The beauty of wrestling is that nothing is sacred and nothing is off limits.

For that 4 minutes of work in 199whatever, he probably got paid better than 3weeks on the road in the 70's. Plus got his name out there for the signings and all that.

Captain had the most conservative clothing on the panel.

Remember the kid a few years ago in the E whose gimmick was being a 2nd generation American of Arab descent (he was actually Italian, IIRC). He wore a balaclava, bitched that Americans treated him as if he were a terrorist, managed by Shawn Davari (who should've been the character)? He was over as fuck, getting massive heat like only a foreigner can do. Some Arab groups had kittens over it, and they cut that guy quicker than shit.

Chickenshit on the E's part, because evil foreigners have always been heat generators. The Sheiks (Iron and Original). Any number of Samoans. Fuji, Kabuki. How many Nazis, or almost Nazis have we booed over the years?

Some stuff is off limits, but we usually don't find out til later.

Here's a clip of former WWE/F star The Godfather. One of the ho's in this clip is actually Amy Dumas aka/ Lita.

The question is, has there ever been a more racist. negative stereotype gimmick than The Godfather?

Godfather was gold. The thing about racist negative stereotypes? They are always true.

Lita certainly was a ho.

Couple years ago, they have Super Crazy, Juvi and another Mexican driving lawnmowers to the ring.

Interesting read.

10 Things Corporations Can Learn from Pro Wrestling

Racisty stereotypes: The early Gangstas. The Public Enemy. PG13. Cena's rapper gimmick. The Wild Samoans, or pretty much any of the Islanders...and part of their gimmick was that if you hit them in the head it wouldn't hurt them. The era where every Indian was a chief, or at the very least wore a headband with a feather in it...and had to do a war dance when they were pissed...kind of the Native American version of hulking up. Any of the "wildmen" from Africa...think Kamala. Any of the "Arabs"...Akbar, Mephisto, the Grand Wizard.

Any of the "sneaky" Japanese until about the mid 80s. Fuji, Hiro Matsuda, the guy who got arrested with Ken Patera. Since the mid 80s, when the "smart" mark community started to grow, there became more of an interest in the Japanese wrestling style. With the influx of more Japanese workers, they became less "exotic".

Any of the steppin and fetchin' black faces. Thunderbolt Patterson, Pez Whatley, Iceman Parsons, Truth Killings.

Ah, good times.

Great worked shoot with Tommy Rich and Doug Gilbert on Wolfie D and JC Ice.

How many of these would be on your list?

Ha! I forgot all about Iceman Parsons and his beaded braids

Shockmaster, Arquette and Yeti, pure WCW garbage.

Red Rooster, waste of decent talet.

Eugene was over and I liked it. He was decent in the ring, wasn't cookie cutter, and probably could have had legs if he would have pissed clean.

Gillberg, I marked out for everytime he came out, because I wasn't a Goldberg fan. I think Goldberg became a mark for himself by the 3rd match he ever had. You know the Gillberg thing pissed him off.

Chief Jay Strongbow and Andre the Giant Vs 3 jobbers.

It's hard to tell if Jay Strongbow was paying tribute to Native Americans or setting race relations with the culture back 100 years.

Would Shockmaster have gotten over if he didn't trip in his entrance?

Arquette really bummed me out. I have always been a mark for the world title of any promotion. To me, the champ is a big deal. Traditionally, the champ was chosen by committee, like the NWA, and was always a legit tough guy, for a few reasons. A local promoter pulling a swerve to get his local talent over. A worker going into business for himself. A guy in a bar wanting to prove something. The face of not only the company but the industry. Putting the strap on a skinny actor to get a movie over? Wrong as wrong can be. But WCW was a trainwreck at the time.

I agree on Terry Taylor. But long term, after his in ring days were over, he's well respected and has had all the big companies bidding on his services over the years.

Was Yeti El Gigante? If so, he was the worst worker of all time.

I really liked Eugene. It was a well crafted character that Dismore made his own. He was also a great mimic and pulled off his "hero's" finishing moves and catchphrases to perfection. A ton of really edgy storyline possibilities.

Goldberg marked for himself long before his first match. I liked the character and he was decent in the ring. Kind of like Hogan. He had three moves, but he did them well. The Gillberg thing was hilarious. Some of the most creative stuff the E and WCW did was the shitting on each other. I'd love a shoot interviewer to ask him about Gillberg.

Who was Phantasio? I don't remember him at all.

The "wrestling anythings". Plumbers, garbagemen. One of the Irwin brothers was a wrestling hockey goon. He had these weird boots that were meant to look like skates. Kinda. It was terrible.

