Tag: wwe

Even across the pond, WWE can’t stop being WWE

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Since the second annual WWE UK Championship tournament and the creation of the NXT UK brand, I’ve actually grown to enjoy the exploration of the UK wrestling scene.  I think they did it fairly smart, building it mostly around UK Champion Pete Dunne, but bolstering it with a few recognizable names and faces like Tyler Bate and Toni Storm for recognition to the American fans, but then intermixing them with all the talent more native to the UK scene.

At first, it was almost like becoming a wrestling fan all over again, watching programming of a bunch of guys I’d never really seen or heard of before because I’m too filthy casual and American to pay attention to the UK scene, like Ligero, Travis Banks, Jinny, Isla Dawn, Mark Andrews and Flash Morgan Webster.  But at the same time, it was kind of refreshing and there was something almost grass-roots charming about seeing something new to me that kept me watching the product, and I’ve grown to really enjoy the NXT UK brand; and seeing as I don’t have cable and watch RAW or Smackdown, two episodes of NXT UK a week helps fill the gaps for whenever I feel like watching wrestling, as opposed to a single episode of NXT each week.

I’ve enjoyed watching the cream of the UK pool rise and stand out like Jordan Devlin, and in true smark fashion, I’m appreciative of the sheer heat and reaction-evoking Zack Gibson, and really wonder just what he’s done in his career to be just such a rabid heat magnet to UK crowds.  The women’s division still has a pretty large talent disparity, but is still young enough to be solely anchored by Toni Storm and Rhea Ripley, with the occasional cameo from Dakota Kai.

Needless to say, I was pleased and excited when they announced their first TakeOver event, with NXT UK TakeOver: Blackpool, and if they handled it like regular NXT handles their American TakeOver events, there was plenty of reason to be optimistic about it.

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Could the XFL actually save football?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve gone on record to say that I’ve typically been in the camp that I don’t think college athletes should be getting paid, because they’re in essence already being paid with college educations, room, board, feed and all sorts of non-monetary privileges that are the things that typically drown all ordinary people in student debt for the vast majority of their lives.

I’ve read numerous articles and arguments both for and against the idea of paying student-athletes, and I most certainly see both sides of the coin.  And although I still feel strongly that college players shouldn’t be paid money, I do feel like I’m softening on the idea that the reality still is that college players receive very little for their blood, sweat and tears, while the coaches, staff, schools and the fat cats of the NCAA are making literal millions of dollars.

I now think the idea of allowing players to make royalties off of their name is fair, and/or the idea that student-athletes should receive some sort of annuities or flexible scholarships that will allow them to protect their lives with educations and more usable degrees, instead of forcing them to make all sorts of essential decisions while they’re still eligible amateurs, often times still teenagers or just past.  The inequity of what students receive versus what the NCAA gets is wider than a Kardashian’s asshole and it just doesn’t seem right to me anymore.

However, going back to the headline of this post, shortly after Clemson put the finishing touches on Alabama in round 4, and winning their second National Championship (which is a disgusting thought in its own right but that’s another diatribe), the recently re-booted XFL made a strategically subtle reminder to the world, that they are “not restricted by the rules that exist in other professional football leagues,” which is basically saying “unlike the NFL, we don’t have rules saying you have to be X years old or have completed X number of years in college,” which to the ears of the young and ambitious sounds a lot like “you can go high school to pro and start getting paid sooner… in the XFL.”

Money is the impetus for everything in the rotten world we live in, and it goes to say that money is main reason for how the world of fútbol americano is the way it is today.  Underclassmen in the college ranks are coveted and exploited because they’re young, have fresh legs, and are malleable to a school’s system.  Subsequently, their young age makes them appealing to the professional ranks since their window of peak physical performance is open longer at 20 than it is at 22, so they can be exploited and milked for longer.

The rich get richer, which is why college football has seen four straight years of Alabama vs. Clemson.  Kids want to play for winners, which is why the top schools always have their veritable picks of the litter, with there being a trickle-down effect of the top prospects often times going to the most winning schools that will have them.  Upstarts often happen when the unheralded and underrated rise to their potentials, or more often times, when a disgruntled former prospect grows tired of riding the bench and being forced to wait their turn, and then they transfer to another school with hopes for actual playing time and exposure, but none of them in recent years have still been able to actually topple a powerhouse.

