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 I’d demonstrate the current state of professional wrestling by wiping my ass and holding up the result… but after the banner I don’t think you need to see two shit stains in the same article (oh lighten up, Bob… be happy we still care). And what a banner it is. It comes to us from net legend YEAHGR; the brains and brawn behind THE RING POST. And you HAVE to follow the link to it, because it’s got an AMAZING new look, format, gaggle of features, and an all new MONDAY NIGHT SUCKS. Plus new Jones (twice, even), Jonny X, Der Kommisar, and brand new news parodies that make me long for my PWS days. Seriously, the look is absolutely AMAZING. Kudos, my friend. And a MAJOR announcement from my other home, WRESTLING OUTLAWS. After years of shaking things up both in and outside of the industry time constraints have forced their closure. It’s a sad day for the Internet wrestling community, but a GREAT one for Lethal. Why? For starters, nigga in charge Matt is coming on board as of Christmas day… bringing not only his column with him but also a yearning to get the long-stagnant FIST FARKING section running again (my biggest disappointment over the last few months has been its inactivity… so this makes me VERY happy). The other news may be even cooler, as we are bringing back one of the OLDEST OF OLD SKOOLERS here at Lethal. Yes, that’s right… the one and only JAMES PHIRE makes his return to the site he helped turn into the juggernaut it is today. You think you’re excited? Feel these nipples (that’s a metaphor, homo… get your fucking hands away from me). How do you follow up a shill like that? You don’t… let’s talk wrestling. So another week where only yours truly can muster up the effort to spit a post out. Why? Is it the fault of tryptophan (that’s the ingredient in turkey that makes you feel all tired after eating it… I’m such a smartie every day). Do I blame the writers? Upcoming exams? Women who are keeping the staff otherwise occupied? (Riiiiiiiiight) No, what is really at the heart of this is something DAVE MELTZER touched on earlier in the week: I know that most people have gotten not only frustrated with Raw, but tired of complaining about Raw. It literally boggles my mind how people with such little understanding of the basics of pro wrestling can be putting together these shows that go nowhere and build very little. It’s true, it’s true. How many fucking times can you say “Triple H is ruining wrestling” and photoshop pictures of him surgically attached to Vince’s ass before it becomes the same post again and again? By now we all know that business could very well turn around if they started focusing on the RVDs of the company rather than Mr. I-Ball-Dead-People-With-My-Huge-Schnozz, but let’s face it… it aint happening any time in the forseeable future. Seriously, people… we’re one creative group of mofos, but there’s only so many ways to say the EXACT SAME THING over and over. So what are the options? One is simply to not write (the popular choice at the moment). Another is to expand what we do here (the URL for this site is up in two months… I have to decide what to do with it after that. I just noticed that a name that would suit our needs very well if we decided to branch out is available), although after four years of writing about wrestling I’m pretty comfortable leaving that the staple… especially since one way or another it WILL be hot again and I’d like our history to really mean something when that happens. Yet another is to expand our focus within wrestling. With the upcoming merger with Outlaws we could add news, “straight” recaps, nude pix, and all kinds of stuff to make the site look “busy” again… except we’d lose our status as the last of the true pure op boards if we went that route. Or… we could expand beyond being 95% centered around the WWE. Only problem is “how?” I mean, I’d love to write about Wildside or CZW, but it aint like I get the fucking show here, and even if I did it’s going to appeal mainly to the people in Georgia or Vegas who get to see it. XPW actually sounds watchable right now with Shane and Styles making things interesting again, but the same demographic problems exist. We could order tapes, but that’s hardly going to be giving you “timely” stories. We could start attacking the net again but that goes back to the problems above… IT’S BEEN DONE TO DEATH. Everyone fucking knows that Ryder and Scherer are tubs-o-shit, that Pat McNeil is a thief, and that Hyatte isn’t funny anymore. WHO CARES?? Fact is, in this near-monopoly that Vince has there’s very little alternative for us. “But Barbed One”, you say (I REALLY wish you’d stop interrupting me when I’m trying to write, you inconsiderate fuck), “you’re forgetting the other national company out there. The one may be able to give the McMahons a run for their money at some point. You know: NWA-TNA.” To which I respond “See, that’s what happens when you rush things. You mess up the flow when I was building to them being the actual topic of this post. Next time keep your sperm recepticle shut and let me do my thing”. Yeah, TNA at one point ALMOST seemed like they had some sort of a future. Sure the PPV thing meant a limited audience at best, but certainly no smaller than ECW in their early days when they paid for space in about four markets and relied on insomniacs with satellite dishes to spread the word. They were more than just cast-offs from the WWE and WCW, they were being run by one of the most respected families in wrestling. Their X-Division was getting over, they’d gotten backing from a major company, their indy talent was