Wrestling News, Opinions, Etc., 11.21.06

Columns, News, Reviews, Shows, Spoilers, TV Shows

So, the Bears beat New York two weeks in a row, Favre gets hurt, Regal beats the crap out of half of Team Twink, etc.

Things are looking up, eh? – Mistah M to the L to the Kennedy, a man who resides in more zones here than I do

Oh, you bet they are, and the capper was Monday night, when I pictured that silly bitch Hulse weeping tears of bitterness and humiliation as Twinkie Barber got bitch-slapped by Jacksonville into his worst performance in three years. Memo to Hulse: the Bears are now three whole games up on the NFC and hold the tie-breaker against your Gicunts. Memo to Daniels: the Jets got blanked by them, and now the New England Faggots line up to get their treatment. Brady will get turned into a bloody smear on Sunday, and I’ll laugh, laugh, laugh all the way. This is what you East Coast Bias bastards get by dissing them.

Of course, all that luscious goodness is counterbalanced by the open sore known as Genesis, which I’ll get to a little later.

From the AP Wire: Web sites that publish inflammatory information written by other parties cannot be sued for libel, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.

Five in the morning, sun’s beginning to come up. Rural interstate. Not a cloud in the sky. Not a cop in sight. Eric’s gonna have a little fun now. Just gotta figure out who’s gonna get it, that’s all. There’s such a large list of people and so much to say. I’ll have to think about it and get back to you.

Then again, I just did that to Hulse and Daniels above, but that’s not libel. You see, libel states that things being said have to be known by the writer to be a lie in advance. Everyone knows that East Coast Bias practitioners are big ol’ nancies who flaunt around with their noses in the air, unwilling and unable to recognize anyone outside of their own little milleu as being superior, and believing that the sewer-like stench emanating from their mouths is Chanel No. 5. The defense is truth, and therefore not libel. And it’s not slander either, since everyone knows it’s the truth except them, and therefore they can’t be damaged by stating it. So f*ck ’em.

And I think that just solved my problem about what to put into the lead-in here. Too bad I can’t use it for a teaser, because we don’t allow that sort of language on the front pages…and speaking of the front page, what the hell does the Reality section think putting every single one of their pieces of shit on the front page? All the other sections are rather judicious about what they give front page coverage to (and even though I have authorization to do so, I don’t throw anything of mine on the front page automatically; I let Fingers decide whether or not to do that). Why does everything from Reality automatically get put on the front page? Fuck you, Murtz. Your little D-grade celebs have to play by the same rules as everyone. And who’s this cocksucker you have writing for you who thinks he can use my name? Sorry, that’s a no-go. And you wonder why I never pimp that section.

Ooooooh, I’m a little bitter today, aren’t I? Thank God Fingers is out of town right now. He’d probably shit-can this one and demand I take whatever medication I might still have.

THE PIMP SECTION

Vin-Man is all over the place this week. And most of his assertions are correct, if slightly overblown. However, I can’t fault him for doing that, because he gives Punk the credit he’s due.

Pomazak gloats about his football experiences this weekend more than I do.

Paul is participating in NaNoWriMo. Hell, fifty thousand words is simple. That’s about three weeks of my columns.

Kennedy doesn’t use the terms Little Ice Age and Little Optimum. I thought that would be mandatory for a U of C grad. Standards must have gone down since I was there.

Cox thinks X-Men, The Arcade Game is retro. Sorry, kid, but I was in high school when Space Invaders came out. Your game is downright modern.

No, Clinton, there is no redneck in me, I’m afraid.

The AMAs take place tonight, and our black…crack staff from MGF has done a Round Table for it. And don’t let them fool you. Eagle’s laid up with a case of Portnoy’s Complaint.

Fernandez forgot to add one thing to the list of the Mexican Experience in Los Estados Unidos: a hundred and ten of them work for me. And I haven’t heard Leo Sayer do any vocals on anything since 1990.

TURN IT OFF AGAIN

After the moderate disappointment that was Bound For Glory, TNA needed to rebound a bit. Did Another Phil Collins-Related PPV do the trick? No, of course not. Angle/Joe was dangled before us like we were Pavlov’s f*cking dogs, daring us to praise the whole thing by osmosis. The rest of the card was incredibly dubious, especially given the fact that what could have been Match of the Night, the gloriously bloody barbed wire cage match between Christian and Rhiyno, was given away to pimp the prime-time debut. So let’s rock here.

