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Submitted by Randomguy#5 on Wednesday, August 9, 2006 at 9:32 PM EST
Welcome back everybody to the column that’s more anti-climactic than the Smackdown SummerSlam Main Event announcement, The Nosebleed Section. I am the worst publicist ever Randomguy#5 and I still cannot believe that the main event match between Batista and Booker T for the World Title was announced on WWE.com in nothing more than a few misplaced sentences from Teddy Long. That’s poor. I’m sorry to all of my faithfull listeners of Monday Night Countdown that we were unable to get a show up for you guys. Actually, it’s entirely Morpheus’ fault ;) No, all kidding aside it did us good to take a week off and the show will be back this weekend. We’ve made the decsion that the show will now be recorded almost exclusively on Friday night or Saturday afternoon barring one of our real lives getting in the way of that, and thus the show will be made available for download sometime Sunday afternoon or evening. Sunday isn’t exactly a huge day in the world of professional wrestling (sans PPV weeks) but it should put the show up more than early enough for everybody to enjoy it prior to Raw on Monday night, maybe even as part of your commute to work on Monday morning, which is when I know many of you like to utilize our show. Rest assured when we come back at you this weekend we’ll be doing so with a few new additions, a slightly longer show, and a brand new ‘homepage’. Of course the real home of Monday Night Countdown will always be here on Lordsofpain.net but I’ve just put a little something together in the Podcast section of The Project that will house some Raw reviews, download statistics, voting options, email links, archives, and all sorts of other fun stuff. That’s next week however, and we have a column to do between now and then so here’s hoping this will appease your wrestling needs until this Sunday. --I love and hope will never leave me: My girlfriend, Albert Pujols, Gail Kim, Edge, Christy Hemme, The Undertaker, Melina, Boss Foxx, Triple H, Paul Heyman, Samoa Joe, friends, family, Mick Foley and Torrie Wilson. the ability to become erect, the Internet, and The Project. --I miss: Chris Jericho, Brock Lesnar, ECW Fans, my little brother, Eddie Guerrero, Roomate Shropy, Pudge, -- I don’t: Bob Holly, Eric Bischoff, boy bands, The Zombie, Stephanie McMahon, Stone Cold, YourAyatollah, Katie Vick, “TICK TOCK”, Velocity, playing football, Chyna, Scott Hall, X-Pac, hair metal. --I wish I missed but can’t because they suck and just won’t go away: The Great Kahli, Rene Dupree, Hulk Hogan, [x] on a pole match, Lumberjack matches, The Diva Search, Telethons, R&B, Don West, Mike Tenay, my roommate’s girlfriend, Spongebob, Wal-Mart, classes, The McMahons. I’ve been bombarded by emails lately and for that I can’t thank you guys enough. I really do read every one of them and trust me when I say that I’m doing everything in my power to reply to every one as well. If I don’t however don’t take it personal-I just haven’t had time. Sad as it may seem I know, I have a life outside wrestling columns on the internet. Shame. The reason I mention this is because there have been a few things that have come up in the majority of the emails lately. Everybody wants to discuss Umaga, (why?) Jeff Hardy, DX, and John Cena. To a lesser degree ECW is still a popular topic as well, as is Kane who continues to intrigue the entire internet. I find this topics funny because it wasn’t until I say down to reply to a bunch of emails, some of them a month or more old, that I was starting to feel like a broken record every time I gave my opinion to any of these topics. Quite simply, I think all these characters/performers/storylines can be as good as the WWE wants them to be. I’m quickly coming to the conclusion as a consciousness observer of professional wrestling that the true power to produce entertaining television has little or nothing to do with the wrestlers themselves. Remember a few years ago when Vince fought Hogan at ‘Mania in the infamous “Who really created Hulkamania” feud? Well given some recent events, I’m inclined to agree with Vince. Now before this gets too far out of hand I start getting lambasted by hate mail from every Bret Hart mark on the Internet, let me clarify something. Professional wrestling has and always will centered around in-ring action. Without it, then wrestling really is a “male soap opera” as so many people like to say, myself included. But in today’s market a performer can have all the technical wrestling prowess in the world, and none of it means shit if the crowd left for the bathroom when his music hit. See for example, the infamous “Charlie Haas Pop”. On an unrelated note, I was at the show in St. Louis the night Haas made his in-ring return on Raw to face off against Shelton Benjamin. Nobody cared. At all. Same thing goes for all other forms of in ring wrestling. Matt wrestling doesn’t draw on its own, though I do believe