Hogan Versus Doink Wrestlemania 9?
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So Davey Boy was the second choice. Seems odd since Davey Boy left the WWF just as the Doink character was coming in.
What exactly did Hogan do to Savage that was so wrong? Savage's ex wife was seeing someone that was a friend of Hogan. What's wrong with that?
He could just get in the ring with Savage and tear it up without saying a word? Isn't Savage known for having to have his matches planned out ahead of time?
What exactly did Hogan do to Savage that was so wrong? Savage's ex wife was seeing someone that was a friend of Hogan. What's wrong with that?
He could just get in the ring with Savage and tear it up without saying a word? Isn't Savage known for having to have his matches planned out ahead of time?
Seriously. This is the first thing that came to my mind as I read that. Savage was obsessive about how he planned out his matches, from what I've heard.
klunderbunker
Welcome to My (And Not Sly's) House
Hulk Hogan had 93,000 people pay to watch him wrestle.
Matt Borne danced with bears in WCW.
Game: Hogan.
Matt Borne danced with bears in WCW.
Game: Hogan.
In one of the DDP shoots he mentions that Savage didn't plan out ALL his matches just some. Everyone gets this idea because of his Steamboat match, but he did that to put on a great match for Wrestlemania III, but this wasn't how he worked each and every match in his career.
This is probably true. I think because everyone knows the WM3 story that Savage's meticulous planning has likely become exaggerated. I remember Steamboat mentioning another match with Savage at the Rosemont Horizon. It was a house show and Savage and Steamboat were going on right before the main event which I think was Hogan vs. Orndorff. This was back when WWF did multiple shows in one day. Hogan and Orndorff worked an afternoon show in another town and were late getting to the night show in Chicago. Savage and Steamboat planned on going about 20 minutes but ended up going 50 while waiting for Hogan and Orndorff to arrive.
I still don't see what Hogan did wrong at WM9 to deserve a black eye from Savage.
Martin Gabriel
Pre-Show Stalwart
I disagree about the way workers today differ from ones back then. There are great workers today who could work a match without much mid-match communication or pre-planning and still tell a fantastic story. But instead of choosing between athleticism and immersing the crowd, why not just do both? Punk and Bryan are examples of tremendous wrestlers who can do both without even a small sacrifice to either. Honestly, when an old-timer says something like that, it sounds more like sour grapes than a credible criticism.
He also seems to think no one goes back and watches stuff from the 90s and 80s. I've seen some and, unsurprisingly, people still botched, had miscommunications or looked sloppy. Even greats like Savage or Hart. So he's fooling himself. Though do you know what often prevents botches and sloppiness? Thoroughly planning the match, or at least its key areas, ahead of time. It's relative to the familiarity between the opponents, length of the match and its complexity. I can go out and have a solid match with my old tag partner at any time and without any planning because we've wrestled dozens of times, but there's a difference between "solid" and fan-fucking-tastic. If we wanted fan-fucking-tastic, we'd have to go over things ahead of time and step out of our comfort zones. No one's going to be wowed when the match feels routine.
BESIDES ALL THAT, this was a neat read.
He also seems to think no one goes back and watches stuff from the 90s and 80s. I've seen some and, unsurprisingly, people still botched, had miscommunications or looked sloppy. Even greats like Savage or Hart. So he's fooling himself. Though do you know what often prevents botches and sloppiness? Thoroughly planning the match, or at least its key areas, ahead of time. It's relative to the familiarity between the opponents, length of the match and its complexity. I can go out and have a solid match with my old tag partner at any time and without any planning because we've wrestled dozens of times, but there's a difference between "solid" and fan-fucking-tastic. If we wanted fan-fucking-tastic, we'd have to go over things ahead of time and step out of our comfort zones. No one's going to be wowed when the match feels routine.
BESIDES ALL THAT, this was a neat read.
Hard Hit Prince
Not really working as a
How in the blue hell can you tell that Punk and Bryan don't plan every bit of their matches? Just a thought..
