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Old Lives Matter


tiger_rick

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4 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

This is absolutely true. Shawn Michaels was a "spot monkey" who couldn't tell a story, Ric Flair was making a mockery of wrestling by bumping too much for a champion, Hulk Hogan would never last because a babyface shouldn't throw punches, Lou Thesz and Karl Gotch thought Harley Race was too acrobatic and over the top to be believable. I read a wrestling history book released in the mid-30s, and the author bemoaned then that the wrestlers of the day were too flashy and acrobatic and more concerned with a good show than a fair fight - Jim Londos didn't know how to work, he was no Frank Gotch, brother.

What's so frustrating is that people who have heard all that about their own generation can't stop and have the sense to recognise it when their mates start chatting shit about the next lot. The thing that annoys me most about guys like Jim Cornette when they talk up how wrestling should or shouldn't be is that their idea of wrestling getting it exactly right just so happens to be in the very narrow chronological period, and geographical location, that they happened to first get involved in wrestling - what are the fucking chances? 

On that note, and harking back to my comments on Undertaker cosplaying an MMA fighter because of his big old inferiority complex, there's a bit in Jonathan Snowden's Ken Shamrock biography that made me laugh out loud - when he went to Japan to wrestle for UWF, and eventually Pancrase, the reason the Japanese wrestlers were so excited by them because in their experience there were no American wrestlers who knew how to fight for real. That's in 1990, smack bang in the middle of Undertaker's manly men who were all hard cases and would definitely be fighting for real if they weren't doing the fake and gay wrestling, brother.

Shawn Michael's storytelling has all the subtlety and nuance of a sledgehammer to the bollocks though, to be fair. I'm still cringing after seeing "I'm sorry, I love you" 13 years on. Awful.

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2 minutes ago, PowerButchi said:

Shawn Michael's storytelling has all the subtlety and nuance of a sledgehammer to the bollocks though, to be fair. I'm still cringing after seeing "I'm sorry, I love you" 13 years on. Awful.

Agreed on that point, the epitome of "tell, don't show".

What makes it worse is that he's heralded as The Greatest Of All Time, so now we have a company full of people doing what Michaels did once or twice with some narrative weight behind it, only they're doing it ten times a match for no reason. It's Dolph Ziggler doing the "skinning the cat" spot four times in a single Rumble, or Roman Reigns saying out loud "this isn't the same Drew McIntyre I beat before!" like no human has ever spoken, rather than trusting that their wrestling match will be good enough to tell the story itself.

It would be like Bret Hart, in his match with Steve Austin at Wrestlemania, saying "sorry, I'm going to be the baddy now", rather than trusting that the match would do its job. 

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It's a shame he's going down this road but I guess he has no fucks left to give really so why not hey.

Thing is he should have a lot of experience and knowledge to share with today's up and comers. You can't be around the business for that long in a sustained role and not have something to teach.

But there's also a lot of bullshit there that you wouldn't want passed on.

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13 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

What makes it worse is that he's heralded as The Greatest Of All Time, so now we have a company full of people doing what Michaels did once or twice with some narrative weight behind it, only they're doing it ten times a match for no reason. It's Dolph Ziggler doing the "skinning the cat" spot four times in a single Rumble, or Roman Reigns saying out loud "this isn't the same Drew McIntyre I beat before!" like no human has ever spoken, rather than trusting that their wrestling match will be good enough to tell the story itself.

It would be like Bret Hart, in his match with Steve Austin at Wrestlemania, saying "sorry, I'm going to be the baddy now", rather than trusting that the match would do its job. 

In fairness I wouldn't necessarily blame the talent as its more of a cultural thing now, subtlety is dead (especially in wrestling). I'm surprised they don't have subtitles/captions at the bottom of the screen. "In case you missed it, that was a heel turn."

Pointing at the Wrestlemania sign was quite clever the first time they did it. Now they do it every spring for at least the past decade and it means nothing.

How many times has the WWE repeated that clip of that lad open mouthed at the Undertaker losing to Brock Lesnar at that Wrestlemania? Fuck off, no way is that genuine. Now its led to people filming and streaming themselves all through PPVs and coming up with totally non-organic reactions.

I can't imagine how horrendously OTT those gurning twats on their webcams are in their mum's basement, now that they're featured all around the ring every week.

