BomberPat

Probably not the promoter - depending on which iteration of the "British Wrestling Federation" it is, that could be Orig Williams or Shane Stevens/Palmer, or Martin Newman, though I know nothing about the latter.

Orig never booked James Mason under that name (he was always "Jesse James" for Orig), so I'd hazard a guess it's Stevens promoting, and that, based off of how Stevens advertised his shows in the Channel Islands, Karl 'The Bull' Antony is a local Isle Of Wight wrestler. I can't find anything about him beyond this flyer.

3 minutes ago, LEGIT said:

Yoko teamed with Fatu, who I thought for years was a post Sultan/ pre Rikishi Fatu but subsequently heard that was incorrect, it was some other member of the family. 

Cagematch and Wrestlingdata both have "Fatu" as Rikishi for a BWF show in Walthamstow, teaming with Yoko in 99, but no other UK matches for him that year. Rikishi was working Memphis most of that month, so it's unlikely he would have popped over to the UK for one or two random matches, so I think you're right about it not being him.

I found this flyer from an Isle of Wight show, and it looks like it's Sam Fatu (Tonga Kid/The Samoan Savage):

It's not Wrestlemania without some old lads stealing the spotlight from the current crop; having Rock, Triple H and Austin hanging around Roman and Cody and turning it into Attitude Era nostalgia wouldn't surprise me at all.

I once found a copy of Mick Foley's Tietam Brown in a charity shop, bought it for a quid, and got it home to find it was signed "to Gary".

I am trying to envision a way Hangman might end up costing himself the match just to spite Swerve, that wouldn't seem cheap, but would still be clear enough what the intention is. Maybe being caught in a Joe submission and tapping out just as Swerve is about to break it up.

my first was the FWA Revival King Of Europe show, as a teenager in 2002.

My parents and older brothers hated wrestling, so it was never on the cards to go to a show before that one, but I managed to cajole one of my older cousins into taking me to this one. I'd been living in Jersey for a couple of years, and basically became a die-hard wrestling fan not longer after moving there, so it was a big thing to be flying over to London for a show, and I found it all very daunting.

The show was superb, as I'm sure plenty of you know. I'd been buying every wrestling magazine I could get my hands on by then, so had been reading about the FWA in Powerslam, and so a lot of the card felt like stars even though it was the first time I was seeing them. As much as I went in for Brian Lawler and Eddie Guerrero, I came away far more a fan of the British guys, and absolutely convinced that Jody Fleisch would be the future of the industry.

It was a long time before I'd go to another show, even though my fandom only got more obsessive - living on an island and working minimum wage jobs put paid to that, and I missed out on Jersey having been one of the regular stopping off points for All-Star and other touring promotions; my friends went to shows in the early and mid-90s featuring a knackered Dynamite Kid and The Legend of Doom (an old mate still insists to this day that he saw Hawk wrestle in a Jersey hotel), whereas the only shows I ever saw advertised in the early '00s were a single newspaper ad for a full-blown tribute show, and posters for a show headlined by Robbie Brookside that ended up cancelled. I only found out a few months ago that Shane Stevens was still running some hotel shows in Jersey around this time, but they were only advertised to hotel guests, so I never heard about them - if I'd known, I could have been watching James Mason wrestle four or five times in a weekend.

My next show was TNA at Wembley Arena in 2011; a good mate of mine that I was going to music festivals with around that time had got big into TNA, and had been to a live show the previous year. He got some cheap tickets for this one and asked if I fancied going - another friend had just started uni at Goldsmiths, so I stayed with him, and made a long weekend of it. Despite having some of the most phoned in matches imaginable - Rob Van Dam vs. Matt Hardy, and Jeff Hardy vs. Mr. Anderson come to mind - it was great fun, with a Jeff Jarrett/Johnny Moss match that's still one of my favourite matches I ever saw live, and made a Jeff Jarrett fan of me. 
The big story going into it was that Ric Flair had missed a show earlier in the tour - from what I remember, he'd not been paid his fee up-front, and was spending money he didn't have, maxing out his credit cards at the bar in every town they went to, and having to get management to cover him. They got sick of it in Dublin, and left him behind, so he missed the following night's event, and it all came to a head again in Manchester the day before I was due to see him wrestle. We weren't sure if we were going to see him, and given that AJ Styles and Kurt Angle had already pulled off, he was one of the big draws for us. Jeremy Borash didn't mention Flair at all during the pre-show hype, and he feared the worst, but he showed up after intermission and had a mad brawl with Doug Williams.

