Toxxic

WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE Sacred v. "The Franchise" Mak Francis ~Mak is alive. Not sure if Sacred is, or if his computer is just posting randomly. I'll take the chicken. CLUSTERFUCK ~If Grappler is back as Grappler (which I heavily doubt) then I say him. If he's in there to make up the numbers, probably Landon although it's a very open field this year. PURE WRESTLING MATCH Dace Night v. Toxxic ~The fans.

Fuck it, give it to me. I'll win that and the World Title, unite the belts and then make a claim to be the best Cruiserweight wrestler of all time. Everyone else is doing it.

I haven't been following the figures but if this man is right, Batista could well become God for the WWE.

Only because you've had twelve. Are we still talking theme songs here?

Long story, Janus. It features EWR, Adam Ryland and me being in the thanks list for Version 4.0. Just accept it and move on.

I'm in with the 'two-themes' crowd, although my time here has obviously been less than most. 'We Still Kill The Old Way' by Lostprophets pre-World Title win, and 'Rookie' by Boy Sets Fire since then.

*Sings along to Fozzy* "DON'TCHA WANNA BE ME!" *Gives Landon's old entrance music back to him* Thinking of which - Landon, how many entrance themes have you had since you came here?

You mean you got drunk and you spilt beer on your keyboard? No matter, anyway. As long as we know by the next time someone wants to book you in a match either with or against me, Spike or Sean, that should be just about OK.

Weird... but rather cool.

Damn Hardcore Champion Straight-Edgers pulling out an unlikely win against Dace and being in line for a massive push... ...er, whoops.

Sacred, what the hell happened to that opening promo you were doing? Cos that might have helped me figure out if, like, you're still part of Rev-0 or not. On the up side, I now get to face off vs Johnny in THE DECIDER~! w00t.

I was referring to you not hanging around AFTER you no-showed the main event of the biggest show of all time... ...sunshine

“Mr. Maddix?” Landon turns, half-expecting to see yet another autograph hunter. Instead it is the lobby clerk calling his name and waving an envelope. Confused, Landon takes it from the beaming, bespectacled man. “What’s this?” he asks as he fishes in his pocket for his keys. “Mail arrived for you just now,” the clerk replies, then his beam fades slightly as Landon looks up sharply. “Just now?” Landon says. “But how did anyone know I’m here?” “Well sir, this hotel is often used by the SWF when they come to town,” the clerk says, “but obviously we don’t advertise which wrestlers are staying here. Maybe someone saw you coming or going, or just decided to try on the off-chance?” Seeing Landon still looking at the envelope curiously, the clerk decides to try some slightly more practical advice. “Why don’t you open it and find out?” “What? Oh… yeah…” Landon mutters, and tears at the paper. He pulls out a sombre card, and both men read the words ‘Condolences on your recent loss’. “Oh my word…” the clerk mutters, suddenly embarrassed. “I’m so sorry Mr. Maddix… I had no idea you were recently bereaved…” “I’m not,” Maddix snaps shortly, and opens the card. Inside, instead of the usual heartfelt message there are simply photos that seem to have been printed out from the SWF website. One is of Toxxic with the World Title over his shoulder, and beneath it has been written ‘Toxxic - World Champion (19 days/93 days)’. The other is a close-up of Landon’s face moments after he tapped to Sacred on Storm, with the caption ‘Landon Maddix - World Champion (24 days)’. Beneath both pictures, written in thick marker pen, are some damning but familiar words: ‘CHEAP IMITATION OF ME’ For a moment Landon just stares at the card. Then, with a convulsive movement, he rips it in half and chucks it in the general direction of a nearby trashcan. It doesn’t go in, but Landon has already stormed off towards the stairs.

You're not a cheap imitation of me - you're the bastard child of Keanu Reeves and Eric Bischoff, remember? That description only came about because that's what you (purely accidentally) looked like when i created Johnny on Here Comes The Pain. Nah... you'd have got a card, if you'd hung around long enough after Genesis to have a postal address...

This is a fucking excellent promo. But I didn't BEG for a rematch, did I?

