Thursday, May 28, 2020

Twitter Request Line, Vol. 295

Could it happen with no fans? Yes, and it'd be weird, but not full Philly weird
Photo Credit: Philadelphia Inquirer File Photograph
It's Twitter Request Line time, everyone! I take to Twitter to get questions about issues in wrestling, past and present, and answer them on here because 280 characters can't restrain me, fool! If you don't know already, follow me @tholzerman, and wait for the call on Wednesday to ask your questions. Hash-tag your questions #TweetBag, and look for the bag to drop Thursday afternoon (most of the time). Without further ado, here are your questions and my answers:

The most Philadelphia thing ever would be losing the final game in your old home stadium, heavily favored against a team that has never won in the weather you're playing in, for a chance to go to the title round against an opponent who would be haplessly overmatched against you, and it already happened in 2003. Honestly, I am achieving zen by not dwelling on it, because 41-33 has unraveled a lot of stress in my head. That being said, the Flyers winning the Cup in what amounts to be an exhibition tournament in front of no fans in a season where at points they were mathematically most likely to win the title? That would be probably a five out of ten on the Philly scale. IT could be a lot more Philly, but honestly, it could be a lot less too. I mean, the Flyers winning a Cup in front of screaming fans as the number one seed in the East after steamrolling through the playoffs would be so not Philly it would be foreign. That's a Boston way to win the title. Now, the most Philly outcome would be the Flyers clinching the top overall seed in the East after beating Boston, Tampa, and Washington in that silly little mini-first round thing while the plebes are all playing their best of five first round series, and then immediately getting swept by the 12-seeded Montreal Canadiens, who had just gutted out a hard win to take the Penguins out in the first round. Now THAT's Philly, babey.

Short answer, because Jim Cornette is a hypocritical piece of shit.

Long answer? Well, he's gotta have a brand in order to make money seeing as though he's unemployable to any wrestling company in the world right now. His last shot, NWA Powerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, he blew because his caveman brain never evolved past the need for racially insensitive jokes, no matter how benign he thought they'db e in his head. Of course, it's better than the other ways he lost out on employment, but either way, no one is going to hire a borderline racist who likes to threaten people who disagree with him with violence. Be that as it all may, he still has people who are willing to pay him for content, whether it be directly like advertisers on his stupid podcast, or indirectly, like the army of trolls who need axes to grind to feel alive online, because what's life if they're not harassing women and POC who happen to like modern wrestling? He's monetized the "old good, new bad, ooga booga" mentality and not only that, he's weaponized it. So that allows him to rail against Orange Cassidy while having done comedic shit himself in the past. It allows him to be angry about light tubes but defend gig blades. Nothing matters to these people except their own id, so they're best to be ignored. They won't, obviously, because nothing gets hits from people who want to be outraged than headlines like "Jim Cornette BLASTS [this wrestling thing you liked]." The demand to be mad isn't the problem if there's no supply. Cornette wouldn't matter if wrestling sites didn't make his supply readily available. Time is a flat circle. But regardless, you don't need to worry about the integrity of his arguments because they have none. He has none. He's a dumbfuck who deserves only mockery.

A castle would be cool, and I think the right wrestlers would be able to explore that studio space to ultimate satisfaction. However, my choice would be a skatepark, a match featuring Darby Allin in AEW. The best-received cinematic matches have everything to do with tugging on a relevant thread, which is why Stadium Stampede, both Mania, and the Money in the Bank matches, and all the Hardy Compound stuff in TNA (the original cinematic matches) were all well-received, and the Johnny Gargano/Tommaso Ciampa NXT one was, well, a critical flop. I still have yet to see any of them, which is on me, obviously. THAT BEING SAID, Allin is probably the most creative wrestler in the game right now, so building a match around him in a unique place that plays to his oeuvre is the most appealing thing. Obviously, Sammy Guevara is the natural opponent for him here, and he'd do a great job playing to the scenery because he understands what it means to be an antagonistic foil more than anyone in AEW right now except perhaps Chris Jericho, who probably gets it too well and ends up getting cheered half the time. Give that match a lot of plunder, one or two crazy stunts, and about 20 minutes of high intensity action that ends with Allin doing a kickflip off his own truck while Priscilla Kelly is driving it (provided you can do it safe enough, even with stuntpeople), and it could be the greatest match of all-time, or at least the biggest spectacle.

The thing about cheating in baseball is no one knows the extent of it, when it began, and how much of a competitive advantage it gave people for real. Barry Bonds notching 45 homers and 1.422 OPS in his age 39 season raises question marks for sure, but when you consider how many other people were suspected of juicing at the time, both hitters and pitchers, you start to realize that PED or no PED, Bonds was a talent above all else. Also, balls were flying off bats starting in 1995 to defray damage from the disastrous 1994 labor stoppage that cancelled a World Series. How much of that was the ball, and how much of it was the player taking roids? Players have been trying to find competitive edges in baseball since it started. Hell, Babe Ruth was rumored to have tried to use animal testosterone to boost his game at times. Methamphetamine, or "greenies" as they were called, were rampant during the '60s and '70s. There's nothing suggesting that the 1996 Mariners were clean other than the fact that they escaped public eye scrutiny that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa started accruing the next season.

However, because the Seattle Mariner baseball franchise is perhaps the most snakebitten team in the league, I will grant them this one title, because what else do they have? Do you want them to be known as the team that won 116 games in 2001 only to be bullied out of the playoffs by the fucking Yankees? NO! They are the home run kings, because it's the least you can do for them, the Baseball Browns.