The following year, it was the return of live wrestling to Jersey at long last! Rumblemania at Fort Regent, a good 500-600 turn-out, and I managed to talk my way in as a ringside photographer as they had booked some of the "stars" of Channel Island Wrestling, then just a ramshackle training school. The show was run by Shane Stevens, serial con-man and convicted fraudster, and those are the nicer things you could say about him, though I didn't know any of that at the time. I mentioned James Mason earlier in connection to the shows Shane Stevens had previously run in Jersey - James told me that Shane was the dodgiest person he had ever met in wrestling, and just imagine the ground that must cover. 
As far as this show goes - VIP ticket-holders got front row tickets, a post-show meet-and-greet, and would be sent a DVD of the show when it was produced; that DVD never surfaced, and because of our involvement on the show, Channel Island Wrestling were still fielding complaints about it at least two years later. He also promised that he was coming back with a bigger show the following year, that would feature an ex-WWE superstar - some kids behind me got excited that it must be Shawn Michaels for some reason - and that show never came to be.
I found out years later that the four CIW talents who got booked on this show, Shane did the expected shitty promoter to naïve young talent thing of not paying them, and just using them to fill spots on the card, and bring in plenty of family and friends buying tickets, and that didn't surprise me at all. What was more of a dick move that I wasn't aware of was that he refused to let them change in the same dressing room as "his" wrestlers, making them get changed in the corridor instead. 

Bob "Blondie" Barrett was advertised for the show, and they used his Rebel Pro ring (I'm racking my brain trying to remember what the actual promotion name they used was, because it wasn't that), but he wasn't there. I don't know if he just never got on the boat, or was there working backstage, but I never saw him. I've been looking up the show and some old photos to try and get a sense of who was on the card - a short-haired and unrecognisable Joseph Conners, Mad Dog Maxx, Danny Steel, Paul Malen, Tom Mason, Flex Buffington, Matt Mentzer, Bam Bam Barton, and others I don't recognise at all. Not exactly a superstar line-up, and what strikes me now is that it's odd that it's almost entirely a Northern and Midlands contingent for a show at the southernmost point of the British Isles.

It was, through a long and convoluted set of circumstances, that the Fort Regent show led to Channel Islands Wrestling (later Channel Islands World Wrestling) getting a regular gig at a local hotel, and running consistently there from 2013 until last year, so after that, I was refereeing and firmly getting started in the business, and every subsequent show I attended was with at least one eye toward that. My next show was RevPro's When Thunder Strikes at York Hall in 2013, for the headline match of Prince Devitt vs. Jushin Thunder Liger. 

From there, I started attending the occasional RevPro show when they had a big NJPW name in, and in 2015 I went along to the first CHIKARA UK tour, co-promoted with Fight Club Pro, and I started going to more of their shows, and later to Pro Wrestling EVE, and picking up other indie shows as and when I could. Before long, all of my disposable income was going on wrestling shows, and I was travelling back and forth between Jersey and London, Birmingham or Manchester for live shows, some years as much as once a month, and since moving to London three years ago, often more than that, so I'm not going to detail every single one of them over the last almost ten years! 

45 minutes ago, air_raid said:

This feels about right. Hogan era of 89 was wildly different to when he ascended in 84. Likewise, by 94 there are very few of the class of 89 left apart from Bret and Shawn who had undergone tremendous growth/change. 1999 might as well be 15 years different in comparison, 2004 feels different again. It's only thereafter where you find more and more of the same guys are still there at five year intervals, and to complete the circular discussion back to the benefit of having AEW and another viable "place to work" - 04-09 being the first full five year markers between which, there was no serious competition.

The old adage used to be the Seven Year Rule - after seven years, you can rehash a storyline or angle, or give an old gimmick to a new wrestler, because the audience will have refreshed itself enough; enough people will have stopped watching, and enough new fans will have started watching, that the ideas will come across as fresh and new again, and the fans who have stuck around either won't make enough noise about it being a rehash for it to matter, or are lifers by now so they're not going anywhere and you don't need to worry about them. 

It usually holds up, but I agree that the inverse should be true as well, that in those seven years the show itself should have refreshed too - whether that's the roster as a whole, or their gimmicks and position on the card; one of the things I always find amusing watching New Generation era WWF is that the midcard is largely awful, but so many of them are people who, with a fresh lick of paint, became much bigger stars in the Attitude Era just a couple of years later.