Let’s start with the pre-show. This is where we all fell apart in the Round Table and picked ourselves off to stay within spitting distance of .500 for the night (almost every one of us finished at 5-4 or 4-5, with the difference being the Joe/Angle match and how we approached it; the discussion of how moronic TNA really is will be picked up there in spades). None of us expected them to throw out Eric Young for this. Blatt, though, came awfully, awfully close, not only calling the fact that Roode would drop the match, but naming for his opponent another member of Team Canada, just not the right one. Considering the level of uncertainty involved in the choice of opponent and the amount of wavering they’ve done on Roode’s push (which won’t get any better during the Impacts of the next few weeks), I’d definitely score this a single bull, right on the rim for a double, for Blatt. And you think he only knows ECW.

Other than that, I’m not sure whether they’ve given up on Roode. They obviously know Traci was a mistake after the level of build-up they gave, and the Impact tapings showed that they’re going to try to disengage him from her in a way that makes him look like what in olden days they called “a total cad”. But can anything be done to recover him? He was a can’t-miss for the upper midcard. Now he’s floundering. In the meantime, his American alternate self Mike Knox is suddenly having great matches and is caught up in a terrific feud with CM Fuckin’ Punk. Weren’t people saying a couple of months ago that WWE should book Knox more like TNA was booking Roode? This is an embarassment for Russo. Like he hasn’t been embarassing before.

To open the show, we had the spectacle of the New Age Fucking Outlaws prancing around with their new “this is really a suck-up to Vince” booking scheme. And as an appetizer, they get fed Raven’s new flock (and credit to all of us here for making Flock jokes before Sunday). Yeah, that’s something to really attract me to get into this show. Come on, it’s the booking equivalent of hemmorhoid surgery. You want something striking out of the gate, not…whatever this was. Pathetic, really.

Road Hogg jumps for joy over Bentley’s new look

The Naturals/Dutt-Lethal match was expected to be good, and it was. Let’s face it, these guys know what they’re doing (amazing to think that Lethal’s half my age, yet he’s got so much damn ring savvy), and they went out and did it. The only thing that was missing for me in this match was for the Nats to job, because I absolutely love seeing Shane Douglas go off. Apparently, though, Shane’s reserving that for any former ECW guy who saunters around the Impact Zone. That’s quite a shame, really. A half-cocked Douglas doesn’t give you the full experience that you deserve. It’s still a good thing, though, just not as good as it can be.

Don’t you love it when a spot comes together?

The Daniels/Sabin X Division title match was…well, let’s face it, they’ve fought each other so much that they’re completely comfortable with what the other wants to do. Sabin still defers a bit to Daniels in that area, but that’s no reason to denigrate him. He’s a great wrestler under the right conditions. They didn’t pull out all the stops on each other, but then again they knew they didn’t have to. They did just enough to make the match interesting and of high quality. So, no real complaints here. It lived up to expectations, but not far beyond them. For the X Division right now, that’s good.

Okay, Daniels has a more well-developed back. And the strap.

I love Ron Killings. I really do. I’m glad that he had so much success after being buried as K-Kwik. I’m incredibly sad to see what’s become of his career. From two-time NWA world champion to having to tag with Lance “Walking Lump Of Shit” Hoyt in order to get any camera time. But this may be a low point for him. Not only having to team with Hoyt, but to be used as a pawn in the Shelley/Aries impending feud. And he had to watch as Hoyt got the pinfall to boot. Maybe he’ll take a cue from Monty and start calling in any markers he might still have in Stamford. Put him on Smackdown and have him beat the living shit out of Mattsy-poo. I just want what’s best for him. Is it too much to ask?

