2012 Pro Wrestling Thread

It also helped that he was around wrestlers with similar styles and worldviews on pro wrestling, in front of a fanbase that clearly prefers those styles and worldviews. But it's hard to translate ROH success to TNA and WWE audiences. Sometimes if they've just got it, it's going to get them over no matter what (Punk, Bryan, Aries to a lesser degree). But then you've got your Kaval/Senshi/Lo-Kis and Colt Cabanas and Homicides and James Gibsons that either never make it or do poorly when they get there. It's like being the chef at a small but critically acclaimed molecular gastronomy kitchen, then trying to translate that to running a TGI Friday's.

 

I understand your assessment of Samoa Joe and his lack of conditioning. However, I think part of that may have been due to what they were doing to him booking-wise and he lost his motivation. Not sure though.

 

I agree with you on this. I think Joe does have "it", but he needs to be booked correctly.

 

There-in lies the problem. Fans don't care about them because they don't see them, other than in calendars and in 2-minute matches.

Which is why they should find some women who can actually put on 4-star matches, mix them in with the models, and build up the division. There's no reason, with the proper build-up, why the Divas can't main-event Raw for a couple of weeks out of the year when things are slow on the men's side.

 

MC and Myers: I think he has had "it" at one point, and "it" probably resides in him somewhere deep. But he seems disinterested in the product and his conditioning in the last couple of years. And sure, the weird booking (two kidnappings, carrying a machete around threatening to kill everyone in the Main Event Mafia before giving the belt to longtime rival Angle so he can win a ridiculously convoluted reverse ladder match, and so on) has got to be disheartening. But from what I gather, he just doesn't care anymore. If nothing else, he should be working his ass off to rise above the TNA bullshit and catch Jim Ross's eye again. Or he can go back to ROH, which has produced plenty of talent for WWE lately. But he has his responsibility in this as well.

Baron: The truly popular Divas they've had in the modern era are few. Trish is probably the alpha Diva. Sunny set the standard (at least as a personality, as she never much wrestled), and Lita was a nice break from the norm. But outside of Kharma, is there anyone under WWE contract that I think is desperately misused? Gail Kim should have gotten better, but apparently she never clicked there. Even so, I never watch Divas matches and angles and think "damn, if only Gail Kim were here." For better or worse, pretty much every popular female in modern-day WWE generated their most popularity/interest based on things they did with men (AJ = Bryan/Punk; Trish = T&A, Jericho, Christian; Lita = Hardy/Edge). Even Beth Phoenix was at her most interesting when she was with Santino.

I don't know if it's that WWE can't book women well, or if there aren't that many truly good women's performers out there.

 

Meat: I definitely think it's more of a failure of the WWE to be able to book the women. Even their "success" stories, like Trish and Lita and Sable, are probably more due to them being super hot. The WWE then managed to kill that by saying, "Well, if having one or two hot girls is good, what about 10???" (And I realize that Trish actually got pretty decent in the ring, and that the older women wrestlers like Victoria and Ivory weren't hags or anything, but the average "score" of the women wrestlers has gone from like a 7 to 9.5.)

Here's the proof that WWE books women wrong - because for a while, women wrestling was the highest rated segment of TNA, pre-Hogan. I think this is before Awesome Kong / Kharma and Gail Kim left, and before Mickey James and Victoria arrived. They had Kong and Gail Kim doing solid in-ring matches, and they had the Beautiful People (IIRC) as the heel tag team.

 

TNA definitely had good women's wrestling (at least by modern American standards) for a while, but having the highest-rated quarter on an episode of Impact is like being the tallest midget. I think it was only fractionally higher than whatever the next-highest quarter was when it happened, and it wasn't consistently so.

It definitely didn't help that they didn't know what to do with their popular stars when their peak angles came to an end. Beautiful People couldn't last forever, but the way they broke them up really hurt Angelina Love (especially with that whatever it was she was doing with Winter) and Velvet Sky. Gail Kim got the KO title almost as soon as she foot in Orlando, but other than a brief tease of drama with Madison Rayne, she hasn't been involved in anything interesting. Mickie James is like RVD; generated a pop on her return, but she doesn't seem like she's really that into it anymore. Sarita and Rosita and that whole Mexican-American group have all but disappeared. Victoria is woodwork, and Tessmacher is there to shake dat ass. Really the only interesting character is ODB, because being the over-the-top southern slut pegged to a weird but likable guy is pretty much in her wheelhouse.

American fans have to be conditioned to accept women's wrestling, and that's a long-term project. Really outside Japan, you don't see it as much more than a secondary attraction.

 

Last thing I saw on Kharma on the dirtsheets was around the Royal Rumble, IIRC. It was an item saying she had lost her baby to a miscarriage, was having some personal issues because of it, and there was no real timetable for her return.

 

If you ever miss Raw and you're wanting to catch up, this is, by far, my favorite way to find out what happened.

http://withleather.uproxx.com/2012/06/the-best-and-worst-of-wwe-raw-6412

 

Given our discussion of the current product and our dissatisfaction, I thought I'd lighten the mood by posting a pretty decent match from back in the day.
It's Sting vs. the Great Muta from Great American Bash 1989. Muta had just arrived on the scene and things like his back handspring elbow and moonsault were things nobody in North America was doing. You might not be a fan of the work so much, but they sure do have the crowd eating out of their hands......

 

I think one of the big problems with WWE/TNA is everyone is so reactionary to TV ratings. I don't watch TNA, but from reading this thread and one other board, they just tried something different and had a bad rating. They went live for a month or so a while back and had disappointing ratings. Shit gets canned SO quickly nowadays it's just like the WWE/TNA go into complete panic mode ASAP. I hear people parsing every 15 minutes of ratings (OMG Raw lost viewers during Punk/Bryan!!!), and the impression is that the executives do this as well.

When Raw made its great comeback in the 90s, they were putting on the superior show for several months before they finally won the Monday Night Wars. Give things a little time to breathe. Why can't they just look back at history and realize things have to grow?

I know people like to blame the PG programming on the current problems with WWE, and that does have something to do with it, but I think it has more to do with the fact that the WWE decision makers just don't have any patience to let things grow.

The two top guys in the WWE over the past year, CM Punk and Daniel Bryan, were complete gifts that creative had zero to do with getting over. Hell, CM Punk was two weeks away from leaving the WWE and Daniel Bryan is perhaps the flukiest main eventer in the past twenty years. In a bizarre twist of fate, it seems like the one thing that got DB so over is how truly atrocious WWE writers booked him at 'Mania. The whole "YES!" phenomenon only occurred because the 'Mania crowd is WAY smarkier than normal and the smarkiest of the smarks stuck around for Raw the next night. DB's main event status is a bizarre rejection of WWE's crappy writing.

 

Daniel Bryan sold me when he just ripped AJ apart after WrestleMania. It was hilarious.