Hunter's Torn Quad

Kurt Angle was on the Danny Bonaduce Show and apparently said the main event of Lockdown will be Team Angle vs. Team Jarrett. The question now is which nonsensical turn, Sting or Foley, sets this up.

Well, it looks all but certain now that the fight is going to be called off

F4W

IIRC, there were an awful lot of people in the arena at the Rumble who agreed with you. First time I can ever remember a WWE crowd turning on Hogan. But you had to watch it live to hear that. Apparently, when they aired the footage on TV, they not only edited out the fans booing Hogan, they also had new commentary done to further make Sid out to be the heel. The best part is Sid pointing out the sign that said "Hulk Who?"

Gordy had a sweet gig in Japan. Good money with no long car rides (the wrestlers ride on a bus together), hotels taken care off, and no political BS to deal with. Add to that that only working 26 week or so out of the year. With a spot like that, it would have taken a deal WCW wasn't going to hand out for Gordy to give that up.

Hogan/Warrior is one of those matches that doesn't hold up to repeat viewings. Until the ref bump, they don't really do anything; it's just endless restholds and stalling. Once the ref comes to, you get some good moves and a dramatic finish, but other than, the match doesn't offer anything outside of the rare Hogan clean job. And Hogan milking the spotlight at the end to make sure we know who the real star is. VII suffers from having too many matches that don't need to be there. And other than Savage pulling off one of the greatest carry jobs of all time and the subsequent reunion with Liz, which produced an emotional response I don't think we've seen since, there's nothing you really need to ever see again. XI was pure drivel. Just unmitigated drivel and a total ego-fest of a finish. X is terribly overrated. A fantastic opener and a Shawn Michaels having a MotY with a ladder while Scott Hall doesn't fall down doesn't make for a great card. Other than those two matches, the rest ranges from bearable to downright hideous.

You know, I don't buy this argument. Actors seem to put their hearts into completely scripted lines, without any improv or whatever. People can still do a great job with lines that were originally written hundreds of years ago, in a live atmosphere. Maybe they could help workers adjust to scripted promos by putting them through acting classes or something. Wrestlers aren't actors and while you could train them to get 'adjusted' to scripted promos, they'd still be non-actors trying to read from a script.

Mir out 4-6 weeks

One idea being floated around on some places is GSP vs. Alves to fill the gap. What marketable HW is out there to fill the gap? Strictly from a sports logic standpoint, you can point to Kongo or dos Santos, but none of them versus Lesnar are much business at this point.

They're very tightly scripted and done so by the writers. And with few exceptions (to guys) the wrestlers are expected to stick to the script and know it verbatim. It's also the same select few who have input into their promos. And while a script might be needed in terms of formatting the show and making sure things are done within a specific timeframe, scripting promos really takes the life out of them. The best promos come from the heart of a wrestler not the pen of a writer. It's hard to really feel a promo, and thus put some life into it, if you're having to spend most of your time memorizing the thing.

Two of the three people in creative have good wrestling minds and should know better. Quite how Jarrett and Dutch think they're putting out a quality product is one of life's great mysteries. Lucky Lopez usually makes a valiant attempt to defend TNA and, unlike most of the pro-Russo/TNA folks here, makes something approaching a credible argument, so his take on this abomination should be interesting.

You really have a hard on for Russo, don't you? It's as if he's under the impression that Russo has a major hand in writing the show and has shown a tendency to try and recreate the Attitude Era over and over and over again.

Meltzer mentioned on the Monday audio update that Kozlov has several detractors now (I believe based on his poor matches with everyone, and I think the Undertaker match on Friday was the clincher). The fact he has lost twice clean looks to me like they're about done pushing him. I would have thought that after he worked with Triple H on weeks of house shows to get ready for PPV and they still had a terrible match, as part of the three-way at Survivor Series, that they'd have thrown in the towel.

Their fight took place the night after King of the Ring. The match was scrapped because Bret wasn't able to recover enough from surgery he'd undergone.

I don't think anyone saw that finish coming.

Destruction!

Yeah, it was at NBR. That whole scenario reached a new level of embarrassing, even for Russo. Almost as bad was the follow up on Nitro the next night, when Russo had Tank Abott in the ring with him and called out Goldberg, swearing, and saying he was going to get a real beating or some stupid shit. Goldberg comes out and he and Tank have this terrible brawl, that is supposed to be real, and they're using moves like irish whips. In the mean time, you've got Russo on commentary, screaming like an idiot and acting like it's a shoot, even screaming to go to a commercial when Goldberg has the advantage. With garbage like this, it's baffling that some people still defend Russo's post-WWF tenures.

Ole came right and told Eric that he'd heard hewas going to fire him and asked Eric if that was true. Eric wouldn't give an answer before driving off. Eric then promptly fired him the next day over the phone.

The best part is that West turned on Tenay for not standing up for him when TNA management discussed his future but then promptly walked out on the broadcast and never returned. Apparently, West wanted to show Tenay how wrong he was to not stand up for him by being unprofessional. Less than 20 minutes of wrestling on a two-hour show and a near one-hour gap between matches. Boy, that's some non-stop action from Total Non-stop Action.

While you can't blame the monkey when it's the organ grinder who is retarded, it's still the monkey you kick when he throws his shit at you.

Joe Lauzon wrote on his website that he'll be out of action for 12-14 months as he needs ACL surgery. Joe Lauzon out of action for 12-14 months

Russo gave WCW fans a product he knew they didn't want. How can that be defended?

If any other top heel got new music and came out to a deafening silence, I wonder how long it would take for people to start whispering that he's failing in the role.

I don't remember anything about a WCW/SMW agreement outside of this match. Care to enlighten us? I love inept WCW stories. Paraphrased from the 2000 Cornette shoot: Late in 1992 Bill Watts contacted Cornette about forming a working agreement with SMW. The idea being to send SMW guys to WCW to get experience, put them over some lower end guys to build them up and eventually put over a big WCW name. The first part of this agreement was the deal with WCW bringing in the Rock and Roll Express, putting them on TV, and then Cornette and the Bodies would 'invade' WCW Saturday Night and confront Watts over doing this because the RnR's were part of SMW. Cornette confronts Watts and they do this great angle with Cornette firing off a number of strong remarks knocking WCW and burying Jim Herd and Watts firing back by telling Cornette not to stick his finger in his chest because Watt's doesn't know where it's been and he doesn't want to have to get a blood test. Anyway, when this fantastic segment airs, Cornette's remarks are edited; when Cornette speaks, the audio goes dead. Watts was told that it was because of a directional microphone. However, when Cornette and Watts meet up about a week or so before Superbrawl, Cornette assures Watts that the explanation he was give was bullshit and the remarks were deliberately edited off. In response, Watts, who correctly figures he's not long for the company, puts their agreement in writing so that WCW is legally obliged to pay Cornette for use of SMW footage and everything else; before this, it had been strictly a handshake deal as both men trusted the other and didn't feel the need to put it in writing. At SuperBrawl, by which time Watts was fired, Cornette confronts Eric Bischoff over the editing, and Bischoff hems and haws and says that a committee of them felt that the comments were too strong and inappropriate. Cornette responds by pointing out that everything he said had been cleared with Watts ("I'd already communicated with the horses head, I didn't feel the need to communicate with his ass").

The Bodies/Express match was added because it was the culmination of the short lived working agreement between WCW and SMW. Which is another WCW-esque story in itself with how that thing went down.