definitely making a splash, and all this was happening at a time when more and more people were turning off “the big guys” than ever before… not ALL of them wanted to desert the sport altogether. But if there’s one given in wrestling, it’s that as soon as a company really starts to make a splash… they do something to fuck it up in ways that makes adding an extra son to Married with Children seem downright brilliant by comparison. EPIC did it by turning their biggest show ever into a comedy of errors. ECW did it by running a WWF marketing style on an APW budget. And TNA…? They brought in Vince Russo. You all remember Vinnie, right? “I’m from NEW YAWK CITY, BABY!” Moreover, you remember what he did last time he had his hands on a wrestling company. Granted, WCW was a sinking ship before he was handed the reins, but if he’d been the captain of the Titanic his solution to the impending iceberg would’ve been to plant dynamite in the engine room and blow everyone to smithereens first. He’s not only the Anti-Christ of wrestling, but the SELF-PROFESSED one! This is a man who not only put the world title “that could be traced back to 1905” (whatEVER) on himself, but also on David Arquette (sidenote: 8-Legged Freaks is the WORST fucking movie I rented all year… and I rented AI). The man who runs the creative gambit from using sex angles for ratings to um… more sex angles for ratings. A man who honestly believes that he was single-handedly responsible for the late 90s boon in the business rather than being lucky enough to be on board for it. And now he gets to ruin another company. Remember when the rumors were flying that he was actually a McMahon plant purposely sabotaging the company? Don’t bury that conspiracy theory just yet. He’s universally despised by the fans and the wrestlers (kind of like a Kevin Nash with two good legs), yet here he is. X-Pac immediately quit the company (or got hella stoned and missed a plane trip and found a convenient excuse for it as the case may be), Mike Tenay is being placed into a “worked shoot” gimmick based on his hatred of him, and the fans that a mere two weeks ago were still giving the company every consideration for success have either deserted it or are rolling their eyes in disgust. It’s inconceivable that the Jarretts could’ve made such a boneheaded decision this early in their existence, but there he is… wasting half the show that was supposed to be the alternative to “soap opera wrestling” cutting long, rambling promos where he brags about how much he sucks and how detested he is. The theory of course is that he’s getting “heel heat”… the actuality is that no one can fucking stand him and don’t want to watch anything that he’s a part of. “Fortunately”, TNA has a back-up plan. During his debut rant he bragged about being called the “cancer of wrestling”. So for balance, TNA has brought in the man who uttered those words: “Hot Rod” Roddy Piper. Again, people… they’re expecting you to PAY for this. Piper has two important “firsts” in my own wrestling history. On the plus side, he was the very first wrestler I ever cheered for, back when the Cyndi Lauper thing happened on MTV and he was smashing things over the head of her fag manager and Lou Albano. Unfortunately that was close to twenty years ago. His more dubious first happened when he was in WCW cutting nonsensical promos that made an Ultimate Warrior speech sound like a Shakespeare soliloquy. He was the very first target I ever wrote about on the Internet… even with Hogan, Bischoff, and the rest of that miserable company seemingly BEGGING to be buried with their actions. He’d lose his place mid-promo (sometimes literally killing a gimmick that had taken weeks to set up with his incompetence), he’d say things that he was the only person on the planet who found entertaining (like his bizarre fascination with RuPaul), he was as responsible as anyone for WCW becoming an acronym for “Wheel Chair Wrestling” with the infamously awful Age In The Cage match. More recently he’s become an industry joke by doing interviews so full of inaccuracies he makes the Hulkster look like a Goddamned historian. Still… he was the “answer” to TNA’s woes… and anyone with their eyes drenched in Freebird hair cream could’ve seen what was going to happen next. He comes out as the guy who’s supposed to represent the “old style rasslin” that theoretically is the allure of TNA, the alternative to the low-class smut on the other show… and HE USES OWEN HART AS A GIMMICK!! Well, needless to say that appealed to the purists about as much as an Ian/Axl Rotten barbed wire baseball bat match. And tonight he’s going to ramble on for 90 minutes about it all on a webcast called PIPERVIEW, which has as much chance of being a positive for the company as bringing in Ahmed Johnson to be their new poet laureate (certainly every bit as coherent). NWA-TNA was far from perfect, but their decisions the last two weeks are tantamount to treating a cold by injecting a patient with the AIDS virus. And I haven’t even mentioned the unnamed “old man running things in the back” (I’m betting it’s either DiBiase or Dallas Page… considering how well the “mystery benefactor” gimmick worked for them in the past). Unfuckingbelievable. So thank you TNA, for assuring that Vince won’t have any real competition for at least another two years and is free to inflict whatever crap he wants upon us without fear of anyone changing the channel to watch “the other guys”. Guess the only thing left to do is bring in Joanie Lauer for the rematches the world has been waiting for. Wrestling sucks. Barbwire Mike LethalBassFishing.com… set your bookmarks now |