Yes, I'm sure Hogan didn't work with Doink the clown because of Doink's friend. It couldn't have been because it was Hogan's first match back in approximately a year, and he'd rather be put into a match that drew money with someone who the fans actually cared about.
Borne is delusional. Once he said that stupid thing about not working with Hogan, it was hard to take anything he said seriously. Then I read how apparently Savage was "a man" for punching Hogan in the eye because Hogan's friend was dating Savage's ex...which makes ZERO sense on all sorts of levels.
I will say he has a point about today's wrestler's not knowing how to work, but that's about the only thing in the entire interview posted (not including his personal bio) that's believable.
You completely missed the point.
Borne was talking about working, not botches or miscommunication. There's a difference. Borne said today's guys substitute athleticism for their lack of ability to work the audience. And he's right, in most cases.
Big Nick Dudley
Nick
Martin Gabriel
Pre-Show Stalwart
Botches and miscommunications come from not working well, thus they're inherent in the subject of working. His point was that he can go out with some guys and work a match without planning things out ahead of time, thus implying it won't be a botchfest. He didn't explicitly talk about botching or how clean a match is, but I brought it up because if you're going to talk about working a match well, you're saying that it's not a disjointed mess. My point was that he's full of shit, even a match that clearly had mid-match communication from his time had its occasional botches and general sloppiness. In fairness, forms and techniques of wrestling have been refined over the years, so a lot of stuff looks sloppier from decades ago compared to today.
As far as how today's guys substitute athleticism for working the crowd, again, he's poorly representing history. He cited only a few names from his time -- not your average guys, but legends of our business. Of course they were good at working the crowd. That's why they were legends. I could pick out just as many names as he did of the WWE's current roster and many more if I were to delve into developmental, TNA, ROH and the rest of the independents. There were people of his time who were bumbling idiots who were neither athletic nor charismatic, as well as people who might have been more athletic than charismatic. He's fooling himself to propose that his era was exempt of that symptom.
No, he was talking about WORKING, not wrestling a match. There's a difference.
Let's put it this way, you know what a shoot is, right? What's the opposite of a shoot? A work, correct? A work in wrestling is making people believe what you are doing is real, when it really is not. Thus, when you're in the ring wrestling, you want to WORK the audience into believing the contest is real.
Borne was saying that today's wrestlers substitute the ability to make a crowd suspend their disbelief (working) with athleticism. He was not talking about the compatibility of wrestlers in doing fake moves.
On the whole, today's guys are much worse at it than guys were 20-30 years ago, mostly due to the amount of experience the older guys had compared to today's guys. But where today's younger wrestlers aren't nearly as good at working in a match, they substitute their far superior athleticism to try and compensate for it. The problem with this is that athleticism can never been a true replacement for the ability to actually work a match.
Take Undertaker vs. Triple from Wrestlemania this year, a phenomenal match. It drew you in, it made you care, it had you on the edge of your seat. It had you enthralled with the story being told in the ring. That was an example of phenomenal working of a match, a tremendous workrate, if you will. Compare that to a Dolph Ziggler vs. Kofi Kingston match. Do you have that same level of emotion? Do you care nearly as much? Does a Dolph vs. Kofi match make you watch, unable to tear your eyes away from the screen even for a moment? Of course not.
That's what Borne is talking about. He's saying today's workers aren't nearly as good at working in a match, and so they try to substitute athleticism to cover up their weaker ability to work a match.
I know.
Martin Gabriel
Pre-Show Stalwart
We're talking about professional wrestling. "Wrestling" encompasses shoot and work, because a wrestling match can be a work or it could be a shoot. Though when I'm talking about any given match, I'll use "wrestling" and "working" interchangeably, because the vast majority of professional wrestling is worked, therefore it's implied in the use of "wrestling" in almost all cases (again, within professional wrestling, not collegiate wrestling or shoot variations of professional wrestling, like some stuff in Japan) that the match is worked. You could try to say "working" is different from "wrestling" because wrestling could refer to the moves themselves whereas working is how you engage the audience, but "worked" can refer to ANYTHING done in the ring that's meant to take something that isn't "real" and make it seem real. That means bumping can be working over the crowd, chaining can be working (you're making them think there's a legitimate struggle, for instance) and just about any given move is done to work over the crowd. Really, it's all worked. Wrestling and working aren't separate things two guys do in the ring, they're one and the same, unless it's a shoot match, but those aren't common in professional wrestling. And maintaining my emphasis on botching as a symptom of not working well, if you fucking botch, you're sure as hell not working the crowd over if it's really obvious you messed up.
