Tag: wrestling

Well that was predictably not great

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Unsurprising to me, considering the fact that professional wresting kind of needs fans and atmosphere to really excel at being the spectator event it’s supposed to be, that a Wrestlemania with no fans and no real atmosphere, just was not that great.  It didn’t help that as a result of coronavirus running wild, there were some massive impacts to the card, like Roman Reigns pulling out because as a leukemia survivor, he’s already immunocompromised, and then the Miz pulling out because he had some ailment that scared the shit out of all other roster and personnel and probably gained him a ton of heat, things were becoming a steeper and steeper uphill battle, even before circumstances made the company turn the whole thing into a closed-door private affair.

In spite of their best efforts and making it a two-night event, very little could’ve really been done to have made the event remotely palatable to an old smark like myself.  The importance of crowds and the atmosphere they bring has been completely understated in the last few weeks of both WWE and AEW putting on empty venue shows.  But as much as I don’t like having to praise AEW, I have to give them credit for at least having the wherewithal to put their superstars in the audience so that there’s some sort of crowd noise or interaction to gain.

WWE on the other hand has literally nobody in the stands whatsoever, and it’s almost an eerie silence when matches go on.  I have to imagine as performers, it’s really jarring and awkward to them to have to perform for nobody but the camera, but act like that there’s a crowd at all, and go through with ring entrances and staring out into nothingness like there’s a sold out show.  I imagine those who are WWE grown struggled with it the most, whereas those who worked their ways through independents and alternative federations are probably no stranger to low-attendance or near-empty gates.

Regardless, the show as a whole was pretty weak, and it was entirely too difficult to get into many of the matches.  I fortunately watched each night of the show the day after, so I had the luxury of being able to fast forward and skip the rest holds and extended promos in order to chew up time.  As well as Rob Gronkowski segments, where the only thing I want to see out of him is to team up with Zack Ryder and Matt Riddle and make a douchey white guy bro stable, and have one program with The New Day since they’re a group of black nerds, and then get the fuck out of the WWE forever.

Undertaker vs. AJ Styles was about as bad as I imagined it would be, considering the fact that it was a gimmicky “Boneyard Match” that wasn’t so much of a match as much as it was an episode of WMAC Masters from back in the 90’s.  It hid every bit of the Undertaker’s lack of mobility and stamina, and AJ Styles had to work his ass off to make it look remotely passable.  It wasn’t really entertaining, but more cringeworthy that the WWE went off in this direction, but given the fact that the Undertaker is like 55 and can barely move, they didn’t really have that much of a choice.

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Neck Beard Club is 2 sweeeeeeeeet

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Don’t wait, get on board with the hottest merch in professional wrestling!  Official Neck Beard Club merchandise is available at Hot Topics across America and ProWrestlingTees.com.  And why stop with the official t-shirt, when you can get the official fedora, and top it off with the official Neck Beard Club vape pen!  Supplies are limited, get ‘em while they last!

This is actually an idea that’s been rattling around my head for a while now, but just very recently did I get the motivation to actually bring it to fruition.  Maybe it’s because I recently went to my very first New Japan Pro Wrestling show, and even in spite of the mass departure of all the guys that ended up birthing All-Elite Wrestling, Bullet Club remains as relevant as ever, even if it’s sort of kind of beginning to feel like the nWo black and white after Hogan and Nash basically imploded the entire faction.

The point is, Bullet Club started to become kind of lame once it reached peak popularity, and much like the nWo, hit a level of where it began saturating so much of NJPW, it was basically the only thing you saw fans gravitating towards.  Suddenly, the whole world’s wrestling fans all started becoming huge Bullet Club marks, and it wasn’t that they were fans of NJPW, it’s just they were fans of this idea that didn’t originate in the WWE, and it was cool to like wrestling things that weren’t WWE.

And in my own little head, when things become too popular, they become lame, and I barely had any time learning about Bullet Club before I began thinking they were so popular, that it was nigh impossible for them to live up to the hype that the collective internet had put them on a pedestal with.

