Actually, last night should have been his last day, given that he put in his two week notice two weeks ago (unless I got that wrong).
So next week, Kane should show up in his old ring gear and mask, only to have Trips ask why he’s there, since he put in his notice.
It would never happen, but “Sorry, to say, we have a new Demon in WWE. Tell you what, we’ll let you wrestle for that title. Go out to the ring, you’ll be up against him next.”
Then give us the full Finn Balor entrance. 
Some of their names are mirthful.
Cobra the Muy Thai Warrior
Special Dark Suge D
The Irish Car Bomb Sean Sullivan
The Slobberknockers
Simply Sexy Shawn Blaze with his finisher, the Sex Drive
Bray Wyatt is set to start a program with Ryback (his Raw promo last week was directed at Ryback). Throw in some animosity because Ryback beat up Wyatt’s brother and you’ve got the making of an old school feud (for you old grumpy fans like me, think Buzz Sawyer defending his brother Brett). Except that Ryback sucks and Wyatt makes his living nowadays looking up at the lights.
They’ve never kayfabe mentioned the Bo/Bray relationship, so as far as the storyline knows they aren’t actually related
They can give him a better mask. They can go back to his original costume. He can’t spend years doing this but he can become a transition champion putting over the next long term champion. Bring back the music and the lights and the fireworks and in short order Kane can be a sensation again.
An awful cage match. There’s no point of having a cage match if at least one of the guys isn’t bleeding profusely in the end. And what kind of cage match has any rules? You go over the top or out the door, that’s it, no referees in the cage, no rules at all, the whole idea is to see someone get beaten to a bloody pulp. Frankly, I’m disgusted by the lack of violence and gore.
Gene Okerlund has tweeted that Verne Gagne has passed away. I remember watching the AWA with my Grandma on Sunday mornings as she viciously defended pro wrestling’s credibility as my Grandpa yelled, “It’s fake!” I saw legends such as Dick the Bruiser, The Crusher and Nick Bockwinkel. I was introduced to The Road Warriors and Hulk Hogan through the AWA. Back before the days of “sports entertainment.”
RIP Verne Gagne.
Me and my roommates would watch AWA on ESPN before they folded. Vince McMahon had raided their best talent, such as Hulk Hogan, Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, Gene Okerland, etc so they tried to make Jerry Blackwell their new Hulk Hogan. The guy’s 5’ 6" and 480 lbs and had a Southern accent that sounded like Deliverance country. He feuded with Sheik Adnon El-Kasey’s contingent and would call him out during his promos. We mocked the way he’d say “Aid Nawn Ail Kasey, I hear you lookin’ me, here I am bruther, I ain’t hard to find!”
The AWA announcer Larry Nelson was something else. He was so mock serious and completely flabbergasted when the heels would do something bad. “Colonel DeBeers! Always running down this country, always proclaiming his superiority! It makes me sick!”
AWA - local for me. I had friends who watched them when I was a child, but I derided it as fake and stupid. Then in my teen years, I had two foster brothers who got into it, which got me into it. I ended up taking them to those final few really big AWA shows before Hogan left for WWE.
After that, AWA kinda faded. I was never impressed with Greg Gagne. He was 5’10" and 180 pounds. I was 5’11" and 200 pounds and figured even I could kick his ass, so there was no way I could buy him as perpetual champion. Liked Buck Zumhofe in that era too, then he pretty much disappeared and well, has ended very badly. (And yes, I still remember that it was he who gave Bobby Heenan the “weasel” nickname, and at one time made him wear a weasel costume as a loser’s stip.)
Oh hey, forgot one thing I was thinking of on the bus ride to work.
I want to see Cody/Stardust win the IC title. “Intercontinental? No no no, this is now the Inter GALACTIC title!”
Then deride the “World” championship as only being one small planet when his title is so much more!
I disagree because I think the Stardust gimmick is stupid and shouldn’t exist without Goldust beside it.
They need to get him off of this and back to Cody here soon because I get no joy out of seeing a weirdo in a lycra bodysuit ramble
On the other hand, eventually Bray Wyatt’s “Pick random guy to feud with because of reasons, get my ass kicked, repeat” booking will lead him into a feud with Stardust.
Just imagine the promos they would cut on each other - the two of them standing in the ring for 20 minutes babbling about cosmic cycles and dead gods and the infinite nothingness of space and the meaningless of existence, none of it meaning a single goddamn thing, and every second of it would be glorious, and it’d lead up to some sort of match where the loser gets banished to the Phantom Zone and David Bowie is the guest referee and they have to wrestle on the ceiling while wearing moon shoes.
