News to Start Your Weekend 8.17.07
Posted by Nick Marsico on 08.17.2007
TNA is complete garbage. That's the jist of this one, really. I also have my live thoughts on last Saturday's Ring of Honor show and a story, too. But mostly, TNA is a bag of poo juice.
My pal Jose and I were on our way to the Ring of Honor show in Philly on Saturday driving on the Jersey Turnpike, and an OCD of mine kicked in. Whenever a driver pulls up on my left side, I have to look over at them. So I did that just as I tend to do, and what I saw was a gentleman with some fairly large shaggy hair and he seemed to be motioning toward me. I looked down for a moment to look at my XM radio to see what song was playing and them looked back, and this time I saw the same gentleman almost hopping up and down in his seat pointing at me and going absolutely banana. At this instant I came to the realization that I was staring across my window into the window of one Larry Sweeney in the passenger seat of an SUV absolutely marking out for my Los Ice Creams t-shirt. Come to think of it, he may have first seen the ‘CHIKARA' bumper sticker I have on the back of my car. Either or, I guess. As soon as I recognized him I acknowledged that I knew who he was, marked back at him for the fact that it was Sweet ‘n' Sour himself, and then proceeded to be left in the dust. Note that we were side by side at about 80 miles an hour, and before I knew it he was out of sight. And not the ‘out of sight' that hippies like to use as an expression for ‘cool', even though he is, but rather he and his SUV just fuckin' bolted down the turnpike. I was going between 75 and 95 the entire way and never ended up seeing the car again. I think they were late, too, because it was coming up on 5:30 by that point and it took us a good 25 minutes to get to South Philly from the time we saw Sweeney. So that's just a cute little story to tell. As far as I'm concerned, Larry Sweeney was marking out for ME. Makes you readers feel insignificant, doesn't it? Yeah, like, cuz u r.
==================== tna is so unbelievably horrific that it gets its own space today
- He's back! It's the Pacman Jones! And nobody really gives a shit. TNA's ratings were actually down from previous weeks after a good bit of publicity for the apparent ‘debut' of Pacman on last week's Impact. Anybody who thought signing this dude was a good idea is a complete idiot. Well, I guess we already knew that about TNA management. Plus, we learned last week that he has a "can't touch or be touched" clause in the deal, which makes the whole thing even more worthless. The media has already stopped caring about the story and this has apparently caused poor morale to get even worse in the TNA locker room. Team Pacman as Tag Team Champions is also one hell of an idea. At this point I've given up on TNA as any sort of even decent promotion, so I just want them to continue to do the most stupid things possible. Pacman and Killings becoming tag champs at No Surrender would be fantastic.
- In a related story, TNA has begun to release members of its roster. This is partially due to the signing of Jones in order to free up some money. Castaways are Matt Bentley, Brother Runt, Doug Basham and the Damaja. According to what I've read, the Red Rooster informed them that they will no longer be under a contract but will be contacted by TNA for per-appearance deals. Bentley shot on TNA on the ‘Between the Ropes' radio show on Wednesday night, basically uttering the same sentiment of anybody with any sense who has seen TNA programming for the past long while. Then again, I don't know why anybody with any sense would actually watch TNA programming at this point. I know I'm senseless, but as I said above, I'm beginning to take joy in seeing them just do dumber and dumber things.
- Both Brian Adams and the Missing Link reportedly killed themselves for TNA's sake when hearing the company had interest in signing them.
- In more TNA news, it continues to appear that after saying it was going to happen on a hundred different occasions only for it to be untrue, TNA will finally be getting their second hour on Spike TV come this fall. There's still some talk about some kind of deal with FOX, but nothing more has come out other that there have been talks about possibly putting TNA on a couple of their networks. I don't know if that is still a possibility and it will be in conjunction with Spike similar to how WWE has programming on both USA and the CW (as well as some FOX affiliates, but that's neither here nor there) or if the idea was one or the other with TNA mostly just using FOX to get Spike to actually finally give them the two hours they've been trying to get for ages. Now we'll just have to wait and see if the TV actually improves with the extra hour or if they just use it to have even more time to do stupid counterproductive shit.
