Topic: Wrestling?

I don't want see Lesnar vs Joe in a wrestling match.

I want to see Lesnar vs Joe in a match like Goldberg Lesnar Mania 33, ( only longer)

by that I mean, have them straight up fucking throwing BOMBS at each other, from the get go, and never letting up. Treating a Lesnar match like a normal wrestling match is dumb and is why Ambrose and Orton failed. This needs to be balls to the wall, best moves out of the damn gate, nonstop smashy smash.

Wolfgang Xander Hardy. That is the name of Matt Hardys newborn son. i know it is cool to be named after bridges, states and fruits in the US. Maybe the Hardys are Vin Diesel fans and named their son after Xander Cage?^^

I have a cousin named Tuesday


Americans will name their kids after whatever bullshit they want.

Gonna start using this as a platform to throw out my two cents/reviews of big njpw shows, starting with Dominion from earlier today.

0. David Finlay, Tomoyuki Oka & Shota Umino vs Hirai Kawato, Katsuya Kitamura & Tetsuhiro Yagi
Young Lions all looked good as usual, decent little preshow match. Kinda feel bad for Finlay though. Dude's stuck in limbo. (**)

1. Togi Makabe, Yuji Nagata, Tiger Mask W & Tiger Mask IV vs Hiroyoshi Tenzan, Satoshi Kojima, Manabu Nakanishi & Justin Thunder Liger
Nothing new, really. Harmless opener. Still find it hilarious that Kota Ibushi's dressing up as an anime character for undercard njpw matches when he could easily be a top talent almost anywhere he wants. (**)

2. NEVER Openweight 6-Man Tag Championship Gauntlet: L.I.J. vs Taguchi Japan vs CHAOS vs Bullet Club vs Suzuki-gun
Lots of comedy, not much else. Everyone got a few minutes to shine, L.I.J. retains. Really good ending sequence though. (**1/2)

3. IWGP Jr. Tag Championship: RPG Vice vs Young Bucks
Tried watching this show live this morning, but fell asleep at some point in this match. Had to rewatch it later. Trent Barreta bumps like a motherfucker. Young Bucks do Young Buck things. Again, really good end sequence. (***)

4. IWGP Tag Championship: War Machine vs G.O.D.
G.O.D. continues to be painfully average, but War Machine carried plenty of weight and made it much more enjoyable than most teams could've. Too bad they lost the titles. Not looking forward to more G.O.D tag matches ugh. (***)

5. Michael Elgin vs Cody
This is Cody's 7th njpw match (9th if you include ROH/NJPW joint shows in North America), and all it's shown is he can't fit in with NJPW's style. He's yet to have a single match that is better than "meh" but is getting a monster push that he doesn't deserve at all. This was his best NJPW performance imo, and still, meh. (**1/2)

6. IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship: Hiromu Takahashi vs KUSHIDA
HOLY SHIT THIS MATCH WAS GODDAMN INSANE!!!!! Fantastic addition to the Hiromu/KUSHIDA rivalry with great callbacks to their other matches on top of amazing new touches. Well worth going out of your way to see. Probably cracks my top 5 of the year so far. (*****)

7. NEVER Openweight Championship - Lumberjack Match: Minoru Suzuki vs Hirooki Goto
Goto's my favorite wrestler, I love Suzuki, and I really wanted to love this match too. But Goto and Suzuki just have really bad chemistry together. Still better than their first match, but not by a lot. Lumberjack stip was initially a decent new touch, but in the end Goto gets screwed the exact same way he did in their last match, and probably just descends back into temporary irrelevancy from here. (***)

8. IWGP Intercontinental Championship: Tetsuya Naito vs Hiroshi Tanahashi
Easily the best story and buildup of any match on the card and it delivered big time, maybe even more so than they did at Wrestle Kingdom. Great callback spots, and the hatred Naito and Tana had for each other helped heat things up even more. (****1/2)

9. IWGP Heavyweight Championship: Kazuchika Okada vs Kenny Omega
Better than their WK match (though honestly I thought that one was a bit overrated). Almost nothing happened the first 20 minutes of their first match, but the action kept going almost nonstop from start to finish this time. Was more about creative sequences and story, and a bit less of a giant spot fest this time around. 60-minute time limit draw was an awesome and unexpected ending. (*****)

Aside from a mostly dull undercard and the Suzuki/Goto issues, only major downside is that now Cody is next to challenge for the heavyweight title. Okada's been having the best year of his career, but I'm incapable of feeling any remote excitement for this match at all.

