Tag: wrestling

Not a fan of split NXT

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When it was announced that NXT was going national, I was most definitely in the camp that met the news with a feeling of dread.  Not just because I’m a cheapskate that doesn’t have access to the USA Network, much less cable television in general, but also because I was very puzzled and dubious about the whole planned execution of NXT, with the first half of the show being exclusive to the USA Network on cable television, and the second hour being exclusive to the WWE Network streaming.

When the day is over, the medium that brings in advertising revenue is going to win out, and I didn’t have to watch New NXT to have guessed that they were going to stack the first hour and then take their foot off the gas once the cameras switched over to streaming for hour two.  Look no further to the hour by hour comparison in matches/segments and come to your own conclusion:

Hour 1 (Nationally televised on USA):

  • Io Shirai vs. Bianca Bel Air vs. Mia Yim vs. Candice LeRae, Fatal 4-Way for #1 Contender to NXT Women’s Championship
  • Cameron Grimes vs. Sean Maluta
  • Roderick Strong vs. Velveteen Dream for NXT North American Championship

Hour 2 (Exclusive to WWE Network subscribers):

  • Pete Dunne vs. Arturo Ruas
  • Xia Li vs. Aaliyah
  • IMPERIUM promo
  • Lio Rush vs. Oney Lorcan for #1 Contender to WWE Cruiserweight Championship
  • Matt Riddle vs. Killian Dain

Sure, it’s hard to count the Grimes/Maluta match considering it was a squash where the entrances took 5x longer than the match itself, but two long-form matches featuring the top talents in both the men’s and women’s divisions, it’s clear that WWE is putting nationally televised first, and taking their foot hard off the gas in hour two, because fewer things denote a reduction in effort than an Aaliyah or Arturo Ruas match, regardless of whom they’re up against.

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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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GLOW, season 3: the setup season

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Just finished watching GLOW, season 3 on Netflix.  In a nutshell, it was an okay season that dealt with some heavy-handed topics, but feels like it’s straying away from everything that made GLOW, GLOW, and that everything in the season was mostly to set up for future seasons of the show.

In some degree, it’s smart that they’ve sowed the seeds necessary in order for them to have future seasons of GLOW, but at the same time, they kind of sacrificed a lot of the present in order to prepare for a future that doesn’t exist yet, as (to my knowledge) there is no future season(s) of GLOW yet ordered.  If I’m a betting man, I bet there will be, but frankly in this day and age, it’s hard to ever be certain whenever it comes to the futures of any show, because every show is one actor scandal, writing controversy or some executive going bonkers from getting killed off, regardless of if they’re already nicely wrapped up, or if the plot is as open-ended as a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

But still, I had a really hard time getting into this season as I did the previous two, because I think that the plot bounced around a little too much throughout the season.  Sure, it’s good to shine the spotlight on all of the girls in various times, but when the day is over, the show really is generally centralized around Sam, Ruth and Debbie.  And as potentially interesting the lives of Bash, Rhonda, Carmen, Cherry and the others are, ten episodes just isn’t really enough time to get into everyone, and ultimately, I felt as if the show couldn’t really decide very well which plots to stick with, and was just kind of all over the place.

And for a show that’s technically about women wrestlers, the show strayed pretty far from the wrestling itself and touched on some pretty heavy handed topics, such as homophobia, racial/religious awareness as well as eating disorders.  I’m not saying that such things shouldn’t be touched on and fleshed out, because they are most definitely very important things in today’s society, but again, going back to the fact that there were just ten episodes, I don’t think there was simply enough time to really get in on all of them, as well as try and be remotely cohesive to the rest of the show.

Ultimately, maybe it was just not being in the right frame of mind to watch, but I did think it got better as it went on.  It was a little slow starting, but did pick up a little momentum along the way.  I don’t think it’s the best season of the three, and I still maintain that it felt like they were spending more time planting seeds for the future rather than being in the present, it was still alright, and as I often say when it comes to Alison Brie, it’s very hard to not fall a little bit of in love with her, when she’s on her game, and thankfully the show made sure to give her enough screen time to get in her shining moments.

And hopefully for the writers of S3, there will be a season 4 announced soon, so that the seeds they’ve planted actually have future seasons to grow into.  And hopefully then, they won’t spend so much time re-preparing for the future that they won’t be able to shine in the present.

Johnny Dreamer

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

After watching Summer Slam, I had this thought in my head that I had spent an inordinate amount of time throughout the weekend watching a whole lot of mediocre wrestling.  However, despite the fact that I was looking forward to, and accordingly planned my evenings to watch both NXT TakeOver: Toronto and Summer Slam, in all honesty, I didn’t really think that there was any particular matches that I thought were going to be great.

Naturally, I prioritized TakeOver over Summer Slam, in spite of their perceived importance, and at least in my opinion, I wasn’t wrong in the fact that TakeOver was the better show.  The Summer Slam card was pretty weak, and the only match that really truly got me excited at any point was the Charlotte Flair vs. Trish Stratus match.  Becky and Natalya wasn’t a bad match, Ziggler getting squashed by Goldberg is an embarrassment to the company, Styles and Ricochet was okay, but nowhere near as good as their combined potential should have made it.  Bayley vs. Ember Moon exposed both wrestlers as good workers, but need someone to carry them to outstanding matches, and Kevin Owens vs. Shane McMahon just had no real emotion behind it.  Kofi and Orton was lame now as it was the 10 other times it’s happened in the last 12 years, Finn Balor getting basically squashed by a yet-again-and-again repackaged Bray Wyatt is going to lead nowhere, and Seth Rollins basically spoiled the entire match by guaranteeing a win the week prior.

