Email of the Week
Im a huge Fourteen year old WWE fan who understands “in’s and out’s” of wrestling and does not buy every thing WWE tries to feed people but I’ve been wacthing matches on ” Rise and Fall of ECW” and I think if ECW wants to takeover the small venue’s it should invest in great wrestling as opposed to wacthing a girl struggle to take off her bra. I know ECW has just started, but untill it gets a 2 hour timeslot there’s is really no need for Kelly beacuse she is really cutting in to wrestling time.
A 14-year old kid gets it… the WWE doesn’t. Go figure.
Links
Murray wants you to check out some videos.
Lucard and Gloomchen know what happened at Smackdown because they were there and you weren’t.
Cooling makes a guest shot and tells me I’m wrong. I stand by my original statement. Just because penalty kicks are better than a coin toss doesn’t mean penalty kicks are good. This is like suggesting they’d allow the Superbowl to end in a tie and would worry about the shows coming on after it. If they had to play fifteen overtimes for the Superbowl to get a winner, they would. And, they play for the Stanley Cup until there’s a winner. Sorry, if you’re going to sell these guys as athletic gods, let them man up and give me a winner.
Coin toss. That should have involved rioting.
Price wants people up north to stop being fat f*cks… or something. Although, I’m pretty sure every southern food recipe involves buttermilk and deep frying but, to each their own. I think he hates the Yankees, too, yet has a ton of them on his historic All-Star selections… go figure.
Me… read the column which made Eric call me a cocksucker!
A Memo To No One In Particular
Dude, if Sean Shannon or Rick Scaia posted that, you would have (deservedly) ripped them a new asshole… including multiple questions about their masculinity and calling them pathetic in seventeen different languages. That sound you’ve been hearing all week is the two of them laughing at how the mighty have fallen. You’re one of them now. It’s time.
ECW 1.5
I can’t do it… I just can’t. How can they get the main event so completely right and everything else so completely wrong? A DQ finish for a table spot? Tommy jobbing out to effing Test. I need a week off.
What They’ve Forgotten
I had no idea what I was going to write about tonight. I didn’t want to do to an ECW column because the show is depressing. I didn’t really want to talk about Raw since it’s Thursday and there’s already approximately nine million looks at Raw around the Internet by the time Thursday rolls around. I haven’t watched Smackdown in about two years, and it’s a bit too early to preview the Great American Bash. So, I had no idea what to write about. To top it all off, the Wednesday following the All-Star game is the abject worst day of the year to be a sports fan. There are no Sports on… save for the WNBA All-Star game (so… there’s no sports on) and it’s repeat season. Usually, as a sports fan, you’re left dumbly looking at a Sportscenter that’s recapping nothing but the All-Star game and cockamamie mid-season predictions.
Then the MSG network saved me… like a gift from heaven. WWF At MSG Classics.
I found myself sitting in my living room, watching lightning crash down into the Hudson River and watching wrestling matches that aired likely when I still had only single digits in my age. Oddly enough, I found these matches fascinating for no discernable reason. I was trying to figure out why, exactly, these matches (slow and plodding as they were) were so exciting. The Brainbusters vs the Rockers? Pedro Morales vs Superfly Snuka? Hulk Hogan vs The Big Bossman? None of these guys were exactly high-impact wrestlers. There wasn’t any jumping off ropes or going through tables. No one got blasted with a chair. There weren’t any steel cages. What was it, exactly, that made these matches good?
Then it struck me. When Pedro Morales is wrestling Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka in 1979 or 1983, there was still the pretense of reality in professional wrestling. Sure, back then everyone “knew” it was fixed but it was never really confirmed. The moves weren’t so ridiculous that you had had to suspend your disbelief to the point of complete ridiculousness. Ric Flair’s finisher was a leg submission that actually hurt. Ivan Putski collapsed your chest with a huge fist. Hulk Hogan dropped a huge leg on your head. Very few of these “old school” finishers involved something that involved the person receiving the move as much as the person giving the move. You could believe that the Polish Hammer could beat someone because Putski was a giant animal. Things weren’t over-used like they are today.
The matches were much slower paced, yet they were still entertaining. Why? As I was watching it, I realized. These guys always had fifteen or twenty minutes to tell their stories. The match started, there would be a feeling each other out phase. It would be followed by headbutts and other such plodding moves. The reason for this, again, was to make the match still seem as realistic as possible. I think over the course of a two-hour program, I only saw five Irish whips, and three of them were from Hogan. When these guys started to act gassed in the ring, it was at least 10 or 15 minutes into the match. 10 to 15 minutes of activity you can believe a guy is breathing heavy or in pain. The WWE’s current Superstars regularly have 6 or 7-minute matches. The guys start acting gassed and exhausted two minutes in. I understand why; they think the current wrestling artist (that they’ve conditioned and trained, but that’s beside the point) will quickly bore of an older styled match, so they condense what used to be 20 minutes of drama into a quick gratification able to be packed into live television segments.
Now, however, they want the best of both worlds. They want the bite-sized television segments, but they also want the old, safe, plodding style of wrestling. The problem is: when you combine both things together, neither is believable. The “greatest athletes in the world” are gassed after two minutes and pinned after four. It’s depressing, boring, and usually disappointing.
Maybe watching the old matches just hit a nostalgic spot, I’m not sure. All I do know is that I’ve never wanted to order WWE 24/7 more than I do at this particular moment so, in that case, job well done.
That’s a wrap, see you Monday.
