|
I'll try and post the links to previous Raw Reports today. Also want to say how much I've enjoyed reading the write-ups about wrestling storylines and backstage drama. Effort-posting at its best! Please keep it up
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 12:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 20, 2024 04:34 |
|
|
Joke's on you since Tony Halme (Ludvig Borga) was a wife beating nazi irl.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 15:20
|
|
|
why don't you put your false teeth in backwards and eat yourself to death, lmfao
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 15:44
|
|
|
Lol at how Hulk Hogan refused to face Bret Hart in WWF, one of the best wrestlers in history with whom he would've possibly have had the only 5* match in his career, and drop the belt to him, but was fine to do so with the Ultimate Warrior, the most garbage wrestler who ever stepped inside the squared circle.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 17:47
|
|
|
Castor Poe posted:Lol at how Hulk Hogan refused to face Bret Hart in WWF, one of the best wrestlers in history with whom he would've possibly have had the only 5* match in his career, and drop the belt to him, but was fine to do so with the Ultimate Warrior, the most garbage wrestler who ever stepped inside the squared circle. He kind of (big question mark) did that with The Rock in Wrestlemania X-8 ( Thanks for the correction, thread, because the mashup of Roman and Arabic numerals seemed cool at the time?) - but that was also weird because neither Hulk nor Rock were invested in the wrestling scene. Also, X-8 (and the lead up) was the biggest waste of a story/talent I'd witnessed. I understand, Vince needed to bury even the pettiest dispute he had with WCW, Hogan, Hall, Nash, et al, but I think it made fans resent the WWE almost as much as Vince resented the industry and the fans. Side note - If I might be serious for a moment: How the hell did he de-push Lance Storm, one of the best technical wrestlers (and also a decent writer/reviewer/historian) of the time? It was like putting a prize racehorse out to pasture before it even reached its prime. In short a WWE/WCW/ECW 3-way invasion angle was a major waste of talent for one man's vindictiveness. But I look forward to a more insightful write-up from someone more knowledgeable. Edit: Changed X-7 to X-8 thanks to the help of this thread for filling in my memory holes. Dementropy fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Feb 17, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 17:59
|
|
|
Vince buried Lance Storm for the same reason he buries all other good wrestlers: he hates wrestling. He also doesn't want anyone making his personally selected clown entertainer of the year look bad and exposing the entertainment clown as a bad wrestler. Also Lance Storm isn't an entertainment clown and that's what Vince wants.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 18:08
|
|
|
More perfectly normal behavior from employer Tony Khan. Folks we are not at all a few months away from AEW falling apart when someone spurns Tony's midnight champagne hot tub advances like a Miramax contract player with a Weinstein. That will not happen. At all. No chance of it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 18:16
|
|
|
Eclipse12 posted:Raw. This was a loving beautiful post. More of this please!
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 18:50
|
|
|
Lance Storm got to fire the first shot of the invasion angle, and I was never a WCW guy so I didn't know that he wasn't really a huge deal over there (if I'm not mistaken), and, I thought he was so loving awesome. I immediately went and made a Lance Storm create-a-wrestler in WWF No Mercy and I was mad because they didn't have his pants and then I just... never saw him again. like dust in the wind  also, nth-ing the sentiment that Raw Report is blessed and good, thank you Eclipse12
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 19:34
|
|
|
Dementropy posted:He kind of (big question mark) did that with The Rock in Wrestlemania X-7 (because the mashup of Roman and Arabic numerals seemed cool at the time?) - but that was also weird because neither Hulk nor Rock were invested in the wrestling scene. It was X8 and despite nothing really happening in that entire match, the entire crowd was losing their poo poo non-stop from start to finish. It's such a fascinating match too, as the crowd was behind Hogan all the way (who was booked as the bad guy and was meant to be defeated) so him and Rock basically had to re-write the match on the fly. According to either Rock or Hogan, if they stuck to the original script, the fans would have killed them lol
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 19:42
|
|
|
Archer666 posted:It was X8 and despite nothing really happening in that entire match, the entire crowd was losing their poo poo non-stop from start to finish. It's such a fascinating match too, as the crowd was behind Hogan all the way (who was booked as the bad guy and was meant to be defeated) so him and Rock basically had to re-write the match on the fly. According to either Rock or Hogan, if they stuck to the original script, the fans would have killed them lol Oh my bad. X8 (which now makes it look like more of an emoji than a lovely enumeration). That match seemed to take forever, which certainly lines up with rewriting things on the fly. The fans were definitely going wild and it seemed to be an ad-hoc passing of the torch, or just a grandiose acknowledgment that more than one "hero" could kinda, sorta, if you squinted, break out of professional wrestling, and still come back occasionally to cheap pops. I did enjoy Hulk's brief return as the masked Patriot (question mark - I'm not going to look it up) in like 2003. Dementropy fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Feb 17, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 20:13
|
|
|
Hiekkakauppias posted:Joke's on you since Tony Halme (Ludvig Borga) was a wife beating nazi irl. I think I mentioned this in the old wrestlethread, but eternal reminder that Ludvig Borga was the first wrestleman to cross over to the UFC, where he would lose to some 0-0 rear end in a top hat named Randy Couture later Brock Lesnar would win back the lineal honour of all wrestlemen and Finns
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 20:14
|
|
|
Dementropy posted:I did enjoy Hulk's brief return as the masked Patriot (question mark - I'm not going to look it up) in like 2003. excuse me what is your evidence that Mr America is the Hulkster???