Cody’s run through a variety of gimmicks. My favorite was the one in which he thought he was so handsome, he set the standard for male beauty and had to teach the audience how to properly groom themselves. Then when Ray Mysterio 619’ed him in the nose, he went around wearing a hood and nose guard because nobody should see such a perfect face disfigured.
Oh God…
If that’s the case then lets hope and pray there’s a good baseball game on because I am not watching that shit. I haven’t even watched a Bray promo in months. The STC guide to promos: If you’re by yourself, I don’t like (especially if it’s videotaped)
So does anyone know how King of the Ring is working tonight? They say it’s live, so are they filming it before Smackdown? After? During?
Who do we think is going to win? I’m actually going to say Neville because he’s SUPER over and I can’t see it benefitting anyone else at this point.
From what I understand, it’s taking the place of Main Event this weekend.
It’s really kind of weird how quickly they’re hot-shotting KoTR, honestly. Announce it on Sunday night (during a commercial break), do the quarter-finals on Monday, and wrap it up on Tuesday. I’m guessing this is one of Triple H’s pet projects since he seems to love booking tournaments so much (NXT has had three of them in the past year), and judging from who’s going into the semi-finals it seems pretty clear to me that the plan is to put over Adrian Neville. “King Neville” is definitely a better gimmick than “Mighty Mouse” by a long shot. I wonder if that’s the reason they had Neville fill in for Daniel Bryan on Sunday’s match - they were already planning Barrett vs. Neville for this show and they figured they may as well give them a warm-up fight.
The problem is, they would have to explain how the match didn’t end in the ring in the arena where it was supposed to end - it might as well have turned into a “falls count anywhere” match, even though they made it quite clear during the match that it wasn’t.
NXT has gore. Oh wait, that’s Gore! Gore!! Gore!!!
As for cage matches, I never liked WWE’s “escape the cage” rules. The NWA (“back when it was good”) had it right; the cage is just there to keep the wrestlers in and the non-wrestlers out - win by pinfall or submission. “The version I heard was,” when Hogan jumped to WCW, he had them change the cage rules to WWE-style because that’s what most of his fans were used to. Imagine what would have happened to the Tully Blanchard-Magnum TA I Quit In A Cage match at Starrcade 85 (talk about gore) if it was “whoever escapes the cage first wins.” Besides, it was hard to have gore in the old-style WWE “monkey bars” cage.
Actually, I liked the old Gene & Mike LeBell (NWA Los Angeles) cage rules - to win, you pin your opponent, and then you escape the cage.
I don’t mind winning the match by escaping the cage if the wrestlers are actually smart about it - how many times in this match was Rollins on the ground for so long that Orton could have climbed out and won the world title in the time that it took him to pose for the crowd, set up a move, deliver that move, pin Rollins, and get a two-count? Cole rambling about how “he wants to pin Rollins to send a message” made no sense either - do wrestlers not actually care about winning matches or championships? And don’t tell me he was afraid of Noble and Mercury - and what are they gonna do, catch him in midair, carry him on their shoulders back into the cage?
But whether you like winning by escaping the cage or not, I think we can all agree that going out through the open door is just plain stupid. I kind of understood when they did it in Bray Wyatt’s matches (because he’s probably too heavy to climb the cage), but even then that was a problem that could have been fixed by just not booking a cage match to begin with.
I never like when they basically have to stop and pause for the other guy to catch up to them. Whether that is;
Stalling on climbing, like it’s difficult when you just saw someone else fly up to the top.
Stopping on the top to take in the view and wait for the other guy.
Being ‘stopped’ by some flimsy grab when they’re on the outside of the cage and crawling back up and over.
All of which we had in the Orton-Rollins match, but the last one was particularly egregious. “Orton has Rollins by the hair!”. So what? Peel his hand off your head and then drop to the ground. Don’t fucking climb back into the goddamned cage!
It’s my same basic pet peeve about ladder matches.
I love ladder matches, they are my absolute favorite gimmick hands down, but it drives me nuts that they have the guy look at the belt/MITB/taser/whatever…
step…
step…
look again…
step…
JUST CLIMB THE GODDAMN LADDER!
Didn’t this happen recently? I remember a tag-team cage match from what I think was back in the pre-RAW days; I want to say Steiners vs. DiBiase & Virgil, and both wrestlers of a team had to escape - one of each was out of the cage, while the other two were climbing out over opposite sides, and I think Virgil ended up on one of the Steiners’ shoulders while the other landed on the floor to win.
Meanwhile, anybody with the slightest about of thinking ahead can win a cage match, in three steps;
(a) Throw powder/salt/Muta mist in the other wrestler’s eyes;
(b) Handcuff him to one of the ring ropes away from the side with the door;
(c) Walk out the door, or climb out.
In the days of the “monkey bars” cage, you probably didn’t even need the handcuffs, if you could climb out quickly enough.