The absence of a major competitor or external pressures, and WWE being content to rest on their laurels with the top stars of yesteryear, meant that not only was never that roster turnover, there was barely any impetus for people to change gimmicks and reinvent themselves - Dolph Ziggler didn't become a tedious time-filler just because he'd been there for so long, but because he'd been doing the exact same schtick the entire time. Ricochet has been in WWE for six years now, and is the exact same character he was when he walked through the door in NXT, and I'd struggle to name you anything of note he's done - in that amount of time, Charles Wright had been Papa Shango, Kama, Kama Mustafa, and the Godfather, and was about to become The Goodfather.

1 hour ago, LaGoosh said:

Revolution is his final match and presumably final appearance. 

Not necessarily final appearance - Tony Khan has said that he hopes Sting will remain part of AEW in some capacity, presumably doing the odd special appearance and so on.

Samoa Joe just brings a credibility to every promo he does, even when he's being wordy and long-winded, he feels like a professional fighter who knows the title means he's the best, not like a guy doing wrestling promos. I love every time he mentions the "championship committee". 

Hangman becoming petty and obsessed enough that he's more focused on Swerve losing than on himself winning is going to be his downfall, and I love it.

I just love the idea that they named all the lines to make it less confusing for tourists and visitors, and then presumed that all of those tourists have an intrinsic knowledge of which areas of London were historical hotspots for the weaving industry.

I understand the logic of splitting the Overground up into groups; I've got used to the little stretch of it I routinely use, but it can be a bit confusing/daunting trying to make sense of it otherwise. 

I'm just not a fan of the names they've chosen, I'd rather something more blandly functional that gave me some indication of where the train was going.

1 hour ago, RedRooster said:

I'm sure Takeshita vs. Ospreay will be great, but I'm not crazy about good matches for the sake of good matches. I need to feel invested in the outcome, so I hope they make the effort to do that. Perhaps Ospreay decides to go solo or something. I do think they need to reassess how the Don Callis family works. It's not about the wrestlers within, it's mostly about Callis. And he's a bit shit, really. 

I assume the end result is Ospreay going babyface against Callis, maybe taking Kyle Fletcher with him. Aussie Open were booked on the Jericho Cruise, so that's Mark Davis due back soon too; as much as you'd think the conventional wisdom is to throw Ospreay in right at the main event level, there's not a clear fit for him in the Joe/Hangman/Swerve situation which is likely to go on past Revolution, so there's worse things they can do with him than Trios matches with Aussie Open until everything is moved around enough to get to him challenging for the World Title at All In.

it's bizarre how Cody hasn't really changed that much, but everything that made him seem like an out-of-place weird robot who spoke via an AI trained on wrestling promos in AEW somehow makes him seem like one of the most organic babyfaces WWE have seen in years.

must have mentioned this before, but I have a wrestler mate who, on hearing WCW commentators call Brian Pillman "Flyin' Brian", was convinced that this wrestler's name was Brian Bryan. 

WWE just aren't very good at putting people over in defeat (and, arguably, not always in victory either). When people talk about wins and losses mattering, that doesn't just mean about title shots and pushes, it's about some indication of momentum, and of the wrestlers involved caring about it. One of the reasons Eddie Kingston is great is because you get the sense that every loss eats away at him, and every victory feels hard-earned, while Cena's schtick for years was to lose to somebody then cut a "nice speech" promo about how it didn't really matter unless they beat him again. 

Ten years ago, when people kicked off that Daniel Bryan didn't win the Royal Rumble, the problem wasn't just that he wasn't in the Royal Rumble, it's that he'd lost earlier that night and there was no indication of any direction or forward momentum for him at all, which left people open to blindly speculating that he would be in the Rumble, and let them down when he wasn't. When John Cena was doing his US Title open challenges, he was doing all he could to have competitive matches and give star-making performances to guys like Cesaro and Kevin Owens, but the problem with star-making performances is that they only actually make stars if there's any follow-up. The only person who used to be able to pull it off was Brock Lesnar, because if he had a competitive match rather than a squash, the opponent usually came out of it with more credibility for simply being able to hang with him. 