it makes a tremendous edition to a match as an escalator, and every great PPV needs at least one wrestling clinic. High flying, high spot wrestling on its own can be fun to watch for a minute though it too needs more to be effective, just ask TNA. Why do you think they’ve abandoned the X-Division as their focus in favor of Steiner/Nash/Sting/Jarrett? Is it because Jarrett’s still holding some level of influence backstage (regardless of the fact that he doesn’t own the place anymore like he once did) or is it because there is significant drama in the Sting/Jarrett feud? The X-D had its shot with Joe, Styles, and Daniels, it drew .9-1.2 range, and now they’re trying something else to see if it can do any better. (The answer is ‘No’ by the way). I suppose one could make the argument that brawling styles draw well, particularly when mixed with a heavy dose of blood and train wreck level carnage. Still though, if those things drew massive numbers on their own we wouldn’t be watching wwECW, we’d be watching ECRaw. When contemplating all the different performance styles of in-ring action that the WWE has to offer, it is quite clear balance between them all is more important than mastering any one style. A program can offer six matches, all of which could be five-star matches the caliber of which have never been seen, but if they all look the same, it doesn’t matter, the show will suck. Now if you give me a card with a 2 out of 3 falls wrestling classic, an Ultimate X or TLC match, a Tag Team Title match, and a Japanese death match, well then now you’ve got yourself a card. What would be at the top of that PPV card though? Simple-its almost always the match that has the most drama surrounding it and drama isn’t built entirely in the ring. Now-it can be sure. There are countless “if/then” conditional statements that go into what makes up a great wrestling match or card, and contrary to what I may have written about thus far, that’s not what this column is about. I recognize that great storytellers are imperative to a wrestling promotion, and certain guys really could wrestle a broom handle and have you on the edge of your seat thinking maybe the broom handle could pull out the win. Shit, you might even root for it. In-ring storytelling is the single most important component of a good match. Wrestling isn’t legit completion however. Raw isn’t just a series of matches, SummerSlam and Wrestlemania aren’t just the culmination of storylines, as storylines themselves are more than just a series of booking instances. Great stories require great characters and while actions may speak louder than words in the real world, in the realm of sports-entertainment actions are just the entertaining filler between storyline advancement. In a world where everybody is a supposed badass, where intensity is now cliché, and where men get up and walk away from sledgehammer’s to the head, we need more than these empty actions to make us care about a character. Why do you think TNA’s Eric Young has found so much success of late? He’s not a badass. He shows fear, humility, a sense of humor, and youthful goofiness. That’s refreshing in an organization in which Abyss, Monty Brown, Rhino, Samoa Joe, Kevin Nash, and even Jeff Jarrett are all badasses who won’t take crap off of anybody. I don’t mean to lump those characters together in anyway, because with the exception of maybe the first three I think they are all quite different. But its easy to predict what would happen with them if we believe them isn’t it? Suppose you walk up to any one of those men while standing in line at Taco Bell for a chili-cheese burrito and say “Hey [x] your mother is a cum-guzzling whore!” What happens? You get the shit kicked out of you, probably having a half-dozen sauce packets shoved up your ass, each with its own cute little saying on it. And if you do that to Eric Young? He’d probably look at you scared and say “Please don’t fire me”. That’s humorous and you’d laugh. So he’d do a little two finger dance, wave a sign around, and you’d laugh some more. Then, while you were laughing, he’d pull your shorts down around your ankles, punch you in the face and shove a half-dozen sauce packets up your ass. And if you were observing that instance from the back with a quesadilla hanging out your mouth, you’d have learned twice as much about Eric Young’s character and you’d actually care about him. And who made the decision for Eric to say those things? Did he come up with it himself? Maybe. Maybe he liked the idea so he said it once on camera and then the next week Scott Damore (head of booking/creative for TNA last I heard) says “Hey that was great last week, next week let’s try [x]”. Regardless of who’s idea the lines and segments are, TNA creative are still the ones giving him the mic time every week, rather than saying “Go lose to Lance Hoyt in 90 seconds”. Those in the back-the guys in the gorilla positions, the guys holding the pencils in one hand and the script in the other, the monkey’s in the