Statto

The line in there about Shane's ideas being laughed at into his 50's stirred a thought in me that links in to Pat's earlier assessment of Shane.

For some reason, Jerry Lawler exclaiming "He's FIFTY-THREE years old!" as Austin did something unpleasant to Vince during the ladder match at KOTR 99 has always stuck in my head. As in, how dare Stone Cold be treating this older gentleman who has no business being in the ring at his age this way.

Shane just turned 52...

35 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

There's one where he says, "do you own or rent your home?" - as opposed to what, exactly?

In slight mitigation for Conrad, that's Geico's copy not his wording, as the exact same read pops up on several of the college football podcasts I listen to being read by various people.

It is fucking stupid, though.

5 hours ago, Supremo said:

Asking this in the Rampage thread? The show HOOK put on the map? For shame!

I said this to a mate after Hook's first match, one of the things I like about him most is that while he is similar to his dad in some ways, he's already different in ways that make sense.

Taz was a hybrid of skilled judoka & street tough, and was a pretty successful pro wrestler as a result. Because his dad was a successful pro wrestler, Hook didn't grow up on the mean streets like Taz did, so whilst he's inherited his dad's mean streak and aptitude for martial arts, he's also a kind of preppy rich kid who played lacrosse at a good university.

44 minutes ago, TildeGuy~! said:

Considering the Rumble was full of Midcarders did they seriously not have any room for Cesaro and Finn in there? 

Cesaro went over Rollins clean at Mania last year, then main evented the following PPV against Reigns. 9 months later, can't even get in the Rumble.

They did, but they had him have his all over the world IIRC. Like he was jetting back & forth from Europe to appear at Full Sail every week.

5 hours ago, DavidB6937 said:

How dare you throw Boogs in with Madcap. I won't have anyone slander Boogs like that. He's way more interesting. Although yeah I guess if you're judging on the Rumble I probably can't argue much.

I love Boogs, but now they have made him have a short back & sides and switch his cool faux denim singlet for an ugly plain red one (while keeping the kneepads from his previous outfit which don't go at all) I can definitely see why someone seeing him for the first time would mistake him for a 5-minute CAW.

2 hours ago, Cousin Jim Bob said:

Who are the faces and who are the heels in these two ? Its been so long since I watched WWE I kind of thought all four were heels atm.

Rollins & Reigns are both heels, but Reigns has been getting the more positive reactions cos Rollins is such an annoying prick. I genuinely don't know why they have been programmed together, particularly as Rollins is on Raw.

Lesnar is very much a babyface at the moment (and seemingly having the time of his life doing it) and Lashley is heel, although for some reason he started slapping hands with the fans on the way to the ring for the weigh-in segment on Raw this week.

Becky Lynch vs Doudrop is also a heel vs heel match.

22 minutes ago, DavidB6937 said:

If there was ever a year to do something ridiculous like a Knoxville win then this is it. No momentum anywhere from anyone. 

Plus you can have Brock throw him about for 5 minutes on the first night of Mania for a bit of mainstream publicity, then did Brock vs Reigns, title vs title the following night.

The people I'm seeing on Twitter with NFT apes for profile pics and other related content are professional football players of both the American & rest of the world variety.

I therefore put it down to being a "more money than I know what to do with and lots of free time" thing.

Yeah, they snuck that in for a little while without actually explaining it, then dropped it again without explaining that they'd done so.

I liked it, personally.

That is a big pet hate of mine and I love this finish, as a result:

OK, Smash is a little late coming in if viewed through the lens of "trying to break up the pin but can't" but I love that he's trying to drag the big old giant off Ax but just can't shift him, and as a result Hebner counts the pin.

5 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

That said, the tail end of his run as Stardust was a big nothing, and I understand his frustration with not being given the go-ahead to drop that gimmick and go back to being Cody Rhodes, especially after Dusty died.

 

Did he ever make that request? It's always stuck in my head that when he came back as Stardust both he & Brandi put out blog posts (which I've just found with a quick Google) defending/explaining why he was still in that gimmick, along the lines of not wanting to use his dad's passing as a stepping stone & having been taught by Dusty to "finish what you started, kid".

I've always taken those to be genuine and have never seen anything to the contrary, which is something that's stuck in my craw about Cody (who used to be one of my favourites in WWE, if you can believe such a thing) subsequently complaining about being mistreated/mishandled, as I've always taken that to be a bit disingenuous.

Perhaps those blog posts were in fact a bit of face saving & not a true representation?

2 hours ago, Carbomb said:

Dann seems like a really good guy in general.

Years ago (must be getting on for 2 decades now) I ordered the VHS of the debut (and only, I think) show of Dann's first foray into promoting on his own (having cut his teeth as one of the FWA's local promoters).

I never ever got that tape but Dann a] phoned my mum & apologised for the delay after about 6 months (I'd moved out since ordering it) & b] never cashed the cheque I sent him. So yeah, good guy really.

I could see all of Team Taz ending up face as a result of Hook's popularity, and I'd be fine with that.

Taz has a lot of goodwill with the fans from his commentary work & cuts a good babyface promo, Hobbs had the makings of a good good guy before they turned him, and although Starks seems a more natural heel I think he could be ok as a face. If he's not, do the jealousy thing (on both sides) and have Hook relieve him of the FTW belt and boot him from the group.