The last few weeks aside, WWE booking seems to have been more coherent lately than in years past, and Triple H seems to have a slightly different creative vision to Vince McMahon, so maybe he will be able to do as a booker what he couldn't as a wrestler, and have people look good in defeat, which I agree would be a fantastic use of John Cena if they can pull it off, but also, maybe for Cena the bloom is off the rose and he's too well known as someone prepared to do business at this stage that a win won't mean much at all.

8 minutes ago, Vamp said:

There's got to be a luchador in his 90s on the Mexican independent scene. 

Wikipedia reckons Tinieblas wrestled in 2019, when he would have been 80, but I'm certain that's incorrect and that it was Tinieblas Jr. in that match at a sprightly 53.

Mil Mascaras has been teasing a comeback at 81, though it's yet to happen. 

While I wouldn't be surprised if there's some obscure local act I don't know about, the oldest I can confirm is El Satanico, who wrestled last Tuesday at the age of 74, and is essentially a regular for CMLL and still taking independent bookings. He's worked more matches this year so far than Roman Reigns worked between Summerslam 2023 and today, despite having debuted in 1973, and having wrestled the original Blue Demon and El Santo - which means there's at least one person wrestling regularly today who wrestled somebody that debuted in the 1930s. 

As for Great Kojika, he's the oldest active wrestler currently, and may also have the record for longest career - aside from Popoff Le Gitan; he's at least 80 years old, claims to have debuted in 1956, and wrestled Charles Crowley in France last year, which maybe gives him the record for wrestling in the most consecutive decades at eight, which, if true, would be the record. The problem is that, like Mae Young, who also claims eight decades (or nine, if you believe that she debuted in 1939, which there isn't really any evidence for - 1941 seems more likely), it's not clear if they worked every intervening decade - Mae most likely didn't work at all in the '80s, and maybe not the '70s either (though there's record of her wrestling in 1969, so the '70s isn't unthinkable), and it's not clear how often Popoff was working, given how little data there is on the parts of the French scene he was working in. A Guardian article claimed his retirement match was in 2009, and I know he worked 2019 and 2023, so that's the three most recent decades covered, but whether he genuinely worked the '90s, '80s, '70s, '60s and '50s I'm not sure.

Back to Kojika - aside from being 81, he also either has or only recently recovered from colon cancer. I would guess that he's the only wrestler still active who came through the JWA dojo.  

When I worked jobs that didn't require me to wear one, I used to wear suits quite a lot just on nights out and the like, and I was told that how I was dressed and the little bits of know-how about fashion I expressed in the interview were what got me the Moss Bros job, but since working there and having to do it all the time, I never wear suits outside of weddings and funerals these days. Aside from the job, part of that is that I used to love tweeds and a waistcoat, and the double whammy of Gareth Southgate and Peaky Blinders made me not want to look like every other prick on a stag do.

I've done a weird amount of jobs that have entailed me being on my own for long stretches, and very few that have allowed for stuff like quizzes and mucking about with co-workers, though on another quiet day at the call centre I introduced people to Tape Measure Pontoon after it got a mention on a Radcliffe and Maconie call-in. You get a tape measure, extend it to full length, then snap it back and try and stop it as close to 21 as possible. 

18 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Growing up bombarded with messages like this from a variety of sources across the cultural landscape, to view the erosion and outright violation of someone's sexual agency as nothing more than a bit of fun at worst and a comedic mishap at best, it's not surprising that insufficient comprehension of what consent entails, both by men who breach it or women who defend said behaviour, has been so endemic.

I think what's worse than it being played for laughs is the extent to which various romance films, TV shows and the like have depicted persistence and ignoring boundaries as somehow romantic, that the way to a woman's heart is just to keep pursuing her until she eventually says yes. That, as much as sexist jokes and objectification and titillation, has contributed to those aspects of the culture.

To bring it back to Vince, and to comments by people like Kevin Nash - I don't know who first said the line that everything is secretly about sex, except sex, which is secretly about power, but lately I tend to see a lot of cultural failings rooted in our inability to reckon with issues of power and systems. Especially in America, where a combination of the fact that talking about power dynamics that can sound a bit too much like scary Marxism, and their culture - especially on the right-wing - being profoundly individualistic, they don't like the idea that anyone but themselves can have bear any responsibility for their actions, or that any external factors can impact on someone's decision-making. When it comes to broader politics, it means pattern recognition that should be identifying systemic corruption and inequality instead misfires and creates conspiracy theories, and when it comes to consent, they can't frame it as anything but yes/no, so anyone who entered into a relationship of any kind with Vince McMahon was de facto consenting, because there's no appreciation of the enormous power imbalance that relationship entails, or the pressures that somebody like Vince McMahon can place on somebody.