A year or so ago, I went to Dallas, and with my brother, we went to a Ring of Honor show.  Back in like 2012, I went to an ROH show in Baltimore, and it was an enjoyable experience seeing a lot of talent that I’d never seen before and just witnessing a brand new scene, very different than that of the WWE crowds that I have little desire of going to their shows anymore.  So I had high hopes that this ROH show in Dallas was going to be as good as my first time.

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Randy Orton is the WWE’s Friend Zone

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not often where I feel like I’ve hit an analogy home run, but I think I hit the nail on the head with this one.  After watching Edge’s return to the ring in the Royal Rumble, and the subsequent segment on RAW the night afterward, where he was brutally attacked by Randy Orton, it dawned on me much like the sun rising: Randy Orton is basically the friend zone for WWE wrestlers.

I feel like the analogy works so perfectly, because not just in the case of Edge, but any wrestler who has the unfortunate situation of being put into a program with Randy Orton, they have to know it’s a dead-end feud with no gain to be had from doing it, much like any sad schlub of a guy who thinks they have a chance with a girl, but get put into the friend zone, and they’re the only ones who don’t realize that they’re in it.

Randy Orton has just enough name and face value to where anyone stashed with him retains some degree of relevance, but he doesn’t have enough of either to really elevate them beyond the holding pen point of relevance.  He’s basically keeping budding stars warm, but for guys that are trying to re-climb the mountain, or in the case of Edge, come back and rise through the ranks, a feud with Orton is literally being put into the friend zone, where there is no happy ending in sight, but he’ll still work like hell trying to prove something, because he doesn’t realize that he’s in the friend zone.

I mean, just look at the last few guys Orton has been paired up with: AJ Styles’ went nowhere working with Orton. Kofi Kingston not only didn’t go anywhere, all the momentum he had from Kofimania came to a slow stop, and not long after vanquishing Randy Orton, ended up jobbing to Brock Lesnar in 4 seconds to drop the WWE Championship.  It’s debatable that it wouldn’t have mattered who he was paired up against, but Jeff Hardy fell off the wagon after working with Orton.  Rusev will never get a main event push in the WWE, and working with Orton couldn’t have helped that cause, and the list goes on and on, really.

But it really sucks for Edge, considering the nine years he’s been away from the business, and as soon as he gets back, he’s thrust into a feud with Randy Orton.  I mean, this is a feud that could have just as easily happened back in 2011, and in fact have faced each other before several times in the past.  But in a company that’s chock full of young guys and guys from different companies, you’d think they’d try and pair Edge up with any one of them before Randy Orton. 

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Tonight, a La Parka died in the ring

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

(spoken in the same manner in which Rorschach says “tonight, a Comedian died in New York”)

I have mixed feelings about this whole situation.  A La Parka died in the ring tonight, but it was confirmed to not be the La Parka that made me a La Parka fan in the first place.  It was in fact La Parka II who dove out of the ring at an AAA show in Mexico, crashed in the guardrail, broke his neck and later died. 

No loss of life is ever not tragic, but at the same time, it wasn’t necessarily the death of the guy that I was actually a fan of, which puts me in this awkward emotional state of where I hear news that “La Parka died,” but there’s always that explanation that it wasn’t the original La Parka that I really loved.

There’s still that emotional surprise of seeing the words that La Parka died, but when I read the explanation that it was actually La Parka II and not the chairman of WCW, and there’s this almost guilty feeling of relief that it wasn’t original La Parka.

I actually didn’t know that there were two La Parkas out there, and this kind of goes back to this joke my friends and I had in high school of how there were always myths that there were multiple Ultimate Warriors, and that they came from a Mayan temple in Parts Unknown that whenever one warrior died, another would remove his robes and sprint out of the temple and begin his own reign as the next Ultimate Warrior.

