Welcome back. Thanks for using your breaks from annual holiday over-eating to send in some more questions. I have now gone 20 hours without any alcohol passing my lips, so I think we’re good to go. Keep ‘em coming!
Before we get to the questions part, Inside Fights’ Kevin Wong has a few additional answers to last week’s query about UFC guys heading into pro-wrestling.
Hey Iain,
3. Which UFC fighter would make the best professional wrestler?
I suppose Sick should be the guy emailing you about this, but well, he’s got a kid and I don’t, so…
Tito Ortiz is definitely a good choice – he’s got name value, he’s appeared in TNA, can cut a promo, and as a bonus is dating Jenna Jameson.
Other names that come to mind are Quinton “Rampage” Jackson – who cuts a pretty good promo and is an entertaining fighter and Brandon “The Truth” Vera, who sounds like The Rock and looks like a cross between ol’ Dwayne and the animated Lex Luthor.
Cheers”
Thanks Kevin. Rest assured I will be buying The Simpsons Season Nine regardless of what the forumers might think. Balderdash, poppycock and scuttlebutt have no effect on me.
So, who is the most whoresome — Jenna Jameson or Amy Dumas? If we only knew”¦
Gerry Stumbaugh makes a welcome debut with:
“Heya – Love the new column. Her’s a promotional question. earlier this year on the WWE Smackdown homepage, there was a Wrestler profile for “Nacho Libre” Was there a plan for Jack Black to be in some matches that was nixed?”
No, as far as I know it was just a little bit of promotion for the movie. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Black was meant to appear on the show at some point but had to cancel for some reason, leading to WWE taking one of their trademark childish potshots with the Macho Libre character on ECW. Then again, celebrity spats like that are usually hard to keep secret, so who knows?
Random bit of trivia — Jack Black trained at an NJPW dojo in Los Angeles whilst preparing to shoot the movie. He also bladed hardway from the eye when he jumped out of the ring and smacked his face off a steel chair. None of this made the movie decent; though to be fair I watched it on a flight to Canada and was far more intrigued by the free bar. Why do they always have such shite beer on planes? Heineken or Amstel? It’s enough to turn an alcoholic in denial to terrorism”¦
Next”¦
The man fka dave returns with:
“i can remember see a single photo of someone in ecw falling of a scaffoling through 1 table out of a stack of 3, it looks like he had then hit the second one and fallen out of the ring. any idea where and when it happen, who it was and how badly he was injuryed?? i’m about 90% sure it was ecw but it might not have been.
thank you.”
I think this would have been Vic Grimes. He had a pretty infamous match with New Jack in ECW that led to a match at Living Dangerously 2000 in which they both fell 20 feet off of a scaffold straight onto the concrete floor. Jack got the worst of it, suffering genuine brain damage and losing sight in one eye. Yup, New Jack’s brain got even smaller. Scary. Since this is wrestling and nobody learns a damn thing from history, even in its most recent form, it was only a couple of years until another promotion had the bright notion to get Jack and Grimes to feud again — and to base the feud around scarily high table bumps. That promotion was XPW, which the world has thankfully seen the end of now. This feud mainly involved Jack jumping from ludicrous heights to try and put Grimes through various tables, with various results. In February 2002 they tried the scaffold bump again, only this time it was even higher than the one in ECW had been. The plan was to ‘break the fall’ with a stack of ten tables. Jack threw Grimes off and he missed all but two of the tables, dislocating his ankle and f*cking him up in numerous other ways. As if that wasn’t enough, Jack finished the match by legitimately electrocuting Grimes with a tazer. In the Forever Hardcore documentary he stated that he intended to throw Grimes as hard as he could, hoping that he would mess up his landing and get injured. It’s hard to figure out exactly who is the most to blame here — New Jack for going into business for himself (aggravated tenfold from his usual angry self by injury and vengeance), Vic Grimes for agreeing to work with him again (he surely must have known what Jack was like), or the idiots who supported XPW so that they had an audience to peddle this trash to.
Anyway, here’s the XPW spot:
And here’s New Jack rambling about it:
Next”¦
Clifton Robinson throws in a stumper:
“Seriouly man, what will it take from ROH, TNA, and WWE to usher in wrestling’s next golden era where the product becomes hot stuff amongst the main stream once again???”
Sheesh. I think the questions about God were easier to answer. The very basic answer is that each of the previous booms came when the product offered something that felt new, had engaging performers to capture the attention of the audience, and had management that was willing to be flexible and even spontaneous on the creative end of things. Now, the harsh truth that ROH is well aware of and quite happy about, and that TNA has still to come to terms with, is that neither of them is ever going to be successful in the mainstream. They are niche products, with ROH focusing on doing the best with what it has and TNA striving so hard to be something else that it just comes over as being bush league. In fact, if any promotion was going to be able to rise up and challenge WWE it would be an MMA one rather than a pro-wrestling outfit. That’s where UFC comes in. They are currently far more successful at getting their audience to buy PPVs than WWE is, yet they still have a long way to go to be established as a legitimate organisation — and it is surely only a matter of time until they run into all the same controversies that hijacked heavyweight boxing.