You compared Undertaker vs. Triple H at WrestleMania to Dolph Ziggler vs. Kofi Kingston on an episode of RAW. Tell me, when Trips and 'Taker were full-time wrestlers, did they go out and have emotionally engaging matches every single week? No. They both often had very routine matches on television. What sets their match at WrestleMania apart is the hype, their legacies and their willingness to work harder because it was such a big match. Could Ziggler and Kingston ever work at that level? I really don't think Kingston could, but Ziggler might be able to one day, if he's able to build the sort of rapport with the fans to where they flip the fuck out with every nearfall he gets in a big match.
You and Borne have a major discrepancy in your logic. Like Borne, you're pointing to the big names and in this case the big matches and making it sound like the talent there applies to everyone from his era. That's not the case. Borne listed, what, four people? Well it's ironic you mentioned Trips and Undertaker, because they weren't there in the 80s. They've both had more of their career occur from 2000 - 2010 (both of them having debuted in the early 90s, but still, that's a portion of a decade compared to a full decade), so I'd say they belong more to this period than Doink's. On top of Undertaker and Triple H, we have John Cena, CM Punk, Edge, Randy Orton and several more who work fans over with the best of them during the big matches. Does the whole roster work that well? Nope, but we're not examining the whole roster of this era, just the best, just like Doink only pointed out the best of his era without realizing, "Oh right, a lot of them were pretty average."
In conclusion, your conception of what's working versus what's wrestling is undermined by you not realizing everything that's wrestling is worked and therefore are ways of working over the crowd. Also you credit the wrestlers too much for their ability to work over a crowd, not realizing that two wrestlers could do EXACTLY the same thing, have the same mannerisms and look, but the one the fans actually recognize and love is the one who'll get the pop. It's not necessarily easy to work a crowd that well, but there are tons of people who can but will never get a chance to showcase it at WrestleMania or in WWE because they never got the right opportunities.
Shadowmancer
I am The Last Baron
Now there is this entire thing about working a match and all that. But there is one major question to come out of all this. These veterans that criticise how the current generation of wrestlers wrestle, do they actively try to explain how to the younger wrestlers that they are working with why they do certain things. I remember reading something that Chris Jericho said about putting a match together with Kofi Kingston, Zach Ryder and someone else and him saying that they should do this this and this because it makes the most sense. But they didn't see it for whatever reason.
Matt Borne Calling Hogan a dick is fine and not really wrestling related as it is personality related. Him criticising Hogan falls into the legitimate things you can criticise Hogan about and not have people bring up the money aspect of the wrestling business.
Matt Borne Calling Hogan a dick is fine and not really wrestling related as it is personality related. Him criticising Hogan falls into the legitimate things you can criticise Hogan about and not have people bring up the money aspect of the wrestling business.
Wow, you really are as dumb as people say.
And if a match is a shoot, then they obviously are not working, right?
But that doesn't mean it's worked well.
I know how to swing a baseball bat, but that doesn't mean I could be a good professional baseball batter.
But it DOESN'T say how well it's worked, which was Borne's point.
Why do I have to keep saying this?
No, I say that working is different from wrestling because the fact there are two guys in between the ropes wrestling, it doesn't mean they are working.
When Bruiser Brody was no-selling Luger in the cage, he wasn't working. When CZW, or some other stupid indy fed, beat each other up with light bulbs, that's not working. Just because you're in the ring, it doesn't mean you're working. And even if you are working, that doesn't mean you're doing it well.
No, it's not all worked. That's a silly statement.
It may all be scripted, but that doesn't mean the wrestlers are working the match.
Yes they are.
