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Submitted by Degenerate on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 at 6:18 PM EST
 How do you do? Welcome once again, all IWC members and even the non-IWC ones, to this humble column that still find pre-pubescent jokes about numbers funny as hell. This is Struggle For Power, with your host Degenerate, bringing you one more column before the year ends and the new year begins. Well, it'll just be the same, with a changed digit at the end. But to those who believe in the new year bringing new life and all that stuff, may the year 2008 be awesome for you all. I have a funny anecdote concerning this column. The spiffy logo I have above (once again, a shout-out to aisce and KrazE from LOPForums.com for creating it) is stored in one of my servers. As such, every time someone accesses my columns, my server logs the information. Part of that information is what's called the referrer page, which is the URL of the site the person was previously visiting before landing in my column page (and loading the picture from my server). I was browsing my logs today searching for some info I needed. I was surprised to see some of the referrers there and their Google Images search queries: * free porn * free porn images * free porn internet * show me all freeporn sites * Todd Pettengill married Interestingly (and probably disturbing) enough, these search queries showed the logo of my column. No, I don't have search-engine optimization hidden in these pages geared to getting horny little teens (and, let's face it, older men too) to land here. It's because a previous column I wrote was called "The Internet Didn't Always Have Free Porn". Although I swear I have no idea why the 'Todd Pettengill' query landed in my column. In fact, I have no earthly idea why someone was searching for 'Todd Pettengill married' in the first place. Creepy, to say the least. My lesson in this experiment? All you Main Pagers who wants a few hundred (or thousand) more views to your column, feel free to throw in the word 'porn' in your column. Consider it my Christmas gift from me to you. That, and the fact that I find this very funny. Enough about my experiments, now it's time to get into the wrestling! * Armageddon marked the end of the WWE Pay-Per-View events this year. I was able to watch the event. It was pretty good to me. I'm psyched that Edge is World Heavyweight Champion once more. He's now a 4-time world champion, but the circumstances of him losing two of the other three times are just unfortunate (once by injury, the other to try to get people to stop booing John Cena). I hope he gets a decent title run this time, and that he doesn't get injured. Also, I'm totally relieved Chris Jericho didn't get a win over Randy Orton. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy Jericho is back, but I don't think anyone should get a world title run after being back less than a month from a long hiatus. That should be reserved for Triple H, exclusively. * Speaking of Jericho, it seems that he'll be thrust into a feud with a returning JBL for the time being. This is interesting. I always felt that JBL didn't want to leave the ring full-time. A lot of other professional athletes (Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Floyd Mayweather, etc.) who retire get that itch to return. I'm sure this happened to JBL as well. Now that he's had more-than-adequate time to heal from injuries, it's a good time to come back, especially with Wrestlemania around the corner. Should be interesting to see who will come out winning that feud between two wrestlers who are back from a lot of time off. * TNA must be seriously pissed at the fact that their television script for their first show of 2008 was leaked into the Internet in its entirety. I have to admit, I was curious enough to view it, and it just has everything that was going to happen - including the upcoming feuds that are started and the entire card for their next Pay-Per-View. If I were the writers, I would be totally stressing. I doubt they'll leave the script as it is right now, and will make a lot of changes. Now who's the mole... I'm guessing Vince Russo. But that's because everyone else blames him for anything that goes wrong. Finally, I want to comment a few things about last week's Raw 15th Anniversary special by itself: * I don't know about you guys, but Sunny was freakin' hot! I honestly thought that Sunny would never even remotely look like her WWE days again. If you had seen pictures of her from about four or five years, you know what I mean. She looked good, and she looked like she was having a lot of fun. I sincerely hope she has defeated all of her demons from the past and the WWE gave her another chance. A woman with vast wrestling experience under her belt certainly isn't a bad thing in the current WWE Diva crop. * This show made me realize how much I missed Trish Stratus. She looked as gorgeous as she usually did in her WWE days, and above all she looked happy. I was watching a video on the 'Net the other day from her debut. Who knew that girl would end up being one of the most important women of all time in the WWE? I remember watching her debut on the day it aired on Sunday Night Heat, and I certainly didn't. Although I miss the hell out of her on TV, I hope her personal