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 20:26
|
|
|
Dementropy posted:
Mr. America! It was Vince's attempt at burying the most over guy in pro wrestling lol I know this is a Vince thread, but can we laugh at Eric Bishoff for doing absolutely nothing with Bret Hart when he was fresh off the screw job/Wrestling with Shadows and the hottest thing in wrestling at the time? They literally had Bret stand in the background in an nWo shirt the first couple months of his tenure in WCW. The guy would have been a license to print money. Looking back, it's kind of heartbreaking how the most memorable thing he did in WCW was the Back to the Future 3 bit with Goldberg. Castor Poe fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Feb 17, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 20:26
|
|
|
Peggy Edson posted:excuse me what is your evidence that Mr America is the Hulkster??? None whatsoever (also Mea Culpa - the Patriot was Kurt Angle). Though I can say I've never seen the Hulkster and
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 20:43
|
|
|
Archer666 posted:It was X8 and despite nothing really happening in that entire match, the entire crowd was losing their poo poo non-stop from start to finish. It's such a fascinating match too, as the crowd was behind Hogan all the way (who was booked as the bad guy and was meant to be defeated) so him and Rock basically had to re-write the match on the fly. According to either Rock or Hogan, if they stuck to the original script, the fans would have killed them lol Add that to the extremely lengthy list of lies from Hulk Hogan. They knew he was going to get cheered.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2022 21:30
|
|
|
This thread is full of fascinating inside baseball, but can any of you tell me if the Iron Sheik really runs his own twitter account?
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 04:53
|
|
|
Shumagorath posted:This thread is full of fascinating inside baseball, but can any of you tell me if the Iron Sheik really runs his own twitter account? Sadly he does not but I pretend he does
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 05:11
|
|
|
Shumagorath posted:This thread is full of fascinating inside baseball, but can any of you tell me if the Iron Sheik really runs his own twitter account? I don't know about his twitter account, but I remember hearing several years ago that its not him behind his Facebook account. Unfortunate, but still usually posts some good stuff.
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 05:12
|
|
|
Say what you want about Jim Cornette but this thumbnail's depiction of Vince's various phases had me in stitches:
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 07:06
|
|
|
C H O N K S
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 07:46
|
|
|
shadow puppet of a posted:Folks we are not at all a few months away from AEW falling apart when someone spurns Tony's midnight champagne hot tub advances like a Miramax contract player with a Weinstein. That will not happen. At all. No chance of it. TNA is 20 years old. OVW is 29 years old. If Dixie Carter and Stacey Cornette loving the wrestlers didn't kill those promotions I don't see why Tony Khan loving the wrestlers would kill his Shumagorath posted:This thread is full of fascinating inside baseball, but can any of you tell me if the Iron Sheik really runs his own twitter account? he doesn't, it's his nephew or something instead and has been for many years
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 09:34
|
|
|
plus you can either work for vince mcmahon, who will call you "colin" and you have to figure out if your career will be over if you correct him or if it'll be over if you DON'T correct him, before then repackaging you as 'The Itchy rear end in a top hat Man' for three years on tv or you can work for tony khan, who will look at you with giddy fascination and ask you to record a voicemail for his friend keith while telling him all about the match you had with bigpuncher o'neill in 2006 in front of a crowd of 50 people or you can work for tna, like a big stupid doofus
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 10:03
|
|
|
Maybe in another timeline, you could work for WCW. Why can't you in THIS timeline? Well... --- In “The Unreal Story Of Professional Wrestling”, one of the analysts said something that stuck with me about the unique blend of sport and entertainment wrestling has. “If you go to a movie premiere, and you shake hands with Tom Cruise, you’re shaking hands with Tom Cruise, not Jerry McGuire (at the time, that was Cruise’s most recent hit film: nowadays he probably would have said Ethan Hunt, Cruise’s Mission Impossible character). If you go to a wrestling event and shake hands with Ric Flair, you are shaking hands with the Ric Flair who will be in the ring, who cut the promos before it, and who will be on the shows after it.” I’ve thoroughly shown the downside of wrestlers being made, or choosing to, live their gimmicks 24/7, but it offers something I think no sport or entertainment can match. Even if Robert Downey Jr was sitting incognito in a midnight debut of Avengers: Endgame and heard the crowd in it roar at his final “I am Iron Man.”, he was still separated by layers of…well, separation. He’d already filmed that months ago, he had taken off the Tony Stark identity to be himself and likely step into other roles. It wouldn’t be Tony Stark sitting in