Paid Members LaGoosh Posted July 13 Paid Members Posted July 13 13 minutes ago, TheBurningRed said: And yet, they had better chemistry than the actual married couple. Well it's Seth Rollins. He has no chemistry with anyone due to being fucking crap. Quote
Paid Members Arch Stanton Posted July 13 Paid Members Posted July 13 Have watched pretty much zero wrestling since the World Cup started. Doesn't feel like it's worth starting up again now! I stop for a month, miss an entire SZ title run and now I'm looking back in and I'm seeing a Danhausen that still hasn't hit the water such was the height he got on his shark jump, and Baron fucking Corbin back on the scene?! Quote
FTR2020 Posted July 13 Posted July 13 3 hours ago, Arch Stanton said: Have watched pretty much zero wrestling since the World Cup started. Doesn't feel like it's worth starting up again now! I stop for a month, miss an entire SZ title run and now I'm looking back in and I'm seeing a Danhausen that still hasn't hit the water such was the height he got on his shark jump, and Baron fucking Corbin back on the scene?! Baron Corbin will take WWE to a new boom period. Jokes aside I think people are a bit harsh on Big Tom. He is an interesting person with him being a former American Footballer and Golden Globe boxer. If they used him in his original gimmick he had in NXT he could of been a good midcarder/upper midcarder. I think there is a good babyface run in him. Quote
Paid Members mim731 Posted July 13 Paid Members Posted July 13 49 minutes ago, FTR2020 said: Jokes aside I think people are a bit harsh on Big Tom. He is an interesting person with him being a former American Footballer and Golden Globe boxer. I'd heard fights got fixed sometimes, but I didn't realise they were giving out awards for it. Quote
Paid Members Supremo Posted July 13 Paid Members Posted July 13 I’m not big on looking down on NXT talent for rehearsing their matches. If it makes their matches more enjoyable, I don’t give a fuck if it’s rehearsed or not. It goes back to Ronda Rousey’s extremely valid criticism of her run in the company. They let her rehearse the Wrestlemania mixed tag with Kurt, Stephanie and Hunter - and it was a Match of the Year candidate. Then everything else she had to improvise, with varying levels of success, but nothing that touched her debut. At the risk of not RESPECTING THE BUSINESS, watching any match on any episode of Raw or Smackdown is enough to convince you that they should be rehearsing them. I’d argue the number of botches has never been higher. Is it really worth the respect of dickheads like The Undertaker? What’s the point of calling it in the ring if it all falls apart once a fortnight? DDP for Performance Center head coach! Quote
Paid Members mim731 Posted July 13 Paid Members Posted July 13 45 minutes ago, Supremo said: At the risk of not RESPECTING THE BUSINESS, watching any match on any episode of Raw or Smackdown is enough to convince you that they should be rehearsing them. I’d argue the number of botches has never been higher. Is it really worth the respect of dickheads like The Undertaker? What’s the point of calling it in the ring if it all falls apart once a fortnight? Wasn't Macho Man super meticulous about getting stuff right, planning and making notes and practicing on house shows? I'm sure I remember reading somewhere him and Steamboat spent weeks on house shows getting the Mania 3 match right. Given that was a classic, I don't know if the nonsense about calling it in the ring is necessarily that valid! Quote
FTR2020 Posted July 13 Posted July 13 1 hour ago, mim731 said: I'd heard fights got fixed sometimes, but I didn't realise they were giving out awards for it. Sorry not Golden Globe 🤣 I meant Golden Glove. Quote
Paid Members LaGoosh Posted July 13 Paid Members Posted July 13 1 hour ago, Supremo said: I’m not big on looking down on NXT talent for rehearsing their matches. If it makes their matches more enjoyable, I don’t give a fuck if it’s rehearsed or not. To be honest my comment on it sounded flippant but likewise I'm not bothered how the matches are done whether it's all planned exactly from start to finish or called on the fly as long as it doesn't look rehearsed and feels like the performers are reacting in the moment even if every movement is being directed through the ref from Gorilla. It's more a criticism of the dreadful Performance Center than the performers themselves. Quote
Paid Members Supremo Posted July 13 Paid Members Posted July 13 I think we’re seeing in real time how the Performance Center completely fails its graduates, with Sol Ruca. She’s looked positively lost on the main roster, blowing spots all over the shop, which I suspect is due to the difference in how people put their matches together on Raw and Smackdown. I’m sure it was important to be able to call stuff in the ring decades ago, when people were working 400 dates a year (time travelling by flying back and forth from Japan). But in 2026, both major promotions are essentially TV productions, where people work once a week. Twice at a push. It should be encouraged that they rehearse their matches, if it helps. Old timers insisting they must call it in the ring would be like Tony Slattery and Ryan Styles arguing modern day dramas are doing it wrong because back in their day they improvised everything on, “Who’s Line is it Anyway?” Game’s changed, Grandads! *Let the record show that rehearsing his matches would categorically not change the fact that Baron Corbin is shit. Quote
