BomberPat

His last match before that Rumble spot was teaming with Terry Funk against Roddy Piper and Bob Orton for one of ICP's shows. His last singles was the Last Man Standing with Flair for TNA.

yeah, there's an old Jack Johnson line - "there's a difference between a deal and a fix". There's more ways to rig a fight than having everyone in on it - really any combination of fighters, referees and promoters can make it work, depending what the desired outcome is. 

13 hours ago, air_raid said:

There would be an easy was to get people to understand wrestling as a form of fiction by showing them “Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling” if you’re also able to suspend your disbelief that it wasn’t made by a wrong un.

It's amazing that someone can be the worst member of their own family even after their dad killed some kids with a helicopter.

My brother has a great running gag where, as he stopped watching wrestling in around 2001/2, he always pretends to be shocked at the discovery that Kurt Angle is bald now. It's a joke he's managed to keep going with me for more than 20 years, but every now and then he'll post it as a Facebook comment on something and people are always quick to "correct" him.

I definitely always have a bit of inherent dread when meeting wrestling fans for the first time - because quite often it's someone who doesn't really get the chance to talk wrestling in their day-to-day life, so want to talk your ear off with every fantasy booking idea they have for whatever's going on in WWE or AEW, or else they're the super-indie ultra who wants to show off. The first RevPro show I went to, there was a guy in front of me who kept trying to make smarmy comments, but they were all shit - when someone did a backbreaker, he said, "who does he think he is, Roderick Strong?" and, honestly, who are you even trying to impress with that? 

The bloke I mentioned before that I used to work with was fucking awful for it. This was mid-00s, and he'd handwrite a bunch of bad fantasy booking ideas at work, and then try and talk me through them all. Almost every single one of them involved one of three things - a gimmicky wrestler rejecting their gimmick so they could be a super-serious wrestler, a stable of second generation wrestlers, or someone getting called up from developmental and immediately being given a massive push. He tried to combine the first two by having Jesse turn on Festus and reveal himself to have been "Terry Gordy Jr." all along, and was absolutely apoplectic at my criticism that most people watching WWE in 2007 didn't know or care who Terry Gordy was. The other one I remember was Fit Finlay and Great Khali were in a nothing midcard feud, and he was absolutely convinced that Finlay was going to cut a promo saying, "you might be a giant, but I have my own giant, the Irish giant" as a way to introduce Sheamus, who is pretty much a full foot shorter than Khali. 

I think the point about fandom in general being more accepted is a really good one, as is that our average ages in relation to wrestling boom periods means most people have at least known something about wrestling at some point during their life. I own a lot of wrestling merch that I've just accumulated over the years, so I tend to wear them out and about a bit, and I've never cared for the whole idea that a wrestling shirt should look cool or really disguise the fact that it's a wrestling shirt, but then you're just asking that it's a secret handshake between wrestling nerds, and that feels way more shameful to me than just proudly wearing a T-shirt with a massive picture of Jeff Jarrett on it. 

I'm pretty sure it will be just a one-fall multi-man match, that's normally what a scramble match entails on the indies. 

There's a qualifier for one of the empty spots on Collision - Dante Martin vs. Bryan Keith vs. Penta El Cero Miedo. I was saying in the Dynamite thread that it's odd given how much time and effort has been expended on CMLL during the build for this PPV that there's no CMLL talent on the card, but that could mean there's an opening for Penta in that match, depending how much faith you put in the report that part of the deal is CMLL talent and non-CMLL Mexican wrestlers can't appear on the same shows.

Yeah, Ospreay's promo, with him hamming up the Essex-isms, was a tough watch. He's better when he has something to actually talk about, so hopefully it won't be that bad every week, but I struggle to think of a storyline I'd want to put him in. He's almost better served being an occasional guest to fly in for big matches, rather than a regular fixture, but we'll see how he gets on with this.

In his promo, he mentioned flying Delta and them losing his bags, despite the fact that we've had two weeks of Don Callis saying that he was flying to England to pick Will up in a chartered private jet, and commentary using that to explain why Don wasn't on TV last week. Will can be excused for just talking off the cuff about what happened and not putting that much thought in, but Don or commentary could have at least picked up on it - Don's a scumbag, a liar, a cheapskate, and a heel, so they could easily play it off that he's been off scheming and just lied about what he was doing, is skimming his wrestlers' paycheques and telling them it's to pay for this private jet, and then making Will fly commercial anyway, but no one in that segment seemed to have it in them to turn it into a bit. 