that theater. But standing in the middle of a ring, surrounded by thousands of people, roaring so loud that your ears are likely suffering low key damage, and they’re cheering for YOU…yes, other legit sports have that as well, but they have no guarantees of it. Football players may do little dances or bits when they score a touchdown as their way of interacting with cheering fans, and noted early UFC star Tito Ortiz would put on a custom shirt of his making after his victories mocking his opponent, but they still have to actually SUCCEED to do it. They don’t KNOW they’re going to, no matter how much confidence they may have. But pro wrestlers do. That leaves them the job of focusing to get the crowd into it, which is, I am not saying, any way easy. But under that spotlight, in front of a giant crowd, and you are the character who everyone else is celebrating…I can’t imagine the thrill. I talk about people wanting the top money spots, but in reality, I think that spotlight, that adulation and the symbiotic relationship a wrestler has with the fans, is far more important to them; if you offered a wrestler a set deal that paid them enough to just make a comfortable living and travel around without a hassle that came with a guarantee of constant fan response, I think 8/10 wrestlers would turn down the chance to be millionaires and live their later lives in comfortable retirement in exchange for that. Most probably would barely spare it a second thought. But…much like a drug addiction, that first high will always be the best. Though while drug and other addictions are based around needing more to try and get as close as you can to that initial high, and eventually just needing the product to function at all, the craving of the spotlight can very easily shift into a ‘good enough’ substitute, that being, that you’re at the top of the card with the lights on you at all. Whether the fans cheer, boo, despise it, love it, or don’t react at all (the worst ‘reaction’, most of the time), it don’t matter. You’re there and the spotlight feels ever so good. Until your actions ensure that there’s no spotlight for anyone, because it caused a knock on effect that led to the company shutting down. But no matter. Like any good parasite, you’ll just look to find a new fresh sack to suck dry. Maybe, even if you TRY, it’s like swimming against the tide. This thread has talked about what, at the moment, seems to be Cody Rhodes leaving AEW, a business he more or less helped found, and possibly going back to the WWE, where odds are he will be treated about as well as his father was when HE jumped companies in the late 80’s. And it was discussed that Cody seemingly tried to not be Triple H, that he had the control, the ‘book’, and he went against it. He booked himself so his character couldn’t challenge for the main AEW title. He lost a feud to his understudy, MJF, a good choice as MJF is of at the start of TYOOL 2022 maybe the best heel in the Western wrestling business. Hell, as said, in the main event of what would become AEW’s first show, he smashed a throne as symbolism. He seemed to at least be TRYING. And yet… He would make himself his own title, the TNT Title. He would book himself to do lengthy promos. He seemed to be operating on his own wavelength, no matter what the fans indicated. He let his wife form her own stable. He got other shows on TNT. And in the end, he fell out with Tony Khan over how important he thought he was, to the point where he decided he’d go back to the company whose misuse of him put him in a position to do all that to begin with. It seemed, as of the time of this writing, that even TRYING, Cody couldn’t help himself. He repressed the urge to put himself under the spotlight, and like a person’s sexual feelings, it just came out in different, maybe weirder ways, but it still came out. (Ha ha, wordplay). Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe no wrestler who has the control, the book, can resist the urge to use it for themselves. Cody’s father couldn’t, the Clique couldn’t, Triple H who learned at their feet sure couldn’t, and Hulk Hogan drat sure couldn’t, and didn’t want to. You can’t hold water in a sieve. Of course, in March of 1997, no one knew this, probably not even Hogan himself. After all, they had to build to this, and that would require Hogan to both look strong, and keep in the main spotlight. Which is exactly what happened. From March to December, PPV’s would generally revolve around other NWO members fighting WCW members; of said PPV’s, Hogan only wrestled on three of them, out of eight, and never with his title on the line. Ironically, one of those matches was Hogan fighting to REGAIN his title; Lex Luger had finally gotten back into the front line of the ‘WCW forces’ and had won the title in a shock upset win on the last Monday Nitro before the August PPV…in which Hogan won the title back, making Luger’s reign last less than a week. This quick loss and win back was endemic of the issue WCW faced during this year long build; even when WCW won, nothing seemed to change. The NWO would just win on the next PPV; they didn’t seem to lose a step, or have cracks starting to form as they just couldn’t seem to finish off WCW. In essence, the WCW vs NWO storyline was spinning its wheels; the plan to build up Hogan vs Sting all year was going to have its downsides, but again, the people involved made the downsides worse. The Luger win, in retrospect, had been