Tag: blets

Where I really wonder what NXT is doing with championships

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a few days since NXT UK TakeOver: Cardiff, and I still can’t really get over the ending to the main event between Walter and Tyler Bate.  It’s not the fact that Walter defeated Tyler Bate to retain the WWE UK Championship, it’s how he won the match that still has me feeling perplexed and amused at the same time: Walter won the match with a clothesline, after everything else in his arsenal failed to keep Bate down for the count.

I mean, it was still a pretty good clothesline that Bate sold like the champion he really should be, but the fact of the matter is that Walter hadn’t really ever bust out a clothesline in general in the WWE until about now.  I guess the question is if he’s going to be using that as his signature move instead of the power bomb and/or big splash, to help reinforce the move, or if it really was an isolated case of an ordinary move succeeding at rendering a guy unconscious enough to end the match.

It reminded me of this classic wrestling match I saw once, where it was Rick Rude before he ever became Ravishing, versus some guy I don’t remember, and with Gordon Solie on commentary.  The conclusion of the match came when the opponent was momentarily distracted by something, leaving him open to an ordinary axe-handle smash from behind, before Rude hit him with an ordinary snap suplex, and pinned him 1-2-3.  All while Solie bemoaned the impact of a regular suplex and verbally sold that the match was over once he hit it.

Walter winning with a regular clothesline made me feel like I was thrown back into the early 80s with a finish that came from what is ordinarily a common move, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a deliberate throw back or if it was the seed to something that will continue to grow.

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What’s old is new again

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Once upon a time, I got a replica of the WCW United States championship, and that was my first ever championship belt.  Then one day, I got a WWF European Championship, and then not long after that, I sniped an ECW World Championship on eBay.

Around this time, I made a goal for myself that five would be the number of belts I would aspire to get, because at the time, I had this perfect corner shelf for championship belts that had five spaces, and I thought it would look great with every shelf occupied.  Eventually, I tracked down an attitude-era WWF World Championship belt, and after one fortuitous trip to Las Vegas, my brother and I each got ourselves a WCW Tag Team Championship belt to signify our life-long unity.  The shelf was now full.

But then one of my best friends got married, and I just so happen to track down a set of WWF Tag Team Championship belts, so I decided to signify that life-long unity with another belt.  Then, I just so happened to be farting around on eBay, and stumbled across a WCW Big Gold belt replica.  And then for whatever reason I was on eBay again, and came across an ECW Television Championship and threw out a fairly low best offer, which was miraculously accepted.  And then Cody Rhodes bust out the white strap Intercontinental championship which inspired me to go look on eBay, and I came across an egregiously low-priced classic WWF Intercontinental Championship and it was unavoidable.

I actually don’t remember the context to what made me look for them, but I came across a pair of ECW Tag Team Championship belts, and I purchased them, and gave one of them to my brother.  I’m pretty sure it was as a birthday gift.

This put me at ten belts.  A nice round number.  It seemed like a good place to stop.  My shelf was long since full, and I’d actually been keeping an eye out for another one just like it, and had come close a few times at a few antique markets in my area.

But then one of my close friends gave me access to his WWE Network account, and I started watching NXT.  And then I saw Andrade Cien Almas vs. Johnny Gargano and suddenly I really wanted to get an NXT Championship replica.  Shortly after that, I started watching some New Japan stuff after hearing all these things about this guy named Kenny Omega, and the legendary match he just had with their world champion, Kazuchika Okada.  And then I really felt like an IWGP World Championship was something that my collection needed.

By now, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there’s probably never going to be a formal “end” to my collection, and thankfully because I display them on the wall, there’s not going to be the same challenges of limited shelf space to limit the growth of my collection.

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Office Space-ing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s only been a year and chance since I moved into my house, but I haven’t really done anything with my office.  Sure, I made and installed my wall of belts, and hung a few frames on the walls, in addition to positioning the futon and setting up a space for my computer.  But I still had a lot of boxes sitting in the closet along with general ideas for lots of little trinkets and nerdy figurines that I had imagined displaying in whatever room I’d designate as my office, that I simply never bothered really getting to.