It also raises the other two ugly aspects of Nash's response - one being that by consenting to a relationship, even if we overlook the duress she was placed under to do so, she consented to everything that Vince subsequently did to her, which is the logic of marital rape. The other is financial - the idea that Vince's victims are either only after his money, or that Vince's actions are excusable because they got or are going to get his money. It seems to start at the assumption that the victims are acting dishonestly, and work backwards from there.

if I'm writing massive walls of text on here, it's usually a good sign that I've got some tedious paperwork that I'm putting off.

In the last couple of weeks it's been Skyvegas. There's a couple of daily free games that can win you free spins on others, so I try and fit those in, and if I win any money on there, if it's less than a fiver I'll generally stick it on a scratch card or another game and try to up it, and withdraw if it's more than a tenner. No money in, so no loss, and I once won £60 doing it, so it beats Solitaire.

One time when working in a call centre, it was a really quiet weekend, getting towards the end of the day with no calls coming in, no mail orders to input, no emails to answer, so we were basically sat clock-watching, some of the temps had already been sent home early as there was nothing for them to do. It got to maybe half an hour, an hour at most before clocking off time, and I'd been (I thought) discreetly fucking about with some games online to pass the time. The supervisor calls out, so everyone can hear, "you fancy going home now Pat, or did you want to finish your game of Tetris?". 

Years later, I worked part-time in a branch of Moss Bros. There were only ever two of us at most on shift, and on Sundays I was the only one in, and because in Jersey shops opening on Sunday was still something of a recent novelty, and we were off the main drag, I hardly ever got any customers. The building had a glass ceiling and no air con, so it was sweltering heat in the summer, you have to be stood up, and you're in a full suit and tie all day. Miserable. Phones have to stay in your locker, so finding any way to pass the time was a killer once you'd got all the little jobs done - and it was a small shop, so with no customers, all of that was done by lunchtime. 
We had these fancy UNIX touch-screen tills built into the counters, though, and I realised on one particularly dull day that there was a decent workaround there - through the till system, you could access the Moss Bros website to check prices, product availability and whatnot. And on the Moss website, there was a link to their Facebook page - and from there, you're just on Facebook, so I could log in, use Messenger, and play some games. They were all practically unplayable with that set-up, but still, it was a good effort.

23 minutes ago, Supremo said:

Interesting that Danielson said they need to do the rubber match on, “neutral ground.” Butlins?!

Zack alluded to wanting to wrestle Danielson in Arena Mexico after the Hechicero match.

been playing Assassins Creed Unity; most of the AC games are free on PS Plus at the moment, and I like the setting of this one, and never really played it, just watched my ex play it. You know what you're getting with these games, so it was all decent enough, but a bit of a slog toward the end - I finished the main story, and started on the Dead Kings DLC and some of the few remaining side quests, but while the DLC has some nice new additions, the story is dogshit and lumbers you with an annoying child sidekick, and it has the problem of all open world games in that after however many hours I've put into it the novelty of jumping about finding treasure chests and collectibles has long since worn off, so I can't get remotely invested in doing any more of it. So I'm shelving that one for the time being.

Still pulling from PS Plus free games, I gave Stranger Of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins a spin and barely made it out of the tutorial. My only prior knowledge was that it was a kind of remake/reimagining of the first Final Fantasy game, but I just didn't get it at all. The opening is just a series of barely connected scenes, unlikeable out of place characters, an inexplicable Frank Sinatra setpiece, dogshit voice acting, and tutorials teaching you how the combat works after it's already made you fight a boss monster. An incomprehensible mess that gave me no reason to want to keep playing.

So instead I went to an old faithful, and started Secret of Mana. It's the PS4 remake, so all cutesy 3D graphics rather than the SNES original, and at least this time the voice acting is, while still bad, kind of charming. It's one of the great JRPGs, and I have only the faintest of memories of anything that happens in it, so it's nice and easy one to play and I'm enjoying it.

