|
|
|
|
|
Submitted by Degenerate on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 12:45 PM EST 
 Hey everyone, and thanks for clicking on the only column with the balls to write the sub-title COMPLETELY IN CAPS, which will undoubtedly spawn tons of copycats all over the 'Net. I'm the Caps-Lock lovin' fool, Degenerate, here one more time on this rainy day in the North-East. Whenever I think Spring is here in full effect, days like these come around, dropping temperatures to the 40's once again. But it's cool, because it's good enough weather to inspire me to write a nice little column. In fact, I believe I started writing columns over at LOPForums.com on a day like this, when it was rainy and I couldn't do much outside. It's been almost three years, and I still love doing this. But you know what I would love a bit more? If you started writing yourself. When I was given this spot, I wanted to be an ambassador or sorts, and bring all the attention I could give to the forums, and the Columns Forum in particular. It's really a fun place to be, and you'll find that it's fun writing things that others can read and comment on. So if you have the chance, whether it's a rainy day or not, head on over, read a few columns, leave feedback, and even write your own. Hopefully I'll see new faces in the near future. Shilling's over, now it's time to get into the real reason you clicked on this link. * 12 and counting... Anyone dare to wager how many more championship reigns Triple H will have before it's all said and done? I have to admit that this was probably a long time coming, since his last meaningful championship run (not counting his two-hour reign at No Mercy this past October) was back in 2005, when he lost to Batista at Wrestlemania 21 - about three years ago. But if you add up all those 12 reigns together (878 days, as of today - April 29, 2008), he's way behind a lot of part WWE wrestlers with much less reigns: Bruno Sammartino (4040 days, 2 reigns), Hulk Hogan (2185 days, 6 reigns), Bob Backlund (2138 days, 2 reigns) and Pedro Morales (1027 days, 1 reign). I'm sure Ric Flair has much more than 878 days too. So which is best: quantity of reigns, or how long the reigns lasted? It'll be an eternal question, I guess. * After years of no one giving a damn about him, Michael Hayes is making the news recently, with his current 60-day suspension due to a drunken tirade towards Mark Henry. The word is that Hayes said he was "more of a nigger" than Henry, which caused Henry to report this incident and have Hays suspended. Now if that weren't funny enough, now everyone inside the wrestling business is coming out with these stories of how Hayes has done these things in the past. As always, my question is, why the fuck didn't you people come out with this before? I think someone said about these stories that while some are true, many will be fabricated just to further cement Hayes' reputation as a racist. See kids, that's what alcohol does to ya. So if you drink, make sure you're not within reach of a 400-pound beast who can easily get hurt and snitch on you. * Another man making the rounds recently is The Warrior (or Ultimate Warrior, if you don't get sued by copyright infringement). I have to say, this man is just a treat to listen to. He has so much garbage to spew that it's like going to a NASCAR event waiting for a car crash to happen. It's like you don't want him to open his mouth, but you can't help but listen. Among the stuff he said: He wants to make a "special Wrestlemania moment" by facing Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania 25, moking Hulk Hogan for not having hair while he still does, and saying that Jake "The Snake" Roberts should "be dead because the world would be a better place". But, my favorite is to take this quote and take it completely out of context: "Warrior said the majority of guys who have died are people he's personally worked with." When I first read that, I thought "Is he saying they're dead because he worked with them? I knew it!" * Oxymoron of the century: The Great Khali Wrestling School. Yep, that's right. Khali wants to open a wrestling school back in his home country of India. While I joke about this, I think Khali should be commended by wanting to give back to his country in any way he can. Apparently the guy's a star in India, so it's nice to see him wanting to do something that could probably be constructive for kids futures. All I hope is that he only opens the school and runs it, but not actually train. Then it'll have to be called The Great Khali Slaughter House, with the motto "It's neck-breakin' fun!" Okay, that was as tasteless as I could get here with this. It was only a joke. Don't shoot me, nor break my neck. * I wanted to talk about the King Of The Ring tournament this week, but I couldn't find myself to do so. After two hot opening round matches with Chris Jericho against MVP, and C.M. Punk against Matt Hardy, and a match that served its purpose well between Khali and Finlay, we had our indicator that this tournament would be a farce: Regal against Hornswoggle. I