- Also in TNA releases, Jerry Lynn is reportedly also done with the company, but asked for his release unlike the others who were simply released from their contracts or aren't going to be asked to re-sign, like Bentley, whose contract actually ends this Monday. This can be considered a definite loss for TNA, not so much on screen, but off screen where he could have continued to be such a positive role model and teacher to the younger guys in the locker room. But I guess signing a ‘controversial' sports figure who has been arrested six times, appears to just be a douche and is a complete black hole of charisma is much more important than keeping someone who could be a legitimate asset around. Oh, TNA, you sure are a smart wrestling company.
- And to make things even sweeter, Kurt Angle's wife Karen has now been signed to a contract, which means that the horrific storyline with them is actually now going to turn into an on screen pairing instead of just being a really, really poorly done story arc that helped ruin an already feebly thought out angle between the two guys who are apparently supposed to be the biggest stars in the company. This just gets better and better.
- Don't get me wrong, by the way… Karen Angle is really hot, and she's a tall chick. She looks like she's at least a legit 6'1'' if not a little taller than that. I dig that. But she's not a good actress and she isn't a wrestler and she isn't a wrestling personality and anything she does for the company isn't going to be good unless they decide that she's going to just appear on every PPV completely nude doing a number of questionable things with certain items. If they don't do that, then this is a complete waste.
- Kurt Angle is trying to get both Brock Lesnar and Big Vito into TNA. More great news.
- TNA makes AWSUM mini-movies. No, really, they do. This is just beyond better than anything I've ever seen on the internet.
- And finally, Congress has now sent a letter to TNA telling them that they must send in the information regarding any drug testing policy that they may or may not have. The information is due in by the end of the business day on August 28. According to Matt Bentley, there isn't a policy, and that seems about right. This story is just the capper on a fantastic week in the existence of TNA Wrestling.
- For more wonderful TNA hatred, check out Larry's wRestling's 4 Rs column. Just great stuff in there from ‘da boss.
==================== the rest of the news
- D'Lo Brown is BACK baby! He wrestled dark matches at RAW on Monday as well as before SmackDown on Tuesday night. I wonder if this is the beginning of the invasion of the Attitude Era stars? Maybe next they'll ask Val Venis to grow his hair back out and for Mark Henry to cut off his.
- A bunch of WWE stars taped an episode of Family Feud and more guys are going to be taping one soon. I'm surprised they're not just doing it on RAW.
- Joey Matthews, known to WWE fans as Joey Mercury, has signed on with OVW as the head trainer of the ‘Beginner's Class' of OVW. In related news, Idol Stevens, who was just released from his WWE contract, has signed up to be a part of that class in order to hopefully improve on whatever they felt was wrong with him and to earn back a contract.
- I'm beginning to like Brooke of Extreme Expose more and more. Not only is she quite the good looking lady, but she recently expressed interest in posing for Playboy and also said that she'd not even think twice about dropping the Expose dancer gimmick if they offered her a chance to learn how to actually wrestle. She has apparently been doing some training down in Florida Championship with Nattie Neidhart among others. Finally a chick with some sense.
- I think Sylvan got fired, but I can't remember.
- WWE is hyping up the appearance of Evander Holyfield for tomorrow night's Saturday Night's Main Event show where he will box Matt Hardy. Spoilers: he beats up on Matt for a little while and then knocks out MVP and wanders away.
- Lance Storm has now apparently officially officially retired from professional wrestling. For real this time.
==================== things concerning the ring of honor
- Project 161 is real. They even have t-shirts to prove it. T-shirts with skulls.
- Ring of Honor is apparently looking to book more venues in New York and run more shows there in 2008. As far as 2007 is concerned, the final three NYC Manhattan Center shows are next weekend's show on 8/25, a show on 11/3 that will feature international talent (Misawa?!?!!) and Final Battle 2007 on 12/27.
- It's really great to see how much ROH has grown. They ran 14 shows in their first full year of existence, and they're going to be running 12 shows in the span of the last four months of this year, including a pair of shows in their debut on the West Coast. They've come a long way.