Alex Shelley gets served

Christian had a major, major problem to deal with on Sunday. No matter what he did in the ring with A. J., it had to compare with very, very fresh memories of the cage match from Impact. Let’s face it, we knew going in that this would be a good match. It couldn’t help but be. Both Christian and A. J. have too much pride to let it suck. But there was no way that it could match up with the visuals from the cage match. Christian, I think, took the right approach: don’t do anything special in here. Just have a solid wrestling match with one of TNA’s best. But after this match, and continuing to now, loads of people are asking why they couldn’t have switched this match with the cage match on Impact. The only good reason that I can think of is that they wanted the PPV’s focus to be on Angle/Joe, and a match like the cage match would have “detracted” from it. Oh, bullshit. If Christian and Rhiyno had had the exact same match on the PPV as they did on Impact (and they could have gone more violent and bloodier on PPV than they could have on network TV), this would have been a candidate for PPV Of The Year when combined with Angle/Joe. Instead, we were left with a technically sound but blah match between two guys who we know can do better. Yes, that shouldn’t be something to complain about, but it’s like going from the hottest, sweatiest, downright dirtiest f*ck of your life with the hottest piece of ass in a hundred-mile radius to getting a handjob from the plain girl next door…oh, sorry, I forgot that most of my audience can’t relate to that analogy. But it’ll have to do.

Hmmmmm, normally it’s A. J. doing the leaping

In case you don’t know, Jim Cornette came up with two standard shibboleths of wrestling analysis. He was the one who invented the star rating system (which is much used and even more abused). He also came up with the Seven-Year Statute Of Limitations On Angles: no angle shall be repeated unless seven years have elapsed since last used. That’s quite ironic given his circumstances right now. How does he feel about doing two very similar angles in two different federations, both featuring the same person on the other side? He’s feuding with Sheremetyevo in TNA, and he’s feuding with Homicide in ROH. The only difference between the two is that the TNA feud is couching itself in a more contentious issue, namely free speech, rather than just Homicide behaving like an asshole/by his own moral code. The only reason they can get away with this little bit of parallelism is that Homicide is goddamn great and Corny is one of the true grandmasters at promos.

Um, Jim, in regard to your promo, I’m a veteran who served during a time of combat, and I don’t mind if Sheremetyevo burned the flag, just as long as they did it for the right reason, like protesting the growth of the police state under the Junta. So, thanks for thinking of my interests, but I really don’t mind. No, really, I don’t.

No, no, the Mexicans throw out the garbage, the white guys run the crew. Do you actually want me to work at work or something?

Now here’s where the booking totally went off the rails, yet still kept moving on. The questions come fast and furious: How in the name of heaven and in all good conscience could Sting, a man at icon level in the industry, be forced to drop the title without a successful defense? Why was Sting given the title in the first place? Why does Abyss have the title? The only obvious answer is so that Abyss can drop it to Angle (with the way they’re booking Joe at this point, a Joe/Abyss match isn’t really in the cards; Joe/Angle III has to be for the title (see below for where Joe/Angle II is coming from)). In that case, why the hell not delay Jarrett’s departure for a month, give Angle the title shot here, and have him win it? Nature prefers the shortest path, and so do I. What a f*cking waste.

I do feel slightly good for Abyss. This title reign should have happened at least two years ago, but he became a victim of Jarrett’s ego. He also became “designated first opponent” for any new title holder, always fated to lose. Well, not this time. You can almost see Russo laughing at us, yelling “SWERVE!!!11!1!eleventyone!!! UP YOURS SMARKS!”, as he booked Abyss to win this one. I honestly didn’t want him to see the title now. Due to the Impact tapings, we know he’ll have at least a two-month run with it, and I hope he and Mitchell can do some good. Of course, given the Impact tapings, that match with Joe might just come off anyway. However, he’s going to go down in the record books as a transitional champion in the true sense of the term (not the Edge sense of it). This reminds me a lot of Kane’s one-day world title reign, except the pain will last a great deal longer.

Mitchell’s just pissed because Sting looks better in red and black

And now for the final abomination. I don’t really know what to say. I mean, there’s no doubt it was a great match between two of the best wrestlers on the planet right now (I’ll consult with Ditch to determine how they’d rank with the puro guys thrown in). But the ending just left a sour taste in my mouth that went all the way through my digestive system and gave me the spastic shits. You wonder why more than half the people in the Round Table said there’d be shenanigans in regard to the ending? It’s because we had the perfectly rational belief that they wouldn’t give this match a definite ending, with one competitor getting the three-count. That would have been the intelligent way to do it, especially given next month (see below).

