So, on New Year’s Eve, ITV aired the debut episode of the World of Sport wrestling revival, with JR and a British guy I’m not familiar with on commentary. I won’t post a link here because I’m not sure if I’d be falling afoul of the board rules, but it is available on YouTube.
It’s a very entertaining show with an NXT-ish feel to it, and it definitely has an old-school feel to it. If this is what the WWE UK division is going to be competing with, it’ll definitely be a stiff competition.
I’m laughing my ass off listening to Talk Is Jericho with Gallows, Anderson and Braun Stroman. They’re drunk as hell and goofing on Stroman’s home town of Sherills Ford NC big time. Braun plugged an app he uses called “Places I Pooped.” He said the first time he wrestled, his last name didn’t have the “r” in it, so Jericho kept calling him Stoman through the rest of the podcast. Anderson never shut up and somehow Jericho managed to keep things rolling along.
I’m actually working on the Miz vs Ambrose video I posted about earlier. I’ve collected about 30 video clips so far. I could use more Miz drama, if anybody’s got any suggestions.
It’s been reported that the first entrant to the 2017 WWE Hall of Fame is Diamond Dallas Page. I expect a lot of “hot takes” regarding this choice, but after seeing what he’s done with Jake Roberts, Scott Hall, Chris Jericho, Mick Foley and now Vader I say it’s well deserved.
Damn, Mauro just dropped a reference to the mesentery, a newly discovered human organ.
So, anybody else staying up late to watch Wrestle Kingdom? Looks like they’re getting ready to start the pre-show.
…I guess not.
Anyway, Michael Elgin just won the opening battle royale, which also included Cheeseburger, Tiger Mask, Yoshi Tatsu, Scott Norton, and Billy Gunn, of all people.
Cheeseburger T Shirts very popular in Japan!
Scott Norton’s still active? He said he wanted to wrestle for TNA a few years back, but they never took him up on it. How bad do you have to be if even TNA turns you down?
Ziggler turned heel last night, so looks like he’s going to be putting over midcard babyfaces like Kallisto and Apollo Crews in the near future. AJ said the Internet to Cena last night. He used every anti-Cena forum barb ever. Cena looks like an old man holding on to his glory days trophies that nobody cares about anymore, like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. Dean won the IC from Miz, so now he’s a quadfecta. And now Carmellsworth! SD has been really interesting these past couple months.
I’ve actually been enjoying Smackdown pretty good these last couple weeks.
Don’t mind the Zigs heel turn because, well, it’s not like it really means anything. I’m fine with Ambrose having the IC title. He and Miz work well together. Although I’m absolutely praying to God that this doesn’t result in a Miz/Maryse versus Dean/Renee. I hate it when they bring non-wrestlers (save for stupid celebrity bits) into wrestling roles. It never works out. Didn’t work for Jojo, didn’t work for Lana, won’t work for Renee.
In other news, I forgot about it until my Rememberall (Ms. Cups) told me…we are going to an NXT taping tomorrow. It’s been a hot minute since we’ve seen anything NXT, so this should be interesting.
Apparently this was his first match since 2007. For a guy who’s pushing 60, though, he still looks pretty fit. I’m guessing they brought him in for nostalgia value - he had a very successful side run in Japan back in the day, and actually main-evented Wrestle Kingdom in 1999, when he defended the heavyweight championship against Keiji Mutoh.
Overall, Wrestle Kingdom was a great show. There were a lot of title changes throughout the night, with Okada and Naito being the only two champs to retain. CHAOS won the tag titles off Tama Tonga & Tanga Loa. Roppongi Vice beat the Young Bucks for the junior tag titles. (They’re still ROH and PWG tag champions, though, and they actually wore all six belts to the ring with them). Los Ingobernables won the gauntlet match for the trios title, eliminating both the champs and BC. Goto won the NEVER title off Shibata, and Takahashi won the junior heavyweight championship off Kushida. Adam Cole even won the ROH championship back from O’Reilly, which really surprised me - how often, if ever, do you see a promotion’s world title change hands on another company’s show? In non-title action, Cody Rhodes beat CJ Parker (I’ll have to congratulate Cody when I meet him next week) and Tiger Mask/Kota Ibushi beat Tiger Dark, who was played by ACH.
Not a dull match the entire show, and every single fight had a clean finish without DQs, countouts, outside interference, crooked authority figures, or any of the stuff that WWE’s run into the ground over the decades. Corrino and Kelly’s commentary wasn’t all that great - I don’t think they’d gotten much briefing on what to expect. At first I thought they were calling it from the States like Maggle did for the Tokyo show last year, but then I saw they had their own commentary table behind the Japanese team, so maybe their view was obstructed. The battle royal at the beginning was a little slow-paced and probably hurt a little by the fact that so many of the competitors were 50+ guys who don’t work full-time any more, but it was fun and it was a good way to start the show.