Another thing I decided to do while mythical gf was out of the country was to finally do something with my office space, and get it to a point beyond where it was just a whole bunch of boxes stacked in a corner with just a computer and a wall of wrestling belts.  A few posts ago, I touched on the hanging wall shelves that I had put together, which are in place and I’m generally happy with, even though I underestimated a little bit just how many Rito figures that I had and how much space they’d take up.

So among the things not making the cut of the above picture are two shelves that I purchased and installed; neither are particularly impressive things, but more like essentials in order to get a degree of organization for all my various personal effects.  The obstacle I faced with my primary shelf was that I had some general dimensions that I did not want to exceed in any capacity so that I could retain as much open floor space as possible but still be able to have a place to hold some shit.

At first, I had resigned myself that storage cubes would be the most logical shelving solution for what I had in mind, but after a lot of digging on various sites, it was Amazon of all places where I found this shelf that fit into my dimensional parameters, and definitely looked like it had way more character than the cubes that just about everyone in my generation has from Ikea, Target or Walmart.  Not to mention I loved the faux-incomplete half edges on opposite ends that definitely gives it some personality as well flexibility in case something is a little wider than the surface area.

I only needed one row and the top to display stuff like nice figures and photo frames, and I didn’t have a lot of printed materials that exceeded the smaller shelf spaces, that didn’t quite fit into my library shelf elsewhere, so that left the entire bottom row available for general storage.  I got these storage bins to store shit like camera equipment, electronic peripherals and art supplies, but also looking a little bit nicer than the army of cardboard printer paper boxes they’d all been sitting in previously.

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I still can always sniff out winners in a fake sport

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know whether it’s just the WWE is just that predictable, or that I really am the self-proclaimed Oracle™ of professional wresting, but I just kind of knew that the B-Team was going to win the tag team champions at Extreme Rules.  Very likely just the former, even if the whole point of the B-Team was that it was supposed to be two jobbers who just keep lucking into wins.

The reality is that the union between Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt seems to already be getting old, and I figure that Creative has better ideas for the each of them as singular performers instead of this tag team that was more or less a hold pattern for two individual stars.  Or seeing as how Jeff Hardy jobbed the United States championship away in a gratifying squash match, maybe the Hardy’s latest run has already come to an end, and it’s time to start saying goodbye to them again, until they make yet another surprise comeback in 2019.

Who knows, who cares?

Either way, the fanboy in me is happy to see the B-Team win, because who doesn’t appreciate it when two guys who have been jobbing to the stars for the better part of the last two years finally get a little bit of recognition and reward for their dutiful work?  The funny thing is that in spite of the lovable losers that Curtis Axel and Bo Dallas portray, the two of them are guys with tons of potential and talent that is more or less kind of expiring unused on the road.  I mean one is the son of Mr. Perfect, the other the son of Mike Rotundo, so they’ve definitely got wrestling in their genes.

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The NXT North American Championship seems like a waste

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As much of a wrestling smark as I can sometimes be, I’m not going to pretend like I knew much about Adam Cole prior to his arrival in NXT.  I knew of his name, and that he was a guy that was pretty big in Ring of Honor, but frankly I didn’t even know what he looked like.  When he showed up in NXT and superkicked Drew McIntyre, my knee-jerk reactions was that he was kind of a Shawn Michaels clone, in look, ring presence and the fact that he whipped out a superkick as the very first thing on screen.

Over the following weeks, I watched Cole with interest and naturally read up on his career up to date on Wikipedia, but I had this suspicion that he was probably going to be an entertaining guy to watch.  Between all the matches he had jobbing to Aleister Black, War Games and his other sporadic appearances, it’s safe to say that I felt that he was a really good talent, and was among the guys I looked forward to seeing the most on episodes of NXT.

When NXT announced the creation of the NXT North American Championship, and that the inaugural champion would be crowned during a six-man ladder match, I kind of cringed when I saw that Adam Cole was tabbed as one of the contenders for the new belt.  But at the same time, I had a sinking suspicion that he was the one most likely to win the belt, because the whole Undisputed Era stable seemed like one of the things going to be relied upon to carry the brand over the next calendar year, and there would be no more serious way to bolster them than to have Adam Cole himself getting his hands on some hardware.

