Did you know that World Wrestling Insanity has a Message Board? Yep. We’ve done got us one of them there fancy Message Boards, where you, the random, unnamed wrestling fan can go and vent your frustrations. From WWE’s Family Friendly Direction, to ROH’s Production issues, to whatever stupid stunt TNA is running with this week, the Insanity Message Boards is your place to speak your mind. You can also interact with fellow Insanity Readers, as well as the Insanity Staff. We even have an E-Fed, if you’re into that whole “Role-Playing” thing, so feel free to stop on by and join in the fun!


In the meantime though, here's a taste of what you're missing –

  In a week that saw a new UFC Heavyweight Champion in Cain Velasquez, and the Undertaker buried alive by his brother Kane (again), all the talk seems to be centered on a momentary confrontation between former UCF Heavyweight Champion Brock Lesnar and the aforementioned Undertaker during a post-fight interview with the Taker minutes after Velasquez defeated Lesnar for the UFC Title.   Here's what the folks on the Insanity Boards had to say about it –

Canadian Bulldog
Call me skeptical... but Taker just happened to be interviewed, and Brock just happened to call him out? If they had personal issues, why would Taker be at the event in the first place (besides the fact that he's a huge UFC fan).... If the money was right, I could see this happening at Mania.

Aaron Wood
as much as I hate to say it, I'm with Bulldog. I suspect that Lesnar and Taker didn't plan anything, but as Lesnar came by and saw Taker get interviewed they switched into work mode for the camera.

To be honest, even if Vince were to want Taker/Lesnar at Mania or Lesnar to come back or anything, I can't think that he would be pleased that 24 hours before his match at Bragging Rights, an out-of-character interview with The Undertaker (and indeed one where he followed The Rock in saying he'd have done MMA instead of wrestling had it come around earlier) at a UFC event is the talk of the wrestling world.

James Guttman
I think the confrontation was more work than shoot, but there's some elements of reality in there. The way Lesnar left, although forgiven by many, still left a sore spot with guys like Taker who are considered to be the defenders of the locker room. Whether it turns into anything in WWE will depend on how long the buzz lasts.

aliasyoshi
Does nobody else notice what Mrs. Taker (Michelle McCool) is doing? Clearly this "personal" issue is due to Brock being a purse snatcher. She looks very, very ready to defend the bag if needed.

Mike Johns
Whatever happened here happened in the moment. I can't think of it as much more than that. Brock saw Taker, said or glared or something, Taker simply said "You wanna go?" and Brock walks off. All we're told is that "it's personal" and never says that he was rooting for Cain. So Taker knows not to talk publicly about it, whatever it is, which makes me think "shoot". Because, if it were a work, there's NO WAY IN HELL Taker the Pro takes the highroad here, and deflects the question. He promos. He talks it up. He calls Lesnar a bitch. Something to sell a future match, or get some publicity to further the story on WWE TV. None of that happened here, which leads me to say there's unresolved heat that's personal, nothing more. In other words - non-issue.

Eaglesfn345
I think the other to come from this clip is that when asked the question of whether he would have gotten into MMA if it was as big as pro wrestling 20 years ago, he gave an pretty enthusiastic "I'd be all over that". That's gotta chafe McMahon's ass a bit. And if I recall, The Rock was interviewed after the last event, and he also would have chosen MMA.

Anthony.Analog
Can you imagine The Rock or Taker or Stone Cold if they'd have been MMA guys? A lot of these MMA guys can't talk for sh*t...

Although, it's a double sided sword, because MMA guys get FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR less time on the mic than WWE guys do... and who knows if Mark Callous or Dwayne Johnson would've developed anything close to the personalities WWE allowed/encouraged them to develop. I think Steve Austin would've broke through either way, if you look at his first ECW promo, he ALWAYS had IT.

We'll never know.

The Chosen 1
Nah everybody is being way too cynical here. Why would Brock want anything to do with a work like this RIGHT AFTER losing the UFC Heavyweight Championship. Let us remember that this isn't like losing a title in Pro Wrestling, you have to imagined he would be in a very very bad mood following such a horrible loss.

This was 100% real. The Undertaker didn't even really play it up, he kind of steered away from the whole thing just saying there was some bad blood but moving on. It was definitely just a coincidence.

James Guttman

Quote: Why would Brock want anything to do with a work like this RIGHT AFTER losing the UFC Heavyweight Championship. Let us remember that this isn't like losing a title in Pro Wrestling, you have to imagined he would be in a very very bad mood following such a horrible loss.

Although the second sentence is right in terms of Brock's emotion, the first sentence explains why.

