2013 Pro Wrestling Thread

The crazy thing about Master P and his crew was that Bischoff got the Turner people to pay P something like $200K per appearance, and signed P's cousin to a $400K/year contract even though the guy had barely ever wrestled before.

This was also the same company that gave Leaping Lanny Poffo a $150K/year deal, even though he only wrestled (reports vary) either never or one match.

Too bad Bischoff and the Turner people weren't huge on the newspaper industry nowadays. It'd be fun to be making a ton of money for doing hardly anything.

 

You can tell with this 11 on 3 handicap match that 10 of the guys are going to be either hurt or KOed beforehand, leaving Bryan on his own.

 

Great segment with Punk, Heyman, Ryback and Axel.

 

OK promo by Bryan, but that sneak attack by Dustin and Cody on the Shield was out of nowhere and fantastic.

 

I know we're supposed to suspend belief, but it's pretty ridiculous to see the Shield just mowing these guys down.

 

#1 thing I hate about these type of elimination/gauntlet matches. It's just stupid. You have guys jobbing to moves that never ever finish guys off in regular matches. Elimination matches are the one type of match where you still see the DDT used to score a pinfall.

 

At least they ended it with Bryan, Ziggler and the Usos winning. I was afraid for a bit that they'd have the Shield beat 10 guys, then Show come down and KO Bryan again.

And Titus must have pissed someone off. He jobbed twice tonight.

 

On the whole, that was a well-played match. The booking made a lot of sense.
The Shield worked a style of match that suited an outnumbered force -- isolate individual guys, get a few pinfalls through quick-hit moves and solid tag team wrestling, and try to even the odds. It actually showed good strategy, especially while the faces were a bit overconfident because of their numerical superiority. If the Shield guys are truly championship-caliber, they ought to be able to hold their own when they can control the pace like they did in the first half of the match. No problems there. Then, you still had a 4-on-1 finish to make the rest of the roster look competent, and Bryan gets to stand tall for once.
Nicely done, WWE.

 

I question giving away Roman Reigns' first pin in the middle of a cluttered handicap match on a between-PPVs Raw. He went unpinned and unsubmitted for 10 months, so you'd think the first loss should be a bigger deal. But then they didn't exactly trumpet his streak in the first place, probably because it would fracture the focus on the group.

 

It also happened during a three-on-one attack from the Usos (plays up their tag title chances) and Daniel Bryan, and after he'd single-handedly eliminated several people. Maybe it should've been a bigger deal, but I don't think he's hurt by it.

 

Nor do I, but if you're going to have a guy rattle off a long winning streak, particularly if he's a rookie, and a big heel at that, logic dictates you make his first defeat a big deal. Though in fairness, the only analog is Goldberg, and he was a monster face. TNA tried to do it with Crimson, but nobody ever cared about him, face or heel.

 

But they never made a big deal of his streak, so it doesn't really matter a whole helluva lot.