The WWE-to-AEW portion is easy. The Duval Office would get Sasha Banks. The company sorely needs a women's star who pops off the screen the way that it has with Jericho or Jon Moxley, someone to be able to enhance the lesser known future stars. You could argue that Allin or Hangman Page haven't gotten mega over without a little help from their friends. Who among the women can GIVE that rub? Certainly not Brandi Rhodes. I'm not sure Awesome Kong can either. Women being the biggest stars in an American promotion that is worth a damn in the mainstream is a new concept, so there isn't a ready roster of them who can easily tap the flint together and spark it up. Allowing AEW to have Banks would go a LONG way.

AEW-to-WWE is harder, because you need to give them value. It would be easy to send them Jimmy Havoc to wither away on NXT UK, but it wouldn't be fair, and you said to make it fair, no matter how little WWE deserves fairness. To get value you'd have to give value, and as much as it would pain me to do, I would send Page over. He would benefit WWE by being a fresh face to insert into a lower-main event program who could continue to stoke his flames and become supernova. There's really no one else on the roster I think would be an equal value for what Banks would bring to her division than Page except Allin, and Allin would get immediately lost in the shuffle because of his size. It's a hard trade to make, but it's equal value going both ways.

Basically, our first dog, Zoey, was tremendously trying to raise as a puppy. Her first year with us, she kept biting and wouldn't leave us alone because she needed constant attention that we couldn't give her. Now, I know what you're saying, don't get a dog if you can't pay it attention, but it's not like we didn't play with her at all. It's just from waking up to going to sleep, all she wanted to do was play, and we had lives to live. So, we got a second dog, Blitz, and now they mostly play with each other. Having a second dog doesn't mean you don't play with either. It's just they have each other to keep each other occupied, and you can enjoy them when they want to relax, because they usually want to relax with you. It's a great thing. That paradigm may not work for everyone, but it worked for us.

The dirty secret is a Hall of Fame is by definition bullshit with bullshit criteria. People say "you can't let player x in, it's not the Hall of Very Good," but "very good" is not a step down from "fame." Like, Jeremy Lin was, for a week, the most famous basketball player in the country, and he wouldn't get into the NBA Hall of Fame if he retired today. In fact, I think he IS retired from the NBA and is playing in China after being a deep bench member of the Champion Raptors from last season. So shouldn't a Hall of Fame have the most notable players, or are you beholden to having the best players in no matter how famous they get? The answer will not be satisfying to anyone no matter what it is.

Personally, my whole attitude towards a Hall for anything is that it only really matters to the person getting into said Hall of Fame. For anyone else not closely connected to its members or aspiring members not in, I can't see why it would matter at all. I have no opinion on whether or not Jimmy Rollins ever gets into Cooperstown. Whether or not he has a plaque there doesn't take away from the memories his play provided to me during the Phillies salad years from 2007-2011, same for Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Cole Hamels, or Carlos Ruiz. So my criteria for a Hall of Fame would be I have no criteria. Let the dipshit sportswriters keep voting for people to give themselves some self-important task to do, and hey, if there's cool shit in the actual brick-and-mortar buildings, then yeah, I'll check it out.

Wrestling journalism can't be good if REAL journalism isn't good, and honestly, in the history of humanity, I'm no sure there's ever been a period of good journalism across the board. Now, wrestling journalism has never had its fleeting moments of important journalism like with Woodward and Bernstein going all in on investigating Watergate. In between intentional sponsored content and sycophancy that is unintentionally fluffy, people in other fields have done important work, whether it be to uncover political malfeasance or just to blow the cover off a Notre Dame linebacker's fake girlfriend. Wrestling hasn't had that and will never have it because wrestling in and of itself isn't important in the grand scheme of things, and absolutely no one who gets into wrestling journalism ever does it to pull on the few important threads.

There is no access journalism in wrestling, for starters. Or more pointedly, the access journalism in wrestling means you're Justin Barrasso or Ryan Satin getting on WWE's unofficial payroll to spread their propaganda. Then there's Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez who don't get inside information from sources they can really trust because wrestling is such a secretive business that they can change what the news is shortly after to discredit their work. Therefore, they've almost lost all interest in real wrestling journalism and have moved further and further into covering MMA, which is closer to a real sport, but also much like wrestling in that guys like human penis Dana White have modeled their business strategies after Vince McMahon.

And then you have the majority of people in the journalism business who just aggregate quotes/tweets from wrestlers to pass off as news and steal the work of guys like Meltzer or Satin (if you can call what Satin does work) to get eyes on their sites. If anything, the only people in wrestling who are doing anything in the journalistic field aren't really journalists, they're the critics. It's why losing a guy like Larry Csonka at 411 Wrestling was such a blow, because while he never broke news, he was a guide for people who wanted to watch wrestling, and not just mainstream shit either. It's really those people who are doing the best work, and there so few of them who don't just recap a match and plop a star rating on it either.

Protected user @earthdog asks:
Who is your #KBOLeague team?
This is the reductive answer, but former Phillie Aaron Altherr plays for the NC Dinos, so I pick them. Honestly though, I'm just glad baseball junkies both have something to latch onto and that they also have to feel the pain of New Japan fans who actually watch shows live and stay up late into the morning to get their fix. YEAH, WHO ARE THE DEGENERATE SPORTS CONSUMERS NOW, NERDS, RIGHT?
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