cursed the WWE when I saw that. I was actually expecting this to be a decent tournament that would push some new talent who needed it. Instead we get William Regal as King Of The Ring. Don't get me wrong, Regal is a great wrestler who can out-wrestle and out-talk most of the roster. But sadly, being put in so many unfavorable positions in the past (he is British, after all - the WWE loves to make fun of stereotypes), I don't think fans care much about him to make Regal have a nice run in Main Events. Who knows, maybe he can pull a "Booker T" and get over. But I wouldn't hold my bloody breath. Get it? "Bloody breath"? Damn you WWE for making lame parodies of British peeps. * Finally, a quick note: Velvet Sky's butt will be appearing in a movie somewhere. Just a quick glimpse, not in the entire movie. That is all. Take that, responsible journalism! With polygamist sects being busted, California wildfires blazing, a Democratic race that apparently won't ever end, along with a worsening situation over in Iraq, there's certainly no shortage of news all around the world. But apparently the most-talked about thing I've seen on the Internet hasn't been any of these. It's the fact that one certain person was put behind the announcer's table this past week in ECW, and the entire Internet Wrestling Community is up in arms over this. Never before have I heard about one single person bringing so much grief to the wrestling world. The man? Mike Adamle, recently appointed ECW play-by-play announcer, taking over Joey Styles as the voice alongside Tazz. Now, I'm not an avid ECW viewer, and only catch the show when I'm either suffering from killer bouts of insomnia on Tuesday nights, or I'm bored enough to spend the bandwidth to download it off the Internet. But seeing that I've read so damn much about how much Adamle sucks, about how people want him fired or perhaps even shot, I decided it was my journalistic duty to see what all the fuss was about. Certainly this Mike Adamle can't be as bad as people say he is, can he? So instead of just copying and pasting, I went ahead and downloaded last week's show. My ears will probably never, ever forgive me. Okay, so he was bad. Really bad. In fact, it brought down the WWE's C-show to about an F-level show. I thought ECW was getting tougher to watch by the week, but this just dragged the entire show down. Adamle seemed totally out of his element. It was like he was given the headset and microphone exactly 10 seconds before the show started, and they told him "You're doing announcing duties from now on. Go get 'em, kid!" I know ECW isn't their biggest show, but they need to keep it up to a level of respectability, don't you think? I know I don't want ratings to flounder thanks to Adamle and have headlines all over the Internet declaring "TNA beats WWE in the ratings war!" as it happened last time TNA got a slightly higher rating than the WWE's third-class citizen. After listening to that abomination of announcing, I grabbed my pitchfork and lit my torch, ready to head on over with the masses to Stamford and ask - nay, demand - that Mike Adamle be fired, put into a rocket ship and shot to the moon, never to see or hear him again. But before I did that, I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that while Adamle sucks as an announcer, it's pretty damn unfair to crucify the dude after just his first show. And I also realized that while Adamle probably had the worst first outing of any WWE employee whose purpose is to talk and not wrestle, there were others who were about as bad as he was. He definitely wasn't the first to be called to slaughter. Take our lovely Raw announcer, Lillian Garcia, as an example. When she debuted back in mid-1999, she replaced long-time Howard Finkel. Being that we fans were already used to listening to Finkel ever since most of us were born, seeing Lillian replace that voice was a shock. it didn't help matters that she absolutely sucked as an announcer those first couple of weeks. She sounded nervous and unsure of herself all the time, and completely devoid of all excitement, as if she were in a event that didn't matter to her nor to anyone. If you want proof, and you have the recently-released Triple H DVD that I mentioned last time around, select the match between Triple H and Mankind in the first disc. That was her WWE debut, and she was horrible. I remember after a couple of weeks of her being the announcer, and subsequently feuding with Howard Finkel (probably because he was jealous, or maybe thought inside his warped mind that men in the 18-34 demographic were more into bald, tubby men, I don't know), the Internet masses did exactly the same thing they're doing now with Adamle. They wanted her to be fired immediately because she sucked. And she did. I mean, she was bad, I don't know whether she actually sucked to get the job. But I digress. After a while, Lillian got good at announcing, and she's been the ring announcer for almost nine years already. It didn't hurt that she could also help sell DVD's and magazines with the rest of the Divas. Another person