Yeah, I’m gonna go with the “middle finger” hypothesis at this point.
This ought to shock me, but given that they fired CM Punk on his wedding day and booked an angle intended to legit break up Rusev’s engagement, it doesn’t really surprise me.
Who wants to bet that Paige and del Rio were suspended for the same thing? Extra odds that it was at the same time.
Rumor is that del Rio has serious heat on him as a “bad influence” on Paige.
I see this whole thing ballooning.
Pretty sure Paige’s giant head/impending alcoholism was her biggest “bad influence”.
So wellness violation means PEDs right? I mean, it makes sense. There was no. way Del Rio wasn’t on SOMETHING. I knew this the moment he came in to answer the Open Challenge.
Although it’s hilarious to me that Paige was tapped too because, seriously, where has she even been?
Gallagher/Tozawa was my favorite match of the tournament so far. Amazing selling with the leg and great storytelling to go along with it. I’m surprised Gentleman Jack didn’t go over - he got an amazing pop for a guy with so little name recognition. WWE will be missing out if they don’t sign him.
My first thought on reading Paige was suspended too was that they did some E in a club or something, got seen doing it and then tested. But of course, I currently have no basis in fact for that mental leap.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t find Billy Kay particularly attractive.
Corey Graves was pretty spot on with watching the six women match though. A lot of beauty in that ring.
Eva Marie suspended for Wellness violation.
bwahahahahahahaaa… 
Ah, guess I’m just a Salty Dog, right? 
Well, I guess that gives her her excuse for not competing at Summerslam.
I’d love it if we got the complete entrance with smarmy speaker, but no Eva Marie, and he announced that she would be unable to compete due to a wellness violation.
Only thing that would make that better would be Corey Graves screaming about how it wasn’t a violation, he obviously mis-spoke because she isn’t well. She’s sick!
What’d she do, inject too much silicon?
Let her drift away WWE, let her drift…
Summer Rae’s still active, right? Home girl should take her place.
Probably the drugs she’s taking that make her think she has the talent to be the next Rock.
…I’m going to re-post my own work from another site:
- I didn’t know that spray tan was a performance enhancing drug.
- Isn’t Eva Marie exempt from the TALENT Wellness Policy, by definition?
- Is her announcer guy going to say this next week while Becky fumes in the ring?
- ALL RED URINE SAMPLE
…and some wag at CSS chimed in with “ALL PED EVERYTHING,” which I have to say is as good or better than anything on my list.
I like the heat between Samoa Joe and Nakamura. Joe keeps up the mean bastard thing, and Nakamura acts too stupid to understand it, and pokes the bear - poke poke poke - and Joe explodes.
It’s a lot different from the usual heel vs face dialogue, where the heel brags about about how he’s the top dog and the face talks about his humble beginnings and how hard he fought to get there. Nakamura just makes faces and pokes the bear. poke poke poke
CWC continues to blow me away each show. It isn’t just straight up wrestling hold vs wrestling hold. There’s always a story that both participants excel at telling. Brian Kendrick channeled his inner Shawn Michaels and made Tony Nese look like Godzilla. Jack Gallagher looked like a cool, sophisticated in-ring genius. I hope whoever’s booking CWC will go on to carry this mojo to RAM.
So Wellness Policy doesn’t apply to part time wrestlers like Brock, just the full time wrestlers like Del Rio, and the no time wrestlers like Eva Marie.
I’m listening to Stone Cold’s podcast with Dean Ambrose, and it’s pretty awkward. They’re not connecting at all. Steve’s kind of shocked that Dean quit high school and his parents didn’t really care. Dean just has such an aloof attitude that’s so counter to Steve’s hard-working personality. Every time Steve asks him a question expecting a positive response, Dean sucks the life out of it. Steve has made connecting with the crowd a lifetime science, and Dean is a devil-may-care iconoclast who just wings it. I don’t get the feeling these two like each other.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Dean Ambrose is that in character he is an awesome person to have on camera.
When he’s not in character he is a godawful interview and has no business being in front of a mic
I’m back at my hotel from the ROH PPV, and it was a hell of a show. I can now check off three things on my wrestling fan to-do list;
- Go to a PPV
- For a company other than WWE
- Where a title change happens
The place was packed and I’d say there were probably about a thousand people there. The only real complaint I have is that the seating sections weren’t well labeled and the ushers seemed to have no idea what they were doing, and the way the tickets were printed didn’t help much either - mine said I was in “Row 1, Row 1-B, Seat 6”, and I got sent to three different seats before I found one that didn’t already have a butt in it. I eventually wound up sitting in the second row, near the entry ramp and just behind the commentary table. (Funny observation; ROH’s commentary team watches the match on flatscreen monitors, while WWE’s commentary are still stuck with those ancient CRT monitors built into the table.) I got there too late for the Jay Lethal photo op, but I did pick up a Bullet Club shirt from the merch table.