He got quite a bit of heat in the NXT locker room by making a joke about Emma being released on Twitter not long after he'd signed. Other than that and his penchant to 'retire' out of the blue, I don't know of a lot.

22 hours ago, Keith Houchen said:

The last verse is essentially a list of what he won’t do. Since the song came out, some hilarious people have been making the same joke over and over again. I guess I’m just bored of hearing the same joke for years and years and years when the joke doesn’t even work in the first place. 
 

Hopefully now, in honour of him, the joke will get dropped. 

I remember a painfully awkward Meat Loaf appearance on the Big Breakfast when throughout the show Mark Little would go "You claim you'd do anything for love but you won't do that, but by that did you mean...this?" and they'd cut to a crew member getting in a bath of beans and shit like that. After the first one Meat was pretty clear about what the song meant*, but they just kept repeating the joke over and over again to an increasingly irate guest.

*FWIW, while Meat was always pretty adamant that the song was quite unambiguously about cheating, Jim Steinman (who wrote it) was always aware there was room for interpretation/debate (despite the fact he wrote it about cheating).

44 minutes ago, Jesse said:

I'm not familiar with employment or contract law, especially in the US

I'm believe a worryingly large majority of employees in the US exist in a world where their boss can come over to their desk on Friday afternoon and say "Hey, sorry but we're not going to need you anymore after today. Best of luck in whatever you do next though" and that's that. It's commonplace over there.

7 hours ago, jazzygeofferz said:

Imagine if they did that over here? Norwich get 4 points because they managed to pull out a win over a top half team, but Chelsea only get 2 for putting 5 past Newcastle. There'd be uproar. 

That's not quite how it works though - if you wanted to map it to English football, the way to think about it would be to imagine you were asked to rank all 92 league teams after they have played the first 12 games of their seasons, playing their usual league fixtures.

After those 12 games a League 2 club might have won all 12 (we'll assume for the sake of this there are no draws as draws aren't a thing in college sports), while Liverpool have won 10 (beating Spurs, Arsenal & Chelsea among them) but lost to West Ham (in a slightly flukey way while Salah & VVD were both out injured) & Man City. Based on that body of work, who do you think is better?

You might argue the League 2 club are in fact better than a significant chunk of League 1 (and probably even that Championship side who have lost all 12 of their games by at least two goals) but you'd be hard pressed to make an argument that they are better than Liverpool.

It's actually more complex/easier than that (depending how you look at it) as teams will have played teams from other leagues so you have points of comparison, but I'll not derail the thread any more than I already have...

I remember going crazy for Blade's textbook vertical suplex the first time I saw it:

13 hours ago, air_raid said:

 

And...

Norwich have quite the history of finishing/almost finishing off Everton managers:

A thought that struck me at the end of the game yesterday (as it won me a bet with a mate that Norwich wouldn't beat Derby's record low points total) - I'm a fairly optimistic Norwich fan, but I'll admit we are pretty weak in comparison to most of the league this year. We've also been pretty hard hit with injury to key players & covid, & apparently aren't one of the clubs that can just ask to have our matches called off. That said, we have gone past the Derby points total at just over the half way point of the season.

I don't remember too much about that Derby team, but... how fucking rancid must they have been??

27 minutes ago, Shane O' Mac Version 2 said:

I love AEW, but a consistently frustrating thing is them always starting the show with the biggest/best match.

I'm fine with it when it is logical - the two Hangman-Danielson matches going on first made sense because they need to allow for a potential 60 minute match, and I think they often apply the SNME logic of putting the main event on first on Rampage cos it starts pretty late.

It does annoy me though when they subsequently insist that the match that ends up going on last is the "main event" even when it's plainly not. It wasn't really an issue on this show as Baker/Rhio was a worthy main event (especially after the TNT title match had to be switched up) but it's a bit glaring sometimes, like on one of the early Rampages when Andrade & Pac had just had that cracker (that had been originally slated as a PPV match) but they immediately tried to tell us our "main event" of Bunny vs Red Velvet (or similar) was still to come.

40 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

So if one wrestler has the other in a hold and they reach the ropes, it means that a submission gained during that hold wouldn't end the match, though because it's no DQ the referee can't force the break.

 

This reminds me of one of my big pet hates - pulling the opponent back out of the ropes and that somehow invalidating the fact they had got there in the first place.

Kurt Angle matches used to be dreadful for it - the ref would be up to 3 or 4 in the count to break the hold, Kurt would drag them back and they'd just carry on.

1 hour ago, garynysmon said:

I was going to ask if he was any good.

Was the best commentator in WWE by a mile when he got fired, IMO. Not that that's too much of a recommendation...

12 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

What's Alex Shelley up to? If Kushida goes I could 100% see Tone bringing them both in for the tag division.

He's living the weekend warrior life at the moment and seems to be liking it - he's either working full time as a physical therapist or possibly back in school to get a higher qualification in the field, I forget which. However, in A Sports Illustrated article about 3 months ago he said:

“Right now, the independents are where I want to be,” Shelley says. “That’s not to say I wouldn’t go back to a big company. AEW looks amazing. I had a great experience in WWE/NXT, Impact is doing some great stuff and so is Ring of Honor. I miss New Japan so dearly. But I very much enjoy independent wrestling on a grassroots level."

I reckon he'd take the call from Tony if it came.