Paid Members tiger_rick Posted July 14 Paid Members Posted July 14 15 hours ago, Supremo said: At the risk of not RESPECTING THE BUSINESS, watching any match on any episode of Raw or Smackdown is enough to convince you that they should be rehearsing them. I’d argue the number of botches has never been higher. Is it really worth the respect of dickheads like The Undertaker? What’s the point of calling it in the ring if it all falls apart once a fortnight? DDP for Performance Center head coach! Not wishing to sound like one of those bitter fucks on an RF Video shoot interview but I'm going to anyway. Surely if we're at the point were rehearsing matches is the solution, the business is fucked. The beauty of pro-wrestling is that it's live, it's spontaneous and it's still all a show. I don't need to lecture anyone on here on how it works because we all know. The people at the top of the game have spent years building up the skills to cope with the environment. They've worked hundreds of shows in front of 12 people, worked in different countries and with wrestlers of different styles, got their reps in night after night on spot shows in front people who love to see them. The erosion of that in the last decade alone in favour of training in a big warehouse and rehearsing the same spots over and over is dreadful. It's why when things fall apart, which they always will, there's no skill in the cover-up or ability to take a different path. Whatever you think of wrestling, and more and more, I think it's a fucking dreadful industry, what you could never disrespect is the craft. This conversation absolutely harms my soul. Where is the fucking craft? Quote
Paid Members Supremo Posted July 14 Paid Members Posted July 14 I completely get it, but given the current climate, what’s the answer? Is the industry healthy enough for people to learn and get reps in on the independent circuit? It doesn’t feel like it. Between NXT and then AEW, that last wave of top Indy talent was completely scooped up. Is it even feasible for someone to develop the craft in the same way workers used to? You’d assume the best bet would be to run house shows, even if they lose money. It’s not like either Tony Khan or TKO are strapped for cash, but how many house shows have either company done this year? It can’t be more than a dozen or two between them. From what I remember, didn’t people also get injured on the most recent house show loop WWE did? Like their bodies weren’t used to working more than once a week. Whole system feels broken, with no obvious answers. Quote
Paid Members LaGoosh Posted July 14 Paid Members Posted July 14 (edited) AEW's answer these days seems to be to scoop up people who went through the Japanese system (Kevin Knight, Kyle Fletcher, Thekla, Takeshita) or TNA (Jake Doyle, Speedball, Ace Austin) or the NY indie scene (Daniel Garcia, Willow, Anthony Bowens, Kris Statlander). The talent they've tried to develop themselves from scratch has mostly been a washout. I'm not really sure what WWE can do though as with the current PC all you've got is super athletes who are learning to wrestle but not against any journeymen or veterans or even in front of proper crowds. No one's working meat and potato veterans like a Bob Holly or Finlay for three months straight on house shows where they learn how to get over naturally, pick up veteran tricks and call it in the ring in front of fresh family crowds every week. Instead you've got Xander Clax vs Harlem Bishop wrestling in a warehouse for weeks on end in pointless matches that only exist for clips to post on social media before getting called up to the main roster where the closest thing to a veteran is Seth Rollins and you're not going to learn anything of real value from someone like him. It's no shocker than the wrestling quality in WWE is generally so low these days. Edited July 14 by LaGoosh Quote
