Professional wrestling thread

Maybe he purchased $50,000 of some unnamed substance for himself and others.

 

Benjamin is the biggest waste of talent the WWE has. Athletically, he's one of their top 5, but has been buried wth shitty plots. Why the hell is WWE constantly pushing Orton when Benjamin for the most part has been the good soldier and has more potential than Orton anyway? I know his mic work stands to be improved, but if that's all that's holding him back, then that's a lame ass excuse. He'll probably jump to TNA or New Japan once his contract runs out, and I wouldn't blame him if he did.

 

Skin color, perhaps?

And he's only a waste of talent because VKM doesn't know how to fucking use him or Haas. But getting those two back together was a step in the right direction. They just forgot to take that second step...

 

Except that wouldn't explain Lashley's mega-push.

Benjamin has a reputation for being sloppy and unmotivated. He and Haas need a manager, a Jim Cornette-type who can get them over without either talking (neither are good promo guys, though Benjamin has flashes).

They could have flipped the two over to Smackdown, where they could have had good matches with London/Kendrick and gotten the titles instead of those bloody greasers.

 

True. But isn't Vince pretty much hands-off when it comes to anything ECW-related?

 

Except Lashley was getting a pretty strong push even before his move to ECW, and he was the guy chosen to beat Umaga and get Vince's head shaved. Outside Cena, nobody's getting a better push.

 

IMO that's only because he's a big guy. No way in hell would he have gotten this big a push if he's some scrawny punk.

 

Certainly not to beat Umaga, and probably not in general, you're right. Vince discriminates on size, not skin tone.

 

Then how does someone like The Rock, who wasn't that big when he first came in, get such a big push?

 

Because Vince is almost as big into pedigree (tee hee) as he is into size. Rock was their first third-generation wrestler of consequence, and his first push relied heavily on that. And it was a pretty strong push, as you might recall. But everyone hated him. Then he turned heel and joined the small group of wrestlers who created their own push by sheer force of personality (Austin, Mick Foley).

Vince likes strong backgrounds, be it legitimate sport (Angle, Brock, even Benjamin to a degree) or wrestling (Rock, Orton).

 

Yeah, I remember all the Rocky sucks and Rocky can die chants. I just never really understood why the fans hated him so much.

 

Because Rocky was getting this unstoppable push that he didn't warrant at the time. His fawning, goody-goody attitude drove people away too. And he wasn't very good in the ring early. Plus this was around the time that fans starting going into business for themselves as to who they liked and who they didn't, whereas in the 1980's they would have gone with the flow.