a bad idea, probably done to ‘pop a rating’, a sign of the flaws that would begin rotting out more and more of WCW. But, even so…the build was still happening, as in storyline Sting kept refusing to get back in the ring with anyone except Hogan, for the title. And the undercard of WCW, flush with talent drawn from Mexico, Japan, and elsewhere, would often have great matches in the opening hours of Nitros and PPVs, while the main events would have plodding, half-baked matches that were supposed to be carried by the story. No more was this demonstrated with Halloween Havoc 1997, whose main event was Roddy Piper, in his THIRD crack at Hogan, wrestling him inside a steel cage (which was the tail end of a small story I might tell later if people care), the two at this point in their mid 40’s and having been doing the wrestling thing for nearly 20 years, and it showed. The undercard matches featured, among others, Rey Mysterio vs the late Eddie Guerrero in a match so amazing most considered it the best ‘lightweight wrestler’ match ever seen in United States wrestling. So yeah. The main events were at best, passable, and the NWO never seemed to suffer a true loss, but WCW had lots of talent, and they had just found this guy Goldberg, and it was all about December 1997. Sting vs Hogan at Starrcade. And then, in another seeming giant get, one of the WWE’s top stars also jumped to WCW, that being Bret Hart (sort of. That’s another, longer story). If that wasn’t enough, Bret’s last match in WWF would end up being so infamous, even at the time (The Montreal Screwjob), that it seemed like the WWF had finally broken and that WCW would now crush them for good. Then the ratings for the first show after Bret’s departure came in, and the WWF’s were up. A lot. People were attracted to the controversy. Okay fine, a temporary surge…except the WWF had finally gelled together a semi-strong product by late 1997, the Attitude Era’s very beginnings having happened just a few months before, and all they needed was something big to get some extra viewers. And Vince McMahon, who after the events, decided to just lean into the immensely negative attention he was getting and turn it into storyline fodder, would find out that yes, there was definitely something in a storyline of the evil controlling boss vs the rebel hellraiser. After all, how many people reading this have wanted to beat up their bosses? But that was still to come, the barest sprouts from fresh dirt. WCW still had Starrcade. Sting vs Hogan. They’d managed to keep them apart, keep both healthy, and make the fans want it more and more and more, and now they were finally getting it. Unfortunately, the one who needed to ‘get it’ the most…wasn’t going to. Even in the face of all common sense. — Wrestling is, and always will be, a two person show. You need to let yourself be lifted, or aid the lift, for most of the moves the wrestlers' do. You need to have someone who can sell for you, or beat you up to get sympathy, or at the very least, do moves so that neither they or you will get hurt. Those that fail in these facets are either very green, or the type of person that Hulk Hogan or Shawn Michaels was. It was all about them, everything else be damned. There’s a giant amount of arguments over how the Starrcade show should have been booked. Despite all the built that indicated ‘the final battle of WCW vs NWO’, the NWO still won most of its matches on the PPV that night. Hell, the only WCW winner got their win through a DQ victory. But all of that was meaningless. They were here for Sting vs Hogan. There’s all sorts of further arguments for how the Sting vs Hogan match should have been designed and executed. Sting should have had a more dramatic entrance. Sting shouldn’t have taken so much offense from Hogan. Sting should have come out and no sold everything and beaten Hogan’s rear end in three minutes. And so on. But for all the theorizing, the THING that actually happened played out as such. You might have noticed before the match that Hogan was having a somewhat extended conversation with the referee, Nick Patrick. What they discussed, I don’t know. But it could be interpreted as Hogan and him going over something that was due to happen in the match itself. It didn’t stand out TOO much: in storyline Nick Patrick was the evil heel referee allied with the NWO, and him being ref was just typical heel stacking the deck against Sting. But as the match seemed like it was going to build to a climax, Hogan slammed Sting down, ran the ropes, and dropped his trademark leg drop. He covered. 1, 2, 3. Sting didn’t kick out. All that, all the build…and Sting didn’t kick out. Based on who you talk to, the plan had been for Nick, being the heel ref, to do a ‘fast count’. Except it wasn’t a fast count. It was more or less a normal count. Oh, maybe the man just screwed up, people are fallible… Or maybe Hogan had made it clear to him that despite what the plan was, Hogan wanted him to count normally. He had complete creative control. Matches happened as HE wanted. And while Hogan was not so up his own rear end as to actually WIN this long term blow off match, he certainly was going to make sure he looked as good as possible. Maybe this was demonstrated best by how, even if it had been a screwed up fast count, Sting laid there afterwards, flat on his back, when he should have just barely managed to ‘not make’ the count and then been immediately back on his feet, full of