However, ROH, TNA and UFC offer three different styles of product. WWE has three different brands. This would be rather convenient if WWE were more willing to adapt itself rather than plugging identikit episodes of Raw every week for the past five years. It won’t provide them with a panacea to take things in this direction but it would certainly have better long-term prospects. Say one of the brands, probably Smackdown, started using the ROH model of focusing almost exclusively on the in-ring storytelling, supplementing it with old-school angles and longer storylines. Raw could continue to be the ‘edgy’ brand but one that would utilise the more ‘progressive’ X Division style of action, plus what Eric S dubbed the Grievous Bodily Harm Division seen in TNA. That would leave ECW to be the home of a highly experimental McMahon-run MMA show, which is exactly what it should have been in the first place and may well have become had Bob Sapp signed. Things are sort of heading that way at the moment but it’s all very half-hearted as the powers-that-be seem incapable of deciding whether they want to have three truly unique brands or just one big WWE product split into separate tours and PPVs.
Still, none of that alone would lead to another wrestling boom in the mainstream. Nothing short of a seismic change in presentation and organisation will do that. When Raw became War back in ’97 and changed the set and the style of the show it felt genuinely exciting to watch because nobody knew what was going to happen next. Now it’s nearly ten years later and everything about the show feels sterile, micro-managed into a meaningless malaise. There aren’t any easy answers but the casual fans certainly aren’t going to start watching regularly unless something different crops up and it’s helped out by two or three charismatic performers too. And no, Cena doesn’t fit that bill. Neither do Orton, Nitro, Punk, Carlito, Kennedy, Lashley, Edge or Dykstra (so far). Some of them might have what it takes but they have no room to breathe. They get brought in, they get allocated a certain spot, they get a script to adhere to, they get stranded in a booking desert where titles don’t matter and nobody gets put over anybody else, and they all play the part of a brick in the wall. Even if somebody does begin to make people sit up and take notice of them, like Benjamin back in ’04, the status quo will quickly reassert itself.
One thing I would definitely install would be a mandatory developmental period of at least three-years in at least two different territories for all inexperienced talent. There’s no logical reason for people like Chris Masters to be fast-tracked to the TV shows when they can’t even work properly in front of smaller crowds. They’re not confident, they are exposed very easily and it becomes far more difficult to repackage them or show them in a different light to the fans. The Randy Orton of 2007 is pretty much at the same point as the Triple H of 1997 and yet the fans are supposed to view him as the Triple H of 2001. It’s shite. Also, the Mike Bucci led unoffical wrestling history course starting in OVW should also be mandatory and involve some sort of exam. They need to know where they came from to figure out where they are.
So, to answer your question more directly, it will take Vince McMahon’s death and/or WWE going bankrupt. Ta-da!
Next”¦
Andrew Clarke, now established as not being that one, returns to ask:
“new question for the column. When did Bret Hart start using the Sharpshooter and when did Sting start using the Scorpion Deathlock?”
Sting used it before Bret did, back in the late ‘80s when he went to the NWA as a singles wrestler and Bret was still in the Hart Foundation. When Bret finally got his big singles push in 1991 he started using the hold, which, according to his DVD, he was taught by Konnan. It’s thought that the first person to use it was Riki Choshu in ‘80s NJPW. He called it the Scorpion Hold (or whatever ‘Scorpion Hold’ is in Japanese), so Sting dubbed his version the Scorpion Deathlock on account of it sounding rather more frightening. Bret called his version the Sharpshooter, probably because the WWF could then copyright the term but also because it fit his Hitman character better than all that there scorpion talk did. Chris Benoit, Lance Storm, Owen Hart and many others then learnt the hold from Bret and Stu at the Dungeon in Calgary. The Rock was not one of them, as I’m sure you can tell.
Next”¦
The well-groomed Homercutio returns with:
“Here are some damn questions:
1. Since this seems to be a popular theme, what do you think would have happened if Brock Lesnar and Goldberg hadn’t both left the WWE after Mania 20?
2. Who’s your favorite obscure/just plain bizare wrestler? I’m partial to Steve Blackman in his “Hardcore Champion” phase, when he did some pretty entertaining things with trash can lids, to give you an idea of what I’m getting at. I was also a big fan of Crowbar in the dying days of WCW.
3. Speaking of that, what the hell ever happened to Crowbar? Or Daffney, for that matter?
4. Does anyone in recent wrestling history have worse luck than Joey Mercury? Other than anyone in the Hart family, obviously.