With the exception of a few matches (like his ones with Kurt Angle) I've found that for the most part, Cody hasn't really showed anything he hadn't already shown in WWE. Same goes for the former Damien Sandow.

People seem to think that people leaving WWE are just massively talented and WWE ruined them or never used them, but in truth, of the three most praised for this, Cody and Sandow have shown nothing special since leaving WWE.

Now, Ok, Drew Mcintyre? Yes, he HAS shown more talent out of WWE than in it, but before everyone gets all "SEE!? WWE WAS DUMB TO FIRE HIM!", WWE was frankly RIGHT to fire him. He was utter garbage in WWE in all his gimmicks, and it took him getting fired to actually light a fire under his ass and actually GIVE A SHIT for once.


As for NJPW, I missed all but the last two matches, both of which I highly enjoyed. I was critical of Omega/Okada 1, I thought it was boring at the start, and then poorly paced after that, and I thought the ending was overbooked.

This though? I really enjoyed this. It was spaced out FAR better than their last match, and instead of rushing 20 minutes of high spots into one long continous thing, they spread it out far better and made it far easier to get emotionally invested in things.

I do not expect a 5 star classic from Damian Sandow to be honest. I am not even sure if he can work a 4 star match or a 3.5 star match. Sandow is much more of an entertainer than an actual wrestler for me, and that is where WWE screws up royally most of the time despite the big emphasis of being sports entertainers. I can only assume that WWE adamantly refused to book him good for some petty reason despite fans loving him, no matter which shitty gimmik he was supposed to portray. In the ring, he seems to be absolutely average for me with some ok moves beside the basics.

Cody Rhodes has the athleticism to theoretically be an above average high flying guy, and is small and slim enough to be classified as vanilla midget by fans of big men. So people assume that he goes all flipedydo in the indies with corkscrew moonsaults and such stuff. But surprise surprise, he´s just a slightly above average wrestler like most of his colleagues in the big indies and WWE too. And again, WWE dropped the entertainment ball with having him fall so deep after legacy. He was massively entertaining within the Rhodes scholars, a reasonably good IC champion and also not bad together with Golddust. Even cosmic wasteland could have been something at least okayish like the Fashion Files are right now.

Drew McIntyre is ok in the ring and at the mic, but in both cases nothing that would want fans to chant this is awesome for him.

Nobody uses the term Vanilla Midgets anymore.


Hell, its 2017. the kind of guys that would be dubbed Vanilla Midgets are the most popular people in wrestling these days, usually the only ones people actually want to see.

Vince McMahon and some forum goers/marks would probably disagree with you. Of course the position of smaller wrestlers has massively improved in the last years, but I would not say that the good looking muscle guy wrestler type usually has to fear for his top spot from them.

Well no, because nobody will outsell Cena in merchandis (btw, somebody who gives a shit look up if Cena has sold more merch than hogan or austin yet, surely he must have by now), and Brock Lesnar can murder ALL of them.

But in the grand wrestling world of worldwide fans and promotions, its the vanilla midgets who reign supreme in all things, with WWE probably being the ONLY holdout in pushing bigger guys.

Give it time, and the "Big Hoss" wrestler will be extinct, and the world will be a sadder place for it.

But hey, they can't do 30 flips, become internet memes, and they aren't focused solely on workrate, (aka, do as many moves as possible as fast as possible), so fuck them.

As far as merch goes, apparently Cena's numbers are way down and Reigns is selling more than any other full-timer on the roster.

Go figure.