Month: March 2004

Here Goes The Pain. I hope he can return the plane!

I think this is actually an okay thing for the WWE, because they’d so overpushed Brock to begin with, so they’d have to pay him top level money and really, he hasn’t clicked with t. Not in terms of his compentency, but in what achievements were left for him to reach. In the first year alone, he

– King of the Ring
– World Title
– World Title again
– Beat the Rock
– Beat the Big Show
– Won the Rumble
– Beat Angle
– Won at WrestleMania

Outside of a win over Austin or Triple H, you’ve hit the highpoints in the WWE on that list.

It wasn’t exactly a Lex Luger situation (where a guy is a top guy only because he’s been a top guy and not for being interesting now or for a long time), but what more were you going to do with him at this point? The rematch with Angle and a team with him might be special (and I guess the match with Triple H but I keep forgetting they haven’t done that and I’m not really looking forward to it), but otherwise he’s an interchangable “top card but not superstar” guy right now.

If he was around, he’d probably turn stale, but now, when he comes back (and he surely will), he’ll mean a lot more. It’s like a bizarre varient of the territory system – instead of moving on to someplace else, you go home, bored or hurt (Edge), so you’re a fresh but skilled guy to bring months later, and that guy gets a lot more main events for coming back then he would’ve for just being another player in the mix. Hogan figured this out first and everyone else is just catching up.

Except, how do you book that match vs Goldberg now? Much to late to put someone in it who can get something of it. I guess it’ll be KICK WHAM STUNNER KICK WHAM STUNNER for all, which will at least be fun. Maybe Goldberg and Brock can form a club or something. With Hogan.

That NFL rumor, that’s probably goofy yest slightly true – someone will look at him at camp if he wants to do it- saves on someone on beating up people they need for the season. And he’ll show up at 250 and get a hundred questions about performance enhancing drugs and that’ll be thrilling for all.

I played that game manically back in the day – you could make so much money going from Arabia (carpets) to Greece (art) that I didn’t get around to doing much else till years when I got the emulated version just to beat it. I never actually bought it, just rented it. Liked when I could rent things, before cards and phones kept disappearing on me, forcing me to question my ability to function like a responible adult.

Anyway.

Prediction? Eight for Nine! Much much better. And kinda cool. I think if I had remembered (or had helpfully been reminded earlier) that

As cool as 8 of 9 is, that final just on ESPN was pretty great. Looked like a close bad game early, but really picked up with about 8 minutes left in the first half and was half basketball half amazing the second half. I don’t know if it was as much Page’s ankle as nerves or pressure or something, because he looked not good often during the game. But then Banks was off quite a bit and Bailey never got rolling, so it was everyone making contributions making it even more fun. I think I might keep watching SportsCenter till the show the highlight reel.

UIC could be scary if Banks and Bailey are coming back for another year, which they talked about briefly on this broadcast and the semis. I don’t know what they’ve scheduled out of confrence, but if they’re there, they ought to try to get a tough enough schedule for an at-large birth again – things didn’t work out this year, but it was worth trying.

You don’t think there’s any chance they’d put UIC in Milwaukee, do you? That’d be unfair for the 3-4-5 seed team they’d be facing, but it’d be fun for me.

Meanwhile, my school’s coach is getting fired. Maybe. Who knows. The thing that video games have taught me – and maybe incorrectly, probably incorrectly because they’re video games – is that if you want to build a program, you’ve got to take advantage of any temporarly bubble of improvement. Either the bubble wasn’t big enough (two years ago…if we had just won…) or we didn’t take advantage of it, but we’re still back to 8 win seasons and you can get a lot of people to do that.

I’ve got done 1! match of CMLL and have no hopes for tommorow – monthly out of nowhere 2.5 trip to do near nothing – so I might just be further behind. I did update LuchaTimes, and I’ve been adding the ratings to the recaps index page. I think I need to explore some database options before I do more, because there really should be some better search capacities – if I’m including all that data, there should be someone way to sort/pick by it. Really, I’d settle for a way to type in someone’s name and get a list of all the shows they’re on

Scott’s WM Preview is really good. Joe was thinking about doing his own round table stuff akin to the old preview, but I’m not sure . In a weird concidence, not only have I seen this format done twice this week on baseball blogs (and not really entertaining, since they’re just recapulations of stuff that’s been talked to death by this point), I’m [SPOILER!] supposed to contribute to a WM preview for OO too. So I’m going be writing plenty of this show anyway.

I had wanted to recap the 10 Best Show, but won’t have time tonight because of the trip tommorow. I did TiVo it to watch get it – for some reason, the preview said Stone Cold was hosting – so here’s the list

10 Angle/Benoit, 17
9 Hogan/Warrior, 6
8 Michaels/Austin, 14
7 Hogan/T vs Piper/Orndoff, 1
6 Austin/Bret, 13 [Ric’s favorite match]
5 Hogan/Rock, 18
4 Savage/Steamboat, 3
3 Michaels/Ramon, 10
2 TLC, 16
1 Michaels/Hart, 11

They showed some clips of other things on the shows, that didn’t make the list. Including Hogan/Andre at 3. They had some interviews with particpants, when the particpant is still with the company to make such comments (though they might have simply been Confidental/DVD bits I forgot). Ric was as effective as he’s been in quite a while.

I was going to make a post at Seadawg’s, to guess what funky thing they’d put on the list. Would’ve been for naught, because there isn’t anything really bad on it. My big problems
– TLC is too high.
– Iron Man is too high.
– No Rock/Austin.
– No Owen/Bret

I was about to give them credit for their guts for leaving the Iron Man match off the show till I realized it was #1. Still, a pretty cool show – they made everything look as great or greater than it was.

I need to burn some CDs.

RAW: 2.3

Okay, so they long term planned all of this out, and then realized much to late they had an extra week, right? Nothing Happened. Every angle and bit was just there to remind us who was fighting who and what we already knew – just treating as a two hour Heat for the show – nothing you didn’t figure out already (except maybe they really are splitting Steven and Victoria and that is horrible.) And This Is Your Life lived up to the first one, going far too long and having a poinltess ending. And that was before the run in.

Good to see they so thought out Tough Enough John’s character that he’s changed his name after one week.