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Happy trails, Gene Okerlund

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s somewhat interesting to me that I’m often times more saddened and upset by the passing of wrestling personalities over wrestlers themselves.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m always sad to hear of when familiar wrestler names to the wrestling I grew up watching are announced as being among the recently departed, but there’s no denying that it’s the guys that weren’t even full-time wrestlers, or even wrestlers themselves, are the ones to elicit the most reaction out of me, because I think often times, wrestlers come and go, but it’s the guys like the announcers, commentators and managers that are the spice that makes professional wrestling so intriguing to a nerd like me.

The passing of “Mean Gene” Okerlund basically means to me, that the voice of professional wrestling has died.  Obviously, I’m not old enough to have really heard other iconic voices like Gordon Solie, and today’s wrestling industry is a microcosm of society itself, and no one voice is ever allowed to stick around long enough to become the icon that Mean Gene was.  Make no mistake though, Mean Gene was a prominent voice all throughout the 80s, into the 90s, and even kept his career going well into the 2000s, for WCW before returning to the WWE for his eventual career wind down.

As I often wax poetic, Mean Gene was there before I even got into wrestling, as the unnamed interviewer interviewing the troika of the Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase, Andre the Giant and even Virgil in the WWF Superstars arcade game that was basically my gateway into wrestling fandom.  And as I often cite, it was a random Sunday afternoon in which I watched my first ever wrestling telecast, an episode of WWF All-American Wrestling, hosted by none other than, Mean Gene Okerlund.  The main event was Superfly Jimmy Snuka versus Black Bart.

And over the next three decades of watching wrestling, Mean Gene was always there.  Whether it was being immortalized in the aforementioned greatest wrestling game ever, or being at Hulk Hogan’s side after he won the world championship at Wrestlemania VII before getting a fireball thrown in his face by Sgt. Slaughter, or when after my sabbatical from wrestling in the 90s (my parents cut cable and I couldn’t watch 😢) and I watched my first episode of WCW Monday Nitro, only to see Mean Gene still present, schilling the WCW 1-900-909-9900 Hotline but only with your parents’ permission.

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Thoughts on WWE Evolution

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Warning: there will probably be spoilers; not that it really matters because who knows how many eons past Evolution it will take before this ever sees the light of day on the internet.

When it was announced that WWE was going to do an all-women’s pay-per-view show, I had a couple of knee jerk reactions.  One was that it had the capability to be the best show of the year, due to the kid gloves that the WWE would undoubtedly have to treat a show of such a nature, and two, that it was a show that could not absolutely afford to fail.  Failure would wreck a tremendous amount of work and equity that the women superstars have put forth to building their brand, and would send things back in time at least a decade.

Fortunately, with the level of talent and the volume of it now present in the WWE, it didn’t seem like failure seemed very likely, especially since the WWE is known to be capable of putting a good show together when they actually give a shit about it.

To no real surprise, Evolution was an outstanding show that I feel lived up to the hype, and truly delivered on what the primary goal of the show was supposed to be: this is women’s professional wrestling.  Sure, there were some booking choices that I probably wouldn’t have made as an armchair booker, but when the show had ended, I can confidently say that the good of the show far outweighed the negatives.

Even some of the matches on the undercard that I didn’t really expect to be that great were better than expected, as if viewers could feel the sheer will and empowerment of the superstars, or the WWE actually let a lot of these women unleash a little bit more from their arsenals than they normally would be allowed to on television.

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The Mae Young Classic, or just Toni Storm?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

After the semi-final match between Toni Storm and Meiko Satomura, I thought to myself: man, I can’t remember the last time I ever felt so vested in a match before.  Usually, whenever I have a that thought, my mind races back way in time in order to exaggerate how long it’s been, which took me back to like Wrestlemania XX, when Chris Benoit (pre-psychotic murderous suicidal breakdown) had Triple H in the Crippler Crossface, and I’m on my feet at my friend’s house screaming at the television TAP TAP TAAAAP.  Then I realized that I was pretty vested and captivated by the Andrade Cien Almas vs. Johnny Gargano match that happened just earlier this year, but the point is, matches that manage to capture the suspense and excitement of a jaded smark like me are still few and far between.

Toni Storm vs. Meiko Satomura managed to do just that, have a match where I had an idea of who I thought was going to win, and I like think I have a good read on professional wrestling direction, but still managed to execute a match that was able to make me unsure of my choice, scoot me towards the edge of my seat, and make my eyes widen with what-ifs.  Several close calls, repeated kicking out of signature maneuvers and just plain great work from two very competent wrestlers made for an extremely good match that might not get five stars from Dave Meltzer, but damn was I pleased with it.

