Professional wrestling thread

Well said, 93Devil. Very well said. As one who is 63 now, I am with you. Where is Gorgeous George? Where is El Medico? Where is Lou Thesz? Where is the quality?

 

I can understand not wanting to sell Benoit merchandise (though imagine what that shit's going to go for on eBay). But it's not like WWE is complicit in Nancy and the kid's death because Benoit is still on the cover of the Wrestlemania XX DVD. He did wrestle for them for years, had a following, and did his job until last weekend. But better that than the "viva la savings" ad they ran on wwe.com shortly after Eddy Guerrero's death.

 

Here's a question I'm going to pose here, because it has more to do with the show's content than Benoit in particular: Does the WWE need to apologize for it's tribute to him?

I say no, because as of the time the tribute aired, there were only unsubstantiated rumors that he was responsible. At that point, for all the WWE knew, one of its stars was dead in a tragedy, and it had a roster full of broken up athletes. At that point, what else could they really have done?

I think that instead of apologizing for the tribute, they should make some kind of brief statement about what is now known (with best wishes to those involved, etc.) and give us some kind of preview about what is upcoming in the show (with regard to it apparently being all matches with no storyline involvement), with the understanding that next week's RAW (or Smackdown) will be the re-start for the storylines and regular shows.

But no apology is necessary.

 

Apparently, Vince will go on tonight and apologize for last night's show and scold the media for blaming steriods...

they should just let this be...

 

Rusty: I'm with you. There weren't many options WWE could have feasably pursued on that short of notice (three hours from notifying the wrestlers to dark and Heat matches). It's not as though they could say, at 7 p.m., holy shit, word's out that Benoit is a murderer, everyone shut it down!. Doing a live tribute show would have been hard on the wrestlers. Doing a live non-tribute show would be even harder, plus at least early on, it would have been seen as incredibly heartless to blow off the death of a former world champion and major name in the industry as no big deal. And if they just picked up the storylines from Sunday's PPV, they'd be spending most of the night focused on Mr. McMahon's "death". And you can't blow up all your major storylines and start over with that kind of timing (well, you can, but WCW did it and we see what happened to them).

They did what they could with what they had, gave Benoit fans one last nice memory before the tsunami of bad news about their guy hit, and did it respectfully and with a light hand. Given the circumstances, that is.

 

Well, that was an interesting way to handle the mess. No apology, per se, other than to say they won't be talking about "Mr. Benoit" any more tonight. Came off like a wrestling promo, though I've been so conditioned to think of McMahon as a character that nothing he says or does is going to come off any other way.

 

Wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Cena vs. Nitro -- a good way to kick things off.

 

There's a quick way they could've handled dropping RAW without a tribute show. Vince McMahoncomes on, says what's going on, then they show the PPV from the night before, or parts of it. Or a PPV from the past. Heck, they've got tons of tapes they can pop in the machine and let it go. Run a scroll across the bottom of the screen saying what's going on every few minutes, re-air McMahon's announcement at the top of every hour. Takes no effort and no time.

Of course, that's considering they had an idea by 6 or 6:30 or so that this was a murder-suicide. Any later, even this might be hard to pull off. All things considered, they're hands were pretty much tied unless they knew any details earlier.

 

WWE takes a lot of flack for things they do, but I think they're handling their part in this situation pretty well. The timeline along which things unfolded yesterday left them handcuffed in regards to what they could do with Raw. McMahon's statement to open the ECW show tonight was straightforward, honest and strong. I thought it came off very well.

 

I'll bet you that when (or if) the Wrestling Network reaches cable, reruns of the old Paul Boesch NWA Wrestling from Houston, etc., and the old Madison Square garden and Mid-South shows will kick the living sh*t out of Raw and SD if they run in the same time slot. The old stuff had balls, unlike VKM and the WWE.

 

i hope your not talking ratings-wise, because that's just a laughable statement.

 

It'll never happen. WWE pretty much owns all the tapes now. Everything from Mid-Atlantic to AWA to World Class to even the older stuff. WWE 24/7 is as close as we'll see to a wrestling network, and obviously they'll never be shown in a superior-to-the-current-product light.