2010 Pro Wrestling Thread

I don't think he was ever regularly on Raw. He's been part of the PPV announcing crew and sometimes steps in for someone on Raw or does something on the three-hour cross-brand shows, but not as a regular Raw announcer.

Striker's problem is that his ECW schtick worked fine in ECW, but he amped it up too much on Smackdown, and what were arcane facts turned into factual errors. He's got good voice and delivery, and he'll probably develop into a decent color guy in time, but still a work in progress.

So what to do with Cole? Keep him in the Raw announcing booth and have him spar more openly with Lawler? Have them have a brief feud and then have Cole be Smackdown only, bringing back JR in the process? Try to throw a bunch of monies at Mike Goldberg again? Rescue Joey Styles from WWE.com hell?

 

Another funny one that I forgot, it's when John Cena gave the AA to Heath Slater on the announce table, and Punk says:

"Hey! This isn't the Spanish announce table"

I don't know about you guys, but before every PPV event, me and my friends always say that the Spanish announce table will get destroyed tonight.

That was another classic line told by Punk on Monday night.

 

I also thought the "This isn't the Spanish announce table!" line was the best of the show. CM Punk is great, but he's too young to start announcing full-time, unfortunately. (And heck, he's good in the ring too.) If anything, I hope he and The Miz eventually feud for the belt, but I doubt they'll keep the belt on him that long.

 

Why the hell didn't they put the belt on Punk during the SES run? I stopped watching in the late 90s/early 00s, and started watching again in January of this year. SES is the best thing I saw all year.

 

He got hurt and it was disbanded, but even before he got hurt it was losing steam. The whole angle lost some intensity when the WWE had him face-off against The Big Show, who is kind of like Smackdown's Cena in that I feel like he never loses clean.

 

Oh yeah, I meant put the belt on him WAYYYY before SES started jobbing out to Big Show.

It's funny how they built up the hooded/masked SES member, but by the time they finally got around to the reveal, it was merely to bury the SES.

 

There's a story in Chyna's book (Yeah, I read it. It sucked), where during a PPV match, she screwed something up and went broke the Spanish announce table.

She went backstage afterward and everyone was quiet. She asked Hunter why, and was told that they were going to break that table during the main event and had been told not to do any spots near it. Now they couldn't do it.

 

Punk's commentary has me actually watching matches I never would have before. I've been doing a lot of skipping through Raw lately, but with him at the announce table, I watch to see what he might interject.

 

I read he's been told to keep using inside jokes too. Which is tremendous news. The announcers have been dull since JR left.

 

It's actually refreshing to hear Punk and Cole go off on tangents sometimes during the matches rather than just keep repeating the name of the upcoming PPV over and over again.

That was one reason, strangely enough, why Gordon Solie ended up losing his job with WCW. He was broadcasting a match on TV, and afterward, some kid producer complained that he hadn't mentioned the PPV enough. Solie pointed out that he mentioned it prior to the match, once during the match, and once after. The kid producer wanted him to do it more frequently.

Solie's point to the kid was that if he was broadcasting the NFC championship game, he wouldn't be mentioning the Super Bowl in nearly every breath. He'd be calling the action. Not enough for the kid, who ended up phasing Solie out.

Same with watching the matches on Prime Time Wrestling around, say 85-88. Not enough PPVs at that time, but still, you'd hear Gorilla and the Brain talking about other stuff outside of the next hyped up show.

 

Heenan has a pretty solid autobiography out there - it's a little short and only a chapter or two is about his time in the WWF, but it's still worth picking up. (If you want to read it on a screen, I do have a PDF copy of it.)

One of his points of disagreement about announcing now is about how they waste a spot on a play-by-play guy. Nobody is listening to a wrestling match on a radio - Why bother with the play by play? They can see the moves being executed, so you should focus much more on color and banter (about the match and wrestlers in the ring, of course) between the announcers.

 

But you could make that case about any sports event (real or predetermined) on TV. You don't need a play by play guy to tell us when someone scores a touchdown or a GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL. Plus just because you've got the TV on doesn't mean you're giving it your undivided attention.