Your Wrestling Pet Peeves/Utter Hatreds

[air_raid]

I was just thinking yesterday how depreciated none-schoolboy pin combinations have become. When was the last time someone won the big belt with one? I bet it was Bret in 95.

12 hours ago, Vamp said:

Wrestlers have basically chin locked the strike exchange into nothingness.

I’ll bet the “reverse chin lock” has had a longer decline in my mind than most, because my first tape was Mania VI so on my first day as a wrestling fan Monsoon convinced me it was a terribly debilitating hold as Hogan applied it to Warrior.

[LaGoosh]

9 hours ago, Merzbow said:

I'll say that actually worked when Necro Butcher did it, it was his spot and he seemed like the kind of daft old bastard to do it.

Yeah like anything in wrestling it can work but in the right context. The sit down punch exchange works if it's two crazy brawlers wanting to prove to the other which is the toughest, similar logic with the strike exchanges. But when instead of Eddie Kingston vs Jun Akiyama it's Action Andretti vs Sammy Guevara it's bloody stupid. 

[CavemanLynn]

10 hours ago, Carbomb said:

Another variant of that that I enjoyed was the original Ebessan vs. Jushin Liger - as Liger drops to the canvas, Ebessan comes off the ropes, stops, and toe kicks him in the face, yelling "Don't be stupid". Liger returns the favour shortly afterwards in a similar spot.

I'm sure I saw Scott Steiner do this more than once, either a kick or a full-on elbow drop across the neck, depending on how he was feeling that day.

I also misread that post as "Luger", which was a very different image.

Quackenbush would throw in a successful drop-down once a season, but would usually catch the guy as he jumped over him rather than taking the ankle pick.

The crux/cruxes (cruces?) of these misused spots is guys not wrestling to their size, skill level, place on the card, or story, ALL fundamentals. I get the impression that guys don't want to lose to a solid basic technical pin because they think it makes them look weak, or more likely, weakER than their opponent. Everyone has to be good at everything, they seem to think, which is why everyone ends up working the same aside from an escalation of legitimate risk. I know the business 'evolves', but c'mon, guys.

Edited March 7, 2023 by CavemanLynn

[LaGoosh]

I hate that rolling pin attempt spot wrestlers do, the one where they roll about doing multiple pins in a row, because it never actually results in a pin so you're just watching them go through pointless motions.

[CavemanLynn]

10 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

I hate that rolling pin attempt spot wrestlers do, the one where they roll about doing multiple pins in a row, because it never actually results in a pin so you're just watching them go through pointless motions.

The only time that back-and-forth rolly-rolly stuff ever worked for me was this match from WoS. The young-uns on the board will roll their eyes, but to be clear, this match is from 3 years before I was even born. The sequence of fast counters works when you've spent the entire match (and indeed, build your entire style) on any of those moves being a match-ender:

Note the match also includes a lovely bit of grumpy commentary from Kent Walton, ripping into the "sleazy" newspapers out the back of Fleet Street claiming none of the lads get hurt.

[Carbomb]

WoS was different in so many ways, though. Finishers and flash pins weren't the only match enders - I remember Johnny Saint winning a match with a simple vertical suplex, and Kendo often winning a pin with a back body drop followed by a splash from standing.

[BomberPat]

38 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

WoS was different in so many ways, though. Finishers and flash pins weren't the only match enders - I remember Johnny Saint winning a match with a simple vertical suplex, and Kendo often winning a pin with a back body drop followed by a splash from standing.

That's part of the beauty of presenting wrestling as a sport, and of the rounds system - when there are multiple falls, and dropping a fall isn't inherently seen as a sign of your inferiority, you can afford to throw in some more interesting "finishes".

As always, there are always examples of where these things work, and examples of where people see them, think they look cool, and then do them with none of the context. Big dumb brawlers being stubborn enough to think "go on, hit me as hard as you can" as a sign of dickish masculinity works, but it needs to be earned, and it shouldn't just be how striking happens in every bloody match. Similarly, there are technical sequences, lucha spots, and stuff nicked from World of Sport, that makes sense in context but looks plain daft or illogical when crowbarred into an American TV wrestling match.

On strike exchanges, there was a match between Fit Finlay and Sami Callihan - either EVOLVE or WXW - where Sami squares up for an exchange of chops. Sami takes one, backs off, then as he's winding up to give Fit one, Fit just stamps on his feet and grabs a headlock, because why would he want to take a chop? I've been waiting for an opportunity to suggest that to someone to nick.

[Carbomb]

4 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

On strike exchanges, there was a match between Fit Finlay and Sami Callihan - either EVOLVE or WXW - where Sami squares up for an exchange of chops. Sami takes one, backs off, then as he's winding up to give Fit one, Fit just stamps on his feet and grabs a headlock, because why would he want to take a chop? I've been waiting for an opportunity to suggest that to someone to nick.

