CB’s World: Taking YOUR Wrestling Pulse, Featuring KON

You’ve got multiple generations that grew up with the original Star Wars trilogy. They had all the toys & pretended to be Luke or Kenobi every time they reached the end of a toilet roll or kitchen roll. You know how you get those big rolls of wrapping paper? Once all my presents were wrapped my parents would give me the tube from that & it was like Christmas came early. Star Wars was like this unbelievably huge part of a lot of our childhoods.

Cut forward about 20 years & here we all are complaining about the changes Lucas has made to the movies & how bad the most recent ones are…

With wrestling, it was different from all the cartoons & live action TV shows aimed at kids. These guys are angry at each other & the only way to solve their problems is by getting in the ring.

Sure, it had cartoon-like characters (or even legit cartoon characters, like Slaughter) but it felt more real. When you’re a child, an un-dead guy in a cowboy hat isn’t the most unbelievable thing in the world, it’s not even the most unbelievable thing you think of on any given day.

I remember getting an Undertaker t-shirt for Christmas one year & I wore it until the print had all but disappeared, I got the big blue ring (with the little mallet for ringing the bell!), Undertaker & Hogan figures too, so ‘Taker would always win.

Guys like him were why I got into it, I wasn’t around for the whole Rock & Wrestling thing (i was born in ’87), so the whole Hulkamania thing was kinda on it’s last legs by ’91 when I started watching. Seeing Undertaker sit up after someone landed a move that’d put anyone else on the roster down for a 10 count would make me jump up & down & do what’s now known now as “marking the fuck out” (I’m pretty sure all these terms just exist to take the fun out of watching/remembering wrestling).

Like I said in the answers to the Survivor Series thing that never happened between Blair & Glazer, I was watching Wrestlemania 8 the other day & the title match was like third on the card or something, but from the pre-match interviews to the post-match victory speech it was all amazing. Savage makes his way backstage during Flair & Perfect’s “he had a fistful of tights” rant, but he’s still selling the figure four leg-lock as he talks to Gene. Savage was another guy that was just amazing to watch. The stuff with him & Jake was really good, it made me loathe Jake.

The early 90’s were a great time to get into it because it was kinda transitional. Guys that didn’t look like Hogan were starting to get more & more airtime, so you got to see some technical wresting as well as the squash matches & brawls.

I guess a lot of it for me is about the story. There’s nothing better than watching a feud reach boiling point, then you get to the match that’s gonna end it once and for all & a guy like Brett is working the leg at every opportunity in order to come out victorious via the sharpshooter. I’m not a massive fan of HHH, but I was re-watching some “Attitude era” stuff & he was always working the opponent’s neck when he could. Things like that grip me.

Regal v Goldberg! Goldberg was just a wrecking ball at the time & he’d do like 3 moves in each match, so out comes Regal & he takes Bill down to the mat, start’s applying all sorts of holds & I’m sitting on the edge of my seat, not even blinking.
Goldberg’s streak worked because if you didn’t like him you’d want whoever he was fighting to win, it was different from stuff like Dr. Death’s 10 year streak. With Crimson over in TNA it didn’t work because we’d seen the exact same thing before (with better booking/marketing). Some of us were just waiting for him to fuck up his arm via a car window…

It’s so easy to watch a whole feud via Youtube or whatever now, you can sit for like an hour & watch Raven’s first year in WCW. Back then I got to watch the show they had on Sky One on every Saturday, but I’d have my grandfather tape the big 4 & maybe it’d be a week or two before I got the tapes. We also had a big van drive round the town that we could rent videos from, so I got to watch stuff from before ’91 too. ITV showed WCW Worldwide back then, but it wasn’t until Nitro that I got into WCW.

If the audience doesn’t know what’s going on, they can’t be expected to cheer or boo X. This is why you watch & see a lot of the matches getting no reaction at all from the crowd.

So when the crowd is dead for most of the show & one guy gets a few cheers, you could say he’s over, but only in terms of the show that week.

I don’t think anyone watching Superstars thinks Morrison is over because one guy in the crowd went “holy shit” when he started jumping round the ring, but it’s that kind of thing that seems to be happening. If you see a lot of shit movies you tend to find things in them that you like while still thinking the movie it’s self is shit, it’s like that.

Other than that? it comes down to some writers not actually believing the stuff they post. I’m not saying they do it for the hits or to attract comments, I’m not them, I don’t know why it happens.
I’m just a blogger.