It was a mediocre show, and it really got me wondering why I put so much effort into keeping track of it sometimes.  Yet, I still feel this allegiance to the company that helped raise me, especially when compared to the rising AEW and other alternatives.

But back to TakeOver, it too was a slightly sub-par show in my opinion; it still makes it a better show than Summer Slam, since NXT’s bar is set so high, but in the grand scheme of things, I still think it was less than as good as I hoped it would be.  The best match of the night was undeniably the Street Profits vs. the Undisputed Era, which shouldn’t be surprising, because when you get four talented guys in a single fall tag team match, good things are capable of happening.  Velveteen Dream vs. Roderick Strong and Pete Dunne probably would’ve been better if it were a one-on-one match, but as often times is the case with the WWE, they love multi-competitor matches, and in my opinion, it tends to water things down.

Shayna Baszler vs. Mia Yim was a pretty solid match, but I feel like NXT is going to get themselves in trouble if they continue to bury their entire women’s division to Baszler; they simply don’t have the depth to make her as unbeatable as they’ve done over the last year.  With Ember Moon, Kairi Sane, Bianca Belair, Io Shirai and now Mia Yim now in the dust, they don’t really have anyone else to pose a threat unless they cop out and do some sort of convoluted multi-women bought where Baszler will lose without getting pinned or some shit, and that’s more of a Vince McMahon cop out than a Triple H one.

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Why I don’t really think AEW is a threat

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Watching highlight packages of AEW’s company-launching pay-per-view event, Double or Nothing, I definitely thought the company has a pretty solid roster of wrestlers to build upon, but I couldn’t help but feel this suspicion of a lot of things that I think are going to hold them back or just be plain detrimental to their budding fed.

As much as the quality of the wrestling was fairly competitive to the talent in the WWE, ROH or NJPW, it’s mostly the way the company presents itself that makes me feel dubious that AEW has more possibility of being the next TNA and not the next WCW, as someone who really has a chance to stand up to the WWE and really compete.

And I don’t bring up WCW without reason, because as much as WCW really did rise and compete with WWE, in the end they still fell apart and ultimately suffered an end worse than defeat, which was being assimilated into the machine, getting purchased for pennies on the dollar, mostly so that the WWE could have the rights to their tapes archives over the vast majority of any actual living human talent.

But it’s because so much of Double or Nothing felt like they borrowed the WCW playbook for Monday Nitro #1.  From the very start of the show, with “Good ‘ol JR” Jim Ross welcoming viewers to the show, to Justin Roberts doing the announcing in the ring, it was the exact play WCW did using Bobby Heenan and “Mean Gene” Okerlund to be their voices and kind of trick casual fans into getting a feeling of familiarity and hopefully stick around.

Then came a really convoluted battle royale featuring their young and mostly lesser-known talent, peppered in with, former WWE guys like Tye Dillinger.  Even not knowing who 80% of the competitors in the ring was, it was still highly predictable to guess who was going to be the last few guys in the contest, and when Hangman Adam Page hit the ring, the winner was all but decided, because anyone who follows wrestling knows Adam Page is a part of the clique that basically made a mass exodus from New Japan in order to create AEW.

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What’s old is new again

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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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Pour one out for the real Silver King

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If most people heard the name César Cuauhtémoc González Barrón, they’d have no clue to whom that was.  Frankly, if most people heard his ring name, Silver King, they’d probably have very little clue to who he was, either.  Then again, I am some lowly brogger living in America, and I’d wager to say that those who lived in Mexico, the names probably would definitely trigger more recognition than it would anywhere outside of the country.

Silver King passed away on May 11, 2019, inside the wrestling ring, while performing at a show in London, England.  Reports say it was due to a heart attack, but there’s still no official cause of death released, officially.  He was wrestling fellow luchador, Juventud Guerrera when this tragedy occurred, and it’s definitely a sad day in professional wrestling when one of the boys goes out so suddenly and unexpectedly.  Silver King was 51 years old, which definitely classifies as “way too soon,” especially considering he was still actively performing literally up until his death.

Although his career legacy is vastly greater and more colorful when you look at his accolades in Mexico and pretty much anywhere outside of the United States, I always remembered him the most from his time in WCW, when unfortunately he and many other Mexican wrestlers were primarily a part of the company to be jobbers and/or the guys to warm up the crowds, usually by jobbing.  But I’ve always had an affinity for the jobbers of wrestling, because most of the time, superstars are boring and one-dimensional, and it’s only by the strength of the guys doing the jobs to them, do they even look good.

I remember just about all of them from WCW; Silver King, El Dandy, Damien, La Parka, Psychosis, Villano IV and V, Hector Garza, Ciclope, Lizmark Jr. and Juventud Guerrera.  And it’s not just out of convenience to fit my narrative, but Silver King always stood out to me, because he was one of the few Mexican expats on the roster, that wrestled without a mask.  Furthermore, he was always a little on the tubby side of stout, yet in spite of his bulk, he was still as agile and high-flying any other luchador, which just added to the ironic entertainment value he brought to WCW.

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