The guy who painted up like Gene Simmons from KISS. The guy who painted his face like the Warrior. The Ultimate Warrior was pretty terrible too.

Giant Hernandez, or any of the gimmicks they had him in. He was a 7'6"+ basketball player from like Brazil that Turner Sports brought up to play for the Hawks. Tore his knee up before he could play, so they gave him to WCW.

Making King of the Ring winners royalty for a year.

The insane Bob Backlund.

I remember the Ding Dongs. Anyone know who they were?

Eddie Guerrero played a masked guy called Tron, I think. He was from the future and "loved the kids". Terrible.

Greg Gagne.

Anybody whose gimmick is their military record. I don't mind it being a piece of the broader character, but to make it the majority of the character never works. It's too one dimensional. Like when Jesse Neal first came on TNA. The entire character was him being in the military. He went nowhere until he went heel, and still languished in obscurity until joining up with Shannon Moore. With Gunnar, his record was used sparsely to pump up his tough guy gimmick.

Not Gigante, Ron Reis.

The KISS Demon was Dale Torborg, sone of MLB player/manager Jeff Torborg. He later went on to be the strength coach for the Blue Jays. And, yes, much like KISS, the KISS Demon sucked.

You didn't mention Glacier. Mortis and Wrath were good, but Glacier sucked.

Love the mention of Greg Gagne. Throw Mike Graham and Erik Watts in there too. Shane McMahon could actually pull off good matches. He had one against Kane at a PPV that stole the show, and the one against Angle where Angle forgot which pane of glass was gimmicked was good too.

Jay Strongbow was just terrible. As a kid, I never understood why Indians were good guys. All the ones I saw in my town were smelly and drunk.

Here Ernie Ladd sets back race relations another 100 or so years. Solie is concerned about Ladd's safety, but I was more concerned about his bad acting and overselling. This was a great feud. Ernie was fantastic on the stick. He stuck to a mostly drunken Indian slurs, but it was good stuff.

This is perhaps the most disturbing thread on XPT. Meditate on that.

Wasn't Glacier the Blood Runs Cold guy? Huge buildup with no payoff at all.

Hey, let's not say things we can't take back about KISS.

At least Erik Watts had the size to make him believable. The skills, not as much. He was terrible in his initial run. Ex- jocks never work for me. Every promo he did had to include the phrase "when I was playing college football...".

In that vein, two words: David Flair.

Probably.

Jerry Lawler reminds us it's OK to punch a bitch if she gets lippy.

Jackie has had great staying power for a woman in this business. She's been at the top of the women's division in any promotion she's been in for at least 20 years.

Eric Embry in his sweaty, wrinkly glory.

Jackie: Sucking off Jeff Jarret must be good job security.

Who was the guy with the Sting mullet?

Thought someone might find this interesting

Wrestling scandals

^^^^2 Notes

1. I liked seeing the RVD/Sabu pot bust video. Paul E woulda used it on the ECW show.

2. I don't see the big deal about Pillman and the gun. You see guns on TV every day.

The Sting mullet guy looks like Lance Storm, but I think he'd have been too young.

I love how RVD pulled the "I'm the World Champ" card with the cop. And how the cop totally blew it off. Driving high is as stupid as it gets.

The Pillman gun thing was a big deal at the time. It had never been played before. Plus the line between work and shoot was getting kind of blurred. Pillman was in the "loose cannon" character that had gone from WCW to ECE to the E, which added to the blurring. To the marks, it was a bit too "real". There's still a difference between "sports entertainment" and CSI. It's real, but it's not.

Hulk Hogan is Fucked
His Ex got a shitload of money

They should reform the real ECW with these guys:

I read the same info on Hogan in a different article. From the sound of it, she got the cash and he got the house, which was over valued at the time. Also, he was trying to get a celebrity premium on the house, but no one with that kind of $$ is going to care that it was Hogan's.

Where he really got fucked was paying all the bills while she was galavanting all over the place with the 20 year old boy toy. Hogan was cutting the check to AmEx while she wined and dined and shopped. I can't say I blame her, because you know damn well Hogan was slaying the ring rats like there was no tomorrow when he was at the top in the 80's. She stuck his face in it on her way out the door, and she raped his wallet.

Hard to tell which is his new wife and which is his daughter.

Can't you totally see his daughter doing porn? At least one of those Vivid-Celeb flicks. Maybe even a girl/girl scene with Chyna!

I'd rather see New Jack get a head full of blow and a belly full of malt liquor, then have a go at her. Lots of choke holds and ATM.

Or maybe the Iron Sheik get some revenge for Hogan taking his strap.

