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I didn't feel the stoppages took away from the main event at the time and I'm even more convinced now. If anything, they made the crowd more bloodthirsty and reinforced the idea of Joe as a monster to be survived rather than defeated - Balor would be dead if Joe hadn't been interrupted every sixty seconds.
I can't emphasise enough how horrifying that fucking crying baby face thing that Asuka was wearing was. If anybody has a picture of it...
So why wasn't anyone else as over as him except Hogan? Why wasn't the crowd going apeshit for The Warlord? I white knight for the Warrior because people like you don't understand the value in mass appeal or how rare that is.
Get off your high horse.
I'm not disputing that he is popular in Japan, but the fact that guys like Albert and Scott Norton are big there proves they have a different taste.
The WWE is a western promotion and I am a western fan.
Nakamura did nothing in that match to appeal to me nor do I think to many western fans unfamiliar with him or the style. It remains to be seen if I am right or not. I hope I'm not, I hope I grow to like him but on tonight's evidence in unlikely to think much beyond "he's a good seller".
The man had a weird charisma to him, no doubt, but he'd be lucky to be a Ryback in the modern age. He's a product of his time completely. There's a reason his big shining moment as WWE champion was so short lived---he bombed on the house show circuit as champion. They couldn't wait to get the belt off him again. Those attendance numbers he drew aren't anything to scoff at in an age when only two companies in the world can draw 10,000 fans regularly to shows, but he still was a disappointment as champion.
Yes, I'm the one on the high horse here, having the audacity to make such a controversial and bold statement as "Japanese people count as much as American people". Japan's wrestling business is nothing to be scoffed at as you basically just did and continue to do, they routinely destroyed WWE's gate records for many, many years.
Yeah, you really don't even know what you're talking about. It's obvious from that statement alone that you've spent maybe 20 minutes watching and learning about Japanese professional wrestling. Norton was a transitional champion who literally only got his push because of a favor to Bischoff and WCW, and Bernard/A-Train was a midcarder his entire career. I can throw out a few atrocious wrestlers who the WWE pushed to the moon too if you'd like, since we're judging entire country's wrestling culture off of a few bad workers. I mean I can literally start listing dozens of guys the WWE pushed to the moon and even got over who were abysmal, awful, shit excuses for pro wrestlers if you'd like me to.
That's nice. Most of us are pro wrestling fans.
Nothing to appeal to many Western fans...are you serious? This match took place in Texas, the most Western place spiritually on the planet. Men in cowboy hats and fucking bolo ties lost their shit from minute one to the last second of the match, particularly for Nakamura, a Japanese man with little Western exposure, wearing a god damn Michael Jackson jacket. Tickets were selling at something like 20 times their original value on the black market for this show, and that is almost entirely because of the anticipation for Nakamura. Watch the match again. You're absolutely wrong in every shape, way, and form that a person can be wrong if you think Nakamura won't appeal to "Western' audiences. There's absolutely no conceivable way a person could watch that match, see that reaction in front of a HUGE crowd of fucking Southern boys, and claim he doesn't appeal to them. Ridiculous.