utter rage and ferocity. Instead, he lay there, broken, fallen, the hope and champion of WCW, laid to waste. He didn’t even have the cover that Giant and his gold-lead belt had. The subconscious message was clear. This company sucks. We rule. And if you don’t get that, you’re stupid. Now buy our shirts. And never, EVER, EVER, EVER will Hulk Hogan look even remotely weak. EVER. Of course, the match didn’t actually end there, and who knows, maybe hairs are being split. Maybe they just hosed things up. It happens. What did happen as followed was Bret Hart running out, getting on a microphone, somewhat muffledly saying “This isn’t going to happen again!”, referencing the real life events that had sent him out the WWF’s door, then he punched out Patrick, took over as referee (because he could), restarted the match, and Sting, finally back up, pounced on Hogan with his trademark corner splash and then locked in his submission hold, which Bret declared Hogan surrendered to and called the match for Sting. Never mind that for at least a year by now, wrestling had adapted the MMA ‘tap out’ gesture to indicate a wrestler was submitting, which was a much better visual indicator than referees just sort of standing near where the wrestler was when in a submission hold and indicating they said they gave up. And Hogan didn’t do that. Bret just said he did. ...Fine. Sting had still won. Hooray. WCW wrestlers poured into the ring, Sting got the on the shoulders treatment, balloons fell, fireworks went off, good had triumphed that night. And Bischoff was laughing all the way to the bank with the biggest PPV buyrate WCW had ever done. ….except, in the end, when the next show went on…nothing had changed. The NWO should have been broken. Instead, it kept dominating more often than not. Hell, on that very first Nitro, Hogan demanded a rematch, got it, and the same thing more or less happened: a screwy three count from Patrick, the match being restarted by another referee, and Sting winning, only for the belt to be ‘held up’ due to the screwiness. They’d taken a simple ending and broken it into a thousand pieces, maybe because WCW just didn’t know when to stop sucking at the teat, or maybe because in the end, the people who had to lose…just really didn’t want to. I have theorized that if you somehow went back in time and jumped into Eric Bischoff’s body in say, August 1997, and around then made it clear to Hogan that while he was gonna get plenty of spotlight all the way to the match, he was going to be destroyed in it, and the NWO would finally break, and he would be taken out of the main event scene a bit to let it breathe, and refused to budge on Hogan’s attempts to get around it, I honestly think Hogan would have taken his ball and went home, completely ruining the storyline. It’s sad when people learn the wrong lessons from having wrong done to them. It’s even sadder that Hogan embraced those wrong lessons so hard that he likely could have had an even more brilliant career if he’d learned to give some back. To recognize in the end, there was no glory for Hulk Hogan in the ring without a Roddy Piper, an Andre the Giant, a Sting. It takes two to tango, and Hogan never learned that. Was it because of a broken leg and being told he’d get a title if he married some girl, or was Terry Bollea just naturally a selfish piece of poo poo with zero ability to instrospect, instead being an expert in manipulating things to get his way? I don’t know. None of us will ever know. All we have is how things played out. In November 1997, the WWF seemed to have one foot in the grave and WCW’s own foot posed over their heads to deliver one final stomp or two. A year later, the two now had a pure competition once again, with combined numbers that dwarfed anything the business had had before. Ratings that tended around the vein of 6.0 for one show to 5.5 for the other, for a combined 11.5, a giant audience that both could have thrived on for years to come even if it shrank some. Key word: "Some". By March 2001, WCW had fallen so hard and so far and so fast that they managed to follow AWA’s path in one third the time, going out of business with a whimper. And if you examined the corpse of the company and the bootmarks on it, you likely would have found the marks were size 12 boots with HULK HOGAN written on them. --- Later Edit: Comments from the Wrestling Observer of the time, including one with redundant info that I'm including anyway for posterity. quote:"Starrcade destroyed WCW's all-time gate records and also set the companies all time one-night merchandise record. The paid attendance was a company record...The show was bad" - The Wrestling Observer Newsletter: December 29, 1997. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Mar 30, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 10:34
|
|
|
Your histories are very good reading Cornwind Evil.
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 12:10
|
|
|
I can’t be alone in wanting the wwe to not sign Cody and he makes his own fed and it’s 100% all of the time dogs and pyro and cigars and whole team entrances coming out of individualized entrance portals and tour busses and sister in law resentment and arm Anderson’s ccw threats and live neck tattoo touch ups in ring and it would be glorious. He’ll turn so stale so fast in Vince world of golden eggs and brass rings. Please cody, prove to the world how right you are about your perma-face booking concepts.