5. If they ever do a Randy Savage DVD, do you think it will be a Woyah! style hatchet job? And, after the last ten years or so of his career, could you blame them? Also, what do they put on there besides the Steamboat match and his WWE title wins?
6. I think I’m out of questions now.”
Numbered questions are sexier somehow.
1. Well, for starters we would have been denied one of the funniest matches of all time. Two of my shiniest friends got to go to that show. I had to download it and watch it on a PC in my bedroom. Gits. Anyway, if neither of them were going to leave WWE then it’s likely that at least one of the world titles would have been on the line in their match and that it would have been made the main focus of attention given the promotion’s hard-on for Lesnar. This means we’d probably have never got that wonderful moment when Eddie won the title at No Way Out ’04, or the even better moment when he and Benoit got to triumph at the end of WM20. Thinking about that not happening just depresses me horrendously, so let’s not dwell on it any longer.
2. It’s hard to go wrong with a Big Wiggle.
3. Crowbar experienced the cultural highlight of Australia, the World Wrestling All-Stars tour, after WCW folded. Then things picked up a bit and he got to job repeatedly on Velocity and Heat. Then things dipped a bit when he went to TNA as part of Jim Mitchell’s New Church stable, which also included such luminaries as Mike Awesome, Brian Lee and a porn star. This was when they were still based in Nashville and had even less money than zero, which meant they quickly tired of flying him down there each week and let him go. After that he pretty much called it quits, returning to his old career in physical therapy and working a few indy dates around New Jersey.
Daffney did the post-WCW rounds too, working for TCW, TNA, XPW and ROH among others, before signing a developmental deal with WWE in 2003. Unfortunately she didn’t get to stay in OVW for long and a knee injury forced her into early retirement the following year. Being a wrestler, that didn’t last. After a spell working as a personal trainer she returned to action in the Women’s Extreme Wrestling promotion earlier this year, followed by appearances in NWA Wrestle Birmingham and Full Impact Pro. In fact, she’s still the reigning NWA Wrestle Birmingham Junior Heavyweight Champion. Check out her website here and keep vague hopes afloat that a larger promotion will get around to hiring her in the near future. She’d certainly be more of an asset than Ariel in ECW2.
4. I guess Rob Van Dam getting busted after finally getting to win not just the ECW belt but the championship could be called bad luck, but I’d prefer to call it sheer stupidity and the same applies to Mercury’s drug problems. Addicts can bitch and moan all they want but there’s no point whatsoever in spraying blame willy-nilly — eventually you just need to wise up and take some personal responsibility for personal actions. But that nose injury was pretty sick:
Still, if you’re a wrestler you can’t really expect to go through your career without taking the odd bad bump. Mercury’s hardly approaching the Eddie Guerrero or Chris Candido level of tragedy — and fingers crossed he never will.
5. If they do it should at the very least include the following:
vs. Rock N Roll Express (w/ Lanny Poffo, AWA, 1984)
vs. Jerry Lawler (Loser Leaves Town, AWA, 1984)
vs. Tito Santana (IC Title, Boston Gardens, 08.02.86)
vs. Ricky Steamboat (IC Title, WrestleMania III)
vs. Bret Hart (SNME, 28.11.87)
vs. Ted Dibiase (WWF Title, WrestleMania IV)
vs. The Mega Bucks (w/ Hulk Hogan, SummerSlam 1988)
vs. Hulk Hogan (WWF Title, WrestleMania V)
vs. Jim Duggan (“King Match”, 1989) — hardly essential but it would be good to see where the Macho King started
vs. WOYAH (Career Match, WrestleMania VII)
vs. Jake Roberts (SNME, 08.02.92) — probably a crap match but I’ve never seen the end of their feud
vs. Ric Flair (WWF Title, WrestleMania VIII)
vs. WOYAH (WWF Title, SummerSlam 1992)
vs. WCW (WCW Title, Battle Royal, World War 3 1995) — if there’s a better place to put crap WCW gimmick matches than on a Savage DVD, I’ve yet to hear it
vs. The Alliance (w/ Hulk Hogan, Tower Of Doom, Uncensored 1996) — ditto”¦ you know you want to watch it”¦
vs. Sting (No DQ, WCW Title, Spring Stampede 1998)
Depending on who you listen to there are various reasons as to why WWE wouldn’t want to release a Macho DVD and has been very sparing with the Savage material they’ve included on other releases. However, let’s face it, they own all of the relevant footage and it’s only a matter of time till it happens. These DVD sets have been a huge financial boon for the company and a profound help in balancing the books given their difficulty at getting people to pay to watch their current product. Vince has shown many times that he is willing to let water flow under the bridge so long as people will pay him afterwards. People will pay for a Macho Man DVD but won’t for a Luger or Jarrett one, so they’re never going to be forgiven. Whether Savage gets involved is pretty much up to him and that means it’s unlikely. If he gets a WOYAH style burial then so be it, it doesn’t really bother me so long as they include his best matches. Also, let’s face it, Savage is a nutbar and would certainly deserve any criticism for his bizarre behaviour. My opinion is that most of it stems from Elizabeth. He only really started to wig out after their marriage ended, he took a big turn for the worse after she joined him in WCW and then wound up with Luger, and her death seems to have been the point of no return for him, with all of his grief turned towards Hogan as a result of a life spent faking reality. Love can f*ck you up no end.