The rest of the show was fine. Sting coming down from the rafters is one of those great moments that they just had to do at least once, even if a lot of what was building up to it made very little sense, and Ric Flair looked like shit. Good matches across the board, none that got me overly invested or excited, but Revolution is a stacked card that I'm looking forward to watching, though probably won't stay up to watch live.

There's probably good reason for it, but it's a shame given how much time they've given over to CMLL talent and the CMLL relationship in general on TV in the build to this show that there doesn't seem to be any CMLL wrestlers on the card. 

1 minute ago, Supremo said:

As previously mentioned by others, I’ve always been far more embarrassed by fans trying to defend it than I ever have by people who don’t get it.

It is fake. It is camp. It is stupid. Life becomes a lot easier when you admit that you love it regardless. Nothing will be achieved listing wrestler injuries or going full Jim Ross and screaming, “HOW DO YOU LEARN TO FALL OFF A FIFTEEN FOOT LADDER?!”

I worked with a guy like this and he was the absolute worst, just a complete grievance machine in every facet of his life, the sort of person to make up arguments just so he can pretend that he won. He used to watch wrestling at work quite often, and he had the full spiel locked and loaded ready for anyone who questioned it, whereas my response has pretty much always been some version of "yep, it's fake and gay". 

For the last few years for me if it comes up with people at work or anything like that, it almost always comes up through me working in wrestling or having written about it, rather than being a fan of it - and I think people at least realise that they're not going to get away with a "you know the Monkees don't really play their own instruments?" revelation on somebody who wrote a book about this shit, and when the context is around me working in wrestling, it tends to be framed far more as a "what's that all about, then?".

If I need to explain it to people, I tend to tailor it to the audience - comparing it to panto or drag is usually a safe bet, and Gladiators probably would work well now. Or not even bothering with that and just, "it's good fun". Placing it in a context that people understand and explaining why it appeals to you is just a far better response than going full "IT IS ENTERTAINMENT, BUT THE HAZARDS ARE REAL", which always comes across as super-defensive, and kind of like you still secretly think it might actually be real after all. 

Listing injuries and accidents as a way to prove it's not "fake" always strikes me as really idiotic too. Because then you're basically saying "it's real when it goes wrong", and fuck, what isn't it? 

12 minutes ago, Vegeta said:

The thing that always amazed me was family friends or relatives would take the piss "what are you watching that for its fake" etc etc 

Funnily when I trained with the NWA and started doing shows with them, all of the sudden the same people were going

yeah, my parents and older brother were the main source of "it's all fake" when I was a kid, my brother in particular hated wrestling. Since then, my Mum and my brothers have come to watch shows I was booked on, and my Dad suggested that we take my nephews to a Megaslam show in Bridlington, and in the car after we'd dropped the kids off was full of questions about how it all worked and how you put a show together.

absolutely convinced that reboot only exists because someone confused the names Liam Neeson and Lesley Nielsen in a meeting and just had to style it out.

16 hours ago, chokeout said:

My main gripe was they were far too subtle with Kerrys drug use. They showed him doing some coke but, by all accounts, he was strung out most of the time and was a full on space cadet. You really didn't get a sense of how out of it he was. 

I saw someone comment on this, about how Hollywood films tend to shy away from really showing drug abuse in biopics, so you just end up with this vague sense that someone just got addicted to "partying" in the vaguest of senses.

Was it Tod Gordon who told the story of bringing in Kerry as a surprise under a mask, having to explain it to him a dozen times, and then him walking out for his match, in the mask, but with a robe with "KERRY" written across the back?

24 minutes ago, Loki said:

The issue I often have with AEW is that they announce "Heisenberg to wrestle Danielson at next PPV" and the announcers go OMG Heisenberg, and expect you to have watched all of Breaking Bad.

I do think this is a valid criticism of AEW, and one that they have improved with as they go along, but I get the impression that a lot of the people who say "who is this guy? Why should I care?" aren't actually watching the show, they're just watching Tony Khan's Twitter account. They attack the match announcement on Twitter, as if that's the be-all and end-all, that it won't be further explored on TV. 

As far as comparing that to Breaking Bad, it's like watching with your Mam who asks, "who's he, then?" the first time Jesse appears on-screen.