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 13:48
|
|
|
shadow puppet of a posted:I can’t be alone in wanting the wwe to not sign Cody and he makes his own fed and it’s 100% all of the time dogs and pyro and cigars and whole team entrances coming out of individualized entrance portals and tour busses and sister in law resentment and arm Anderson’s ccw threats and live neck tattoo touch ups in ring and it would be glorious. He’ll turn so stale so fast in Vince world of golden eggs and brass rings. Please cody, prove to the world how right you are about your perma-face booking concepts. Tbh this would be the best possible outcome bc then we'd have AEW AND Codyverse and maybe they could build a new SUPER FORBIDDEN DOOR and Cody can break it down with a sledgehammer
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 16:06
|
|
|
But, as it keeps being said, even utterly fumbling Sting vs Hogan could have been recovered from. WCW’s ratings were still strong; the WWE was more growing its own ratings again than taking WCW’s. Maybe too strong. As 1998 began, not only did WCW expand its Nitro show’s length from two hours to three, which meant that it now not only had an hour lead in to Raw (Raw aired 9 to 11, Nitro aired 8 to 10, and now 8 to 11), but started up another show, WCW Thunder, which ran for two hours. Great if WCW had decided to experiment with different foci and maybe figure out a new main story angle or two…except, of course, it just ended up being the same focus on the same people, now just more. Hell, it’s arguable that Thunder was created because of the still persistent idea that the NWO would take over WCW’s prime show Nitro entirely and force WCW to ‘retreat’ to Thunder. But, as said, for the time, ratings were good on both sides. WWF, however, had the momentum. As 1998 began, Steve Austin won the Royal Rumble to set up his official crowning as the top star of the company at the next Wrestlemania. The WWF got some real life attention by bringing in Mike Tyson to be a ‘special enforcer’ for said match, and Austin immediately getting in his face and causing problems. And Vince continued his slow transformation from Vince the goofy play by play man to what would be known as Mr. McMahon, the evil head of WWF who wanted absolute control over his empire, getting angrier and angrier at Austin’s antics. When Austin won the title as planned (and Shawn Michaels, having suffered a back injury at the same Rumble Austin won, would end up on the shelf for years and end up missing, more or less, the entire Attitude era that he helped found), McMahon confronted him on the Raw after Wrestlemania and said “In the end, you work for me, so you will do what I say and we’ll be good.” Austin flipped McMahon off and stunned him for what I believe was the second time. The ratings kept climbing. WCW’s win streak was in danger, but it just managed to beat Raw in the ratings that week. But next week, it was still close. And finally, the week after that, where Vince challenged Austin to a match himself to ‘teach him a lesson’, the streak finally broke, as Raw beat Nitro in the overall nightly rating for the first time in over a year and a half. And Eric Bischoff promptly lost his drat mind. Now, on some level, I get it. No one likes to lose. And being on an extended victory streak can make losses that inevitably happen suck even more. I can imagine the fact that the Patriots’ perfect season ending with a shock Superbowl loss in the last minutes of the game in 2007 stung even more if the Patriots actually had lost a game or two before that one, for one example. It’s insanely rare to go all the way and never suffer the law of averages, and odds are, like Floyd Mayweather, eventually people will think it was more avoiding and delaying and picking his spots than boxing skill that let him end up with a 50-0 record or whatever it supposedly is. But, unfortunately, much like Hogan, by now Eric had long drunk his own flavor aid. He’d come to see himself as the new empire builder of wrestling, and all the greater because he would beat the one who himself did it, Vince McMahon. He’d helped WCW (eventually) turn a profit and reach its greatest heights: for all the things Dusty and Flair and others who came before, they’d never even come close to being ‘a Nintendo’, while the NWO had, albeit on a smaller basis that didn’t match Hogan in the 80’s or, ironically, Steve Austin to come. And now, the Monday Night Wars winning streak was over. You know these sorts. They had to find someone to blame. But who? Maybe actually sit Hogan down and tell him his actions were becoming unacceptable? No, of course not; if anything Hogan’s actions had made Bischoff’s viewpoints that was now causing him to flip out grow even worse over the years (after all, even WITH total creative control, Hogan would not have been able to pull off his ‘fast count that wasn’t’ and not be punished afterwards if Bischoff on some level didn’t support it, or get talked into supporting it). Maybe someone in Hogan’s orbit, as a misplaced ‘punishment’ done because Hogan was off limits, like his good friend Ed Leslie? No. Maybe one of the lesser problem-causers, like Kevin Nash, who was starting to flex his own creative control muscles in the same ways that had caused the rating win streak to end, stopping him before it started? No. Instead, Bischoff went after Ric Flair, the heart of WCW along with Sting, who had had nothing to do with the storylines or matches that were just starting to make WCW’s decline begin. Flair had given notice that he would be taking a show off (A Thunder) to watch his son Reid participate in an actual middle school Greco-roman wrestling weeks in advance. Bischoff pretended like he had no showed with zero advance warning, flipped out, and actually filed a lawsuit against Flair for it, resulting in Flair disappearing from WCW TV for months. It was complete horseshit and would be a shining example of just why WCW would fall apart, the whole inferiority complex constantly inherited by those who ran WCW taken to its logical extreme. It wasn’t even like it started a cascade of losses: WCW won the next week’s ratings and it just began going back and forth like it had back at the start of the Monday Night Wars. But the end of the streak scarred Eric, and would lead to numerous terrible business decisions to come. And it wasn’t just him. Even as the Nitro ratings win streak was ending, the Goldberg on air win streak was growing, as was the man’s overness. People have made jokes about how both companies ended up with their biggest stars being bald, goateed men in simple black trunks, and how if there had been a ‘dream match’ between late 90’s Austin and Goldberg, it would have become a confusing mess because people wouldn’t be able to tell who was who, but those are all jokes; it’s akin to saying Lebron James and Usain Bolt are identical because they’re both lanky black male athletes. Jokes aside, in late April Goldberg claimed his first singles title, the US Title. On the June PPV. Goldberg would claim his supposed 100th victory, making his streak 100-0. With an upcoming Nitro due to happen in the now-demolished Georgia Dome, Hogan, who was AGAIN WCW champion after six months of nonsense (Sting beat him again to win the held up title in February, only for Sting to lose it to Randy Savage in April, making him a side character in what had ended up being a splitting of the NWO, more on that later, only for Hogan to beat Savage immediately afterward and win the title back, and then Sting ended up joining one of the two NWO factions rendering his whole crusade against Hogan more or less moot and a waste of time), saw the possible crowd numbers for the Nitro, and Goldberg’s popularity, and the fact that this was going to happen in Time Warner’s backyard and people from the company were likely going to be there, and came up with an idea. He’d have a match with Goldberg (originally just an off TV non title match, I believe). The Time Warner folks would see the giant crowd and believe Hogan drew it, and Hogan would be in a strong position to keep negotiating his contracts to have way too much money and creative control and etc etc. In negotiations, though, this offered match grew even bigger, until it became Goldberg’s defining moment. Hogan would not fight Goldberg off TV non title: he would face Goldberg for the WCW Title in the main event, and lose, making Goldberg WCW champion less than a year from his debut…in exchange that several months later, Hogan would be the one to end Goldberg’s winning streak. Bischoff and WCW went for it, and Hogan dropped the belt in front of Nitro’s biggest ever crowd and popping a giant rating. Of course, it could have made far much more money if they'd done the match on PPV with build behind it instead of just springing it on the night of that Nitro. But fine, whatever. It still happened, and seemed like a fix and a new direction after the failed Sting vs Hogan match. Goldberg was young, fresh, and could finally be the spear (ha ha) to put down the NWO angle and let WCW move on. So what happened? The Clique happened. Again. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Feb 18, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 16:54
|
|
|
Am I the only one who used to refer to him as Eric "bitchoff"?