- The 2 disc DVD set of the first ever ROH PPV "Respect is Earned" will finally be released this Monday on ROHWrestling dot com. It features the entire PPV as it aired as well as 4 bonus matches that were taped during the course of the night of the PPV.
- Jimmy Jacobs will finally be making his return to action in Ring of Honor. He will get a chance to test out his knee in matches that have yet to be announced for next weekend's shows on 8/24 in Hartford and 8/25 in New York City.
- According to the Newswire, this year's ‘Glory by Honor' will be the biggest one in the history of the company. Enticing.
- It was thought that Mike Quackenbush would be unable to appear in Ring of Honor for the remainder of 2007, but he had an opening in his schedule and will be able to make it onto the card for next Saturday's Manhattan Center show. It will be QuackSaw versus Matt Cross & Erick Stevens.
- Amazing Kong will make her Ring of Honor debut teaming with Daizee Haze to take on the team of Lacey and SHIMMER Champion Sara Del Rey. This will take place on September 15 in Chicago on the night of the third ROH PPV taping.
- Speaking of PPV tapings, I forgot to mention last week that the fourth PPV taping will take place on October 6 in Edison, NJ.
- PAC will be making his stateside debut for ROH next weekend when he takes on Bryan Danielson in Hartford the night before Dragon's ROH World Title shot. In Manhattan, PAC will face the challenge of the No Remorse Corps' Davey Richards.
- Speaking of the NRC, the leader of the NRC Roderick Strong will take on Jack Evans and Austin Aries in a triple threat in New York City next Saturday night. It is the battle between the three former Generation Next members and is a prelude to Jack Evans finally bringing in his group, which he promised to do last weekend in Boston.
- Rhett Titus may, in fact, be the Sexiest Man Alive.
- Some (not very) quick thoughts on the show in Philadelphia last Saturday night… Eddie Kingston looked fantastic in his pre-show match, and Cheech and Cloudy also did a fine job, albeit in a rather short match. It's going to take a while to get used to Cloudy's new hair, though. I didn't even think it was him at first. Deranged got a bit of a bad rap. While he was definitely not ‘on' during his match with Jack Evans, Jack was definitely very much off of his game and blew at least three, probably more, spots during the match, and blew them badly. I don't know what was going on, but the "Don't Come Back" chants that Deranged got as he left the building were very much not warranted and uncool.
The pair of matches between the Briscoes and Steenerico were I think just about perfectly done. The two teams faced off in what I've read was a brutally fantastic show closing match the night before and were on Saturday going on before another big street fight main event, therefore the amount of violence needed to be toned down in order to both sell the match from Friday as well as to not overshadow the bigger match later on in the show. The Mark/Generico match was a lot of fun, although I didn't see the ending or even know it happened. Generico finished with his through the ropes diving tornado DDT, but it was on the opposite side of the ring from where I was sitting and nobody in the crowd counted along with the pinfall, so I was perplexed for a quick moment when Sinclair called for the bell. Jay and Steen had a very good ‘Lights Out' match later on in the night and Steen won this one with help from Generico just like he helped his little masked buddy earlier on. Generico hit some badass running boots in the corner, too. I think Jay may have lost a tooth on the second one. It was brutal.
Sweeney's group is absolutely phenomenal. They all were hysterical around ring side as always, and Hero's shenanigannery was funny as shit too. He spent the entire match being the jackass that he is and playing up how great he is and his superior athleticism only to turn around multiple times to see Claudio standing right behind him. He was able to get away, though, almost every time, in very entertaining fashion. The finish came when Hero took Claudio out with his Race to the Top trophy, and Hero then busted him open with it and destroyed it, as is customary for a trophy in wrestling. Oh, Nigel and Jigsaw were also in the match, teaming with Claudio and Hero respectively. I don't know when he started doing this (I assume either Friday or Saturday night), but he told the crowd to count down from 3 before he did his necktie lariat. I thought that was a nice touch that may go a little bit of a ways into freshening up his massive amount of lariats that a lot of people seemed to have turned on even though they all still get great reactions.