Which has absolutely nothing with what Borne said, which was my point from the beginning.
How can you be this stupid?
You're a dumbass.
I never said they did every night, I used that match as an example of what a high workrate looks like. I could have easily used Punk vs. Cena from MITB last year. I used the Kofi vs. Ziggler match (and I'm referring to one of their many PPV contests, not a Raw match) to illustrate the difference between how well the Undertaker and Trips worked, compared to how poorly Kofi and Ziggler worked. But I also used Kofi and Ziggler because they are a prime example of a pair of wrestlers who try to substitute athleticism for their subpar ability to work a match.
And the fact it was a phenomenal story, with both men selling the story of the match, making people care about each character, and giving them a reason to become emotionally invested in the match.
You know, because they had a great workrate.
No, you're just too stupid to understand some of the basic concepts of pro wrestling. Don't blame me and Borne for your ignorance.
Fuck off, I did no such thing. I was providing an example of what a match with a high workrate looks like, and what a match with two guys who try to substitute athleticism for working looks like.
Wow, you COMPLETELY missed the point. I don't even feel like responding to your utter stupidity here.
No, the problem here is you don't understand that working and popping the crowd are related, but completely different.
You seem to be suggesting that because these guys do fancy moves, they are working the crowd. That's a complete load of bullshit.
Not work over a crowd, their ability to work in a match.
God, you're stupid. Have I mentioned that yet?
Completely false, because you're assuming that everything before the particular moment you refer to was equal as well. Which is NEVER the case.
For example, if Batista and Mason Ryan were to do the exact same thing, Batista would receive the much better pop, not because the fans like him better, but because Batista has shown himself to be a far superior worker over the years. And because Batista was the far better worker, fans cared more about him than they do Mason Ryan.
Batista is better than Mason Ryan, because he was far better at selling a match than Mason Ryan is. Batista was better at working the match than Mason Ryan.
Another stupid comment. Why would the WWE NOT want to make money? The WWE puts the guys who know how to make fans care in the big money spots. They don't care who it is, all they care about is making money.
Those guys who know how to work in the ring, are the ones who are far more likely to make people care about them.
So, basically, your entire post was an exercise in ignorance and stupidity. I highly suggest you just stop before you embarrass yourself further.
Martin Gabriel
Pre-Show Stalwart
Here's a definition of work (verb) on Wikipedia's page of wrestling jargon: "The act of deceiving or manipulating a person or persons, which may or may not be done to preserve kayfabe." Those "persons" referring to an audience. In that case, no, a shoot match wouldn't be worked, since the match would occur outside of kayfabe. I heard of some form of wrestling that was only partly shoot, so some aspects would be worked.
At that point I was discussing the meaning of "working" or what a "work" is, not talking about how well wrestlers work, whether from today or Doink's era. I didn't say everyone works well or that it's not possible to work well. Now you're fishing for things with which to disagree before I said them.
Before I move on, I hope you'll go back over your responses and ask, "Wow, did I make an impersonal discussion something entirely too personal?" Whether we agree or not, there's no reason to turn what should be a discussion into name-calling. I'm 19 and I know that well enough. If you think you have absolute knowledge of this subject, you're fooling yourself, especially when we both stand from mostly outside perspectives of the industry. Remaining resolutely by your perceptions is a bigger demonstration of ignorance than anything I've said. I'll make concessions when I genuinely feel proven wrong, but so far you've reacted like an angry child.
Again, I wasn't talking about the quality of anyone's work at that point, I was discussing the concept's meaning. I'm allowed to review the terms with which we're discussing before moving onto apply them to the relative context. Though in that case, I was clarifying what I consider the definition of "working" to be, as Sara had just offered a slightly different definition. I'm not even being aggressive at this point, so why would you react so angrily?
You're right those examples aren't quite "working," but I wasn't accounting for outliers or abnormal instances. My discussion was on how average wrestling includes working. Again, you're right those aren't examples aren't working, so we aren't even in disagreement at this juncture.