2 minutes ago, Chili said:

If you feel it's immoral to watch wrestling because of some of the types involved, and don't eat certain bread because of a CEO or because a musician is difficult then you have to be hard-line about everything surely. No exceptions. Some drugs are illegal, so you'd have to be against anyone or any art influenced by that surely too. Absolutely any company that's ethically difficult in the past would be a no go? That's practically nearly everything. For what? I don't think anyone would be impressed and it just affects the one person. You'd be denying yourself of everything bar Daniel O'Donnell records. 

I don't think that's fair - drugs being illegal would only present an issue if your morality is exactly in line with the law, which I'd suggest nobody's really is. Like with everything else, it's about where the line is drawn, and it seems like @tiger_rick's line is drawn in a fairly rational place, which is not wanting to financially support anyone he feels was complicit in the crimes of Vince McMahon, and it's reasonable to assume that's a wide net that would cover most of WWE's management structure at least.

Death Of The Author and all that, but it's reasonably cut and dry when financial gain is part of the equation. Very different not buying a book from a racist author who continues to profit from it, compared to buying a book by HP Lovecraft, who was undoubtedly a staggeringly racist bigot, but isn't around to benefit from the sales of his work any more, so questions about the content and its implications can be dealt with in a far more academic and less knee-jerk emotive or reactionary way.

I saw someone put the "who is he? Where are the video packages?" argument in context I had never really considered recently - so, we can probably agree that the reason a lot of people criticise AEW for not "telling stories" (discounting those who make this criticism disingenuously) is because they see "wrestling match" and "story" as two distinct parts of the show, because that tends to be how things go in WWE; the story is told through promos and angles, the match is a means to an end. If anything, the story often contradicts what happens in the match. So when they argue that they're not given an "introduction" to a new character, it's because they can't comprehend that the match itself is the introduction - that's the first time you see this person wrestling, and wrestling is what they do, what more intro is needed?

But as @Chris B said, "why won't they tell me who this is?" is a criticism that seems exclusively to be leveled at Japanese or Mexican wrestlers booked in AEW. 

stuff like giants and giant skeletons is where I wish I hadn't slightly poisoned my brain looking too far into all of this stuff, because it's all ridiculous and good fun until you start looking into it and how it ties into evangelical Christian far-right movements and science denial, and all the usual fun stuff. 

I have a subscription to Fortean Times, and tend to gloss over all the ghost and UFO stuff, as I find it all the most tedious, and they all come down to, "well, it didn't happen, did it? They're not real, someone saw something they thought was something else, that's it". That said, I am really fascinated by what makes supposedly haunted places feel so uncanny and weird - it can't just be all draughts and weird noises from the plumbing, and it can only be in part because of people having prior knowledge of the place's history or reputation. My half-formed pub reckon is that it's something to do with the acoustics of the space, and soundwaves outside of our hearing spectrum that we process in other ways, giving us the feeling that we've sensed something, but without recognising what it was.

I don't think I've ever really believed in ghosts, though some friends of mine when I was a kid lived in one of the older houses in the village, and you got that sense throughout it, just that there was something. You couldn't fully explain it with the sounds and atmosphere of an old building, you'd just be sat playing at their computer and then a really oppressive feeling would come over you, and you'd feel a chill no matter the temperature. Very weird stuff that there must be a rational explanation for, but every part of your brain that seeks one is kind of short-circuited by it. My half-brother - who does believe in all this stuff - house-sat for them once, and after spending a couple of nights in there refused to ever go back. When I was back in the village for my Gran's funeral, a good fifteen years at least since that happened, he still upped his pace and power-walked past the house to get away from it as quickly as possible when we got near to it. When he refused to stay there any more, my other, older, half-brother, who as far as I know doesn't believe in ghosts at all, agreed to look after instead, and lasted even less time there. Weird, weird place.

In my last charity shop haul, I picked up a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious. Other than local ghost story books, Mysterious World was my gateway into all things Fortean and weird, and I've always had a soft spot for it, and this was a bit of a late cash-in, coming after Mysterious World and World of Strange Powers, but before Mysterious Universe. I thought it would be interesting to see what the big mysterious topics of the day were, as presumably some of them would have been solved, and some were peculiar obsessions of the day rather than long-running mysteries - similar to reading Randi and Gardner, where there's a lot of focus on psychic photography, psychic surgery, and other scams that don't really persist in the same way any more.

