hotshot for me because of the amount of money left on the table.  Goldberg v Hogan was by a mile the biggest match WCW could promote at the time, and perhaps ever (perhaps only Sting v Hogan, with its superb, patient build, could top it).  Yet WCW gave it away for free on Nitro, with almost no promotion as it was only announced on the Thunder before.  Yes it succeed in a one night ratings hike and iconic moment in front of a white hot Georgia Dome crowd, but promoted correctly and with a long build, you have to think this could have done north of 750k PPV buys and given prestige and value back to WCW PPVs.

Reigns v Cena 2017: The first ever meeting between the two biggest stars in the industry at the time, the faces of their respective generations in WWE, was presented to us at No Mercy 2017.  Unlike Goldberg and Hogan, this feud was at least given a few weeks or so build, but it just felt mad to throw away such an obvious Wrestlemania main event match for a B level PPV in what wasn't even the main event of the show (it went on 3rd from last).  I don't have any numbers at hand to suggest how many extra Network subscriptions or additional ticket sales this match drew, but I can't imagine it would come close to the same match being presented with a several month long build as a Wrestlemania headliner.  I'm glad we got to see the re-match four years later on a more fitting stage, but it left me thinking what could have been for that first time around.

While I'm not saying Goldberg v Lashley was good by any stretch of the imagination, I'm glad that they at least tried to change the formula of Goldberg's standard 5 minute "finishers only" match that he's wrestled every time since his WWE return in 2016.

14 hours ago, DavidB6937 said:

The worst thing about RAW is that you can miss it in between PPVs. There's absolutely no reason why you need to tune in every week at all.

This for me.  Since first getting Sky in 2002 I've watched Raw and Smackdown every week, apart from a five month blip in 2007 when I started university, and another month or two in 2020 when they were still stuck in the PC just before the Thunderdome.

But I've gave up on both Raw (and later Smackdown) post Wrestlemania this year (for the same reasons as many), and only watch PPVs now.  And watching those PPVs I don't feel like I'm missing anything, as all the important events of a feud seem to be comfortably covered in the usually excellent pre-match packages.

I remember pissing myself at the time when first seeing an early Lashley entrance on Smackdown and the words "SOFT SPOKEN" appearing on the big screen behind him.

Reminds me that we were lucky to have nice plastic VHS cases in the UK, rather than those thin cardboard covers they had in America (which we only used for the blank video cassettes you bought to record stuff on). 

I live in Derry, Northern Ireland's second biggest city.  In the six years I've lived here, there has been almost no local wrestling scene.  The Irish "American Wrestling" national touring brand aimed at families visits once a year, but besides that there has only ever been one "indy" show from a different company.

Lived in Newcastle and Nottingham in England in the years before moving here, and both had excellent local wrestling scenes.

I understand volume of and support local shows in just one of several gauges in how popular wrestling is in a given region.  But in general, and very anecdotally, I've not met very many wrestling fans here, or seen many people out wearing merch, compared to places in England I've lived.

Of course, could vary from city to city within Northern Ireland.  Wrestling may be a lot more popular in Belfast, which I've only ever visited once so can't comment on.

2 hours ago, Uncle Zeb said:

And a BBC News write-up.

The BBC news write up is reminiscent of mainstream media's reporting of wrestling around the turn of the millennium - that it could only be treated as a joke.  Bear in mind this is a BBC article about sexual abuse in British wrestling, yet the journalist couldn't help but get the following lines in:

"MPs grapple with future of British wrestling"

"a report by MPs with a passion for powerslams"

"Mr Fletcher - whose undertaking was inspired by The Undertaker"

"But away from the drama of the duplexes (sic), he said there were serious issues"

14 hours ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

I suppose whether you consider the last match of Night 1 to be the main event of WrestleMania depends on whether you also consider the last match in each of the three venues from WrestleMania 2 to have been the main event. Doing it this way does turn the British Bulldogs into WrestleMania main eventers. And Greg Valentine for that matter. But if you only count Hogan vs. Bundy as the main event of WrestleMania 2, which I do, I would only count the last match of WrestleMania 37 as the main event - which would be the last match on Night 2. Last match of Night 1 is the last match before the interval, only the interval's 20 hours instead of 20 minutes and there's a chance for a sleep instead of a raffle.

I definitely only consider McIntyre v Lesnar as the main event of WM36, not sharing the honours with the Boneyard match.

On a side note, regardless of whether Belair v Banks counts as a main event, I think I'm right in saying this is the first time a Smackdown match(es) has headlined Wrestlemania since WM24 with Edge v Taker.  I know the WM35 triple threat match was 2/3 Smackdown competitors, but it was built up on, and felt essentially presented as a Raw brand match.

The "You Deserve It" chant by the Wrestlemania 34 crowd for Nia Jax when she won the women's title.

7 hours ago, d-d-d-dAz said:

There seems to be a very vocal anti-Daniel Bryan contingent on wrestling twitter. Quite a few #FuckDanielBryan type hashtags and wrestling journos confusingly questioning what’s going on.

I do wonder if you’re a very young internet wrestling fan, and didn’t live it, whether it’s possible to even ‘get’ Daniel Bryan properly.

Maybe to some youngsters he’s just like your dads favourite wrestler and so to you he’s just the WWE’s ‘favoured’ talent who ‘books himself’ into high profile matches.

Crikey.

I'm a big Daniel Bryan fan, but from a kayfabe perspective there does seem credibility to the injustice that Edge is pointing out: Edge won the Royal Rumble from the number 1 position.  Daniel Bryan was in that Rumble and didn't win.  Bryan has since lost two WWE title matches (non-clean admittedly).  Why should Edge's reward for winning the Rumble be significantly reduced now that he has to share the Mania main event with Bryan (and by WWE's logic reduce his "chances of winning" from 50% to 33%)?

I hate seeing the Rumble winner prize being devalued by the title match turning into a triple threat, or not main eventing Mania.  Has happened too much the past 15 years.  But on the other hand, I do think adding Bryan will make the match, crowd reaction, and maybe build better.  So overall I'm neutral on the change to the triple threat.

If I recall correctly, Eugene was pretty hot for a few weeks in the summer of 04, including an incredible segment on Raw with the Rock and Coachman.  But he got pushed too heavily in such a short period of time and ended up in one of the main matches of Summerslam where he got booed out of the building against a heel HHH, and then it was pretty much curtains (or Sunday Night Heat) for him.

17 hours ago, scratchdj said:

Not a particularly mad idea, but Vince giving Luger an actual trial run as champion at a live show in 1994 was news to me.

And video:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CMxsabPs7e3/?igshid=160zltj7jecir

Prichard said on his podcast a while ago that they genuinely did this solely to fuck with Meltzer.  Would be amazing if that is true.  But given that Prichard said it on the podcast, I imagine it therefore isn't true and the real reason is the one stated a few posts back that it was to test the reaction of the crowd to Luger as champion.

EDIT:  Just seen this is being discussed in a different thread now, sorry.