Finally, I started playing Rollerdrome and I absolutely adore it. I was sold the moment I saw the trailer, but assumed I would be terrible at it. Luckily the controls are a lot more intuitive than I imagined, and it manages what to me is the real sweet spot of good game design - it's enjoyable and you want to keep playing even if you keep losing, and I never get annoyed at the game design when I lose, as it's always my own fault, not a bit of bad level layout, cheap CPU behaviour or bad camera. 
If you don't know it, the game is right up my street aesthetically - a retrofuturist blood-sport in the Speedball/Death Race 2000 style; it's rollerblading with guns, so gameplay is fast and frantic and bonkers, but the main selling point for me is that it's visually gorgeous, everything that as a kid I wanted video games of the future to look like. Beautiful cel-shading that makes it look like a European graphic novel.

Mega Drive games all fall into one of three categories for me - the ones we actually owned, the ones we rented a few times, and the ones I didn't play until years later on emulation, and Mega Games 1 falls into the first category, which means it was played to death and it's pretty much impossible for me to be objective about it.

I'm not a football guy, and while I've played a few later football games on PS1 and PS2, I probably put more time into World Cup Italia '90 than any of them. All of your criticisms are spot on, but they can't combat the wave of nostalgia that comes from those chunky top down sprites and that world map. I have joked a few times over the years that the last time I was any good at a football game I was playing as West Germany, because they were my go-to team (mostly because everyone else always went straight for Brazil).

I enjoyed Super Hang-On for a time but was never good at it, because as a more or less straight arcade port it was hard as balls. After I'd rented Road Rash 2 a couple of times, I almost resented having to play a bike game where I couldn't hit the other riders with a chain. As a kid, the challenge was always trying to run across the finish line after getting knocked from your bike.

Columns is the one, though. I have the Mega Drive Collection on PS2, and have sunk more hours into Columns than any other game on there, it's just beautifully meditative and the right side of challenging without getting frustrating, so I've racked up some mad high scores on there over the years. I played it before I ever played Tetris, so for a long time it kind of felt like the default of this sort of game, and the matching colours mechanic felt more intuitive to me than making lines in Tetris. It was also, until Beehive Bedlam came along on Sky Digital, the only game my Mum ever played.

7 hours ago, simonworden said:

I've got two questions for all the wrestling history buffs on here. What prominent 80s wrestlers started wrestling pre 1960? And we're there many/any wrestlers that were wrestling way back in the 20s to 40s still active in the 80s or even later. I o ow Lou Thez had a match in the 90s and Moolah is probably a good example but are there any others?

There's guys like Fritz Von Erich and Stu Hart who debuted in the 50s and 40s and still worked occasional tag matches up until the mid-80s.

Killer Kowalski debuted in the '40s and would still work the occasional tag match into the early '00s.

Jackie Fargo debuted in 1950 and worked his last match in 2006.

Adrian Street debuted in 1957, and had his last match in 2014.

Mr Wrestling II debuted in the 50s and had his last match in 2006.

Mae Young claimed to have debuted in 1939, though more likely it was 1941, and her last "match" was 2010.

Bruno Sammartino debuted in 1957, had his last match in 1987.

Gypsy Joe debuted in 1952 and wrestled until 2011.

Dominic DeNucci debuted in the 50s and had his last match in 2012.

I'm not aware of any from the '20s that would have still been working as late as the '80s - Angelo Savoldi and Michele Leone are as close as it gets, working from the mid-30s to mid-70s, or Octavio Gaona in Mexico in a similar timeframe. Aside from the amount of time passed, there's a real changing of the guard in wrestling after World War 2, and really another before that in the 30s.

12 hours ago, IANdrewDiceClay said:

Been a fan of Kevin Nash for years. Even in the years it was clear there was little value in him. But I saw someone I really dont like watching that clip the other day. Like a desperate man who knows so much, trying to cover it up just so he can still have his legends deal. So fuck him. 

That's the thing - Kevin Nash is likely a millionaire, could coast on royalties from video game appearances and nWo merch alone, and won't ever wrestle again. If he's too scared to criticise Vince, even after the stories are public knowledge, what hope do we have of anyone who actually works there, or is in his inner circle, doing anything?

Of course the alternative is that it's not about protecting his buddy Triple H or downplaying what Vince did, but that wrestling has been so deep in this shit for so long that Kevin genuinely doesn't see what the problem is.

Fuck, that one hurts.

His stuff with Can is as good as anything ever recorded, and his never-ending improv tour was fantastic. I met him at ATP in 2007, and he was a real class act - wheelchair-bound at the time, but just super enthused to be around music and watching as much as he could.