There's some expected old favourites - Loch Ness, the Nazca Lines, all that jazz - but it's the stuff that feels really quaint and of its time that I found really endearing. Alien Big Cats and the Beast of Exmoor, rains of fish, timeslips and phantom houses; stories of pubs and hotels that, once visited, people could never find again, usually populated by people in old-fashioned clothes. A surprising amount of time still dedicated to the Cottingley Fairies, which I remember still being a bit of an obsession into the '90s despite having always been an obvious fake. Some stuff on religious customs in Sri Lanka, and finding explanations for fire-walking and hook-hanging, which I associate far more with body modders in Bizarre magazine than with Sri Lankan religious devotees. And, of course, a massive section on Spontaneous Human Combustion, complete with grisly photos of loose limbs in piles of ash, and Clarke being thoroughly weirded out by it all. There's an old meme about childhood media making you think quicksand would be a much bigger issue in life, but for me it was SHC, I was utterly convinced it was a widespread concern. 

I just found it all really quaint and reassuring, this collection of odd little paranormal obsessions of my childhood.

Ole Anderson shoot interviews were a constant reference point backstage at CIWW shows when I was working there regularly, this in particular:

We'd crack each other up with "bullshit bullshit bullshit!" and "couldn't work a shit" constantly. We made a couple of parody documentaries, like a Hall of Fame induction for a guy who only ever had one match, or a half hour mockumentary they made about me (without my knowledge!) after I left, and there was always a running joke that people were appearing on them "out of character", but they'd have completely made up names, be putting on accents, and just generally dicking around. We never got around to it, but I really wanted my character on them to be based on Ole here, just every time any wrestler's name got mentioned, cutting to me saying "couldn't work a shit". 

14 hours ago, jm29195 said:

Wasn't this the No Way Out match? I recall both being pretty poor but the Rumble one was the entertainingly bad one!

You're right, I'd conflated the two in my head, possibly because I couldn't believe they booked a rematch after the first one!

it's the curse of Triple H matches. He's great when he's prepared to work someone else's match, but those occasions are so few and far between that the only ones that come to mind are his matches with Foley, and his match with Daniel Bryan. The rest of the time, no matter who you are, you have to work his twenty minute slog of a match whether that makes sense or not. 

When he fought Reigns at Wrestlemania, the show was already running so late that, feeling encouraged by the fact that in the Daniel Bryan feud and match he showed himself as prepared to bump and sell and play the part of the heel boss getting his comeuppance, I honestly thought Roman was just going to steamroll through him in short order for an impactful win, but nope, 27 minutes. Same thing with Steiner, with Goldberg, with Brock Lesnar, and in the 'Mania match with John Cena, the story leaned so heavily into Triple H being the better "technical wrestler" after a couple of years with the likes of Angle, Eddie and Benoit of teaching the audience that a technical wrestler is a good thing to be, that it felt like if the entire thing had been set up to cut Cena off at the knees in comparison to H they couldn't have planned it any better.

I can't think of another wrestler - maybe only Hogan or Cena - who I think has been part of so many counter-productively booked, miserable to watch matches and angles, yet still has a strong list of genuinely great matches to show for it in spite of themselves.

I don't think people are criticising Punk because he fell out with AEW, they're criticising him because he has made a career of selling himself as someone who would say the unsayable, stand up for the underdog, and, in recent years, specifically make a public stand when it came to women's rights, and he's seemingly had nothing to say about a major sex trafficking and sexual abuse scandal in the company he works for after years of being extremely critical of said company. 

A lot of that is buying into the gimmick as being the real person, but I don't think it's unreasonable for people to be disappointed in him. 

lovely stuff!

I just finished Michael Moorcock's latest, The Woods of Arcady. It's the second part of what's at least a trilogy, in which Moorcock begins writing autobiographically, but then it all gets waylaid into a fantasy story. He ends up going on a Boy's Own adventure romp through the desert with the Three Musketeers, musing on his ideas of the Multiverse, while there's also a little sci-fi side-story that pops up unexpectedly into the narrative at times. There are some references to the previous book, but it doesn't seem to follow on directly (multiverse, innit), so I'm not sure whether the next book is intended to tie it all together or just more of the same.

It had its moments, but I don't think it really worked for me. The autobiography sections are interesting, because Moorcock is an interesting guy who has been around the sci-fi/fantasy world for decades, met everyone and done everything, and it's interesting when fantasy tropes and ideas start infringing on that story. But then for most of the second half of the book, at least, it just becomes a fairly pedestrian sword-and-sandals adventure with pretty odd pacing, and the fact that the central character is Michael Moorcock is barely relevant. It just feels like an idea that's never fully explored, but maybe that comes of being book two of three.