I’ll do WWE first:

Orton v Christian:

So Christian has the belt for roughly the same time as Taker did when he won it from Hogan, then Orton gets it at whatever they called This Tuesday In Texas. Christian is the face who was robbed of his title, right? Orton, the guy who’s known for kicking people in the head in order to give them brain damage, he must be the heel, right? It all made no sense. Sure, it comes down to Orton being the guy who’s selling action figures, but if you go back in time (and I’m sure a lot of guys who’ve been watching since the territories were strong will back me up on this), what would happen is that the heel wins the title by grabbing the tights or something, then they have a re-match & it hits the time limit, so the next one has no limit & ends in DQ, the one after is no DQ & so on…

It’s that kind of booking that gave meaning to things like cage matches & it doesn’t devalue the title in any way either. If the heel is champion for four+ months, the face ends up looking really good when he eventually overcomes the odds & wins the belt again.

Why don’t WWE book things like that? I know why, but it’s kinda like hitting my head against a wall…

Reason 1: Orton & Cena.

If you’re a young Cena fan, seeing your idol overcome Miz & Riley dropping a nuke on him is a huge pay-off.

For a long time, they’ve been scared to have a PPV that doesn’t feature Cena/Orton in the title match, because they think that’s what kids & young, uh, wimmins want to see. Recently they’ve slowly began to realise that they can still cater for the Cena/Orton fans while using the belt to make the next Cena/Orton type figure (hopefully Punk).

Reason 2: Gimmick PPVs.

They can’t have a feud end in a Hell in a Cell match because they have the Hell in a Cell PPV scheduled for October. See also: Extreme Rules, Tables Ladders & Chairs…

Reason 3: Speed.

WWE like to rush things for fear of them not catching on, but if you do too much in a short space of time it has to end up feeling weak. How can Show v Henry 2 top the ring breaking? (aside from re-doing it & making the actual “implosion” not take place over 5 seconds & look botched as fuck)

Reason 4: TNA DO THAT, FUCK THOSE GUYS.

TNA has a lot of problems, but for the most part they know when a cage match should be a cage match, a No DQ match should be no DQ & so on. While Vince has never been one to pay attention to the competition, I know guys like PS Hayes do & they don’t want it to look like they’re ripping off the bingo hall promotions.

R Truth v Cena:

Truth v Cena was good because if you look back, it played out like a parody of what was to come. Truth kinda said everything that Punk did a month or so later, but everyone just brushed it off because it was in a more jokey style.

It’s kinda like WWE were planting seeds for the Awesome Truth thing from back when Miz was feuding with Cena, so for it to go:

Miz v Cena
Truth v Cena
Punk v Cena
Cena & someone v Truth & Miz while Punk tries to get the belt

It’s all kinda like one long storyline & the pay-off hasn’t come yet.

TNA time…

Hogan v Sting:

So the pay-off was clear on this one & well worth the wait.
Hogan is no longer appearing on every show and taking up our valuable time!

Sting isn’t a horrible combination of Cesar Romero & Heath Ledger any more!

The face turn had the crowd going wild & the shows have improved since then, so this one goes down as a good storyline in my book.

What other story-lines did TNA really have? I could talk about how the “Legends Ring” completely ruined Abyss, but that’s like 18 months old.

I was happy to see Velvet winning the Knockouts belt, but she’s been involved in almost everything over the last year, so it’s kinda hard to say what the story was (other than her overcoming TNA’s booking problems).

Angle v Jarrett?

I think that ran way past boiling point. If it gets to the stage where I want to tape Karen’s mouth shut & kick the living shit out of Jeff: They’ve got the wrong kind of heat.

Nash & Waltman did a shoot, I think it was for RF, where they talk about Nash flying down to Mexico because Waltman had been on a crazy drug binge & locked him self in the hotel toilet while contemplating suicide. Tears are rolling down Nash’s face for most of it & Sean is trying to put on a brave face for his girlfriend (who’s also crying her heart out). We’ve all heard some stories about Shawn & the guys, but watching the shoot shows the end result of those “fun, crazy stories”.

I had seen the footage of Hall at INSERT SHITTY PROMOTION NAME HERE (shitty because of the guy running it, I’m sure most of the staff work hard & the wrestlers they had on were guys like Justin Credible) online shortly after it happened, I think it was posted on thepowerbomb (former home of Newbury, Swayze and Blair) & by this time I’d already seen the Nash & Waltman shoot & I had been following Hall’s youtube channel for a while & he wasn’t in the best of shape during most of those videos either, so I was like “Why the fuck aren’t they helping Hall out?”.

They can’t look after Hall all the time, obviously, & it’s not like none of them have tried to help. Even Steph was saying how much WWE had put up to try & get him clean… (Hunter & Shawn’s absence was kinda strange). Hogan though, fucking Hogan. His entire input consisted of “NWO were big, brother! Almost as big as Hulkamania!”