That's genuinely great, and not just because of the general principle surrounding it, but because of how it specifically fits Finlay's character too - yes, he's a big bruiser of a bloke, but he's also a no-nonsense grumpy bastard, who won't waste time and energy on stupid crap like dick-swinging and peacocking, and just wants to win the fight.

[Loki]

I don't mind sequences per se.  For example, the first 10 minutes or so of the Iron Man match at the PPV was basic training exercises - leapfrog and drop down, trading hammerlocks, that sort of thing.  And it worked because of the context - they were feeling each other out, trying to establish some wrestling superiority, all the storyline stuff leading into the match.

Look at Rock v Hogan, they did a very similar thing - it was just headlocks and tests of strength.  And it was awesome.

But AEW is particularly bad for having a series of matches where everyone does the same moves, regardless of context, character, feud type, match type.  I don't need to see Samoa Joe jumping through the ropes if it's going to happen 12 times in the Trios match. I don't need blood in 4 matches in a row before a Deathmatch.  There's this company-wise sense of "getting your shit in" and I wonder if this feeds into what Regal was saying about people not being interested in his feedback.

On the flip side, having someone submit lower down the card via the limp arm check in one match, to set up a near fall in the main event was SMART.  
 

[BomberPat]

Just now, Loki said:

But AEW is particularly bad for having a series of matches where everyone does the same moves, regardless of context, character, feud type, match type.
 

I counted three or four "powerbomb out of the corner" spots on this show, and at least three matches had a half Boston Crab in them, which was especially egregious considering that hold played a major part in the main event. It would be something else if someone had tapped to one earlier in the show, but instead it was, "will MJF tap out to this hold? Well, the other two blokes who got put in them tonight didn't, so it can't hurt that much". 

I get that one of the selling points for AEW to wrestlers is more creative freedom than what WWE affords them, and there's a lot to be said for that, but there seems to be a lack of basic agenting that makes me wonder what the likes of Dean Malenko, Arn Anderson, Jerry Lynn and Dustin Rhodes actually do. There are tiny indie shows with a fraction of the budget that are capable of putting "don't do this move, it's in the main event" on a whiteboard backstage.

[air_raid]

Ah, fond memories of a ZSJ vs Marty Scurll match in London where two guys spent a good portion of a 45 minute match engaged in lengthy and complex reversal/evade sequences conducted at lightning speed. Which while I understand the theory of "Look how well these guys know each other that used to team and have now spent years fighting each other - they're even ready for the counters to each others counters!!" - the reality is that the stuff is just so convoluted with zero perceivable thinking time, that it gives away so badly that it's co-operation. Goes back to "just because you CAN, doesn't mean you should." When done right (and I'm thinking of Toryumon/Dragon Gate multimans at their best) it's breathtaking but so often it just looks like performance of athleticism rather than two guys trying to win a fight. When Low Ki and Red did their famed sequence, they got away with it and I believed it. But half the time it looks awful.

[Sheffbag]

Twats standing up on the front row facing the hard cam.

Dynamite is terrible for it. had the couple in the "look at us" outfits thinking they were the children of the hat guy from ECW standing up for virtually the entire show blocking the view of people behind

Just sit down bellends

[Surf Digby]

Banging the ring. 

Any act, deliberately done, to show how easy it is to get the ring to make a noise. I don't even mean over-bumping, it's more when the match hasn't even started.

Jumping the top rope, fine.
Jumping the top rope, and instead of landing lightly with your knees bent, slamming all your weight into the ring to make it sound like a balcony has collapsed, not fine.

Similarly, climbing the turnbuckles to pose, and then jumping back off it, again, to land as loudly as possible.

And the worst, when circling the ring, usually before the first lock-up, dropping to one knee for no other reason than to make a loud bang.

If you're going to show the audience how easy it is to get the ring to bang, it completely undermines the sound of when the face takes that first big slam and gets the wind knocked out of them, or when someone jumps from the top rope and misses. How are we supposed to comprehend how hard an impact is, when the ring responds to a powerbomb in the same way as it does to someone simply walking?

Also, it's taken almost 20 years for me to realise how dodgy the phrase "banging the ring" is.

[BomberPat]

I was once at a seminar where we spent upwards of an hour learning how to move around the ring without "disturbing the boards" for that exact reason - how to walk, roll, even jump around the ring while avoiding making the kind of impact sounds that would take away from the sound of a bump. I was absolute shit at it.

[CavemanLynn]

10 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I was once at a seminar where we spent upwards of an hour learning how to move around the ring without "disturbing the boards" for that exact reason - how to walk, roll, even jump around the ring while avoiding making the kind of impact sounds that would take away from the sound of a bump. I was absolute shit at it.