2020 Pro Wrestling Thread

Yeah. I know sometimes he was a little too over the top, even by wrestling standards, but I loved his work with Nigel. Hope he’s in a good place mentally.

 

Love Mauro, hope he comes back later on. His stuff is so much better in the arena with crowds.

 

Joining the EC3 Memorial Club of Cursed NXT Promotions...

 

Whoever laid out the womens tag title match deserves a raise. Masterful story telling leading into the angle afterward. I really didnt want them to pull the trigger now but the way it was done was A++

 

So Vince put out an edict restricting the wrestlers on their outside activities, and, depending on who you believe, is supposedly claiming he owns wrestlers’ real names.

Meanwhile, not to get political, Andrew Yang is targeting Vince.

 

This has the prospects of being REALLY good, or it'll get bungled like much of what WWE does.

 

Good interview with Chris Jericho ahead of All Out.

Q&A: Why Chris Jericho Decided to Spend 14 Weeks Building Toward Mimosa Mayhem With Orange Cassidy — Sports Illustrated

 

I mean when you’ve lost Mankind and Diesel...

 

The second half of that Nash tweet makes some sense, but not the first part. Every job, independent contractor or not, requires you to show up at a specific time in order to do the job, right? If the show starts at 7, you can't show up at 9 and wrestle yourself. It doesn't seem unreasonable, even, to have people arrive several hours before a show to prepare and do other things like shooting promos.

And, as always, the second half of the tweet is more complicated than it looks. My understanding is, part of the deal with WWE is that you trade away some of those things an ordinary employee would get for stability, exposure and a lot more money. Even jobbers like Heath Slater or Zach Ryder get a pretty good paycheck if they make it to the main roster of WWE, and I don't think the people who leave WWE of their own accord do it because they're unhappy with that side of it. They might be creatively frustrated, but there aren't many that seem upset with the business side of things.
Then, the other aspect of it is the ripple effect on the rest of the industry. WWE is in a strange position of being both the industry leader and an anomaly. Its talent signs exclusive contracts, but wrestlers outside the company might work for a dozen different promotions during a year. They're free to do so, and a lot of them make a living doing it.
If you go after the WWE for this stuff, you need to apply the same standard to tons of independent promotions as well, which would certainly put some of them out of business. Killing the minor leagues would limit opportunities for a lot of wrestlers to do independent bookings that they depend on for income and exposure.
There is definitely a "the grass ain't always greener" argument to be had about this.

 

You don't have to apply the same standard to non-WWE companies unless they're also trying to insist on exclusivity. I mean, it seems slightly insane to me that WWE still gets away with the IC bullshit - They're a billion dollar and multi-national company, and the wrestlers are clearly employees. McMahon has now pissed away the money that could have taken care of this with two attempts at a football league.

 

I generally agree that the independent contractor stuff is far more complicated than the Bixenspans and John Olivers make it out to be.

The timing of the cameo/twitch thing is lousy and more likely than not Vince is just mad the fans are cutting out the cut the E used to get by acting as the middle man between talent and signing/media appearances before. also that these apps took off and the nonsense he backed like tout

 

Just like he meant to do.