Was it necessary to blow Joe’s undefeated streak? What does this give Angle? Some sort of status as The Chosen One or something? Like he needs that. He’s Kurt Fucking Angle, for God’s sake. Because he’s Kurt Fucking Angle, Joe isn’t that hurt by the loss, but there is a severe dent on the image. A great portion of the reason why Goldberg is still seen with golden goggles by a lot of fans is the fact that he “didn’t lose a match” until after he had won the world title (of course, we who were there know that the winning streak was a lie, but the hype machine blotted out the collective IWC memory yet again). Don’t tell me that Jarrett’s WCW LUV prevented him from seeing that. Russo may have screwed with Goldberg when he arrived in WCW, but even he’s acknowledged that Goldberg’s booking during the “unbeaten streak” was one of the few things WCW did right. Joe’s a once-in-a-decade kind of guy and deserved similar treatment. Joe’s streak should have lasted until he dropped the title. At that point, Angle would have been the logical guy to do it. But the timing was just incredibly wrong here. And now, instead of keeping the fans on tenterhooks as to a massive confrontation between them, they’re going to oversaturate things. The match here, the rematch…no. Joe and Angle should have not met until Slammiversary in King of the Mountain, with a build-up to Bound For Glory, when the first singles match should have taken place. But Russo and Jarrett couldn’t help but show off their shiny new toy. Horrid booking all around.

And I thought Angle suplexing Abyss was a mindf*ck

And that depressing ending blotted out the good stuff that was present in a large portion of the card. I once wrote an essay years ago on how hot endings color memories of average-to-bleh PPVs and improve them. The reverse is also true. Bad endings can alter the view of what would have been a good PPV. This would have been good, if a little care was taken. But it wasn’t, and it’s shameful.

So, where do they go from here? Fortunately, we know for at least the next three weeks…

IMPACT SOMEWHAT SPOILED

Okay, so what form of living nightmare does TNA have in store for us on the road to Turning Point? Let’s have a look into the crystal balls of 1bullshit Junior’s TNA remora Richard Trionfo, who has nothing better to do than attend TNA tapings.

Oh, Lord, I was just thinking about this while in the Damn Vaninator at work. I was mulling over what to write in the Sting graph in the above section, and my thought was, “What do they do with Sting next? Give him to Christian again? Yeah, that really worked out well last time.” Guess what they did? Yep, three-way for the title at Turning Point. And even worse, guess who’s back at Christian’s side? You thought you got rid of Tyson Tomko, didn’t you? Tee hee.

Surprise, surprise, Styles and Daniels are no longer going to be a regular team. They did go out on top, though, with the entire damn X Division watching them. No, no surprise as to what they’re going to be doing for a while longer. A. J.’s going tweener by getting into a demi-feud with Rhiyno and Daniels is going along for the ride, waiting for a chance to defend his X Division title. Well, why not? They’re turning Abyss tweener, so why not A. J. as well?

The whole thing about suing someone for violating freedom of speech comes up again. Yes, I know, technically, you can’t under First Amendment guarantees, but Fourteenth Amendment guarantees do make some form of suit possible. I talked enough about Cornette above, though, so I’ll refrain.

Angle/Joe II at Turning Point, and they’re going to “watch each others’ backs” until then. Vince Russo books like Augustus Gloop locked in a candy store, doesn’t he?

The Jackasses blow up in a three-way match scheduled for next week’s Impact. Naturally, Sabin gets the duke. Man, what did Dutt and Lethal do to piss people off? Of course, this is Vince Russo booking, and you kinda remember what he implied about people whose skin was darker than anyone who uses SPF 30 at the beach.

Shelley and Aries are going to get a nice little feud between themselves going. This should be fun to watch from both a match and SE standpoint.

The Can-Am Connection is resurrected for one night, and, hey, you gotta admit, Angle and Williams sounds like one helluva team. One guy’s got a broken neck, and the other guy has a move that can break your neck.

Everyone’s going to prematurely spooge over the main event for December 7th. It’s a definite Pearl Harbor Day festival when the entire upper card participates in a six-man free-for-all (even money on Tenay making a Pearl Harbor reference). Yep, a six-man singles match with no rules. Hey, they should put a large cage around the ring and…hold it. When is December To Dismember again?