A quick review, since probably nobody watched it;
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First dark match was Candice LeRae vs. Veda Scott. Never seen either one wrestle before - I only know Veda as a manager, and all I know about Candice is that she and Joey Ryan are a tag team in the indies. Pretty good opener, despite a major botch - Candice was doing a rope-walking spot, then slipped, fell off the apron, and landed face-first on the floor. She recovered to win the match by German-suplexing Veda from a vag-hold (Joey would be proud.)
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The other dark match was a six-man tag of Joey Diesel, Cheeseburger, and a guy whose name I can’t recall vs. the Cabinet, whose gimmick is that they’re basically wrestlers who like Donald Trump. The Cabinet won.
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First match of the show proper was a four-way match for a shot at the TV title, with Lio Rush, Donovan Dijak, Jay White, and Kamaitachi. Lio was amazing here - he’s a tiny little black guy with a very acrobatic lucha libre sort of moveset. Donovan won the match.
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Up next was Silas Young vs. Katsuyori Shibata. Silas is a Jake the Snake looking beer belly brawler guy you’d expect to see drinking Michelob in a biker bar and his gimmick was all about how there aren’t any real men in wrestling anymore, whereas Shibata was more strong style and wore his NEVER Openweight Championship (NEVER being New Japan’s version of NXT) belt to the ring. Shibata won after a good deal of back-and-forth.
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Up next was another six-man tag which featured Bullet Club, represented by Tama Tonga and Tanga Loa (Haku’s sons, the latter having been Camacho in WWE) and Yujiro Takahashi, against “Chaos”, a group made up of Roppongi Vice (Rocky Romero & Beretta) and Toru Yano, who came to the ring wearing his GHC (Pro Wrestling Noah, one of the smaller Japanese promotions) tag title belt. This match, and the IWGP championship match later on, was officiated by a New Japan referee instead of the ROH ref - an old guy with a gray beard and a topknot, who used a slower pin cadence than the standard pin count and called countouts in Japanese. Yano was the star of this match, despite basically working a comedy gimmick. He got a surprise win over Bullet Club, which lead to a post-match beatdown. “Hangman” Adam Page, who joined Bullet Club recently, ran out with a noose and tried to lynch Yano. Jay Briscoe ran in to make the save, and Nigel McGuinness booked them to face each other right then in a “Fight Without Honor” - i.e. hardcore rules.
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Jay vs. Page. This match was brutal. Like, '90s ECW levels of brutal. Blood. Chair-shots to the head. Head-first piledrivers into tables. Actual in-ring hangings as submission moves. I’m surprised either of them were still moving by the end. There was a funny moment - Jay grabbed the noose and went to choke out Page with it, someone yelled “That’s racist!” and Jay stopped and started laughing. Page got the win after absolutely and completely beating the shit out of Jay, who crawled to the back afterwards because he probably legit couldn’t walk straight afterward.
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IWGP World Heavyweight Champion Kazuchika “Rainmaker” Okuda vs. Dalton Castle. I’ve never seen Dalton’s act before, and the only way I can describe it is “Freddie Mercury, but gayer”. His theme music is “I Want It All”, and he enters in a silver lamé jumpsuit with cape, being carried on a throne by a group of masked shirtless men called “the Boys” who fan him with peacock feathers throughout the match. We got handed stacks of play money to throw in the air for Okuda’s entrance. Really good match, good mix of comedy and technical/strong style, both guys were really over with the crowd. Okuda got the win, though it really seemed like Dalton had a chance. He, Okuda, and the Boys all posed together at the end.
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Bobby Fish vs. Mark Briscoe for the TV title. This match was OK, but it was a bit of a cooldown after the last couple fights. Never realized how acrobatic Mark was. He came out with his IWGP tag championship belt (Jay did for his match also). Bobby got the win to retain.
