Thursday, September 6, 2012

That Super Dragon Q and A Was Pretty Awesome (Recap)

Super Dragon
So, Super Dragon, head honcho of Southern California's epically awesome Pro Wrestling Guerrilla promotion, took to the company's message board last night to partake in a Q and A session with forum members. Not many promoters/bookers/head bee guys take the time to indulge the fans of this, so I give Dragon all the credit in the world for actually setting up the session as a "thank you" to PWG fans, whom he has called the best in the world. He was also very candid during the whole thing. You can see the entire transcript here but here are some highlights, including questions that yours truly asked.

A friend of a user, handled "Reservoirs" asked how involved Super Dragon was with PWG nowadays. His answer:
It's basically two of us left at this point. In late 2008 I took over the business/booking aspects of PWG. We were very close to closing down in late 2008, and I had to use a lot of my own money to get things back on track. I also do all the video editing and DVD authoring as well as the DVD previews for Youtube.

Excalibur does all the graphics on the site/dvd covers/ dvd menus/shirts, as well as running the site. He also does the press releases for the site. He's also obviously become the voice of PWG with his commentary which is unmatched!
The two men behind the masks are the ones who run the whole show. Interesting. The most interesting nugget of all here is that the company was close to shutting down before I even caught wind of its existence. It just goes to show the tenuous and fleeting nature of wrestling companies and wrestling in general. Support your local indies as well as the national/pseudo-national ones that you've become a fan of as well.

Forum user CheoMateo asked which wrestlers Dragon wanted to bring in, and he replied that Rich Swann was making his debut "pretty soon." This is pretty exciting news, because he's on a shortlist of guys I think would rock the house in Reseda.

Another forum regular, BigBen213, asked him if there were any matches he wished he could have done in PWG. His answer was a doozy:
I really wanted to do Kurt Angle vs [Bryan] Danielson when Angle got released. I had him booked and everything. Then TNA pulled canceled it, and said he is not taking indy bookings in the end. Was looking into running a bigger venue for that one as well.
As much as I find Angle to be terrible nowadays, I have to admit, even that match against Danielson would have been at the very least surreal. That's a HUGE what if?

DeadmanDRB asked about the Young Bucks. His story about when he first met them was pretty amusing:
I hated their guts when I first met them. They came to Rev Pro training and wanted to show off doing shooting stars in an elbow drop drill. If you told me in 10 years they would be one of the things that makes a fed I haven't even started so special I would have laughed in your face again!

I think they are the best tag team in wrestling. Their run this year has been incredible. You will never see them in a bad match. They do for tags in PWG what Steen/Generico do for singles. They're also great guys. They love PWG.
Our fears about them being concerned with only flippy shit are confirmed! Haha, it just goes to show that sometimes, a bad first impression isn't too hard to overcome.

From camstun187:
-In one of your last tag matches (Passive Hostility w/ B-BOY Vs. Generico/Quicksilver), you gave Quicksilver one of the nastiest tombstone piledrivers I can ever remember seeing. You spiked the hell out of him, and shortly after he retired because of lingering neck issues. Did that have anything to do with it?
Dragon's reply:
I don't remember him hurting his neck in that match. He actually retired because he kept getting hurt over the years, and in one of his last matches ended up getting a staph infection that he almost died from. I guess it was the last straw for him. He ended up burning all his wrestling gear and calling it quits. Pretty unfortunate.
Yeah, I'd say that's pretty bad. I've only seen the one Quicksilver match from PWG Sells Out Vol. 1, but it was a damn nutty, damn entertaining tag match. Damn.

The mystery of why Paul London disappeared from PWG is illuminated, at least partially:
I don't really even know what happened. I know London has an issue with someone in PWG. He told me he wanted to take some time off while he was tag champ, and then I never heard back from him again.

It's too bad. I thought him/Generico were great together, and he cut some of the funniest promos we've ever had. He's also a super nice guy. I actually thought I saw him walking a dog by the freeway on my way to BOLA. Maybe one day he'll be back.
I don't know if we'll ever know who London has heat with, but I'm not sure it matters. I hope he goes back because there's something about Paul London and PWG that just feels right.

Facetious asked how Low Ki was to work with:
Very difficult. He's set in his ways and doesn't like to lose. Which makes it incredibly difficult to book him. One of my biggest wrestling accomplishments was having him lose to Claudio! It's unfortunate, because I think he is a very talented wrestler, and we could have done some great things together.
Low Ki, a mark for himself? Get out!

He also says that Necro Butcher is a "very nice guy," which is funny to think about if all you know about him is stapling dudes in the forehead and walking barefoot on broken glass. It just goes to show that the nicest guys can do the craziest shit in the wrestling ring.

As for me, I asked two questions. The first was how much wrestling he watched in a week:
I don't watch wrestling at all. The last WWE match I saw was Angle vs [Chris] Benoit in a cage. I don't even remember what it was. I checkout some indy stuff here and there, but that's about it.
This wasn't surprising to me at all, actually. I didn't expect him to watch much or any WWE, but it's surprising that the last match he watched was from that long ago. Angle seems to be a wrestler's wrestler for as much as I have a distaste for him nowadays (I admit that was a pretty neat match though), and it's clear that at least he can separate Benoit the wrestler from He Who Shall Not Be Named, the shithead murdering scumbucket (he mentioned that he would have liked to have wrestled Benoit earlier in the open interview). My second question was whether he would book more intergender matches in the future:
Doubtful. I haven't liked any women matches in PWG ever. Which makes it hard to figure out what to do with Candice [LeRae] nowdays.
Here's where I have to call him out a little bit, because he really hasn't brought a whole lot of women into PWG lately outside of LeRae, Christina von Eerie and Portia Perez. Those are all awesome wrestlers, but hey, it's his company, and those are his whims. Still, I'm disappointed that he's discounting a whole gender because (and I'm assuming here) he wasn't impressed with what could have been an off-night for Perez in her debut match. That being said, he mentioned later on that he wrestled Sara del Rey in APW and thought she was very talented, so maybe this is just a matter of him getting burnt out on spending a bunch of money on women who don't work out for him? It's hard to give him too much crap when his company ran an angle where Joey Ryan made LeRae look like a goddamn star.

Overall, it was a fascinating exercise, and Dragon really was candid with all his answers. PWG has always been one of the best companies for in-ring stuff, but they show that they're awesome in terms of fanservice and interaction as well.

Also worth checking out in the thread is anything posted by Kevin Steen (KevinSteenReally). Dude really is crazy (in a good way).