Paid Members BomberPat Posted July 14 Paid Members Posted July 14 someone I trained under about ten years ago started the seminar by asking roughly what balance of everyone's matches they would say was called in the ring vs. laid out beforehand, then revealed that almost every match he ever had was planned out meticulously. He started out in the '90s in the US, and said a lot of the old WWF veterans would bully younger wrestlers for getting in the ring at all before a show, with the logic being that they should just be able to call everything out there - his counterpoint was that those were guys who did four or five moves each, so it was a lot easier for them to call everything on the fly than it would be for a wrestler today with a far wider moveset, and a lot more moves that rely on precise teaming and cooperation. I have a lot of sympathy for that point, but the answer isn't to plan everything. The art of wrestling is in the space in-between, and often it's in what happens when things don't go to plan. If someone fucks up, or forgets a spot, and they either freeze because they don't know what to do next, still go for a pin on a move that didn't remotely look like it landed, or just get up and get back in position to do the exact same spot again, every one of those choices just draws attention not only to the fact that they fucked up, but that there was a script in the first place. Something I've said to wrestlers, bands when I was booking them, and to myself when I used to fuck up by playing the wrong song as a DJ, is that the audience don't know what you meant to do, they only know what you did. The skill isn't in whether you can call a match on the fly or remember every individual spot in a fifteen minute match, it's in whether you have the ability to fill in the gaps and cover for the mistakes. If your opponent forgets a spot, can you grab a hold and just work with them until you get them where they need to be? I don't watch WWE, and the only clips I see from NXT tend to be things that have gone viral or popped up on Botchamania, so that's going to skew towards the worst examples, but everything I see from there has people fucking up in the most basic of ways - running the ropes wrong, not pinning their opponent properly, poor footwork, or just freezing in place when something goes wrong - or else it has those same people doing big Ospreay vs. Ricochet acrobatic displays or elaborate finishers like Sol Ruca's thing. That tells me that they're being taught how to work that specific match, not how to actually work, and it's mad that not only are WWE training people that way, but that they're putting that product on television. If I were to be conspiracy-minded about it, I would say that they're specifically setting people up to only be able to work WWE TV, so that they'd be useless to any other wrestling promotion after they're released. But the truth is more likely just that the Performance Center is a massive wash-out, and I can't see it lasting more than another year or two under TKO. Quote
Paid Members tiger_rick Posted July 14 Paid Members Posted July 14 1 hour ago, Supremo said: I completely get it, but given the current climate, what’s the answer? Is the industry healthy enough for people to learn and get reps in on the independent circuit? It doesn’t feel like it. Between NXT and then AEW, that last wave of top Indy talent was completely scooped up. Is it even feasible for someone to develop the craft in the same way workers used to? You’d assume the best bet would be to run house shows, even if they lose money. It’s not like either Tony Khan or TKO are strapped for cash, but how many house shows have either company done this year? It can’t be more than a dozen or two between them. From what I remember, didn’t people also get injured on the most recent house show loop WWE did? Like their bodies weren’t used to working more than once a week. Whole system feels broken, with no obvious answers. I think there a few really obvious things they can do that aren't even new suggestions. We were having this debate pre-performance centre when the WWE monopoly was in full swing. The WWE ID thing is the kernal of a good idea. However, rather than asking people just to sign up and wear the armband, they should put promising talent under contract but leave them working indies. Pay them a living wage, put some sensible rules in place so they don't end up working on MyAEW or something but let them work and learn until you consider them almost NXT ready. Once you've got people who are almost NXT ready, establish a proper talent exchange program with a handful of major indies and promotions in the UK, Japan and Mexico. They already own AAA and seem to be primed to do something with NOAH. They definitely need to run house shows too. The fact that they were still running a full house schedule when this started to crop up as a future problem shows that alone isn't a solution but it's definitely needed. I think AEW need to run far more shows too but their talent do work elsewhere far more so it's not like they're not getting any reps but probably not quite the ones you'd like once they're working on TV for a major promotion. I've no problem with the PC and NXT. They're incredible facilities but should be a finishing school, not a create-a-wrestler camp. Quote
Paid Members LaGoosh Posted July 14 Paid Members Posted July 14 Chris Hero once said that the true art of pro wrestling isn't calling it in the ring, it's to adapt whatever you're doing (pre planned or not) and change up on a moments notice to control the crowd and take them on the journey you want to take them on. Quote
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