life is better than ever and that she's enjoying the fruits of her labor. * While I'm always happy when someone just punks out The Great Khali on TV, I felt that Hulk Hogan's appearance in the show was made for all the wrong reasons. Yeah, he had the pop and all, but to me his 'thank you' speech felt totally scripted, and he was only there to shill the new American Gladiators show. Then again, maybe he was sincere and my 'inner smark' popped up and just made my brain think he's the evilest man in professional wrestling history. * But wait, there were matches too! There was a nice ladder match, but it seemed that either Carlito and Jeff Hardy don't mesh well, or one of the two was half-assing the match, because it didn't come off well, in my eyes. The Old-Timer Battle Royal was fun, and Ted DiBiase 'winning' the match was a mark-out moment for me. * The show was pretty well-executed, in my eyes. It's not easy having a three-hour special on free TV, much less a momentous one as a 15th anniversary celebration, so kudos to the entire WWE staff for making it happen. It's really a feel-good moment for us wrestling fans, and I hope you all felt the same way about the show too. I want to start this column with a bit of biographical facts about the person I'm going to write in this column, who currently resides in San Antonio. Texas. By the age of 12, he wanted to become a professional wrestler. Training under the guidance of Jose Lothario... Nah, just kidding. I've written way too much about Shawn Michaels recently, and I know a lot of people are starting to question how much I like him. Still, this column will be written about someone near and dear to me. This weekend I was over at my mom's house after a hellish day of Christmas shopping, bored out of my mind. Since I usually record TNA Impact from Thursday nights, I decided this was the best time I had to watch the show that day. So I fired up my DVR and started watching the show. It was just slightly good. If I can sum the show up in one word, it would be "meh", if such a word exists. I mean, it wasn't horrible or anything, but it's just retarded at some points. The fact that A.J. Styles and Samoa Joe are nowhere to be found in the top of the card should more than explain the 'retarded' reasoning/ Anyway, my brother happened to stop on by while I was mid-show, and he irritatingly started to tell me what happened towards the end. He knows I hate when he does it (which is why he proceeds to do it every chance he gets), and I almost killed him right there. But I digress. The whole point is that I noticed this passion emanating from my brother when he started asking me what I thought about the stuff I had seen, like the Women's Division and Christian Cage looking for a partner, among other things. So it just begged the question "Why are you so excited by this show?" His answer? "TNA's the shit." Guess who got the brains of the family. I immediately asked him if he was on drugs. After making sure he wasn't full of narcotics, I asked him why did he like TNA so much, he simply said "I'm tired of the WWE. I don't watch it anymore. TNA's a thousand times better." Oh Lord... My brother's gone fucking crazy. Time to sic Lance Storm on his ass. I think my shock was completely visible when my brother asked me "Why have you been staring at me with your mouth open for a minute?". I snapped out of it, just ignored his comment and brought another subject to the table to forget about this. But my brother's words were haunting, to say the least. I have never met anyone who loves TNA more than either WWE or any other wrestling promotion, like Ring Of Honor or Japanese ones. Hell, I haven't seen anyone on the Internet who has said this. And this is the place where Lolcats and videos of people lip-syncing to "Numa Numa" are cultural icons. So I tried to take a while and try to analyze what my brother sees in TNA. I've been watching TNA on and off for the past two years, roughly the same time my brother has been as well. I've always been a WWE guy, watching for more than 20 years. But I know enough about TNA's short history, thanks to the Internet and some of their DVD's (their most-recent DVD about the history of the first year of TNA's existence isn't bad at all, you people should try to see it if you get a chance). So I think I can form an honest and unbiased opinion on this manner. The first pro for TNA is the fact that they seem to know their strengths and their competitors weaknesses (i.e. WWE), so they try to exploit that to their advantage. The entire rage of TNA before it became "mainstream" (as in having a television deal in a nationally-known station like Spike TV) was their X-Division. My curiosity about TNA started years ago, when the Internet was buzzing about this division. I downloaded some matches from 2002 and 2003, and was pretty impressed. True, some were just spotfests, but in a world where exciting action draws short attention spans, this seemed like just the thing to do. After the X-Division, TNA did the same with their other divisions. The WWE's Tag Team Division has been dormant most of the past few years. So TNA filled this void on their own, creating some of the most memorable tag teams and excellent matches to go along with it. Most recently, TNA formed a Women's Division, and they have assembled a pretty good