who everyone wanted to be shown the door at the WWE Headquarters was good ol' Michael Cole. Cole started off as an in-ring and backstage interviewer back in about 1997. I remember the date because this was the time the original version of Degeneration X (with Shawn Michaels, Triple H, Chyna and for a short time Rick Rude) was formed, and I remember feeling sorry for Cole whenever he was in the ring with them. Shawn Michaels and Triple H had a field day with Cole, doing every adolescent prank in the book: giving him a wedgie, someone crouching behind him while he was shoved down to the ground, Shawn's flicking his hair right in his face while he was asking serious questions, fun stuff like that. No one paid too much mind to him them. But then in 1999, Raw's quintessential announcer, Jim Ross, had an extended leave from the announcing booth due to the unfortunate passing of his momma, which then triggered a bout with Bell's Palsy. The WWE chose Michael Cole as his "suitable" replacement during that time. At a time when the WWE was on the verge of exploding in the Stone Cold era, with Wrestlemania 14 right around the corner, this couldn't have happened at a worse time. Cold was just horrible his first weeks on the job. If it weren't for Jerry "The King" Lawler busting his chops all the time, the shows would've been better viewed on mute. While relief was found when Jim Ross returned, it wouldn't last long. With the launch of WWE's newest show, Smackdown, they needed to find someone to call that show exclusively. Cole was probably the one of the few in the company at the time with TV announcing experience, so he got the gig. Fans everywhere exploded, some even going as far as saying they wouldn't watch the show with him on the air, which is just retarded, in my opinion. Eventually, Cole got comfortable with the act, and he's a pretty decent announcer nowadays. He's been a staple on Smackdown since the early days, while his broadcast partners have gone from Tazz, J.B.L., The Coach and now Mick Foley. I'm sure when Foley leaves, Cole will still be on. Now that I mention those names, Jonathan Coachman can be taken as another example. Coming in the company at the very end of 1999, he was met as virtually all new faces in the company are, with a lukewarm response. The Coach was smart enough to not go the same route Cole did when his interviewees would make fun of him. This made him a somewhat entertaining character, but that was only thanks to The Rock making him sing, dance and do other silly stuff. Oddly enough, the most criticism I heard about Coach during that time was partly racist. I heard many times stupid comments from people saying that "Coachman makes Bryant Gumbel look black", which doesn't have absolutely a thing to do with wrestling or interviewing. In any case, he received most of the criticizing blows when he became first a permanent on-screen character, then a play-by-play announcer on Raw. During his time of entry, there was already a crowded booth on Raw, with Lawler still there and the recently-signed Joey Styles filling in for a kayfabe-fired Jim Ross, so he was the odd man out. In all, I don't think Coach was as bad as his counterparts when they began, but a lot of people called for his head for whatever reason. While he's admittedly not too good in the announcing booth, he's a respectable on-air character and has improved in his time with the company. I was only planning about writing about interviewers or announcers for this column, but last night I watched some old Raw episodes from 1999 and 2000 that I had downloaded a while back (no, I won't tell you where I got them, so don't bother asking). On some of those episodes, a rookie called Kurt Angle was shown. Let me tell you, it was obvious from the beginning that Angle would shine greatly inside the wrestling ring. But once he grabbed the microphone... It was brutal. I don't know if it was a result of his character being so "whitebread" or something, but he was just bad. In contrast, you see the Kurt Angle today, and he shows much brilliance on the mic. This isn't limited to Angle alone. Such of the best talkers in wrestling, like The Rock and Shawn Michaels, were also bland and uninspiring on the mic when they started out. While brings me to my whole point: If these people I mentioned hadn't gotten time to get more comfortable in their role, they wouldn't be with us today. So who's to say that Mike Adamle won't also get comfortable in his role? It can happen. If he wants to get better, he will. He didn't get jobs covering the original American Gladiators or both the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympics for sucking at his job (figuratively speaking, not literally). Of course, it probably won't ever happen, and he'll be fired in a few weeks. But seeing the past, there's a nice chance he could get better. So give the man some time. And while I won't post a video on YouTube wearing mascara and crying, I'll just say this: leave Mike Adamle alone. Like I mentioned in the column, I've been watching some "retro" episodes of Raw (if you