It’s like when Beyond the Mat came out & everyone started thinking Jake’s situation was tragic. Jake was having quite a shite life for years before that, but suddenly that same switch was flipped & people went from laughing at him to feeling sorry for him. We’ve passed the point now where it’s “ok again” to laugh at things like “you wanna play 21? I got 22!”

You know what though? Jake Roberts is an arse hole. He fucked up his own life & many others along the way.

Scott Hall is still an arse hole. It’s kinda worse because he was the guy on Springer telling a 10 year old AIDS sufferer “Hey yo, chico. You know the moment you give up fighting, that’s when you lose, man”. Look at his own son in the documentary, basically saying he’s only training to become a wrestler because he think’s it’ll keep his father alive.

I think if Nash & co. sat down with Hall & actually said “you’re a piece of shit, you know that?” He might actually clean up.

The fact that those guys were & are arse holes doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the matches though. Savage v Jake was still great. I remember loving Razor & Shawn’s ladder match when I watched the tape. I couldn’t tell you anything about the rest of the PPV, but that’s still the best ladder match i’ve ever seen.

I remember hearing about Bam Bam’s death & being like “holy fuck”, it was pre-Benoit & I hadn’t been keeping up with wrestling for a few years (apart from the ECW One Night Stand PPV). Bigelow’s death got me onto reading wiki articles to find out what was happening to the guys a grew up watching & then I discovered shoot interviews (it’s still be a few years before I started watching actual wrestling again though).

So I start reading through all this stuff & find out things like: Luger was living on Sting’s sofa because he’d got really fucked up on drugs, lost all his money & may or may not have had a hand in Liz’s death.
When you read that it’s like, well what can you say? No words can really explain it.

When Savage died it was a huge shock. He wasn’t known for having a heroin problem or a massive coke addiction people rarely had a bad word to say about him. That kinda hit me hard.

I guess the real question is: Do ESPN give a shit about Scott Hall & a whole lot of other guys that are in the same boat?
If so, why haven’t we seen more of these things?
Why don’t we see one each month about a wrestler who’s life is really shit right now?

Maybe once the WWE Network gets going they’ll have this type of thing & show us the good that the Wellness Program can do. Either that or they’ll have their own version of Celebrity Rehab & exploit what’s left of their former stars…

Also, what are you two favorite and least favorite things about today’s WWE product and why?

Favourite thing number 1: His name is Santino Marella

When nobody in the company is aloud to be “too evil” or “too sexy” & no match can be “too violent”, all you have left is comedy. Santino might be the best thing about the “PG era”. Anyone want to argue with me on this? Head over to Youtube & watch Santino play with an Iron Sheik action figure.

Least favourite thing number 1: Johnny Ace

I don’t want to harp on about it again, but watch Maria’s Youshoot & you’ll learn exactly how talent relations treat the “divas”. Laurinaitis will walk around saying shit like “you might want to drop 20 pounds before the next PPV” & “You know, a larger cup size might just help you get over”.

“Talent Relations” also go to clubs & find girls who they think would be good on the show. I’m not saying Ace does that himself, but I guess he doesn’t see a problem with the people who work for him saying “You know, if you want to get over…”. That’s just the “divas” related stuff, but nobody has a good word to say about Johnny.

Favourite thing number 2: The possibility of a tag-team division (Evan just had to get high & fuck things up…)

As the champs, the tag division rests on Kofi & Evan’s shoulders. If they got no response then the belts would probably disappear again, but as long as they get a reaction WWE can think about throwing other guys together (like some of the hungry guys in Florida who might lack the skills to get over on their own) & build it into something.

I’m not expecting it to be on the level of the early 90’s, but if they can get some teams together & have them all compete for a chance to be #1 contenders? It’d be something fresh & they might even find the next Cena/Orton out of it.

Least favourite thing number 2: Lazy booking

Cody Rhodes vs. his dad

Dusty had two things that Cody lacks: charisma & kneepads.
Regardless of anyone’s opinion on Dusty’s in-ring ability, the guy has contributed so much to the business behind the scenes & his legacy was hard for Dustin to deal with 15-20 years ago, so I think Cody probably has a lot of baggage too.

Every time Blair is writing a Jarrett related response I ask him to print the following:

EXT. Jerry Jarret’s House – Day

Dusty & Jerry are sitting having a beer & reminiscing about the territories.

DUSTY: …so now Cody has the IC title & Dustin has been given a production role, how’s Jeff getting on?

JERRY: FUCK YOU, DUSTY. FUCK YOU!