Sacred's World Champ! w00t! But I'm going to do what I used to do, which was a review for one match. So we get what is probably the surprise of the evening - Spike beating Dace. And in a hardcore environment, no less, although the ‘420 Lighttube’ stip is a bit confusing seeing as Spike is notably straight-edge now. First off, I think Spike does an excellent job with the crowd heat, and for a good reason as well. Spike and Dace had a heated SJL rivalry, Spike is well-hated, AND it’s Dace’s first match back. That WOULD lead to immense crowd heat, and Spike does a good job of getting it over. The chain-wrestling sequence is decent enough, but it lacks a certain something in terms of description. Spike tends to use things like ‘his own arm-wringer’ too many times, and quite frankly I can’t see Dace being so calm about his first match back, in this environment, against Spike. Nevertheless it’s a good, fairly simple sequence, but the way Spike writes it makes it sound like it’s an announcer calling the match on radio to people who can’t see it. Stand-alone sentences like ‘Both men are on their feet’ just give it a very artificial, stilted feel to me. But then again I know jack shit about chain-wrestling, so maybe I should keep my mouth shut J But even with Dace ring-rusty, I’m not seeing Spike holding his own against him. The Dace character has had years of being a renowned mat wrestler, Spike’s development has been much more recent. Now, the strike exchange. This is VERY RoH (or at least the RoH that I’ve been watching recently), and to be honest I’ve seen so much of this strike/counterstrike shit recently that it’s really starting to piss me off, so I’m not in much of a mood for this style of thing. I think Spike does an EXCELLENT job of really getting over the incredible atmosphere this exchange would get from the crowd, as the capitals first seem like overkill but then just grow to be accepted as the crowd being red, red hot. Unfortunately there is a problem - Spike shouldn’t be able to stand toe-to-toe with Dace on strikes. Admittedly he does try and stop the striking contest by grabbing a side headlock but from ‘watching’ the match there’s no reason to really, they’ve been pretty much equal so far. However, the strike exchange brings us to my personal favourite moment of the night, even better than Sacred winning. Spike gives Dace a Roaring Elbow, but Dace no-sells it and nearly breaks Spike’s jaw with his own. THAT is what should be happening when Dace’s St and Vt ratings are double those of Spike’s. Reading the match you can just feel the mark-out moment from the fans in attendance. Now we move onto the ‘hardcore’ portion (and this match really is very segmented) which consists basically of Dace bringing the weapons in, and Spike using them on him after getting a brief advantage. Spike is exceptionally brutal here, as befits both men’s history with each other, then locks in the rear naked choke (shades of Lita). And Dace is KO’d. All well and good, but the one thing that brings this ending up just a bit more? The fact that Spike’s last REAL upset in a singles match was when he beat Landon in a non-title match way back in… I don’t know, May? Landon was the USJL Champion when he was heel and Spike was still face, and Spike beat him by choking him out behind the referee’s back. Tonight the choke was legal, but it was still some good continuity. Overall, the match was too segmented, Spike was just a little too good at mat wrestling and striking considering whom he was in the ring with, and it stopped just as it looked like it was about to get going. On the upside, just compare this with how Spike was writing after his comeback last year. Look at Spike vs. Stryke (from Battleground?) for example. Spike has made BIG developments, and in my (maybe biased) opinion needs to be moving beyond the Cruiser Division That No-One Cares About. He also managed to give his match a MASSIVE amount of heat from the crowd convincingly, and the greatest achievement of all, he managed to get a win over Dace in straight singles. Not easy.

I'd like to say "amen" to the lighter days where pornos and cum flowed.

Hey, I'm still waiting for you to come back with your real wrestler and try and exact revenge! Cos yeah, I don't have enough to do at the moment...

Tom rocks.

Well, it IS what I was calling Maddix in the run-up to him whipping my arse at Slay Ride. What were you expecting, me to be a good loser? I also remember when I gave Danny Williams a welcome-back card which had a picture of him receiving the Va'aiga Stinger on the front... Yup, I'm a bastard. Sorry Landon.

You did. Unfortunately, you didn't need to.

Make this man head booker NOW. That team would be... well, very very bad, but bad in a great way as opposed to bad in a bad way. I mean, can you imagine Steven The Dork Richards trying to team with King Slug?

Hey! You watch your damned mouth! Hey, I like the Cruiser Division. i just wish we had one. Spike squashing Jake three times in a row doesn't count. nor does Spike beating Sly via no-show a similar number or more doesn't either. Like Landon says, half the cruiserweights here are main-event, or close to. I'm a spotty Cruiser, as is Landon. Clark, Cortez, you, Johnny, Sacred - all Cruisers. None of us have gone anywhere near the title in ages. I had one contendership match - my second match ever - and since then I haven't even SNIFFED it. I'm not going for the Cruiser title right now because I want to get another World Title run before I burn out writing Toxxic completely, but if I ever go through with my plan to eventually retire him and return sometime with Jet, I'm going for that belt if it's still there. Spike is the longest-running Cruiserweight Champion ever. Hell, give him a month or so and he's closing on Fallout's LHW record, and your HGC record. He might be the longest-running champion of any sort soon. And no disrespect to Spike, but for most of this run anyone capable of putting together the words 'Spike wins' and PMing them to the marker would have been able to do the same, at least as far as Cruiserweight Title bouts were concerned. No-one cares about it except Spike, and I think he feels that it's holding him back, so he'll probably stop caring soon. It's notable that the best thing ever done with this belt was Taamo's run where he aggressively didn't care about it. The best thing for Spike to do might be to spit on it and chuck it in a trashcan on Nitro. Or a gun.

If Batista got injured again, and they fired or otherwise lost Regal and Jericho, I'd stop watching WWE completely. I've already stopped watching Smackdown simply due to the sheer mind-numbing dullness of it (JBL being a large part of it). I watch Raw because I'm actually interested to see what they're doing with Batista (unfortunately this also features the god-awful Triple H, but you've got to take the rough with the smooth), and Jericho and Regal are entertaining and can actually wrestle. There are no surprises anymore, I agree. I returned to watching in the summer of 2000 when the Monday Night Wars were all over but the shouting, but even then they'd still do the occasional thing that would surprise me. Now - what is there that's surprising? There's no development anywhere except with Bradshaw, and that's a development i could REALLY have done without.

CURTAIN JERKING WITH AGENT 27 AND THE ICONIC ONE! Munich vs “The Icon” Max King ~King. He's reliable, Munich isn't. HARDCORE MATCH! Carnage vs Danny Dagda ~Carnage. Via no-show, i strongly suspect. SLY DEALINGS WITH STRYKE! Stryke vs Austin Sly ~Gotta go with bad-ass Sly on this one. TRIPLE THREAT DAY OF DEFEAT MATCH! Hollywood Spike Jenkins vs Johnny Dangerous vs Alan Clark ~Stable pride says Spike. IN reality, it could go any way. But you don't get it, IL. The trick isn't getting Clark to write, it's getting him to STOP. RUMBLE IN THE PIT! "Urban Legend" Todd Cortez vs Dace Night ~Dace Night, or I'll drive to Reading and whip him myself INTERCONTINENTAL TELEVISION CHAMPIONSHIP! UNITED STATES/JUNIOR LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP! TITLE FOR TITLE! Landon Maddix © (ICTV Champ) vs Sean Davis © (USJL Champ) ~Stable pride says Davis. In reality, I fear Landon may rebound from his loss to Sacred and take OUR USJL title.