roster, with women who apparently have been trained to be wrestlers first and eye-candy a distant second. Well, except Awesome Kong, but she's just, well, awesome. That brings me to my second point in favor of TNA: their talent pool. There are some wrestlers who just blow me away, especially taking into consideration that many of them are in their twenties and have just a few years of experience under their belt. It's scary to think that most of them haven't even reached their prime yet. A.J. Styles is rapidly becoming one of my favorite wrestlers of all time. Samoa Joe has proved he can hang with the best of them. Many X-Division stars (Jay Lethal, Petey Williams, Christopher Daniels, to name a few) have given excellent matches and show signs that they can mix it up with the heavyweights at any time. There's just a good mix right now of guys who can put on an exciting show. Except Shark Boy. I hate him. Please don't send the flames my way for this comment, it's just my opinion. Finally, my last point is that they have shown growth all over the board, which I thought was impossible in a WWE-dominated atmosphere in U.S. professional wrestling. They went from doing weekly Pay-Per-View shows to getting a TV deal with Fox Sports, to getting a better deal with Spike TV, then expanding their show to two hours. I've read that their Pay-Per-Views do decent numbers. Nothing close to WWE numbers, but still good to survive. Their talent pool has also expanded from a handful of WWE rejects that Vince McMahon didn't want even if they wrestled for free to big-name wrestlers who the WWE wishes they never lost. But to me, that's where the pros start. And all of them bring their own cons in the mix. Take for instance the non-heavyweight divisions for example. The X-Division and its matches, once the selling point for TNA, are now just an after-thought. Excellent X-Division matches are few and far in between nowadays. Same with the Tag Team Division. Last year, teams like LAX and A.J. Styles & Christopher Daniels were having 4+-star matches in every Pay-Per-View. Now, I sometimes forget who are the Tag Team Champions, even though A.J. Styles is one half of the champs. Having your favorite wrestler champion and forgetting about it is a bad sign. I fear the same thing will happen to the Women's Division in one or two years. While I hope not, history shows that it's likely to happen. The next is the talent pool. I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago that the talent pool is just awesome. But unfortunately, the excellent part of the talent pool is currently mostly being misused. The entire X-Division (sans Shark Boy) are rarely shown on TV. Worse yet, the excellent home-grown talent, like Styles, Joe, Abyss and Robert Roode are pushed aside for former WWE wrestlers. True, these wrestlers bring in more fans thanks to the recognition they got while wrestling for the other company. But I think if TNA drops from the face of the Earth in the future and closes down, it'll be mostly due to the fact that their own in-bred talent are being overlooked. Having some guys like Booker T and Christian Cage come in and pass by others who have busted their asses for years seems totally wrong. Plus, add the fact that the storylines are some of the most retarded out there at the moment. They range from the boring () to the cliché (Robert Roode treating his valet, Ms. Brooks, like dirt and refusing to let her get away from him? The 80's called - it's Macho Man, and he wants his storyline back), to ever-changing (James Storm appears only one time every month to keep his going-nowhere "I'm being screwed!" storyline alive), to the, ahem, retarded (Kurt Angle acting like a doofus? A.J. Styles being Christian's bitch? Shark Boy being on TV? Okay, that last one was biased, I apologize). Thanks to some freedom in their contracts, most of these storylines are inconsistent, thanks to wrestlers appearing once every two, three, even four weeks. And there's nothing new right now going on. It's like Wrestling 101 every week. Finally, the growth part. Yes, there's apparent growth, as I mentioned with the TV deals and such. But there are two factors that don't show that growth at: the ratings haven't gone up, and they're still having shows at Universal Studios. For all the expansion of show length TNA has done, and all the recognized names they've acquired, the ratings have remained constant for the past year, probably more. That certainly doesn't favor the company when making deals with advertisers. Also, while they leave the comfort of Orlando from time to time, TNA needs to start having more shows elsewhere. Keeping the show in one place will keep on making them look small-time. So yeah, TNA has some good things going to it. But to me, the cons outweigh everything. I keep on watching the show, probably in hopes of seeing something new and/or exciting, secretly praying that A.J. Styles finally breaks out on his own (yeah yeah, I mentioned Styles a billion times already, but it's my column, I do what I want), or seeing someone other than Angle / Christian or Booker get a chance to be at the top. Until then I'll have to give my brother some electrical shocks in the head, hoping he'll lose enough neurons to remove the word 'the' from his vocabulary. After that, anytime he wants to say "TNA's the