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2022 20:43
|
|
|
Not anymore!
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2022 00:09
|
|
|
wesleywillis posted:Am I the only one who used to refer to him as Eric "bitchoff"? i remember it being a schoolyard thing
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2022 00:53
|
|
|
wesleywillis posted:Am I the only one who used to refer to him as Eric "bitchoff"? Do you also own a Shoney’s franchise?
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2022 00:59
|
|
|
scott steiner's shoneys went outta business last year bitchoff is 100% a bitch though
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2022 02:02
|
|
|
So I said the Clique happened again. Not exactly true. Rather, Kevin Nash happened. By now, Shawn Michaels was seemingly retired, Waltman had returned to the WWE, Hunter was starting to rise in the ranks alongside him (Waltman), and Hall, who had had long time substance abuse problems, was getting to the point where they were interfering in his work. But the lessons Nash learned had never gone away, and while Nash had played second fiddle to Hogan ever since the NWO formed, the storyline that led to the NWO breaking into two factions finally gave him a chance to pull the man down and take his place as the guy running things backstage, his way. I have noted how the ‘cool heel’ is a troublesome and often short term gain, long term detriment problem, and when the NWO broke in two, this problem compounded itself. Nash had been ‘cool heeling’ on and off during the whole NWO angle, and the split allowed him to switch to anti-hero face, forming the “NWO Wolfpac”. While popular... (I remember the very first time I ever joined a wrestling chatroom on the internet, people kept asking for a recording of the Wolfpac’s new entrance music, which is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYwXUxgszF0 Indeed, pretty cool for the time, I guess.) ...the Wolfpac was still the same problem of “The NWO just will not go away and won’t get out of the top spots on the card”. Bill Goldberg might have been the champion now, and immensely over, but the NWO was still taking the big storylines and the main events. Of the PPVs that followed Goldberg’s win in July to December, Goldberg main evented approximately one of them. He didn’t even get booked to wrestle on two of them, and the rest had him appearing in the semi main event, while the focus was on things like Hogan fighting Jay Leno, or the Ultimate Warrior returning and turning a three way War Games match into a glorified (and bad) magic show. But even then, Goldberg was over. He was drawing. People were buying tickets to see him, buying merchandise, chanting his name. The WWF had Austin vs McMahon in full swing, with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson starting taking his first steps to his own top star and beyond status as well, and WCW had Goldberg. Things were far from perfect, but they were still good. In November 1998, two things happened. One was Hulk Hogan appearing on Jay Leno (not holding a grudge over Leno beating him in a wrestling match at a PPV, good on HIM, I guess) to announce he was retiring from pro wrestling, AND running for President of the United States. Why in the hell would he do that? Well, to fake people out for what happened later, perhaps, but most likely because Jesse Ventura had, in a rather shocking turn of events, managed to win the governorship of Minnesota and Hogan, who had a rather POOR relationship with Ventura to say the least, did it to get attention on him instead after Ventura had succeeded in something Hogan had never managed to do. The other was that Kevin Nash joined the backstage booking committee. Nash now had creative control over how storylines would go. Nash, as was said back at the time, HAD THE BOOK. And with Hogan seemingly retired, and for all we know, he actually HAD meant it at the time, that left an opening. A big one. The inevitable happened. Nash promptly (ie booked himself to) won WCW’s Royal Rumble equivalent in November 1998, and at Starrcade, one year after the first giant mistake, the second and more fatal giant mistake happened. While it was done through numerous cases of interference and Goldberg literally being zapped with a cattle prod, Nash defeated him to claim the WCW title and end Goldberg’s winning streak at 173-0. Once again, as Death of WCW says (I am drawing a fair chunk of my posts from it), it shouldn’t have been this way. Goldberg’s streak should have ended if he was cooling off, to give someone else a rub. And it wasn’t. Goldberg was hot. There was no sign he was going to cool down any time soon. He was making WCW money. He was their future. But, as the book quotes someone who had worked for WCW at the time, whose bitterness leapt off the page, “Some people didn’t care about that.” — “He beats the big guy with three superkicks.” The days when Eric Bischoff was brilliantly counter programming WWE and breaking all the rules to get an advantage were long gone, as was the time when doing something like saying that Shawn Michaels was