By the definition of what "working" is (manipulating persons into furthering kayfabe), all the examples I gave are examples of working. You're not just falling on your back, you're landing in a practiced way to lesson the blow, therefore it's worked; you're not just exchanging holds, you're chaining together practiced moves and pretending there's a struggle, when really you're allowing and setting up counters. As far as its quality relative to this era versus Doink's, that again wasn't quite what i was trying to relay at this juncture of my post, I was still discussing what "working" is. Though even if they're not chaining well, not bumping well and not selling either well so as to work the crowd over, it's still "working," just badly. So I agree there's a difference in quality, but we'll return to the discussion of this era versus Doink's later.
You didn't certify that with anything, so what was the point of saying it? In my last section, I think I firmly established how any AVERAGE wrestling (as in not those extreme examples mentioned earlier) is using skills and techniques that are practiced to make what isn't real look more real, which is what working is. It's difficult to wrestle at all without what you're doing to be worked.
I originally brought up the point about botching to emphasize how botching can occur more often when two guys go out there and try to work a match without planning ahead of time (that was what Doink was saying he and some elites could do), which occurred even among those legends Doink mentioned. I returned to that point to explain how said botches would undermine, at least partly, the efforts to work over the crowd, as suddenly they're not thinking, "GO BRET, GO!" they're shouting, "YOU FUCKED UP! YOU FUCKED UP!" So yeah, it has plenty to do with Doink's comments. It was a criticism of his idea.
Several sections back, after I responded to an assumption you had made about my comment, I said, "I never said (whatever)," but I didn't call you a dumbass. Yet you called me a dumbass before saying, "I never said they did every night." The tricky thing about having a discussion is sometimes you say something that carries an implication you didn't mean to say. Everyone does it and sometimes they'll be pointed out and the speaker will have to account for it. When he does, he shouldn't just say, "You're a dumbass," for people who noticed those unintentional implications. He's at least partly responsible for covering all of his bases and making sure such implications aren't ruled out. We both failed to do that 100-percent of the time in this discussion. In summation of this paragraph, learn some humility and grant me the benefit of the doubt, just as I'll try to you when there are "loose ends," so to speak, in your comments you may have not intended to have any additional meaning.
So I can withdraw my disagreement, really, since it only applied to what I thought you were saying. I do disagree that Ziggler substitutes athleticism for working. He does both very well. Selling is an eample of working over the crowd. You have to remember we're not the majority of the audience. The majority of fans don't see one of his over-the-top sells and think, "Wow, this guy's really fucking crazy bumping like that," like we sometimes do. Such "smart" fans often make that a point of criticism for Ziggler. However, the average fan is more likely to think "AMG, HE GOT BEATEN THE FUCK UP!" If that is the case (and it's kind of impossible to measure that accurately), Ziggler's selling does work as good selling. Then he taunts and does other things to work well, but fuck, let's move to the next point already.
I kind of meant "hype" to refer to the story. And yeah, because they worked to the crowd well. I didn't say they did not. I don't disagree with that.
That's just mean and demonstrably untrue.
Combined two.
I already established that I mistakenly assumed you were implying that because Undertaker/Triple H worked phenomenally at WrestleMania, they were just as on every night and thus represented a superior alternative to today's wrestlers. This can be chalked up to a misunderstanding, for which you didn't need to get so cranky. Really, I didn't just miss your point, you didn't recognize what sub-topic I was hitting on. Or maybe you're assuming those quotes were responding to parts of your comments that were meant to respond to other parts or were just referring to unstated ideas that are floating around. Dialogue is a tricky thing.
In that light, it depends on the setting. An indie crowd isn't going to be "worked over" most the time anyway. They'll just pop for fancy moves, cool chaining and good characters. However, a WWE crowd with its mostly mark viewers will be worked over the entire time, by anything, because some people, especially little kids, think it's real. They're already buying into this kayfabe perspective that they're already worked over by the time someone comes out and does a clothesline. Hell, in that sense, the production of a show can even "work over" someone. Try to think about it creatively, because the examples I'm giving are not black-and-white. There's a lot of grey area and a lot of relativity because of how different any given viewer or crowd might react to certain shows, wrestlers, personalities, etc.
