Hunter's Torn Quad

I've been there for about the same length of time, but I avoid the actual message board. It's really, really bad.

It was a really diehard fan who gets a lot of grief on their board for going to great lengths to defend TNA. The best part was when the fan said that he had purchased every TNA PPV since they went monthly in November of 2004 but that he didn't get Against All Odds as things were just too bad even for him. It's quite a feat to turn off a fan who defends you at every turn and has paid money to you on a monthly basis for over four years.

I would agree. As long as TNA do decent ratings, Jarrett and company will be able to keep the gravy train going, and TNA will still be around, but they'll be doing nothing more than treading water. Unless a miracle happens and either Jarrett comes to his senses or someone clues in Dixie, then TNA will be stick around to provide a woeful product that diehards will watch for free but an ever decreasing amount of them will actually pay for.

According to the latest Observer:

You used to get people who were so angry about TNA fucking things up left and right, which wasn't that bad of a sign because it showed that there was still a strong desire there to see things turn around and succeed. Now people don't even care enough about TNA to get angry. They just shake their heads and wonder how people who should have some kind of clue about wrestling booking can get things so gloriously wrong.

And kept it a great secret by having Matt help his brother into the main event and then keeping the interference out of the match that lead him to winning the WWE title. Just brilliant misdirection! When he was attacked in the motel, Matt found him. When he was ran off the road, he was leaving Matt's house. Then there was that episode on Smackdown, where Matt "accidently" yanked his arm, after it had been injured the previous match. They can easily explain Matt attacking Kozlov, was simply, because Kozlove beat him the earlier that night. Or they could say, Matt "helped" Jeff, because he knew Jeff would chopke ;ike he did, in every other title match he had. WWE never gave any kind of hint that Christian was the one attacking Jeff, people just made that up in their own mind an fooled themselves. He helped him win the fucking WWE title. You're trying to paint that as making sense is almost as nonsensical. So he was so consumed with hurting his brother that he attacked him and cost him a title shot one month...and then the next month decided to help him get into a title match... But he hates him so much that he'd run him off the road...and yet he's more angry with Kozlov beating him in a nontitle match...even though he'd cost his brother the title the next month and never really have anything to do with Kozlov again? That's what you're going with? You do realize who you're arguing with, right? If it's a 'leap' to have assumed Christian was the attacker, which was the plan, then it's a leap of monumental proportions to think it was always going to be Matt. Even WWE wouldn't have had a storyline with such huge gaps in logic if it was intended to be Matt as the attacker. Which, by the way, he hasn't even admitted to. If it was meant to be Matt as the attacker, wouldn't he admit to it so as to get even more heat?

Was it ever proven that the kid in question was really his and the girl wasn't just full of shit?

GLOW 2K.

That crowd was more than pretty solidly behind Goldberg; they were going nuts for him. That crowd was ready to explode and were primed for Goldberg to win. Instead, we got the same, lame Game finish with the sledgehammer. I don't think I've ever seen a crowd get so badly deflated. That's one of the few match finishes to actively get me angry because that night you had the feeling of something really special, something really big that you very rarely get, and it was all flushed away because of ego and politics.

That's been my biggest problem with this whole storyline, that it's not the Frontline bring down the MEM, but the MEM themselves. The only non-MEM people to really get one up on them are either Foley, Cornette or Jarrett. Anyone else gets only the briefest of hope spots before being beaten down and treated like garbage. The only real exception was Team 3D beating Angle and Sting at the last tapings, but even then it was a banana peel finish and after that the focus was on the MEM fighting amongst themselves rather than on the fact that the Frontline got a win over a former TNA champion.

The Bam Bam story that springs to mind for me is his refusal to lose to Taiyo Kea on some charity wrestling show held, I think, at the ECW Arena. Vampiro talked about it in his shoot, and was understandably critical of Bigelow for it. Bigelow talked about it in his shoot too, and even said that from that point on, his stance on jobs was that he wasn't doing any more of them for anyone.

I would imagine that to be the TNA mindset; dismiss it as the crowd being collective smartasses and ignore that they might simply be registering dislike of something.

Probably just because a really basic match like this shouldn't even have been booked on the ppv. The problem with "Fire Russo" having become the TNA fans all purpose chant for something they don't like, is that TNA management, instead of taking on board that the fans aren't liking what's going on and correcting it, instead dismiss them as idiots for not knowing Russo didn't have anything to do with the segment at hand and accordingly dismiss their dislike as the reaction of people who don't know what they're talking about. While the chant was funny at first, now it just enables TNA to dismiss a negative reaction to something they do and convince themselves a bomb of a segment was really a success. Back when this first started happening with the chants, that definately was the case, but that was a good while ago.....I'd like to think by now, the company gets it more when the Fire Russo chant happens. It's clearly directed to make a point that they aren't liking what they are seeing, just the same thing as a boring chant or bullshit chant or whatnot. I don't know how anyone who has followed TNA as long as you have can give them the benefit of the doubt on something like acknowledging their mistakes.