44 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

Thing is this woman may genuinely believe that she can talk to the dead. She can't though.

A bloke I used to work with, Chris French, was just interviewed about his new book on Parapsychology in the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer, and he commented on this sort of thing, and his growth from an earlier James Randi-influenced position that all psychics were grifters and con artists to his current stance, which is that actually the majority of people who believe themselves to be psychic aren't making any money off of it and are genuine in their belief.

That obviously doesn't mean they are psychic, it just means that they're unwittingly reproducing some of the simpler techniques used by "psychics" and mentalists - asking leading questions, knowing that you'll remember the hits more than the misses, safe guesses and weasel-words, but they think they're doing it earnestly. 

I've read a lot of James Randi and Martin Gardner books on this sort of thing, and I recently picked up the book that accompanied James Randi's ITV series "Psychic Investigator" in a charity shop. In there, he lays out some of the tests he put supposed psychics and telepaths through, and what he found is people would massively overestimate the number of things a psychic got correct and either forget or downplay what they got wrong - all the "I'm getting Mary...no, Joan...maybe it's Dorothy?" guesswork - and would forget how many things they credit the psychic for when, in reality, it was the subject who basically gave them the information in the first place. 

There's a really fun book called "The Psychic Mafia" by M. Lamar Keene, and a decent podcast about him called "Fake Psychic" from a few years ago. A lot of the more lurid stuff is almost certainly bollocks, but he was a phony medium at an American spiritualist camp. As well as a lot of cold reading stuff, he wrote at length about how much background work would be done to find out as much information about clients, especially wealthier ones, to completely win them over - up to and including stealing jewellery from them so he could make it magically reappear at their next meeting, and keeping coded index cards about everyone who visited the camp, similar to how Peter Popoff made his audience fill in "prayer cards" so that they already had all the information they needed. But Keene, in his book and in his conversations with James Randi, talked about "True Believer Syndrome" - how most people who go to visit psychics and spiritualists will keep on believing in them no matter how much you expose them, or how much they recant. When Keene confessed that it had all been a hoax, many of his followers went on believing that he had psychic powers even if he didn't think he did, because it was too important to them that they go on believing.
Similarly, when Randi and other magicians used to debunk psychics and the likes of Uri Gellar, it often worked in the psychics' favour. Because they would bullshit something about the aura or the energy not being right, or the spirits not cooperating today, and the true believers would argue that this just proved it was real, because if it were just a trick they would be able to do it every time!

My favourite story about mediums and messages from beyond the grave was Harry Houdini. He spent a lot of time and energy debunking psychics and spiritualists, and it's quite well known that he and his wife had a codeword, so whoever outlived the other would attend seances once a year, and if anybody claimed to have contacted the other, they'd know if it was fake if they didn't relay this word. Prior to that, Houdini had attended a number of seances attempting to reach his mother, who he adored and I think honestly held out hope that there would be some way of contacting. He gave up when a medium relayed a message to him, purporting to be from his mother, who seemed to know so many details of their life together, but it was all in perfect English, which she couldn't speak, and she was making the sign of the cross, when Houdini's mother was Jewish. 

Nick Kiniski was second generation, son of a former NWA Champion, and by all accounts pretty legit, so would never have been short of work in wrestling while he wanted it. It suggests Garvin felt pretty untouchable about it all that he felt he could go after men like him, and not just the naive kids who just wanted to get into their dream job at all costs.

It sounds like, as many abusers do, Garvin felt like he could at least halfway play it off as a joke so that he always had a shred of plausible deniability.

perhaps my favourite thing about that match is babyface Scott Steiner wearing the stars and stripes in Canada, and nobody thinking that might be at least part of the reason the crowd are shitting on it.

the Grayson Waller Effect is the most house show thing I've seen make it on to a PPV in years. Furthered nothing, some embarrassingly basic or just nonsensical mic work, and just sort of petered out with no conclusion. Four blokes cutting promos about The Rock, who wasn't there, so they all look like mugs.

Only one answer for this one:

The coolest any wrestler has ever looked. 

Sitting down to light up a fag, brushing off the fact that he's the most hated man in the building, catching a drink thrown at him and pouring it over his own head. Just a boss.