Sara Del Rey made a very good successful title defense against Lacey in front of another unsurprisingly disrespectful crowd. I don't know if it's fair to say the majority of the crowd were douchebags, but a lot of people around me especially didn't give any respect to the good match the ladies were putting on out there in the ring, and that never seems to fail with an ROH crowd. This was definitely the best SHIMMER match I've seen live in ROH and I was glad that they gave them some real time to work with. I hope they have more SHIMMER Title defenses on Ring of Honor cards in the future, maybe even with some angles playing out. Small ones, kind of like when Undertaker was defending his belt on both RAW and SmackDown and had a side story on RAW every week while doing the PPV build on SD. That would be some good fun and if done well enough, maybe get some of the detractors in the crowd to change their tune a little bit.
I was highly anticipating Quack v. Danielson, and they did not disappoint. Quack went hold for hold with Dragon and a great story was played out as the cocky Best Wrestler In the World took the man behind the little indy that could a little too lightly and almost ended up paying for it. Danielson had a good joke in there, as the crowd continually chanted "he has ‘til FIVE referee" every time he had to break a hold in the ropes, which disallowed Dragon to say it himself. When he finally got a chance to say something, Danielson quipped: "I have… a COMPLETELY LEGAL hold" to the delight of the entire crowd. Very good stuff here that carried the show into the intermission.
I've heard great things about Morishima's title defense against Claudio in Roxbury, and I am patiently awaiting the eventual release of that one on DVD. The Albright title shot in Philly started out a bit slow but had some good arm work by Albright who in the early going posed a threat in potentially making the big man tap out to the Crowbar. Eventually Morishima began to dominate, but Albright then released a flurry of head dropping goodness, with at least two, maybe even three half nelson suplexes that led to what everybody in the building thought was a legit three count, much like what apparently happened the night before with Claudio. The crowd was massively into this match and it ended up being a very fun match to see live.
Finally, the Non Sanctioned Street Fight. I'm on the fence with this one. The action immediately spilled all over the building including action for the second show in a row that took place in just about the exact spot on the bleachers I was sitting. The vast majority of this, however, I couldn't see. A lot of stuff happened on the opposite side of the building inside of a huge surrounding wall of fans. Matt Cross I think finally had his break out performance in ROH, though. He showed some real heart and fire for the first time and came off pretty bad ass. His two big spots were pretty spectacular. He hit his trademark horizontal ring post splash, except he did it about 2/3 of the way up one of the spotlight scaffoldings through a table. The bigger spot happened before that, though. He and Sydal were fighting on the top of the closed bleachers and Cross knocked Sydal off and followed a short while after with a front flip off the top of the bleachers after he kicked off the wall. It was amazingly awesome. The last 10 or so minutes of the match were kind of confusing, as it featured a slow brawl-like fight between Stevens and Strong in the middle of the ring with Rocky Romero making his presence felt for a short time.
I understand the booking of it, as Strong and Stevens have a history in FIP and I think on DVD this will really come off well and put Stevens over like a motherfucker, but live it came off as a little flat. A few people around me were wondering if they were stalling for time or something of the sort, because not a lot was really going on, but I really do have faith that when the DVD is released this match will live up to around the 4 stars that I've seen a lot of people giving it online. Also to be noted, Austin Aries broke out a rake and used it for legit back rake action. I totally marked out for that one.
Overall this was definitely a very fun show and I'm looking forward to the release of this entire weekend on DVD so I can see it all play out together.
==================== other goodness and whatnot
- Blues Ux found something I wrote last week to be rather amusing:
hi, its blues, longtime reader. anwyho, great column. the part that i loved the most was when you said this:
"RAW stunk. THAT is how Vince reacts to what he thought was a 2.5 rating? My god man."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i literallly couldn't stop laughing! i thought that was some funny shit mostly because i agree with you. it was the same mcmahon bullshit like always. i dont know why everyone is like 'OMG! best Raw ever!' please, it sucked ass. at least it wasnt 3 hrs though. that would've been worse. and on top of that, i dont like the whole paternity angle. i think its lame. but, oh well.......
solid column, keep up the good work,
Thank you, sir.