WORKING is establishing or maintaining kayfabe. A "work" is something that's fake and is only true to the kayfabe universe. Working IS working over a crowd. Their ability to work in a match (or promos or anything the audience sees) is how they work over a crowd. Maybe you're not being particular enough of what you consider "working" to be. I'm basing this off my definition of "working" from the Wikipedia glossary of jargon I mentioned earlier. If you have a different authority who presents definitions of what working is IN CONCEPT, share it and I PROMISE I'll consider it objectively.
You do realize that wrestling is 100% worked, right, as in staged? I mean, it can hurt. Bumping hurts. It can hurt to get hit sometimes, depending on who's striking. Even in Doink's example of how he'd work a match with experienced guys, it was still "worked," as in staged. Instead of scripting the match ahead of time or stopping to discuss spots mid-match, they were familiar with each other or knew the ropes well enough that they could exchange holds or blows without communicating. They were still letting each other do these things, there was still no genuine struggle, they were only pretending for there to be a struggle (again, let's not try to contradict this with abnormal examples) just not planning it ahead of time.
Before you get mad at me again, know I'm NOT trying to put words in your mouth, I'm just trying to firmly establish what exactly you think is actually going on between those ropes. If you get mad that I missed your point, guess what, you've done it with me too or made assumptions that I said things I didn't mean to say. Again, try to be more understanding.
That was a complete hypothetical. I mean two guys who do everything the same but are still different people we can identify as such. Let's just say, they both work very well. Your example isn't what I was getting at, because you pointed out two people who are kind of the same in the sense they're both big men, but still work very different styles. I'm pretty sure, and bare in mind this is a while ago, was to point out how relative fans' impressions of two workers are. It really can be relative to the time, place, audiences, etc. I don't think it's the only factor, but it sure affects things.
Sometimes they don't know the guy can work that well or sometimes they just don't have room to book him into a story. My point wasn't that WWE knew someone was a good worker and thought, "Nah, let's not use him." Though they could. I'm sure they knew Bryan was a good worker before they hired him, but they sure as hell took their sweet time offering him a contract. Even when they do recognize someone could potentially work a crowd (and in Bryan's case, he's even needed some opportunities to show just how well he can work in other areas) well, they can't just drop everything to put him in there. Though if WWE ONLY put good workers into big spots, why have guys like Khali been world champions? He's awful in just about every respect. Sometimes they think other aspects that go beyond what's traditionally "working" might get them buys.
No, this was a demonstration of how fickle a dialogue can be, especially when the perspectives involved don't quite agree on how the very terms with which the subject is being discussed are defined. Regardless of whether you disagree with me or not, you should concede you made some false assumptions (as I did), made things personal when they didn't need to be and really lacked the sort of patience necessary to conduct a mature argument. Argument isn't bashing your perspective into someone's face until he gets it. You need to try to find out WHY we disagree (are we lost in translation?, for instance) and how we can reconcile those disagreements. It can just be simple miscommunication and that's something I tried to work through in this response. If you aren't willing to, don't just assume you're right and start calling me names.
That was fun. Hopefully you'll move with a more cooperative attitude.
Martin Gabriel
Pre-Show Stalwart
Really, this would have been so much simpler if earlier I said, "What exactly do you think 'working' is? How does it differ from wrestling?" We sort of did discuss that, but in ambiguous terms at times. And then I'd respond to his answer with, "Oh, but this is what I know working as based on my alternative source." Then it wouldn't be a matter of who's stupid or not, it would be, "We have different sources of information."
Didactic over rhetoric, people. Every time.
SlyFox, I apologize ahead of time for whatever discrepancies will arise between our opposing perspectives. I wish I had begun this discussion as an attempt to reconcile differences rather than furthering my own opinion.
Didactic over rhetoric, people. Every time.
SlyFox, I apologize ahead of time for whatever discrepancies will arise between our opposing perspectives. I wish I had begun this discussion as an attempt to reconcile differences rather than furthering my own opinion.
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