going to win his brief feud with Sid in 1996 via the above sentence on Raw would do anything for WCW. But, for some reason, as 1998’s last days passed, Bischoff decided to resurrect it. While Austin and Rock were getting the spotlight in the WWF, Mick Foley had slipped in and was rapidly gaining on their side in the last quarter of 1998. By the last weeks of 1998, Mick was so over that the WWE decided to give him a brief world title reign, taping his triumphant win at the very end of 1998 for the first Raw show of 1999. On that night, with Bischoff likely speaking through him, WCW play by play announcer Tony Schiavone would say something along the lines of “No need to change channels, folks. Mick Foley, who used to wrestle for this company as Cactus Jack, and now wrestles as Mankind, is going to win the competition’s world title tonight.” That would have been bad enough, but in a pure tempting of fate, Schiavone, or rather, Bischoff, because I am CERTAIN he was feeding the man the line, would follow this ‘reveal’ by adding “Wow, that’s going to put a lot of butts in the seats.” When the ratings were broken down after the shows, it revealed that as soon as the announcement was made, thousands of houses, possibly 100,000 or more, switched off Nitro and moved over to watch Raw instead to watch Foley get the biggest win of his career. But because hubris is still sometimes punished, what happened also that night combined to signal the end. It’s been spoken about before. Goldberg was going to challenge Nash for the title again, only for Miss Elizabeth to make claims that got Goldberg ‘arrested’. Nash claimed Hogan, who had been off TV for weeks, but was now backstage again, seemingly just because, was behind it and said he would challenge him instead, the leaders of NWO Wolfpac and NWO Hollywood/Black and White clashing in a finally happening battle of leaders and warriors. So we thought. The match began, and Hogan poked Nash in the chest. Nash acted like he’d been shot with a cannonball and fell over like a broken toy, and Hogan pinned him to win the WCW title. Because after ending Goldberg’s streak, after all they’d done to kill Starrcade 1997 throughout 1998, the answer for what would be done in WCW now was…the NWO. Again. It was all Bischoff ever had. And it wasn’t even a good buggy whip product. That was more or less it for WCW. The ratings war as a competition was over: they'd started to slip some, but after January 4th, the slip became permanent, and WCW would never even win a quarter hour ratings match with WWF for the next two years and change, let alone a full night assessment. Even when Raw would be delayed for things like tennis or dog shows and air at midnight, the show's overall rating would STILL be higher than WCW’s running in their normal Nitro time slot unopposed. The ‘twist’ would be fittingly dubbed the “Fingerpoke of Doom”, originally just for the ‘match’ itself, but later gaining the greater secondary meaning that it was WCW’s doom. And for months afterwards, the WWF crowds would be full of signs that all said more or less the same thing: MICK FOLEY PUT MY BUTT IN THIS SEAT. Of course, you know what happens to the average body when it dies. Its bowels release. To be cruder, it shits itself. And ho boy, did WCW have a full lower intestine.
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2022 02:28
|
|
|
i could kick hulk hogans rear end
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2022 02:36
|
|
|
GolfHole posted:i could kick hulk hogans rear end He's not going to fight you without creative control, and then you're not going over brother.
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2022 02:43
|
|
|
Ad by Khad posted:scott steiner's shoneys went outta business last year Hopefully because it was time to stop paying some twenty five and four sevenths of his net sales to corporate and open up a joint of his own where you KNOW he’ll be taking sixty six and five eights of every dollar above food cost once you add beverages and event catering into the mix.
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2022 02:47
|
|
|
shadow puppet of a posted:Hopefully because it was time to stop paying some twenty five and four sevenths of his net sales to corporate and open up a joint of his own where you KNOW he’ll be taking sixty six and five eights of every dollar above food cost once you add beverages and event catering into the mix. Denny's KNOWS they can't beat him, so they're not even gonna try.
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2022 03:02
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 20, 2024 04:34 |
|
|
Then you have to add the extra beef charge, coming from a freak like me! That's at least an extra six dollars, on your two dollar upcharge. So now we're looking at a six by two upcharge, so a 62 percent upcharge. So you're paying sixty six and five eights of every 62 percent upcharge, and you don't stand a chance. So I've got a six dollar charge on a two dollar charge, times 162 percent, plus your 66 5/8 of the 62 percent. Those numbers don't add up for you!
|
|
#
?
Feb 19, 2022 03:28
|
|