The difference is that there actually were two La Parkas, and it was a little fascinating reading about how it came to be, primarily stemming from a disagreement between wrestler and promoter, and then the promoter realizing just how easy it is to replace a masked wrestler in the first place.

Either way, I’m still sad that a La Parka died at all, even if it wasn’t the La Parka that would definitely warrant a longer eulogy in the brog.  In a way, La Parka is more than just an ordinary man, proven by two different men who took the mantle and were stars simultaneously, in different parts of the world.  And it’s only a matter of time before an el Hijo de La Parka shows up and starts blending the lucha flying of La Parka II with bashing guys with chairs from the original La Parka, and sets the wrestling world on fire.

The reflection post, circa 2019

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
photo courtesy Matt Altmix

If I had to make an observation about what it’s like getting older, I think I would have to say something along the lines of increasingly feeling like there isn’t enough time, like ever, for like, anything and everything.  Maybe it’s exclusive to me, or perhaps it affects millions of others, but I feel that I spent an inordinate amount of time feeling anxious about how I don’t feel like there’s time for anything, or at least, there isn’t an adequate amount of time that I’d like in order to do particular things, and therefore I simply don’t do them.

Like video games, or starting a new television series; typically, I prefer to have like a nice, 2-3 hour block of time in which I can dive in and be properly acquainted with something new, learn the controls, characters, look for critical information that might re-emerge later when stories unfold.  I’m not the type of person who’s ever satisfied with a short introductory period or just a singular pilot episode; subsequently, if I don’t get such conditions, there’s a higher chance that I simply don’t even begin, because there’s always something else I could be doing instead that’s probably actually more productive, or at least essential to my general pace of living, and then suddenly it’s the next day, and I’ve got to go to work, where there’s seldom adequate time for my team to get their tasks done because we’re constantly behind schedule, and are reliant on the partnership of other teams in order to get our jobs done, but they’re lazy and constantly coasting their ways to the next weekend, and then the weekend comes and then it’s almost over, and it’s back to work on Monday where we have yet another planning meeting on how we’re going to catch up, but then the people we rely on are already beginning their downhill coasting towards the weekend on Tuesday afternoon, and this cycle of constantly feeling like there’s no time continues to cycle and repeat.

All this being said, if I had to look back at 2019 as a whole, I would have to say that I think it went by pretty quickly.  Often times, I’ve given thought to how fast things have flown by, and amazed at the idea that when I was a kid, I’d often thought that time couldn’t move slow enough, and how I had all the time in the world to beat and master every single Nintendo game that came across my path.  About how when I was a teenager, I was able to balance time between numerous friend groups, family and responsibilities; like this one time back in 2001 where I somehow remember balancing my newspaper job, going to Baltimore to meet up with some friends who were arriving from out of town for Otakon, driving back to Virginia to meet up with some other friends that night so we could grill out, going to work the next morning, stopping on Columbia on my way back up to Baltimore to visit a cousin, then going to Baltimore for Otakon, taking 200 pictures, coming back home, whipping up a photo gallery and recap of the con for my website, while going back to work. 

Like, I couldn’t even fathom doing that many activities in the span of a week at the age of 37 now.

However, in spite of the perpetual feeling that the clock is spinning faster, this doesn’t mean that my quality of life is necessarily worsening.  In fact, I can say with tremendous clarity that 2019 was a pretty incredible year.  Without question, some of the most grandiose and life-changing events occurred within 2019 and have laid down the foundation for the rest of said life.  Most notably highlighted by the event of having gotten married to my beautiful wife, and having an incredible wedding celebration surrounded by friends and family who all poured into Georgia to celebrate with us.  But then the honeymoon didn’t last that long, or maybe I could say the magic of a Disney cruise was a little too OP in our case, because shortly afterwards did we discover that mythical wife was pregnant, putting us on the fast track to parenthood, and the jarring realization that I was going to become a dad.