6. Ditto.
Next”¦
But wait! Homercutio returns with a follow-up:
“What ROH DVD would you reccomend to someone who hasn’t really followed the promotion but is interested in them because so many of their favorite new wrestlers in the last few years cut their teeth there? Also, do you think that comparing ROH to ECW in its prime is apt? Because I do. For reasons I don’t want to elaborate on, but you could probably figure out. You’re a bright fellow, being the answer man and all.”
In terms of actual wrestling content then I suppose ROH is closer to ECW than TNA is, but remember that ROH has no TV show and no PPVs, so the comparison is not really apt. Also, so far as we know, ROH is not getting any kickbacks from Vince McMahon and, unlike TNA, is not trying to market itself on the ‘f*ck WWE’ ticket, which ECW certainly did on numerous occasions. Also, ROH just doesn’t have the same levels of controversy that followed ECW, its wrestlers do actually get paid, and the name is far, far less marketable than ECW’s was. I’d be very surprised if there were sizeable ‘R-O-H’ chants at WWE shows five years after whatever point the promotion closes (fingers crossed it’s a long way off). ROH is very much its own thing. ECW was very much of its time, as WWE has found out to their cost. You could make the comparison if you like but it would be rather pointless.
Now, as far as recommendations go, I’m going to temporarily lend my Answer Man cloak to our resident ROH reviewer, Pulse Glazer:
“Alright, well, it depends if you’re looking to see where guys got their beginning or not. If you want the big names before they were big names, there’s the very first Death Before Dishonor. That one has a hilarious Low Ki vs. Deranged match, Homicide in a big 4 way, AJ and Red vs. The Briscoes, Punk vs. Raven, and Joe vs. London in London’s last, and maybe best, ROH Match.
Also early ROH, there is the absolutely stacked ROH Reborn Stage one. That one has Danielson vs. Punk, Joe vs. Homicide and early ROH matches from later ROH mainstays like Jimmy Jacobs, Delirious, Matt Sydal, Alex Shelley, Nigel, BJ, and Colt Cabana. That’s $10 right now.
If you’re talking current, you want the Milestone Series, which is ROH’s Fourth Anniversary Show up to the 100th Show. The best two cards around there are Supercard of Honor and Better than our Best. Scott Keith reviewed both if you want more info on those.
Lastly, there’s the pure emotion shows. If you want one of those, then check out- Punk- The Final Chapter, Joe-Kobashi, The Trilogy between Punk and Joe in order, Final Battle 2004, Death Before Dishonor IV, and, when it comes out, Final Battle 2006.”
Thank you, Special Guest Answer Man Aaron. Be sure to check out his series of ROH reviews here. Then there’s also Scott Keith’s recap of Better than our Best, his pant-wetting thoughts on Supercard of Honor and even on Joey, Season Two, Episode One, which I happened upon for no known reason.
To my shame I am far, far behind on my ROH viewing. With my lack of a decent net connection and a habitual obsessive-compulsive tendency, I’ve started with the very first DVD and I’m slowly buying them all from that point on. Still, if the people that were planning on buying each WWE PPV in 2007 bought those ROH DVDs instead, I’m sure the world would be a less smelly place.
Next”¦
Brian Palmer has time for a quickie:
“Maybe you can help me out. Do you know the origin of the nickname “Nature Boy”? What exactly does it mean? Is it some sort of 1940’s slang or something? Thanks.”
Basically, yeah. It was the name of a popular jazz tune in the ‘40s and Texan promoter Jack Pfeffer gave the moniker to Buddy Rogers after he bleached his hair whilst working in the territory. It stuck with him all through his career and was unofficially passed on to Ric Flair after their epic feud in ’78. And let’s not forget the other Nature Boy, Buddy Landel, who worked for Jim Crockett in the ‘80s and lost a ‘Battle of the Nature Boys’ match to Flair in 1990.
You can hear the “Nature Boy” song here.
Next”¦
Well, next column, next week would be next. I also bought myself a snazzy jacket at the Next sale but that’s neither here nor there. Thanks for reading, keep the questions coming and look out for – *hushed awe* – The Top 50!
Yup.