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Triple threat for the tag titles; the Addiction (Christopher Daniels & Frankie Kazarian) defending against the team of Michael Elgin & Hiroshi Tanahashi and against Los Ingobernables de Japon (Tetsuya Naito and Evil). The latter are the New Japan chapter of a CMLL heel stable that La Sombra (Andrade Almas) was a co-founder of. The former are a weird pairing, as the crowd loved Tanahashi and hated Elgin, who came out wearing two belts - the IWGP Intercontinental Championship, and the Lucha Libra Elite World Championship. The Addiction is a heel team of two very different types - Kazarian came out dressed as an outlaw biker, while Daniels came out dressed as a Nazi general. Another funny moment when Elgin first got tagged in - a guy seated near me yelled “Fuck you, Elgin!”, which prompted Daniels to turn around, and give the guy a death-stare. This match was pretty much a free-for-all, and despite Elgin being hated by the crowd, he eventually won them over with a chain of spots where he was suplexing two or three people at a time. The Addiction eventually retained after some heel work where the ref was distracted while Daniels took out the other teams with a combination of low blows and hitting them in the face with the title belt.
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Main event was Jay Lethal defending the world title against Adam Cole. Lethal came out with a shaved head, as Bullet Club cut off his dreads a few weeks ago. This and Briscoe/Page are tied for the match of the night in my book - these guys gave each other everything they had, hit all kinds of power moves, Lethal was bleeding from the back of his head after a table spot - but they kept going and going and kicking out at two to the shock of everyone in the room. There was a botch when Lethal went to set up the table spot and the table wasn’t on the side of the ring he thought it was, so the ref stopped the countout in order to allow him to find it. After a series of kicks to the head, Cole managed to pin Lethal, winning the world championship for Bullet Club. The crowd was red hot for both guys during this match and Cole got a big pop after winning, but his celebration was short-lived, as Kyle O’Reilly ran out and beat him up to finish up the live show. After the two of them cleared the ring, there was a big “THANK YOU LETHAL” chant to Jay as he finished up his 15-month title reign.
Overall, it was a hell of a show. I’d go so far to say that, in terms of high-quality wrestling, it was the best show I’ve ever been to live. I’ve never been in the house for a title change before, let alone a world title change, so that was especially awesome. I had a lot of fun, and it was refreshing to be in a crowd where the wrestlers getting heat weren’t getting it for X-Pac reasons.
I’ll also be going to the TV taping tomorrow, where they’ll be doing three or four episodes of the weekly show. It probably won’t be as good as tonight’s act was, but it’s been rumored that Cody Rhodes, whose non-compete clause ran out yesterday and who celebrated by beating Zack Sabre Jr. at an Evolve show tonight, might be making an appearance. I’ve got a front-row seat for that show, in any event, and it oughta be a lot of fun.
Wow that sounds like a great show!
Thanks for the detailed match commentary, I always hear these names from time to time on the podcasts, it helps to put a description to the names!
That three-way match for the tag belts was originally Addiction vs War Machine vs Motor City Machine Guns. Last week on RoH’s TV show, they announced MCMG was out because of injury, then they showed War Machine being taken out backstage by two big black guys, don’t remember their names. Don’t know why they would remove War Machine from the card. They’re both 275 pounders that are really agile and quick for their size.
So, it looked like they were going to replace the two MIA teams with the Young Bucks and Rapongi Vice, but looks like they changed their minds again.
Surprised that Adam Page won over Jay Briscoe. Page had been a midcarder until they had him join Bullet Club, and Briscoe’s a former world champ. Page however has been looking really good lately. I didn’t think they would put him over Briscoe, but he’s definitely going to be a top draw some day.
Michael Elgin moved over to New Japan as a heel, but he used to be RoH World champion for about a week. Then he had to hand the belt back over because he’s Canadian and didn’t have his VISA papers or something. They had an angle after that where they tried to turn him into the RoH version of Dean Ambrose, but it died a quiet death. Too bad, he’s really versatile along with being super strong, but somehow he and RoH didn’t mesh.
Dalton Castle is super fun to watch. They had an angle where he lost custody of The Boys to Silas Young, who tried to turn them into “Real Men.” Things got borderline homosexual-dominant enough to be pretty cringeworthy, but they managed to keep from going over the edge, and Castle eventually got The Boys back. I thought for sure WWE would have snatched him (them) away by now.
Adam Cole will make for a great heel champ. He’s like the sleazebag version of CM Punk, w/o the tattoos. I’m surprised the Young Bucks didn’t have a run-in. I see from their Twitter they wrestled against the MCMGs in Tokyo. Wait, what? Apparently, RoH and New Japan don’t have their scheduling kinks worked out.
Smapti, you happy now? Hideo finally got off his GTS!