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How to reflect on a decade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This year ending isn’t just an ordinary ending of a year, because it’s also the end of a decade.  Naturally, a sentimental person like me tends to want to reflect on an entire decade, because much like individual years, a decade is a nice round chunk of time that one might think it would be easy to reflect upon, but in the greater spectrum, it’s ten full years we’d be trying to look back onto.  Now I like to think I have a good memory, but even without the aid of my trusty brog, it’s difficult to really look back at an entire decade.

Regardless, that’s not going to stop all the self-important jobbers of the internet who will try their darnedest to speak with authority and copy and paste all the same milestones the major news outlets will when it comes to trying to summarize and reflect upon the entire decade.  The funny thing is that most of the internet savvy generations probably aren’t that much older or younger than I am, which means that in the grand spectrums of our respective lives, we’ve only really lived through 3-4 decades, whereas I’d probably estimate that 1.5-2 of them are pretty invalid, because we’re simply not articulate and/or educated enough to have the capacity to reflect on entire decades.

So combined with the advent and growth of the internet, and the notion that everyone has a voice, I’d wager this is probably, at the very most, the second real decade of the modern high-speed internet that people really care to really reminisce about; and I’m being generous by calling it the second, because DSLs and cable internet didn’t really flourish until nearly the mid-2000’s; I couldn’t imagine people trying to use streaming, auto-refreshing social media on a 56K modem, so frankly I see this more as the first real decade that everyone and their literal mothers on the internet are going to be writing about.

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to try to recollect from mostly just my own memories, and stick to things that are more relevant to my own little world, and not the big gigantic depressing one we live in.  If I had any readers, they can google any decade in review, and probably find more worldly and probably more high-profile shit than the things I have to say about the things going on in my own little life, like the start and finish of Game of Thrones, Pokemon Go, the sad state of American politics, all the endless mass shootings, and Bill Cosby being outed as a rapist.

And the reason that I disclaim the whole “if I had any readers” because one of the most devastating things that occurred for me is the fact that despite my WordPress going online in 2010, at nearly the very start of the decade, midway through the decade my brog went down indefinitely, when my brother relocated from one part of the country to another.  A lot of hardware changes meant no more place to host my brog, and despite having the supposed backups, I simply haven’t taken the time or allocated the funds necessary to get my site up and running again.

If I were the type to do New Years resolutions anymore, I think I’d resolve to get my site back up and running again in 2020.  TBD on if that will actually occur, and frankly with the things I have on my plate going into the next decade, I don’t want to commit and then fail to deliver.

In spite of the brog blackout, that hasn’t stopped me from writing.  Even to the day my site went down, I have been writing on a fairly regular basis, taking no more than two weeks off before the internal guilt gets my fingers flying across the keys again, and I’ve got at this point, hundreds of folders of dated and timestamped Word docs, all awaiting their day in which they can be posted retroactively to a brog.

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You heard it here first

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Say it with me now: Luke Harper* – IWGP World Heavyweight Champion

*or whatever name he chooses to go with, because the WWE probably owns the copyright the name “Luke Harper”

When news broke that the WWE had released, among several performers, Luke Harper, from their contracts, my friend and I immediately realized the destiny that was now free to become fulfilled: Luke Harper was now free to migrate over to the land of the rising sun, and begin his reign as a foreign terror, en route to a lucrative and prosperous career revitalization for New Japan Pro-Wrestling, culminating with at least one reign as the IWGP World Heavyweight Champion.

For a while now, my friend and I have always made the joke about how Luke Harper was a future IWGP champion; historically, there’s no secret that NJPW loves bringing in big white guys to push as these evil foreign heel characters for their national Japanese heroes to feud against.  And in order for the feuds to have any modicum of impact, they occasionally need to be allowed to ascend to the highest honors, so that the heroes can have lofty goals to achieve.

From guys like Vader, Scott Norton, Tyson Tomko and even Prince Albert, Japan has often times embraced the big white guy heel, pushed them to the moon so that their stars could fight them, and eventually put the faces over, and if there was ever a guy more destined to be the next great big white terror in Japan, it was Luke Harper.

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