THE END

Mark Henry vs. Vader

Mark Henry is a less fortunate Jeff Jarrett. He’s a guy that never had the talent, but stuck it out anyway. Jarrett found himself in a position where he could book himself into any angle he wanted (pun slightly intended) & Henry has found himself in the top spot on Smackdown (just don’t tell Orton’s fans).

Vader could run across the ring, moonsault & do a lot of other stuff that you wouldn’t normally see from a man of his stature.
Henry rests on the ropes after each scoop slam.
Vader came off as a vicious bastard even though he’s a really soft guy in real life.

Henry pauses to catch his breath between every two words.
Vader used to wear a terrifying metal helmet. Mark Henry used to wear a singlet with “Sexual Chocolate” written on the back.

Vader is well known as the guy that works through injuries, even going as far as pushing his eye back into it’s socket mid-match. Mark Henry is well known for disappearing from TV for what seems like years at a time due to injuries.

Vader will forever be known as the guy that beat Foley until his ear fell off. Mark Henry will forever be known as the guy that fathered a hand.

Sheamus

Fella has a good set of moves & he’s not bad on the mic. He doesn’t have the crowd behind him as much as some people maintain (watch his match at Vengeance for proof) & he’s suffered from shite writing. They put the belt on him far too early & now you see things like “we’ve seen Seamus as champion before, it didn’t work”. You can’t really argue with that.

Like I said in the comments of Aaron’s post about him: They should run with Cody v Sheamus & have him come out of it with the IC title.
It’d rebuild him in the eyes of some viewers & hopefully get him more crowd support.

Did you know his finisher was called “Pale Justice” for a little bit? I found that out after I did the “sexism & racism in modern wrestling” thing that Blair posted. Fucking ridiculous.

Dolph Ziggler vs. Mr. Perfect

Hennig was the fucking man, I don’t see any way you could compare the two in terms of Pro Wrestling. Perfect was amazing, even during that whole “Rap is Crap” thing.

Dolph has a good amateur background, but then so did Sheiky Baby & he only got to carry the belt because Backlund didn’t want to put Hogan over (quite right, fack the Hulk Hogan!). It’s not like having him as one of Vickie’s mumbling heels is a great opportunity to showcase his technical skills.

Ask me this again in 5 years time.

CM Punk vs. Stone Cold

Austin had a few years of fighting the boss, Punk’s had maybe 6 months.
Austin v Vince wouldn’t have been as big a thing if the Screwjob hadn’t turned Vince into “the evil boss”. It’s weird, because if WWF had been a normal TV show or a movie, Austin would’ve been the bad guy. Austin was drinking on the job & terrorizing his boss at every opportunity,

With Punk v HHH & now Punk v Johnny Ace, it’s kind of different. The HHH & Steph thing happened like a decade ago, so it’s not like it’s capitalising on something recent. With Ace it’s even more strange, a lot of viewers wouldn’t have known who he was when he started following Vince around on RAW.

A lot of people say it’s happening because they’ve been paying attention to the internet, “Punk said what a lot of us were posting” & that kind of stuff, but it kicked off around the time Chavo got released & all the stuff Punk was saying rang far truer for Guerrero than it did a guy who has his own segment on the show, A guy who’s sitting at the top of the entrance with a microphone on live TV. A guy with the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand…

It’s gonna be a lot harder to surprise Laurinaitis or McMahon with a G.T.S. (and there’s no way he’s gonna be able to ambush them with a Pepsi Plunge).

Wild Card – your choice

I was going to mention a TNA guy here because it seems like they’ve been lacking some love during this edition of Taking YOUR Wrestling Pulse, but what can I say about AJ & Joe that hasn’t been said by everyone else 1000 times?

Jay Lethal

TNA are fucking morons for letting this guy go and keeping bland guys like Crimson & Gunner. Black Machismo got a better reaction than anything else on the Impacts that he appeared.
Watch the video from when he came out as Flair. Taz & Tenay are are singing his praises, but you can’t hear that because the crowd is going absolutely crazy.

He had fantastic mic skills, he was young, he was good in the ring & the crowd loved him. How can they justify firing a guy like that?
Because he asked for some airtime?

My TNA moment of the year was Rosita from Mexican America crying at No Surrender. That sounds awful right? I’m not a cold heartless bastard, let me explain: TNA did a way with the whole “heels & faces are never seen together” shit & you got to see something real.

Her interview later on in the PPV was really moving. Did they give the girl who spent 5mins on the PPV crying her heart out about her father’s death a face turn, or even try to break her away from the awfulness that is Mexican America? Fuck no, this is TNA we’re talking about.