truck-those guys have more control over what we find entertaining than anybody else, more than any wrestler you’ll ever watch. Booking is formulaic. You can take any wrestler who’s capable and turn him into at least a midlevel midcarder with very little effort on behalf of the wrestler. Now of course the wrestler still has to be able to execute, and that’s what makes the difference between a quality segment and a megastar. The wrestling landscape nowadays is filled with quality performers who can be average every night and phenomenal with the right storyline. It is however extremely devoid of entertaining characters and storylines. I’ve never been a professional wrestler, so maybe they have immensely more control over their own character’s words and actions than what I realize, but I don’t think I’m wrong on this. You think Cena’s the one who decided to quit rapping? You think he’s the one who said “cool it with the making heels cry” bit? No-of course not. He probably has some pull-but the ultimate decision I doubt very strongly is his. Wrestling has always been about hype. It’s the reason the WWE is the most dominant company right now. Their matches on any given night are likely not as high quality as that of TNA (particularly when looking at TNA PPV as opposed to Impact). Both of them may pale in comparison to matches held in ROH, CZW, New-Japan, or any other promotion. Doesn’t matter. The WWE can give us Icon vs. Icon in The Rock vs. Hogan, they can give us Stone Cold Steve Austin when in reality anybody throwing beer around, shouting off “3:16” and the like would have likely been cheered at that point. Admittedly “Venis 3:16 says I just whooped your ass!” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it and “Can you smell what The Stevie Richards is cooking!?” comes off as just plain stupid. So, yes of course the performer plays a huge role in wrestling’s success. But at the end of the day, Jeff Hardy is going to role in to the WWE dropping the same moves he’s always done. He’ll still do the Swanton, he’ll still do that “Whisper in the Wind” run up and flip off the turnbuckle thing, he’ll still do his variation of the Twist of Fate. This will be all the same things that people got tired of before, particularly if he does them while dripping in highlighter-juice again. Yet, people are going to mark hard for this, myself included. We’ll see some hype videos of all of his suicidal stunts, set to some clichéd yet awesome music. Maybe he’ll drop the queer glow paint and come out with a different attire which we’ll say is “so much cooler than that retarded shit he was wearing” and he’ll die his hair black instead of limegreen or indigo or some other ‘eccentric’ color. He’ll drop some witty catchphrase about living for the moment or being extreme, he’ll get some new music and maybe even a little pyro that makes him look like a badass. He’ll embarrasses a bottom of the card heel (probably Matt Stryker) with his newly written one-liners and he’ll pull off a miracle win over a top level heel (probably Edge) and he’ll nearly kill himself with some crazy move from an obscene height through a concrete platform or something. All of these things will fuse together and with the excitement over seeing something/somebody we haven’t seen in a while, and it will result in a deafening pop that will eventually drown out the 13 year old girls screaming every time his scrawny emo-ass rips off his tattered T-shirt. He’ll become a big time draw for the company, maybe main event a PPV or two before being robbed of his title shot and relegated to the midcard where he’ll enjoy a nice run as Intercontinental champion before burning out and being released again. And he’ll do it all with the same goofy/creepy dance ring entrance, the same three or four moves, the same punches, the same kicks, and the same physical skills he’s been using for years. Will it all go like that? Maybe, maybe not. But it could. It could go exactly like that. Don’t get me wrong, I like Jeff Hardy, and I’m looking forward to the scenario planning out exactly like I just said it would. Yet it has become crystal clear to me that the person making the decision over whether or not Jeff Hardy is a success is certainly not Jeff Hardy. It’s the same people who have taken Jamal, fired him, hired him, turned him into Umaga and made his thumb the most devastating digit in the history of the squared circle. Go back and look at the formula again, its there. It’s relatively the same formula that made Mark Henry a main event player, it’s the same reason that on any given moment Kane could be turned into the most devastating force on Raw. [catalyst moment] + [time away from TV] + [hype video] + [dramatic entrance with music and pyro] + [great one liner or ‘voice’ to use] =creditable contender. Still don’t believe me? Ask Edge. All of this brings me back to the emails I’ve started with today. “Do you think Umaga will be a main event heel?” “What do you think Jeff Hardy’s return will be like?” “Will John