Professional Wrestling

Re: Brodus Clay. First I was like :|

Then I was like :D. Still to this day.*

Totally agree with you about Daniel Bryan shark. I don't always get to watch Smackdown! so what I've seen is pretty limited, but the heat I've heard is great. I only got back into wrestling much more last year and while I understood why so many were high on him, my general fondness for talkers put him down a little. He's winning me though.

Bit of irony on my love of talkers though: I've loved Jericho's return routine. Granted I also love Andy Kaufman so that explains it.

And now what's arguably my favourite event of the year is just around the corner!

HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR BAAAAAAAH

Rewatching WWE Money in the Bank 2011. Still think it's the best PPV of 2011, at least from the 'E'

Man this Jericho Punk feud has gotten personal... I love it!

Bryan vs Sheamus was complete bullshit. At least Taker/HHH was awesome enough to take that off my mind for the rest of the show.

Yes Yes YES YES YES YES God I love that new chant

edited 3rd Apr '12 6:55:54 PM by diomedes2

YES! is the new What?

It was awesome seeing Brock Lesnar make his triumphant return on RAW by beating up John Cena.

It'd be more awesome if WWE wasn't such a strict enforcer of the three month rule.

Anticipating tonight's RAW. At the expense of sounding nostalgic, I haven't felt this way since the late 1990s/early 2000s. Not implying that older is better, of course.

I'm excited for RAW too. Hopefully Brock appears again, and I'm interested to see if the YES chants will continue tonight.

edited 9th Apr '12 5:30:50 PM by shark33

After last night's RAW, Johnny Ace seems to have officially disqualified himself from the human race.

Also, you can't follow a firing angle with the Funkasaurus, you just can't.

Is it just me, or did Scott Hall look like Wolverine back in the '90's?

It's just you. I don't remember Wolvie ever had slicked-back hair.

I've started watching WWE again and noticed something. For, whatever reason, the crowd is completely dead but the commentators are all excited because whatever activity before them is "trending world wide on twitter". Did it ever occur to them those tweets aren't positive, and why do they care more about the internet than the live audience?

Becuase WWE seeks to get more people interested in the show and by trending worldwide, it may attract the attention of people who normally don't follow the show.

Wrestle Crap actually had WWE's Twitter obsession in the running for 2011's Gooker Award. Here's what RD had to say about it:

WWE's obsession with Twitter (#WWE): #Overkill, pure and simple. Sure, Twitter is popular with the #peoplethesedays, many things are right now. #thatshowweroll. But the way that the @WWEUniverse has been all over the #socialnetworking site like a loner masturbating to a nudie mag is, well, #madness. Could you imagine if @WWE did that with #Myspace and how annoying THAT would be? And we all know what happened to THEM, right? #Epicfail, truly. And for all we know, this #trendingonTwitter may last about as long and positively in #thepubliceye as most #Divasmatches are currently. Hell, Twitter itself may go #thewayofthedodo by the end of the year and make WWE look like it has an #eggontheface from all the #dicksucking it's been doing. Let's hope they don't get that #obnoxious ever again.

edited 7th Sep '12 4:14:56 AM by KilgoreTrout

Two opposing points? Still, you can't have modern professional wrestling without the live audience. I as far as my wrestler friend tells me, it's do whatever, see how the crowd reacts and act accordingly from there. Twitter is not an adequate replacement, at least I don't see how it could be.

I thought it might have just been me, the few wrestlers I know don't have much comment but people talking on any given website might not actually be saying anything nice. Those two guys who did Epic Movie, that DMC Devil May Cry, Joe Quesada all had "popular"(high activity pages) but they were full of negativity.

Well, might as well be positive. I watched Smackdown and the tag team action has me hopeful the division won't be gutted this time. It has survived the release of Abraham Washington.

Any thoughts on Jerry Lawler's brush with death last Monday in Montreal?

I wasn't watching Raw, but I just saw the updates from Michael Cole online. I had heard that he died so that he's stable is a relief.

Seen enough! Cenanuff! Vote for Ryback!

edited 12th Oct '12 6:51:56 PM by Cider

I went to see IWC's Winner Takes All event in Elizabeth, PA. It was good stuff. They had two outside guest stars, Tommy Dreamer and Chuck Taylor ("The Kentucky Gentleman". I'd never heard of him before, but apparently he's a reasonably big deal). I was very entertained. The wrestlers have excellent grappling technique, made it look very real. The striking is a bit more of a mixed bag. The chest slaps were loud and meaty, but there were a lot of air punches with no sound whatsoever.

I was particularly impressed with Colin Delaney and Kevin Haught, who went up against "The Founding Fathers". Two against three, and very much out of their weight class, they nonetheless put in an excellent showing where they only lost because the other side cheated every chance they got (That's the one problem I had with the overall tenor of the matches. Even among the supposed faces, the people who won were the ones who cheated, and a lot of the "heel behavior" consisted of intelligent use of match strictures, like routinely tagging fresh teammates in and keeping a guy away from his partner's corner). Apparently Colin is a former WWE wrestler who got eliminated during budget cuts and has since been touring the independent circuit. Haught is an earnest young fellow, all of 5'5", apparently been wrestling for about four years hoping for a breakthrough (I talked with him during intermission, kept calling me "sir", but apparently he uses "sir" and "ma'am" with everyone). His offense in the ring wasn't great, but he did wonderfully at selling the moves, and his rallying points were convincing.

Overall, I was very happy with the show. I'm probably not going to make their next event on January 26th, but I'm definitely going to look at further ones out. For those looking to get an idea of the matches, my wife's co-worker, Justin Plummer, does their IWC Aftershock show. It's mainly interviews (they sell most match footage on their DV Ds), but there's enough to get an idea of the talent involved.

Tommy Dreamer, well I hope he is happy. It is good to see anybody keeping interest in the "sport" alive but strangely, I do not think I have heard of the international wrestling cartel. I kept thinking of that Puerto Rican company or Irish Whip Wrestling.

Collin's offense vs selling? Well, there is likely a reason he was/is a jobber. He may get his break yet, the Brooklyn Brawler was on a WWE pay per view yesterday.

^_^ Yeah, doing searches for IWC turns up a bewildering array of results that have used those initials including, as best I can tell, an abbreviation or the International Wrestling Community on this wiki.

As best I can tell, they have results dating back from 2001. Speaking with one of the employees Saturday night, they're about a third-tier organization, at least based on his explanation that people like Tommy Dreamer are top-tier, wrestling fairly regularly in front of televised audiences. The Kentucky Gentleman guy is second-tier, not with a main event, but used to wrestling in front of crowds of thousands. This one, well, the crowd we had of 300 or so was considered to be a fairly epic turnout.

As regards Colin, I was very amused to see listed that he's apparently been primarily a heel. Based on the Wikipedia article, it looks like he's back to his "Olsen Twins" persona, kind of a teenybopper thing. He was clean-shaven, sported long red tights, and in general came off very "Gee whiz, golly" in how he spoke and acted. I think we were supposed to root against him because he was so dorky, but honestly, I think it came off more as the other side being jock bullies right out of high school.

IWC Aftershock 17: Part 1 IWC Aftershock 17: Part 2