shit", he'll be saying my exact same thought about Total Nonstop Action. As you might have noticed, I really like WWE-produced DVD's a lot. So it should be no surprise that this weekend I purchased The Triumph and Tragedies of World Class Championship Wrestling DVD. For those who don't know, WCCW was a small wrestling promotion from the Texas-based territory that started in 1966 (not to be confused with the even more unknown World Class Canadian Wrestling that started a few months ago). Outside of Texas, this territory is best known for brining the Von Erich family into the world of professional wrestling. This DVD shows the story behind the beginning of the promotion, its rise as a wrestling powerhouse (although still not as famous as, say, the AWA or the WWF), and how it all went horribly wrong in the end. Well, it didn't go horribly wrong in the end. Basically the death of virtually all the Von Erich sons (except one) and some other incidents just drew less and less fans, eventually leading to being canceled on TV and just dying out. While my main exposure about the Von Erichs was solely due to Kerry Von Erich's appearances in the WWE in the early '90s (former Intercontinental Champion known as the Texas Tornado), I had heard about the Von Erich family before, and somewhat knew about the deaths of the other family members. But this DVD is pretty much an eye-opener as to what happened to them. Out of five brothers, one died due to supposed 'intestinal rupture' (although Ric Flair pointed out in his biography it was due to a drug overdose), and three others committed suicide. The oldest of the four brothers who are dead was Kerry, who was just 33 years old when he offed himself. So to say their deaths were premature is an understatement. The only surviving Von Erich son, Kevin, appears through the entire documentary, and it really just made me sad to imagine how he felt (or probably still feels) about all of these early deaths, and being all alone after growing up with four others. My heart truly goes out to him. I have a major gripe, in that about 80% of the documentary talks about only the Von Erichs and the Fabulous Freebirds. While this is what put WCCW on the map, from what I saw, they greatly neglected the fact that WCCW was one of the hotbeds of wrestling in the territorial days. Guys like Shawn Michaels, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Rick Rude, Jake Roberts and Mick Foley wrestled here before hitting it big elsewhere, yet they're rarely mentioned in the documentary, some not even mentioned at all. Why they didn't include this, I have no idea. Most likely it was done to allow the viewer to keep their focus on the less-known wrestlers and feuds in WCCW rather than those who did nothing for that territory at the time. In any case, this DVD is, as most other WWE documentaries, really well-done all around. A great story on a oft-neglected organization that should be included when talking about wrestling history from the '80s. Well, here are some of my last picks from the Columns Forum for this year. As always, they're some good reads, so make sure to stop on by. The Lost Files--#499: Kay Fabian By SUPERFAN! Ahh, the lost art of people staying in character in their line of work. Remember those days? I don't. I feels like it's been too long. The recently-disappeared SUPERFAN! dropped by to leave this little gem, showing the importance of staying in character in wrestling, or 'kayfabe', as all the cool kids call it. Hardtime #103: King David Vs. Goliath By RIPbossman How many times have you rooted for someone who's scratching and clawing their way to the top, only to stop caring when they actually do reach the top? This is what RIPbossman brings to the table with this outing. What happens to us when a wrestler is champion? Read and draw your own conclusions. Also, any column that has Little Mac from Mike Tyson's Punch Out fame automatically gets props from me. Rome's 2007 CF Awards By romans_3:23 This isn't a wrestling column per se, but CF resident romans took the time to write about the best (and even worst) columns and columnists of the year down in the Columns Forum. While I try my best to plug the great columns and columnists every chance that I get here on the Main Page, there's a lot of ground I can't possibly cover every time. So this is an excellent way to read up on the awesome work the fine fellas in the forums have been doing. As always, feedback can be directed in one of two ways: via E-Mail (dennmart@gmail.com) or my feedback thread. E-Mail is preferred this time around, as the forums will be closing down for remodeling (or something) during this weekend. I appreciate your support and all the messages I receive, so feel free to keep on sending them in. I'll make sure to get back to you. Thanks for reading, guys. Not only this column, but the rest of my columns I've written in the past. These past months have been a blast, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to be able to write for a much larger audience. 2008 will be my first full year in LordsOfPain.net, so here's to hoping everything goes well and I'll be writing for you all before the end of 2009. See y'all next year, Degenerate ***DIRECT LINK*** Over 14 Total HIGH QUALITY Maria 2008 PB Photos! MUST SEE!
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