Cena ever not-suck again?” I don’t know guys. I think all of those things could go either way. All I know is that whether they all reach astronomical success, or if they all suck and make you change the channel collectively causing the collapse of the wrestling industry, has very little to do with the wrestlers themselves. It’s a team of people depending on the company I’d imagine. It’s Scott D’Amore, Paul Heyman, Mike Tenay, Stephanie McMahon, Jeff Jarrett, Paul Levesque, Kevin Dunn, Dutch Mantel and Vince McMahon. They hold the keys to wrestling’s success and wrestling’s failures, the answers to the questions “Is wrestling in an upswing? Will I enjoy Raw tonight? Is the industry dying? Will Jeff Hardy suck?” It’s sad really and it pains me to admit it but with the exceptions of very few and in spite of their brilliant contributions to the process the wrestlers themselves are but cogs in the machine. Sanctimonious Son of a Bitch The following is a Pubic Service Announcement brought to you by lopforums.com. To all potential participants of the PWA or any other E-Fed: find something to debut with that looks like you at least tried to be original. It sucks something fierce when “heel” comes into an E-fed saying “I’m going to be the most dominant force this industry has ever seen” or “you all better make way because This Schmuck is about to take the PWA by storm.” Likewise it is equally as nauseating when a “baby face” joins with the debut gimmick of “I’m just here to work hard and earn people’s respect.” Lame. Pick something. I don’t care if you’re a used car salesmen, claustrophobic, a pedophile, gay, strait, pissed cause your black, pissed cause your white, or any other gimmick. But damnit kids do something! Show humility out of character, listen to what people tell you, don’t type in “OMFG STFU NT SPEEK,” and be creative and we won’t hate you. Don’t do those things, and you’ll continue to bring the suck like a door to door vacuum salesmen. Thank you. Cannon Fodder Poor, poor DX. You fell victim to the old “Divide and conquer” trick-the oldest trick in the “heel authority figure” book. Don’t worry, you’ve got one more week of asskickings coming your way before you get the “miracle” win at SummerSlam. Cheesy Thumbs Up This whole Vampire gimmick that the former Mordaci is running is the shit. I seriously dug that entire bit with Kevin Thorn and Aerial last night. She’s got the creepy hot chick thing down cold, and Kevin seemed to play off of it very, very well. His moves seemed natural, nothing seemed too labored, and with any luck it will appease some Sci-Fi geeks long enough to forgive us wrestling nerds for taking up precious time that could be spent on reality shows like “Who Wants to be a Superhero?” or movies about giant ants. I hope I didn’t rub anybody the wrong way with today’s column It’s not that I don’t think the world of professional wrestlers because I do-I consider them performance artists on par in their craft with that of Broadway actors and stage musicians. Without them, nothing gets done in wrestling. By that same token its not as if the really great stars don’t deserve some credit for what they do. Obviously the examples I gave mocking The Rock and Stone Cold were a bit extreme, but I was trying to make a point. Those in charge are really the ones responsible for the state of wrestling, both good and bad, and if somebody more ‘in the know’ about the wrestling business than I am feel free to enlighten me on such things. (Please actually know something-don’t just read a different website than this one and think you know more than I do-athankya). Thus concludes another edition of ‘Bleeder and I trust you weren’t any more disappointed than you would be if you’d just read an edition of “Enter the Dream Realm”. As always I’d appreciate your feedback on this column and encourage you to check out some of the links I’m dropping below, maybe you’ll find something there that interests you. If not-then be sure to stop bye this Sunday for a brand new Monday Night Countdown and next week (hopefully) for a brand spanking new ‘Bleeder. Until then, thanks oh so much for visiting The Nosebleed Section-but next time, get better seats. Lop columns Forum Click here to Email Randomguy#5!  Visit TheProjectLives.com and check out some great creative writing, social commentary, music downloads and pod casting including some familiar names you may recognize from Lop. Do some writing yourself? Jump in and give it a shot! Know somebody else who’d be better? Spread the word!  Free internet radio station ran by yours truly featuring all the best in hard rock and mainstream metal. If it seems like anything you’d be interested in listening to, give it a spin while you’re reading through some columns on Lop or The Project.  8.1.06 Hi-Fi Edition 8.1.06 Low-Fi Edition --Hi-Fi Editions are slightly larger files and take longer to download but are better audio quality. Low-Fi are more dial-up user friendly.
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