Posting between Black Friday mopes here, read Velvets question about racism in wrasslin, and skipped the rest due to time constraints. I do have a second to answer his question, if it hasn't already been answered. I give you Tony Atlas as Saba Simba:



Sure he claims Vince "saved his life" with this gimmick, but at what cost to the proud, black, race of America.

Well played fartz. We may have ourselves a winner!

I guess I just never saw Tony Atlas as a role model or typical of anything other than a stupid juicehead. No more racist than Kamala, which was pretty racist.

My problem with the E in that era was this self delusion they had that no one who watched the E watched anything else. You end up with Harley Race being royalty, Steve Keirn being an alligator hunter, DiBiase being a jillionaire, Dirty White Boy Tony Anthony being a plumber, and Dusty fucking Rhoades being whatever that abortion of a gimmick was. At this truly forgettable Tony Atlas gimmick. "Legally changed his name". Fuck you, Vince. I think it was less about overt racism than it was a lack of creativity and vision. Can you imagine what E Creative would've done with Magnum TA or Nikita Koloff? Or Sting, for that matter? A chimney sweeping Sting. That'd put asses in seats.

I was sitting in a little burger joint with the family not long ago. They had various magazines laying around, so I picked up the E's mag and paged through it. As a company, they laugh at those 80's gimmicks. The one that stands out in my mind was some really heartless shit said about the guy who was a garbageman. I can't remember his name. I was thinking it was such bullshit. You geniuses in Titan Tower cane up with this shit, told some worker to go out and do it, and he busted his ass to make it happen. And 20some years later that same brain trust mocks the guy. I think it's the culture at the E. Throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. I think it was less about Tony Atlas being Black than it was that Tony Atlas fit the costume. The costume sold the merch, and that's what it was (and is) all about.

Sure, there's entrenched racism in wrestling. Watts, Michael Hayes. Just like everywhere else. But that racism can be easily set aside for the sake of selling tshirts and big foam fingers.

Speaking of racism, Truth Killings got a 30 day stay home notice for smoking the fake reefer. And being a Black man in America telling the Truth.

Piper's commentary in the clip is gold. I'm sure he got a little talking to after the show was over.

A little Papa Shango using his Black Magic on the Ultimate Warrior and Mean Gene. Watch for some classic Warrior jibberish at the end.

The trash guy was Dumpster Duke Droese or something like that. My big problem with the WWE in the late 80s and early 90s was their insistence that every world champion weigh at least 280lbs.

I've always like the faster paced cruiserweight style of match. By far my favorite WWE wrestler of this time period was Ricky Steamboat. I would much rather watch matches where wrestlers are actually chaining there moves together fluidly one right after another than watch Hogan or Andre lumber around the ring, do one body slam, stomp around, pose for the crowd, then go into a boring bear hug for five minutes followed by a test of strength for another three minutes. To me it was never a good sign if Mean Gene Okerlund moved around the ring faster than your world champion could pace a match.

They give a 30 day suspension for smoking fake weed, and a $2500 dollar fine for smoking the real stuff.

But no suspension for real weed? Fuckin Vince.

Vince is a bodybuilder at heart and he always is hard for roided up freaks. And if they fit the costume, so much the better. My bigger problem was that Hulk Hogan had to be THE champion through the 80's. Hogan doing the job is bad to watch because Hogan doesn't do the job. His usual MO of getting his ass kicked until hulking up time is one thing. But for him to get cleanly pinned...well, Terry doesn't care for that much. So he makes sure he smells up the place.

But bigger guys can put on good matches. It's a matter of staying limber and knowing your limits. Brody/ Abdullah did great work. Lots of psychology, usually a bloodbath. Good stuff.

Then you have Big Show when he was ECW champion. It was shameful. He could barely move. But look at him now. Personal trainer, decent diet, he's a whole new worker. Not a cruiserweight, but he moves pretty good.

Big Show was at his best back in WCW when he was palling around w/Luger juicing and working out. Dude went from 7' 425 of big to about 450 of really fucking scary. Then I think Nash dropped him on his head and it was down hill until he went on the little retirement from WWE and was doing some boxing training.

He was a pretty young man then, too. And a total monster. He's almost as good now as then. Losing a few steps, but for his age, and the condition he has, he's doing really well. Look at Andre at that age.

Well Show had the pituitary tumor taken out sometime during his WCW run. Unless that tumor was from whatever Lex was feeding him.....

You might be right on that. I know he had/ has the same condition Andre had. I remember when he first started they were saying he would be on crutches by 35. It was experts. Like Meltzer. I don't remember what the thing was Andre had, and I'm too high look it up tonite.