- That actually leads me right into my thoughts on RAW this past week. I enjoyed it. It isn't the kind of wrestling show I'm really looking for as far as being a pro wrestling show, but as an hour and a half (I'm a man too important to watch commercials) out of my day, it's an entertaining little thing to watch. There was nothing actively bad on the show and I wasn't as disgusted this week as I was last week at the complete lack of humor in McMahon's attempt at making fun of the government. I have to wonder if Vince really thinks that stuff is actually edgy and funny. As long as I don't think about it, the paternity angle is inoffensive enough for me to not complain about it.
- I wonder if Cryme Tyme is now going to get that title shot they earned what seems like six years ago. The match was short, but Cade and Murdoch are always good and JTG is really looking quite good in the ring. Shad plays his role well enough in the ring and is entertaining enough on the mic to justify his otherwise complete lack of ability as a wrestler.
- It would be great if Triple H didn't come in next Sunday and immediately beat Booker and move on like he was just a small road block. The Booker/Lawler angle has been THE reason to watch RAW lately, and an unceremonious job to HHH at the pay-per-view would be a terrible way to reward a guy who has gotten so ridiculously over with the crowd.
- WWE Idol, like the Dating Game before it, was an average attempt at comedy. It wasn't a horrid laughless mess like most of the WWE comedy has been for a while now, but it really isn't worth the praise that a lot of people have given it. It's all very, very simple cute punch line oriented stuff, but at least it isn't cringe worthy. Better than DX, at least. Oh, and the Roe v. Wade abortion joke was, however, top notch. I wonder what percentage of the viewing audience actually got it, though? And how many less people would have gotten it if Regal would have left out the word abortion?
- The only reason I care even the slightest bit about the Orton/Cena match next Sunday is to see if they have the balls to actually put Orton over Cena for the belt. Their "feud" has been one of the most lackluster and boring builds to a main event of a major PPV that I've ever seen. Nothing has happened. If Orton takes the belt, it will be possibly the most anticlimactic event in the history of the entire universe.
- ECW didn't deliver the quality match I've been coming to expect on a weekly basis, but it was a fun show where once again everything that happened had a purpose and seemed to be building to something to take place the following week. Stevie got another win, albeit by a reversed decision, and I'm looking forward to seeing just exactly where they intend to go with this whole situation.
- I saw that Larry didn't like it from reading his 4 Rs column that I linked to above, but I'm really going for the Balls/Kelly angle. It's the classic pretty girl has feelings for the more or less retarded gentlefellow who has developed a crush even though she has a man that she generally associates herself with. Like the Stevie stuff, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes next week.
- The main event stuff with Punk and Morrison kind of perplexed me. I know it was done to build for the tag match at SNME, but I hope that's all it was for. Both of the guys in the PPV title match came off looking kind of weak, especially the challenger who should be looking strong going into what we all expect to be his title win. It does set up BDV as a challenger for the belt, and I think that given time, he and Punk can do something pretty fun together. Nothing spectacular, but something sort of along the lines of a Shawn Michaels/big man match. Punk has to win the title, too. There are no other babyfaces for Morrison to take on and Punk has one return match with Morrison, BDV, Elijah, a face/face respect match with Tommy and possibly a Cor Von match that can take him through probably an entire reign, as well as maybe even a TV defense against Richards and something with Thorn. This is the time to do the change.
- I don't have the heart to get into it, but let's just say that outside of the opening three way tag match, Hard Justice was an abomination. Oh, and I read that Kurt Angle's new theme was done by John Cena's cousin Trademarc. I'm about 99 percent sure that he was the guy who played Karen's "new boyfriend", too. I thought he looked like him, and then I read he did the song, so it certainly makes sense.
==================== one last final goodbye
- Next week I'll have a preview of the Ring of Honor shows for the weekend, the return of QUICK ‘N DIRTY picks for SummerSlam and a whole lot of other crap that you may or may not end up reading. I'll write it either way, though.
