The Pro Wrestling Thread

[Jeff]

There used to be a fairly regular following at times on the wrestling thread at the old site... Sooooo, who still watcheds wrestling?

I haven't watched as religiously this century as I did in the last, mainly because having kids and not having money. The wife doesn't want the kids watching it (and I have to agree that at their age wrestling in it's current form isn't something they should be impressed with). So I quit for awhile sometime in 2003. When Eddie died in 2005 I started watching again, but lost interest probably around May or so last year.

Recent things have brought me back though.... First of all, we upgraded our satellite to a DVR system back in April, though I filled the hard drive up with movies and have just now watched and deleted enough of the non-keepers to have room... so now I can record it and watch it by myself where the kids can't see it and I don't have to put up with icy glares whenever they have something racy.

Also, now that I have High Speed internet, I have solved another of my big complaints (though I won't go into detail about it because of forum policy): not being able to watch the ppv's. Not watching the ppv's after watching all the runup I imagine is like going to the movies on a regular basis with your friends, but having to leave every movie right before the climax and resolution, and then having your friends give you a short recap of what happened the next day... So there is my two biggest complaints resolved...

Like with Eddie, the recent tragedy set me in motion to start watching again a couple of weeks ago.

I watched Vengeance and TNA Slammiverary over this past weekend.

Vengeance I thought was good. It was nice seeing some of the older wrestlers back. I'm a big mark for Barry Windham and got a big kick out of seeing him in the audience. I wish Snuka and Slaughter had been in the audience though. Their attempt at wrestling was embarassing, especially Snuka. It was weird hearing the references to Benoit in the broadcast, especially during the Nitro/Punk match, which I had just watched on ECW a few days before. The ECW broadcast though, had all the Benoit references taken out, and also there were several loud fan chants for Benoit that were taken out for TV.

Other than the gimmick of having every championship defended, this felt like a glorified house show. I wonder how many people were disappointed with it. Out of 8 titles being defended, the only title change was the Women's Championship...

TNA Slammiversary was a great show though. It felt so much different watching it that a WWE PPV. Maybe it is because TNA has one hour of televison a week and WWE has 5. By the time each PPV has rolled around, the WWE has had 20 hrs of television to build a 3hr PPV, and TNA has had four. At any rate, it was a highly entertaining PPV, and I look forward to more in the future.

Next up I have Wrestlemania 23 to watch, but after that I imagine I will just watch new ones rather than try to get a lot of the older PPV's


(btw, I stuck this in Television as I thought it was the best place for it, being that it isn't really a sport, and it's basically just television entertainment in the modern era)

[Mike Saville]

I've not watched any WWE product in a year. It just got more and more pointless, and every time I was half interested, there'd be some crappy story that got in the way, such as the recent McMahon Murdered story... it was so funny that it cost them stock prices on WallStreet because some of the reporting took it seriously.

TNA is a joke too. We still have Joe who should be the biggest name in pro wrestling used to bolster the hasbeens. I'm a massive, massive fan of Sting, both in the ring and in life, but c'mon... you've had your day Steve...

Also, the X-Division, the most exciting wrestling there is, is often relegated to a 2 minute match each show. Give us some full on X division matches!

[Jeff]

I really like what I've seen of TNA. It evokes a feeling of WCW and late era ECW to me, which is something I missed pretty much from the Vince Russo WCW era till McMahon bought the companies out.

I'll give the X-division it's due, but I've never really been a massive fan of the light heavyweight/cruiserweight high flying stuff. At least not the Mexican style, which has heavily influenced all light heavyweights now to some extent. It's very acrobatic and impressive, but it is usually very frantic with a finish coming out of nowhere. I'd prefer watching classic Bret Hart or Ric Flair matches that have pychology and tell a story to that any day.

Samoa Joe is great though. He'll probably never amount to anything in the WWE since he isn't a steroid freak with a bodybuillder physique, so hopefully he will stick with TNA. I'm sure they will move him to the top of the mountain eventually. They seem to be aware that he is the future of the company, I think (hope).

[Lissa]

The internet is a wonderful thing. It lets me obtain twenty year old TV shows and PPVs, it lets me get ROH shows - the only product which is actually worth watching these days and it lets me pay people to watch WWE and TNA for me and tear them to bits in a quarter of the time it would take me to sit through them.

Vince Russo's booking philosophy (and that of his followers) is so wrong, so flawed and so worthless that don't want to waste an hour watching it. He fails to understand any level of the business from the tiniest detail to the booking of main event feuds. As for the other Vince, if there wasn't something worse waiting in the wings I'd be delighted to see him walk away from the company and enjoy his retirement.

Right now there are probably four men in America who know how to book sports entertainment. Gabe Sapolsky is happy to do so for a few hundred people, Paul Heyman is paid to do nothing by WWE, Jim Cornette is paid not to book for TNA and Dana White isn't even in the wrestling business.

Until the next golden age comes along (which it must do eventually) I'll stick with UFC.

[Jeff]

I don't know that I'd agree that it's any worse now than it has been at many other times in the current era (as far as the product goes). I prefer now to the early 90's WWF when almost everyone had a gimmick such as policeman, ex-con, repo man, Indian, voodoo priest, etc. I still believe wrestling reached its nadir when Papa Shango made the Ultimate Warrior vomit. The Boogeyman is pretty bad, but at least he doesn't have "magic powers". Speaking of which, some of 'Takers angles in the past have been really cheesy.

There are a couple of areas in which I do think that wrestling has hit an all time low, in that it is now more mysogenistic and masochistic than ever. I love horror movies as much as anyone, but I have no desire to see someone slammed into a bed of tacks or glass, or set on fire, or attacked with a bat wrapped in barbed wire etc... and I don't really understand why anyone would enjoy that. Wrestling has gone from something I enjoyed as kid, to being something that kids shouldn't be allowed to watch.

As far as MMA stuff, I've never had a real interest in it. It was interesting in the beginning with the "what if wrestling were real" aspect, and I rented a couple of the early UFC videos, but that interest is long satisfied. Whatever it is that attracts me to wrestling, it isn't the aspect of people beating each other up.

What is going on with Shawn Michaels? Did he really collapse, or is it a work? And if he did collapse, how much of the Orton/concussion angle is a work? I looked on wiki, but it just says he collapsed.

[Jeff]

The internet is a wonderful thing. It lets me obtain twenty year old TV shows and PPVs, it lets me get ROH shows - the only product which is actually worth watching these days

I've read a bit about ROH, enough to be intersted, especially in the Joe vs. Punk II match, and a couple of other highly hyped matches. I've heard they have started doing PPV's recently. I may have to look into them if I find time.

and it lets me pay people to watch WWE and TNA for me and tear them to bits in a quarter of the time it would take me to sit through them.

That is one aspect in which I don't think I agree that the internet is a great thing anymore. I started getting insider info and backstage politics from an insider newsletter before the age of the internet, and it was great at first and rejuvenated my interest in wrestling. But in the internet era I have found the smark thing to be very cynical to the point where it starts making me not wan't to watch the stuff 'the experts' say not too. It seemed to me that everyone wanted to be the smark who knew the most and they all turned to Meltzer et al and just repeated whatever he and the other experts told them to think. Plus, knowing most everything that was going to happen got old.

This time around I don't think I will ever log into a wrestling news site, and may even avoid forum threads like this one. Part of the reason I started this one is cause there is already more info on the OG thread than I care to know. I don't want to know all the surprises before they happen anymore. I want to watch someone make a surprise debut and not know about it beforehand, or know who is going to make a heel or face turn, or know that a title will probably change hands or whatever.