So, bunches of the usual crap interspersed with bunches of good ideas that may or may not be executed well. Stay tuned.

And you have no excuse to stay tuned with Raw, since it’s already been broadcast. Let’s take a look back at the Monday Night Moronfest…

THE SHORT FORM

Match Results:

Jamalga over Sabu, Cross-Promotion Pimp Match (Pinfall, Samoan Spike): Yet more proof, if more was needed, that no one takes a beating like Sabu. And he also got in a surprising amount of offense considering who his opponent was. So why hasn’t he had a match on ECW TV in the longest time?

Jamalga instinctively goes for the one part of Sabu’s body that he hasn’t broken

Jeffykins over Johnny Nitro, Intercontinental Title Ladder Match (duh): Don’t care. Wouldn’t have cared unless Jeffykins died in the ring. Then I would have done the dance of joy.

Ask the gang at Torchwood how difficult it is to catch fairies

Dusty Rhodes over Nick Nemeth (Pinfall, Bionic Elbow to chest): FatDust cutting a promo: golden. FatDust in the ring for an extended period of time: painful.

It’s just not the same without the polka dots. Or Sapphire, God rest her soul.

Lita over MickieLexis LaJames, Blindfold Match (Pinfall, whatever): So, Amy is going to take a powder after all. Well, it was the IWC’s worst-kept secret, but it was kept so uncertain that we started to wonder if it’d ever happen. Now, will they allow her to retain the title on the way out? That’s the question I’ll have to figure out before the Round Table, I guess.

And did anyone else expect either Trish or Moolah to walk out during Lita’s promo when she started mouthing off about being an “innovator” or being the greatest Women’s champ of all time? Oh, could Moolah have cut one helluva promo on her. Of course, Lita couldn’t have responded with a corresponding match. Well, these days, neither could Moolah. Of course, the ultimate surprise entrance would have been Madusa, but I don’t think that bridges in that regard have been repaired.

Is this really in the Lesbian Kama Sutra?

Trip ‘n Shawn, John Cena, and Ric Flair over The Big Show, My Illegitimate Son Ken Doane, Randy Orton, and Edge, Serious PPV Pimp Match (Pinfall, Cena pins Doane, F-U): Hold it, did Ross really use the term “Garvin stomp”? That freaked me out as much as Lawler bringing up cornea damage did to Slick Rick (although if Lawler really was verging into Solie territory, Rick, he would have used the term “su-play”). And is this the first time that Trip and Flair have teamed up since the dissolution of Evolution? If so, it would definitely have been nice to have had a Batista run-in at some point to finally take care of Orton once and for all. As for the match, when I saw that, after the entrances, there was less than ten minutes of action left, I ceased to care. It’s a PPV Pimp Match, nothing more, although some of you might have gotten off on it.

Bambi’s perfect Raw moment: no DX in sight

Angle Developments:

Losers

More losers

Definitely not losers

Definitely losers. Except for my boy, of course.

Memo To Trip: when standing next to Mattsy-poo and Jeffykins, it’s better not to use the word “twinkies” or make gay jokes. Trust me.

I’d say it was back to the losers, except that Finlay and Jamalga would beat the piss out of me

A Fitful Observation: The Carly Colon/Chris Masters feud has now been running, on and off, for eleven months. Has there ever been a longer feud involving two people no one gives a shit about? And how many women has Carly involved in this thing? Trish, Maria, the Ten-Buck Tramp…am I missing anyone? Hell, they need to rehire Joy Giovanni just to have some fresh blood involved in this thing. Geez.

They make a cute…something

Hey, once you go black…

Well, I’ll end this and start to recover a good portion of my suddenly-vanished music directory. Somehow, about thirty gigs worth of MP3s magically vanished (and, no, I wasn’t sharing the directory on P2P). I had about eight gigs of that on CD and on my phone for automotive purposes. Honestly, it did need some trimming down. Maybe I’ll start categorizing things instead of just leaving the directory in a jumble as I did. That should appeal to my sense of organization. Until the ECW Short Form, I bid you adieu.