And for the second year in a row, I have this thought that this is why the Mae Young Classic is so great, is because they put on center stage, a bunch of female wrestlers whom the casual WWE audience probably isn’t aware of, so the idea of predicting things is kind of negated and it creates this completely fresh wrestling environment for fans to indulge in.  However, when I think of the matches that stood out the most from last year’s Mae Young Classic and this one, I also realize that there’s a correlation between those too: Toni Storm.

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Does the show always have to go on?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the first thoughts that went through my head when I heard the news that Roman Reigns had leukemia and was going to relinquish the Universal title and take a leave of absence from the WWE was: this is what the WWE was going to start the show with?

Sure, I’m as surprised as the most casual of wrestling fans are, because I don’t use Twitter nor do I have any sort of sources be on top of every little tidbit of wrestling news, and it’s certainly surprising and sad to hear of one of the top guys in the industry to be derailed like this due to a terminal illness.  Obviously as both a wrestling fan and a human being, I would like to see Roman Reigns beat leukemia back into remission again and return to the ring, and I hope treatment is both manageable and successful.

But my skepticism and disappointment, as cliché as it may seem, remains with the WWE itself, whom as all die-hard wrestling fans know about the business, is that the show must go on.  No one man or woman is bigger than the industry, and the show does not stop for anybody.  The Royal We get it; however that’s more applicable to the unpredictable and unexpected, the things that cannot be controlled or anticipated, like injury, emergency and death.  The fact that the WWE continued on with Over the Edge in 1999, even after Owen Hart fell to his death in the middle of the show is proof to this staunch and concrete mentality.

Roman Reigns’ leukemia announcement though, that’s different.  Despite the fact that the biggest tryhard internet smarks probably all knew what was up before the cameras started rolling, as much as the WWE might not want to believe it, there are more casual fans out there that do not live and die with the minutiae of the internet and might not have been aware of the news.  The choice of when to air the Roman Reigns segment was entirely controllable, and I have to question the WWE’s choice to emotionally powerbomb the audience in the first 25 minutes of the show, and then expect business to go on as usually for the remainder of a three hour program.

I see both sides of the coin, because it’s no secret that the third hour is kind of a drag, and the WWE often times phones it in, in hour three.  It’s later, fewer eyes might be on the tv by then, and if the goal is to get as many eyes on the segment as possible, then hour three is not the logical placement, even if the idea of “the main event” is supposed to be saved for last.  An announcement of this importance should be done when peoples’ attentions are at their peak.

However, this is the kind of announcement that absolutely derails everything.  Reality doesn’t often permeate into the world of professional wrestling, and when it does, it’s very much a big deal.  And as much as professional wrestling is full of trolly smark fans who love to troll live shows and act contrarian to fuck with the business, they’re still going to these shows and buying merchandise because at the end of the day, they’re still fans; and still human beings, who will most likely be impacted by the very real news of a cancer diagnosis of a very prominent figure in their preferred entertainment.

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WWE’s got to ease up on the historic international events

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have a theory about WWE pay-per-views; do we still call them pay-per-views anymore, considering they’re all included with the WWE Network anyway?  But anyway, I have a theory about the monthly shows that the WWE puts out: the less effort it looks like they put into their title logo cards, then the less effort viewers should expect from the show itself.

Naturally, this isn’t perfect, definitive and doesn’t apply to all shows; WWE Fastlane had quite the impressive graphic treatment in the production of its marketing, buildup and actual show, but the card itself actually turned out to be quite lackluster.  But for the most part, it’s no secret that the WWE dumps more money into their big four ppvs of the year (Royal Rumble, Wrestlemania, SummerSlam, Survivor Series), than they do any other show throughout the year.

And as of this year, 2018, WWE’s gotten into this hysteria over producing shows in other countries, almost for no other reason than to call them historic first-time events, to help drum up interest, hype and other attention.  It started with “The Greatest” Royal Rumble in Saudi Arabia, and was followed by the United Kingdom Championship Tournament, where it was held at, for the very first time, the Royal Albert Hall in London.  This past weekend was the WWE Super Show-Down, which was held, for the very first time, in Melbourne, Australia.  And during Super Show-Down, I found out that there was yet another international show on the horizon, Crown Jewel which is going to be in Saudi Arabia again, but instead in, for the very first time, Riyadh.

As historically monumental as the WWE likes to tout these international events, make no mistake that they are NOT immune from the shitty logo, shitty show logic.  Look no further than the fact that “The Greatest” Royal Rumble logo was literally the same logo used in January’s Royal Rumble, but had the word “Greatest” added to the top of it, and had their accent colors changed to Saudi red, green and white.  Surprising nobody, the show was horribly sub-par, and the events of the show had nearly no impact on storylines, save for the Reigns vs. Lesnar feud.

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