Edited by garynysmon
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I don't blame the older generation for looking back at the past thourgh rose tinted glasses, I think it's natural for anyone who gets old, but to long for a time when it was a funny story to date rape fans, get stabbed in the locker room, get a gun pulled out on you by a co-worker, have most of the guys messed up on drink and drugs, have a boss who possibly helped cover up a murder, and who knows how much other bad shit, it all seems a bit weird to me to that anyone would look back on that as a time when "men were men"

I'd prefer to work in a place where people get excited over video games rather than walk into an environment where there's addicts carrying guns and knives

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10 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

What makes it worse is that he's heralded as The Greatest Of All Time, so now we have a company full of people doing what Michaels did once or twice with some narrative weight behind it, only they're doing it ten times a match for no reason.

Yeah, this is spot on. 

Michaels is fantastic - I don't want to detract from that - but WWE obsessively play officialdom with how certain guys should be perceived, and those tags are subject to change depending on your relationship with the company. Shawn's never had a damn thing going on outside WWE, is Hunter's pal and Vince has always been weak at the knees for him so he's going to be forever enshrined as the - tear in the eye - "Best in ring performer in WWE history". 

That's his official position. Undertaker's official position is the greatest character. Flair's official position is the greatest legend. Three guys who are absolute marks for WWE and would fob off their kid's birthdays to do a Raw reunion for the old man. 

Yeah, they've all gotten the boxset treatment, but notice how the likes of Bret, Rock and Austin only get that treatment when it suits them? It's because they don't have that same intrinsic relationship/dependency on WWE for their legacy anymore. 

Austin's a better worker than Shawn Michaels. Fight me. Watching him in his prime on the Network - that pregnant pause in the crowd before his music hits and turns what had been a shit 1999 PPV all worthwhile - he was the man. They don't talk about this anymore. 

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16 minutes ago, Pork Pie said:

I don't blame the older generation for looking back at the past thourgh rose tinted glasses, I think it's natural for anyone who gets old, but to long for a time when it was a funny story to date rape fans, get stabbed in the locker room, get a gun pulled out on you by a co-worker, have most of the guys messed up on drink and drugs, have a boss who possibly helped cover up a murder, and who knows how much other bad shit, it all seems a bit weird to me to that anyone would look back on that as a time when "men were men"

I'd prefer to work in a place where people get excited over video games rather than walk into an environment where there's addicts carrying guns and knives

To be fair, how many of us have dined out on some of the 'ribs' that would horrify most right thinking people? Marty Jannetty alone has provided reams of pages of entertainment on this very forum.

I don't think I'd still be into wrestling at all if it weren't for listening to shoot interviews and/or reading about the crazy road stories, so I'd be a hypocrite and lying if I pretended that didn't make up a lot of wrestling's folklore.

Most of them include some sort of drink driving/drugs/alcohol abuse or general nastiness in some way or another.

Did they go too far? Absolutely. 

That said, there's at least a part of me that wishes the culture of wrestling hadn't changed to quite the degree it has. Playing video games backstage is a hell of a departure for someone who's seen what the Undertaker saw.

Clearly, as mentioned before, social media and camera phones means its not worth most well known people going out and certainly not to attract attention to themselves.

That said, there's a reason why most modern shoot interviews are boring as fuck.

@Gay as FOOKGood point. Flair in particular has driven me crazy with his public wanking off of "Hunter and Shawn" at every possible avenue over the past 10-15 years. For a guy who worked in the WWE for only a small-ish percentage of his career, its quite mind bending how he'll bend over backwards to speak highly of WWE over all his previous achievements. 

Edited by garynysmon
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27 minutes ago, DavidB6937 said:

It's a shame he's going down this road but I guess he has no fucks left to give really so why not hey.

Thing is he should have a lot of experience and knowledge to share with today's up and comers. You can't be around the business for that long in a sustained role and not have something to teach.

I meant to end my post on a point like this; it shows how great and valuable guys like Tracy Smothers were, and Ricky Morton and Dustin Rhodes are, to recognise the trends in the business and work with them rather than against them, as it puts them in a much better position for younger talent to learn from them.

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Because there's always been so much talk about how respected Taker was, how he was the Locker Room Leader and the Courtroom Judge, most of the stories that came out about him before painted him pretty well. He taped his fists to make sure Michaels played ball, he got in Vince's face over Montreal, he was fucked over by Hogan, Foley loved him, etc etc. He's come across at times as eye-rolling when things have gone badly, and he seems to have had a good sense of what's shit and what wasn't (hated working with the monsters Vince loved, had his stars-and-stripes coat fed to his dog, etc).

All of which makes it pretty disappointing to realise that the more he talks, the more he displays that he's dull and thick.

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