New Jack says Sunny asked him to kill her NJ cop ex

What surprised me in the story, is that New Jack is on Facebook. Someone needs to get in touch and invite him here. As for Tammy's ex, lotsa cops beat their women, its the power trip, same reason they became cops AND lotsa junkie broads date cops, they take the rough stuff because he can bury it when they get pulled over high and drunk and they can threaten small time dealers.

In one of her shoots she said he was the greatest guy in the world. Tammy's had a rough go of it.

New Jack is a horse's ass. He lives his gimmick and I imagine his schtick would get pretty tiresome pretty quick. Death threats and such. I was a total Gangstas mark, tho.

Awesome fucking story from Paul E.

Definitely a good find.

Great story. His young Tommy Rich was spot on and hilarious.

Memphis, in that era, was lightening in a bottle. The audience was ripe for good vs. evil and the storylines were just that basic. The Andy Kauffman run showed that. They loved their faces and hated their heels.

Add to that the almost bigger than life characters. Lots of local, or at least regional talent, that a lot of the fanbase knew personally, or were maybe five or six degrees removed from knowing them personally. This made any "outsider", especially from the northeast, very suspect.

The announce team were less play by play guys that mouthpieces for the fanbase. Russel and Brown did not call it down the middle in any way. Which was great for that emotional of a fanbase,

Add the drugs, marital infidelity, wife swapping, chasing of young girls going and the legitimate heat between various people and you had the perfect storm of tv wrestling.

I was always under the impression that Paul had the best mind in the business when it came to creativity and putting on a compelling card. Guy really knew how to build a feud. Dreamer/Raven is in my and most of the internet community's opinion, the best goddamn feud of all time. There became a part in that fued, where Kayfabe almost had me believing that these guys really fucking hated each other. With the right money guy around to filter him, he could drag any promotion out of the gutter.

TNA came extremely close to handing all creative over to Paul, but they decided against it and offered him a smaller role on the writing/talent side. Paul refused, because he knew he wouldn't jibe with Russo and the like, and wanted all or nothing. Paul stated flat-out that he would eliminate every one on the roster over the age of 40, except for one veteran, that he could realistically build as the exception that proves the rule of young talent putting asses in the seats. Besides the one veteran, he said he would have focused entirely on new fresh guys, get them working the mic better, and put a stronger emphasis on fast-paced X-division style matches that are more the norm in the indies.

I gotta say, however, that as jaded as I am with TNA, the last Impact was exremely entertaining. From Kid Kash and A-double's funny exchange, to the "Roode is a shitty family man" vignette, to "Gunner invades the gym", I was laughing throughout the entire fucking thing. I'd also like to add that Bully Ray and Steiner are a hell of a lot funnier as a duo then they should be allowed.

"I get freaks NINE days out of the week"

Steiner fucks me up, man.

Heyman is a genius for crafting stories. Not only that but being able to let go and let the guys who are really creative do what they do. I came into the ECW on the ep that Franchise announced that Beaulah was cheating with Kimona. That was the beauty of the Dreamer/ Raven feud. Many storylines within the bigger story. That's how you can drag out a feud almost as long as you want to, because it's always fresh.

I have to say I really enjoyed the last TNA too. The Roode family thing was fantastic. You never see stuff like that. And I think there are lots of good directions to take it to. I hope they don't just drop it.

The Gunnar gym thing went a long way to getting him over as a monster. Everyone was reasonable with him and he was just raging, throwing all these guys around. Pretty stiffly too. I'm liking this Gunnar/ Garrett thing. If done right, they're both going to get a lot of seasoning and they're both going to get way over.

I'm weirded out by AA's facial hair. But during his confrontation with Kid Kash, it hit me that I'm supposed to be weirded out by it. It's those subtle little details that help get a guy heat. I was never a KK fan when he was in ECW, but he was mostly enhancement talent. But getting him in front of a mic, he's really good. He's got that Arn Anderson interview style. Not loud, just matter of fact. It makes it much more believable. He reminds me a lot of the Grappler, Len Denton. He was always kind of an Assassin fat guy. Then one day he just showed up all muscled up. Not the bodybuilder kind, but the just big guy look. Like how Kash has gone from scrawny to pretty beefed up. It makes him more believable as a tough guy. Should be a great run.

Bully seems to be going back a little to the old Buh Buh character. Not full on idiot, but more humor than badass. He's really good when he does comedy. I hate Steiner, but he was really good. It was a good piece. They were riffing off each other nicely.

Sadly, I'm sure it'll be business as usual Thursday.

As an aside, am I the only one who thinks Tessmacher has an awesome ass?