If you want to enjoy 4 hours or so of quality wrestling, go sign up for the New Japan network and watch it - or if you live in the LA area, New Japan is putting on its first-ever self-promoted (as opposed to the ones it co-promotes with ROH) US shows there this summer as part of G1 Climax. I’d fly out to see it myself, but my vacation budget this summer has already been spoken for.
Although Corey Graves gets props for dropping the Dustyism “Clubberin’,” he got the definition slightly wrong. He said it meant “4 fists.” Actually, Dusty defined it as “4 fisties against 1 headus.”
Discovered last night that we apparently get El Rey Network.
So we caught Lucha Underground last night. I was able to seem smart because I recognized a few of the people from the few episodes I saw a Knowed Out’s house a few years ago.
So I guess we can add that to the cacophony of wrestling that I know watch.
On the bad side, that means you’re coming in a week before they take an extended mid-season break. On the good side, that means you have plenty of time to catch up on old episodes.
Just in case you needed another reason to watch Wrestle Kingdom, Meltzer has gone ahead and given Okada vs. Omega six stars out of five, which I don’t think has ever happened before.
And if that impossibly hard-to-please old nerd loves it, it’s gotta be good. 
Okada vs Omega is already on YouTube.
Pretty fun and interesting round of tapings yesterday.
I highly doubt anyone here cares about spoilers, but it seems they’re going really hard on Sanity since we saw them like 3 or 4 times. I tend to like them, but their entrance takes FOREVER. I can’t tell if I’m attracted to Nikki Cross yet…but I’m thinking I am.
I saw Tajiri for the first time and thought he was hilarious. He’s such an old Japanese guy. You can tell he likes the raucous American crowd because he kept inciting us to chant and do more. He would also dance around when we were chanting (which, at Full Sail, is always…ugh…). I think my favorite thing he would do is take a hard bump and twitch for a while on the mat.
I love how NXT doesn’t even pretend that the shows aren’t taped weeks in advanced when William Regal comes out and says “I know we’re only 3 days from Takeover: San Antonio…”
Not 100% certain, but I think the group of people who were crammed into the sardine tin known as Full Sail left in order to go to TNA. Which isn’t the correct choice to make regardless, but also stems from the fact that Universal is like 45 minutes away.
Lastly, and I’ll spoiler this because I’ll feel mildly guilty if I don’t, but this happened too:
I have to laugh at the people who left right after the last main event, because as Nakamura was celebrating his win, Kassius someoneorother…otherwise known as Chris Hero…walked out, tapped the title belt on Naka’s shoulder and said something like “that’s nice! I’ll take it” and walked away. I guess the dirt sheets get some right sometimes huh?
Is it too early to say that Shinsuke Nakamura is already more over, and more accomplished, than any Japanese wrestler ever has been in WWE? (Unless I’m missing someone.)
Considering the ridiculous stereotypes they were saddled with before? If they’d have brought in Nakamura in 20 years ago, they’d have destroyed him with a comedy gimmick.
But yes, he’s definitely over and should be pushed main event when he’s ready for the main roster. I just think he needs a little more work on his english. He needs to be able to do the morning show circuit as champion.
I’ve been listening a lot to Jim Cornette’s podcast lately. I don’t usually go for these kinds of things, but I’ve really been enjoying his - he’s an angry, foul-mouthed, slightly racist old Southern hillbilly whose worldview is still stuck in the territory days, but he’s also extremely liberal, and damn if he isn’t utterly hilarious when he’s ranting about Donald Trump, Vince McMahon, Dixie Carter, and all the other stuff in the world of politics and/or wrestling that he doesn’t care for.
It’s worth checking out if you have some spare time.
Watched the Okada vs Omega match and it is well worth the hype. I’d only seen Omega a couple times on RoH before, and not Okada at all, but I marked out big time. This match was so well paced. They’d do a flurry of moves then sell like they survived being shot out of a volcano. Both guys took some scary sick bumps, and they didn’t make the match a spot fest. Omega’s got the perfect facial expression for being dazed, and he flows into the lucha type moves without looking like he’s going to do them.
Hey Smapti, your boy Bull Dempsey is now in RoH as Bull James. Silas Young and the Beer City Bruiser introduced him as their third man, then turned on him, so looks like he’s already embroiled in a feud. He looks a little fatter than he did in NXT. Maybe he’ll make back to cost of his singlet.