Probably just because a really basic match like this shouldn't even have been booked on the ppv. The problem with "Fire Russo" having become the TNA fans all purpose chant for something they don't like, is that TNA management, instead of taking on board that the fans aren't liking what's going on and correcting it, instead dismiss them as idiots for not knowing Russo didn't have anything to do with the segment at hand and accordingly dismiss their dislike as the reaction of people who don't know what they're talking about. While the chant was funny at first, now it just enables TNA to dismiss a negative reaction to something they do and convince themselves a bomb of a segment was really a success.

I believe that's one of the top buyrates ever, and that's for a show as awfully booked as that one. Now imagine a show with WCW guys people cared about. It was the best number of non-WM buys the company ever did. Though, apparently adding a number of top stars wouldn't have meant that much more... Hall and Nash had stopped drawing a dime in the WWF, and some would say had never even started drawing to begin with, when Vince let them go. Hulk Hogan's drawing power in the WWF had waned considerably when he was let go, both on PPV and at the house shows. Randy Savage had long since stopped meaning anything in the WWF by the time 1994 rolled around. Yet all four did big business for WCW when they jumped. One could also point out that Chris Jericho was never pushed as anything special in WCW, was mired in the midcard for the first couple of months of 1999, and wasn't even on TV from April of that year. Yet the moment he walked onto Raw he was treated like a superstar by the crowd. There are countless examples of a wrestler having run out of drawing power in one territory or promotion and moving to another group and promptly meaning something at the gate. Because he owned the company now?

As ECW was growing so was the voice of the internet, and back then the internet was filled almost exclusively with hardcore fans who hated WCW and the WWF, so they ate up everything Shane said when he knocked Flair. I've always said that Shane Douglas is a Jeff Jarrett like wrestler, who is good enough at everything to be a great utility wrestler, but lacking that something that could see him reasonably fit into the main event scene. His interviews could be really good at times, but more often than not they were adequate enough to get the job done and no more. Shane did rely on swearing far too much and doing so, especially outside of ECW, made him come off like the very cartoon character, albeit an adult orientated one, he decried in ECW.

Next week, Rey Mysterio should start attacking John Cena and they can going into this heated feud, and not bother with promos or angles telling people why it's happening. After all, we can just assume something happened backstage and that's why Rey is gunning for Cena.

If the WWF had had those names then, providing the booking had been even half decent, Team WCW would have won the match because the feud would still be red hot. You could have even kept it going until Mania, with the idea going in of WCW threatening to kill the WWF at the biggest event of the year.

True, but that's before they've aired and the rantings are in the context of how things come across on paper. Once the show has aired, though, and we've had the chance to see how things come across on television, if you're going to complain about it you should at least watch it, because occasionally things come across a lot different on television than they did on paper, and if there's a disparity between the two, you'd be looking at things wrong if you've not seen the television product. Bottom line is, if you're wanting to give an accurate assessment of how you think things came across on television, you have to watch the show. Otherwise, you get the hardcore defenders dismissing what you have to say, regardless of how accurate it is. Then again, as this forum continues to show, even if you do watch something before commenting on it, those some people simply resort to telling you not to watch it if you don't like it, before sticking their fingers in their ears and ignoring the actual points made.

Hogan, Hall, Nash, etc were still huge names at the time. Remember the reaction they got during the Hogan nWo vs. Rock feud? And that was a full year later. Your're telling me that if Hogan, Hall, Nash, Goldberg, Sting, Flair, Steiner, Jarret, and DDP all came in at once, as one group, and feuded with Austin, Angle, Undertaker, Rock, Big Show, Foley, Dudley Boys, etc that wouldn't have drawn? Goldberg vs. Undertaker at the time wouldn't draw? How about Austin vs. Flair or Hall/Nash vs. Dudleys? These guys were still huge names and, if put in the right situation, could have drawn huge money. Sure, guys like Hall/Nash wouldn't have lasted long but if they capatilized on them right off the bat they could have drawn. I usually don't agree with you, CubbyBr, but this time you're right on the money.

It's hard to make an assessment of a show without watching it. If people said they didn't watch the show and then ranted about, he'd have bitched about that, too. In any event, few people would have watched that show wiithout ranting about it to some degree.

Yours sincerely, The Internet. I like how you explained why you didn't like what Storm had to say.

I expect the idea would have been to debut a member of the Hart Foundation to take out Shawn and give Bret the win. Shawn would have probably demanded they debut two new members and use lots of plunder to beat him up. Vince would have then gone with just one man, as planned, but acquiesced to Shawn and allow him to get knocked out with some foreign object before losing.