Other thoughts:

Hogan is off screen & Sting isn’t “insane” any more, but they still need to keep Flair away from the ring before he dies in it.

They have a roster full of guys that you never see. I’m not sure if they’re on Xplosion or what, but they seem to play it like the X Division only has like 4 people now. Did they fire all of the guys who wrote “Who’s next?” on the side of Bischoff’s car?

In a world where a lot of people think WWE’s product is just really bland, why are TNA dropping everything to sign ex-WWE wrestlers?
Why don’t they just try to show off the people they have?

Sorensen, Gunner & Crimson need to take a few months off and come up with better characters. The only thing I remember Gunner doing this year is managing to get his nose cut open on a paper cup.

Karen needs to stop screaming all the time. I know the WWE “divas” do it too & while I think they should all stop, TNA seem to have a strange way of placing mics where the in-ring stuff drowns out the commentators & the music. Karen is supposed to be the boss of the “knockouts”, so why is she getting emotional all the time? She should talk like Cody Rhodes.

Nobody wants to see more AJ v Daniels if TNA are going to continue to book it the way they have. They must’ve worked really hard in order to fuck up that I Quit match, I was expecting it to be the match of the night.

Steiner should be leader of Immortal if they’re still going to run with it, he’d done way more in his career than Jarrett ever will.

Everything needs a lot of work. While they do a creative overhaul they could just have an episode of Impact where Steiner walks down to the ring & shoots on everyone he’s ever met.

Favourite finishing move, both today and all-time: This is quite hard. A lot of finishers today appear to hurt the guy who’s doing them more than the opponent (Truth, Cody, Miz…).

Today: I like the move Beth Phoenix does where she gets them in a double chicken-wing, lifts them up for a bit & then drops them down with a reverse face-buster kind of thing. It looks like it’d hurt.

All-time: The Stunner — Other finishers are technically better, but it always had that element of surprise. The way guys like The Rock would sell it too, bouncing all over the ring & sometimes over the ropes, that puts it up there.

I could just say The Cutter, but nobody sold the RKO, Twist of Fate, Ace Crusher, Diamond Cutter, etc. like they did Austin’s Stunner.

Favourite theme song of all-time: Rockhouse (N.W.O) — It’s a bunch of Jimmy Hendrix songs smashed together. Swayze, Dave Dubya and I sat down one night & tried to figure out every sample/re-interpretation. The only part we couldn’t nail down was the lick used just before it loops back round to the main riff…

Runners up: Perfect, Savage & Flair

Favourite ring entrance of all-time: Sandman — Very few guys have an entrance that can eclipse their in-ring performance.

Favourite live event experience: N/A :( — We never had the money when I was growing up to be able to go to them. I remember one time, I think it was 1999, Yokozuna was wrestling 3 towns over. He hadn’t been on TV for years, but I still wanted to go. We couldn’t attend, but that’s the closest i’ve been to sitting in the crowd at a pro wrestling event.

If you could travel anywhere in the world with Joseph Hargrove, where would you go and why? — John Lister has a book called Slamthology that covers his crazy trips to America in the 90’s. Stories about hanging out with the ECW guys, getting lost in the middle of nowhere & lots of other crazy stuff… It’s a great read.

The point, seeing as you were all wondering where it is, is that if Hargrove can get a time machine up & running, i’d like to go on that same adventure. I’d also go on my own little side-adventure, hunting Jarrett. I’m not sure Hargrove would be up for that though.

1) The only trolls on pulse are the guys that call writer’s wives fat.
A troll isn’t someone who disagrees with a writer, or critiques their writing style, a troll is someone who says a bunch of shit they don’t believe in just to get a reaction. It’s kinda like JBL’s blog about how to be a good heel.

2) My problem with Aaron (you knew this was coming) was about professionalism. I see just as much wrong with Aaron calling the writing staff “hacks” on the site as I do with Vince talking about the “divas” division being a disappointment in public interviews. It’s the kind of opinion that should be kept behind closed doors. You’re all part of a team who’s job is to cover pro-wrestling & the leader (he’s an editor, after all) shouldn’t do anything to deliberately lower team morale (especially when some of the wresting they have to cover makes them want to curl up into the foetal position or shoot themselves in the head anyway).

I re-caped a 3 hour long Nitro for my site & had to go into rehab the next day, so I have a lot of respect for the people that can do that on a regular basis.

The comments section exists so guys like me can throw their opinion in. If a reader doesn’t like it? They have as much right to throw in their opinion too. As long as nobody is issuing threats, the stuff found in the comment section isn’t damaging anything or anyone.