And true to prophecy, Adam Cole did win the North American Championship, and I was a combination of happy to see a guy I enjoyed watching win a title, unsurprised because I kind of figured this was going to happen, but at the same time a little bit disappointed that Cole won it.

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The wrestling belt display rail

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is a wall in my office.  It makes me tremendously happy whenever I look at it.  Fewer things I’ve created in my life give me the amount of satisfaction that an eight-foot plank of wood with some boat snaps in it does currently.  Mostly because it was an idea that came to me that executed nearly as accurately to its concept as I had imagined it, and there’s seldom better feelings than when a plan goes according to plan.

While I was living in an apartment during the transitional phase between homes, my treasured wrestling belts had all sat in storage.  I always knew and treated the apartment like the transitional domicile, and put little effort into doing much decoration or adorning it with much of my own personal effects.  The belts remained in storage because I didn’t feel like unpacking them, I didn’t want to bother re-packing them, and frankly they’ve always been something of a challenge to display without consuming too much space.

When I moved into my new house where the whole world of home living was full of possibilities, I actually didn’t have much clue on what I was going to do with my belts.  I knew that I had dedicated one bedroom to become my personal office space, and that’s where I wanted to have my belts, but the question was always how I was going to display them.

My old corner shelf was no longer an option, because it only had five shelves and I now had ten belts, and being the stickler for symmetry, refused to have half my belts displayed in one fashion, and the other five displayed alternatively. 

I didn’t want to go the route of a glass display cases, because wrestling belts are no small things, and with ten of them, I would require a lot of glass display, which would also have been very costly, and frankly space consuming.  I know a new, larger house has lots of extra space to accommodate things, but I’m also kind of minimalist and don’t like too many bulky things to make me feel claustrophobic.

I liked the idea of hanging my belts off the wall, because being on the wall would mean they wouldn’t be on the floor, and not being on the floor would mean they weren’t necessarily cluttering up my place.  But I was really very much against the idea of affixing them to the wall like the Miz does, because he’s actually drilling screws through the physical belts themselves; I know he’s a professional wrestler who probably gets his replicas for cheap if not free, but I don’t, and I care for my belts a little bit more to where I don’t want to physically add any holes that I don’t feel needed to be added.

My thought was, why not use hardware that already existed?  As in the snaps on the belt themselves?  But wouldn’t affixing snaps be perilous and risk coming undone, especially under the weight of belts, which can weigh anywhere from 8-13 lbs. each?

But then a cursory search revealed the existence of screwable marine snaps, which would be the perfect things to bore into a plank of wood, to which I could then paint to match my wall and hang up to hold my belt collection.  And then the idea was underway.

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WWE Power Rankings, revisited

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While watching RAW, I was asking myself what the heck was there to look forward to after The New Day had finished their segment? Needless to say, it’s a really dark time for the WWE right now. With John Cena taking a well-deserved break from television, and the unfortunate timing of Seth Rollins’ injuries set to shelf him for almost a whole year, the sheer lack of depth in the WWE is being brutally exploited right now.

There are a lot of guys on the roster, but not nearly enough of them have been developed to the point where they could shoulder more television time and not bore the audience of start generating X-Pac heat, and it’s times like these where I’m curious just how big of a challenge it is to fill a three-hour block now.

With Sheamus cashing in Money in the Bank, the WWE has basically burned its biggest creative get-out-of-jail-free card, but I can’t help but feel that they jumped the gun on it just a little bit. Ultimately, my opinion on the MITB case is that it serves as a hard-reset to storylines, just in case a storyline doesn’t go the way it really should have, and instead of trying to phase it out, simply pull the plug on it with the MITB; however, by Sheamus having cashed it approximately five minutes and fifteen seconds after Roman Reigns had won the World title, they basically pulled the plug on a title run that didn’t even have a chance to fail.

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