consider "retro" to be less than ten years ago) and it's just weird how fickle wrestling fans can be. In those episodes, there were so many wrestlers that most people used to love, yet now have apparently real hatred towards them. The first one I saw was Chyna, back when she became the first woman to win a major WWE Championship (the Intercontinental Championship). The reception she had in those episodes rivaled those of most of the top guys in the company at the time. I remembered really enjoying her work ever since her debut with Triple H (and props to Triple H for speaking nicely about her in his DVD), and she was definitely one of the faces of the company at their hottest period. It's a shame her life took a downward spiral as it did. Whenever I see her old matches, I'm usually finding myself wishing she would recover and have a grand return to wrestling like Shawn Michaels did. The person Chyna took her first Intercontinental Championship win from was Jeff Jarrett, yet another hated man on the Internet these days. Back in his final days with the WWE, he was hated for being a heel, but recently he was hated due to his constant whoring of the World Heavyweight Championship on TNA. Well, if you were a damn good wrestler who was never given a decent push in the biggest wrestling company in the world - and even after being stuck for years with the "Double J" gimmick, nonetheless - and you had your own company, wouldn't you reward yourself with championship reigns too? I know I would. And Jarrett also did put people over a lot more than he's given credit for - A.J. Styles, Christian Cage and Sting took the gold from him during their initial days at the company. There were other current TNA mainstays that were insanely popular back then. The New Age Outlaws, both Road Dogg (B.G. James) and Billy Gunn (Kip James), were not only the biggest tag team in the WWE ten years ago, but each also received decent single pushes afterwards, both winning the Intercontinental Championship once (although to be fair, this was in a period where the Intercontinental Championship was in the hands of people like Val Venis and The Godfather). I remember also being a huge fan of each of them when they were in those spots, especially Kip James, as much as it pains me to admit it now. There were countless others around there as well. But the thing is that it's odd that someone we used to cheer for a lot are those same ones people would spit on if they had the opportunity. As I scan the current roster, I wonder who will we do the same with in 2018? Will people unanimously curse John Cena's name? Will people say they were never C.M. Punk fans? I'm sure there will be a couple of who will call guys like Randy Orton and Jeff Hardy "washed-up has-beens" in the future. It seems that being this cruel to those who gave most of us a lot of good memories in the past is the norm for the wrestling business. It's sort of hypocritical, if you ask me. Anyway, I don't want to end this column on a downer, so let's perk things up a bit with some awesome columns written by the kind peeps over at the Columns Forum. As always, they're recommended reads, and hopefully it will get you inspired enough to go ahead and write your own column. Who knows, you could probably be taking my spot here in the future! Wait, that's not funny... An Offer You Can't Refuse III - Kennedy By The Godfather I think the beginning paragraph of this column should describe the story written by The Godfather - not to be confused with the undeserving Intercontinental Champion Godfather I mentioned a while back - should be better than any witty thing I would have to say: "The date is April 5th, 2009. Wrestlemania 25 is in the books. After a gruelling 30-minute match, Ken Kennedy has captured the WWE Title from a battered Jeff Hardy. Jeff’s downfall came when he attempted a Swanton Bomb from the top of a balcony. He legitimately fractured his spine when the tables, meant to cushion his fall, did not break on impact. Kennedy received the word from the referee to quickly cover and take the WWE Championship, on a night where Jeff Hardy had been booked to continue his four-month reign." Hot off the shooting star press: A forgotten man's diary By ds69100 This is the story by ds64783287324 (I forget the numbers) of a forgotten man and his diary entries as he continues to bust his rear end in a position where he'll probably never grow from. And I use the term "grow" for one reason - you'll need to read and find out for yourself. So that wraps up one more Struggle For Power. In the next couple of weeks I should have the ground-breaking 75th edition, which will be just as special as this one - meaning that it probably won't be special at all. Still, I hope you all stop by to read it. In the meantime, you can send feedback my way, either via E-Mail to dennmart@gmail.com, or if you have an account at LOPForums.com, head on over to this column's feedback thread. As always, everything you send is appreciated. See you in a few, Degenerate *NEW GALLERY* Very COOL and RARE Photos of WWE Stars and Divas OUT PARTYING!
|
|