I’m thinking it’s much like the Roman Brady/Roman 2.0/ Roman Returns and Roman 3.0 of the soap opera Days of our Lives: Roman Brady - Wikipedia
I am confident that someone will come up with a move or catch phrase that will ignite a whole new era of fans. Maybe someone who can do the real moves and not just the stamp on the ring stuff.
It’s about time because I really want to start watching again; wrestling, not just the opera part (which can be fun… but the last decade or so was way unreal from what I saw as I peeked in here and there).
(Then again the “feuds” I watched as a kid/teen/twenty-something were pretty fake too … just not ridiculous.)
Removing him from the Hall of Fame kinda exposes that it’s not a real Hall of Fame. Some might say, “Oh, it’s a fake sport, so a fake HOF.” True, but the Wrestling Hall of Fame was thought by many of us to at least a little bit separate from WWE, a way to honor pro wrestling’s most important contributors. This would be like the Baseball HOF removing Ty Cobb, or the football HOF removing OJ.
I think the WHofF is something that can be separated from the WWE. Because it does encompass many eras before Vince Jr adulterated the show. And it doesn’t contain just WWF (err, WWE) or its precursors people. It includes men and women athletes who wrestled around the world and in your backyard.
It’s kind of like how there’s cheese and
Pasteurized process cheese - contains 100% cheese
Pasteurized process cheese food - contains at least 51% cheese.
Pasteurized process cheese product - contains less than 51% cheese
A good show uses a combination of all 3 (4 if you include the real deal of which there were a few… Bob, Curt etc) just like a good party does. (What? Some good cheddar cheese and ham on some tasty bits of rye or multi-grain bread bits, some easy cheeze on chicken in a biskit and some jalapeno grated on corn chips with salsa.) (Or any of the million ways cheese can be paired up for tasty enjoyable goodness.)
I grew up with 3 to 4 good “cheese” a week. Local tv and cable in the late 70s and 80s. I was sad when it was slowly narrowed down to 2 (and really just 1).
Are we remembering the same shows from the 70s and 80s? Wall-to-wall squash matches with the main event being the jobber who actually gets to fight back?
For me, it was WWWF until one summer night I found Florida Championship Wrestling on the Spanish station. Better matches, but probably because there were fewer one-sided squashes and I didn’t know who all the jobbers were. I could only watch in summer, because it was after my bedtime during the school year. Then ~1980 (maybe a year or two earlier), we got cable. WWF shows from MSG. Georgia Championship Wrestling (which was also a squash fest, though usually better matches than the WWF squash fest). Occassionally WCCW and the Von Erichs, AWA, plus a few other shows trying to hit a national market (and usually failing because they wouldn’t stay on long). I, too, miss those days.
That’s pretty much what I remember but also including Wharton Fieldhouse (Quad Cities) on at 8am …I had time to watch a few morning cartoons, then wrassling, another hour of cartoons and then switch to TBS for an hour and then USA for an hour… and I think TBS also did a Saturday Night show… and then Sunday for USA and TBS kind of back to back or I had to go up to the cable box and actually turn the dial to the other channel :eek:
The feuds were not as story told in 3 matches … but took longer to wrap up since this was before PPV mega matches. So Wahoo was against Arn, Roddy went after Junkyard, and so on… match after match after disrupted match.
But at least back then any woman wrestler probably learned under The Fabulous Moolah and actually knew a few real wrestling moves and not just “the hair pull” (although there was plenty of that still.) Most guys had some Technical wrestling under their belt… unless they were Giants (see Andre) or were Luchadores who did all the high flying which was a nice break from watching guys being grappled in one position for 2 minutes while struggling for the release.
Although as a pre-pubescent and adolescent female back then… that throwing down and holding was just fine. A forearm or leg smash disabling people for the win that came later? Not so much.
The Professional Wrestling HOF and the WWE HOF are two entirely different things. Hogan is still listed in the PWHOF (inducted in 2003). He is only removed from the WWE HOF - and, as far as I know, only removed from the website; I don’t remember reading anything about his being removed from the HOF membership itself.
Well yeah there’s lots of NBA players who’ve done bad things but, again, the point of the thread is to ask if anyone did something bad enough to be ostracized from their team/organization.
It’s not just a thread to talk about shitty things athletes have done.
To quote myself from my OP:
“Can anyone think of an athlete in a major sports organization that, after doing something bad, was not just fired or disowned…but basically erased from existence?”