Personally, as you can see from my previous post, I'm in the "Not A Big Deal" camp on this issue.   Nothing will come of it, real or worked.   It happened in the moment, Undertaker deflected any further questions on the subject, and this is as far as it's ever going to go.   They're not going to fight.   They're not going to wrestle.   It was two guys measuring their dicks in the moment, for whatever reasons they felt they needed to.   Nothing more.

 On top of the big UFC PPV this weekend, there was also the matter of a WWE PPV (whose buyrate more or less got slaughtered by UFC 121) taking place this past Sunday.   Trying to think of the name of it… Something about "Bragging…"

The Chosen 1
Wow. That was so lame. Kane buried Undertaker alive with interference from The Nexus?

It may not be the story the wanted to tell... but the entire time I was watched Nexus beat down Taker I was thinking about how cool it was going to be when the turned and started beating down on KANE as well... I thought how cool it would be when they threw BOTH Kane & Undertaker in the pit and buried them alive. What that would mean for Kane-Taker I don't know but it would have been huge, and completely AWESOME! The reasoning would of course be that when Wade won the WWE Title he'd want to be the ONLY World Champion in the WWE... or at least destroy the two World Title contenders if not screw the Title itself completely... and who could be more anti-Nexus then guys that have been with the company for 10+ years... it would especially make sense if a heel HHH ended up being behind them

OH! and Kane had a big thing of dirt bury Taker... ya know.. like SS 2003... except this time it had like 15 pounds of dirt in it... it looked so pathetic. You couldn't even see the dirt it looked like the pit was still empty. It was so bad that they were forced to use camera trickery and close ups so you didn't see the pit at all. Especially disappointing considering the last time KANE did this it looked like THOUSANDS of pounds of dirt was dropped THAT was sick... this was sad and pathetic.

T - Dog
I get the feeling Styker and Lawler seriously HATE each other.

Lawler: Yeah Styker, how many championships did you win in your career?
Stryker: Well I didn't have my own territory to book my own matches in.

Stryker: Aksana's 24, she's too old for you.

And there was a few more.

James Guttman
WWE's approach to PPV business has changed in that they almost see it as an extention of their tv shows now. It makes sense for the match to end the way it did in order to further storylines, but I can see the frustration of fans who still view PPVs as special events. They pay to see definitive answers, winners, and losers. When they get a DQ in the main event, they tend to get upset about it.

WWE's biggest mistake was putting Barrett-Orton on last. When a pay show ends like that, people are left with a bad taste in their mouths. Given the Nexus interference in Taker-Kane, it sort of made it impossible to have that go last. Over time, fans will either come to accept how WWE uses their pay shows as nothing more than a 3 hour Raw with less talking. Those who don't, will just stop ordering. It's really a shame too because pay-per-views used to generate a ton of interest. Now they're afterthoughts at best.

The Chosen 1
They don't really need less PPV's. I think that we've gotten to the point where people in charge would fear that if there wasn't a PPV each month, people would actually LOSE interest in the shows.

Think about it. We're SO conditioned to the monthly PPV's if one day someone just asked what the big show was this month (in September) and they were told "there isn't one"... and they went "oh. What about next month?" -"Nope. None next month either." It might lead people to feel as though the RAW & Smackdown's had no point. Unfortunately, the 80's thought process can't work anymore because we've come WAAAY too far from those days and it would be impossible to go back, in my opinion.

The lesser PPV's need to just be less money. If a show with plot points like this cost 20 Bucks, they could use it to build to the bigger PPV's and no one could complain. Plus it would give the Raw & Smackdowns something to build to each month WHILE at the same time the matches for those shows wouldn't have as much pressure on them as they do it now. With a PPV costing as much as this one people are expecting big moments to happen. If it were half the price a match that furthers a storyline that is TOO BIG for RAW but not big enough for say Survivor Series... and at the same time lacks any significant "oh my god" angle to it... would be perfectly acceptable. I know I was kind of all over the place here but I really don't think there's any way this could be looked down on, the WWE probably wouldn't even lose money in this case.

There's no reason for a show not to be a SUPER Raw if you only have to drop 15-20 bucks to watch it.

Aaron Wood
The best un-intentional comedy from last night:

James Bullock
I just finished watching the show, and you don't know how much that moment messed me up.

Anthony.Analog
Greatest. Clip. Ever. I uh, I'm going to go have some private time now.

 Hopefully, everyone here has been reading my weekly recap of All Things TNA, This Week in TNA (every Sunday, right here on World Wrestling Insanity), where you would have read about how Eric Bischoff took an hour of TV time on ReAction last week to explain how his devious plot to steal TNA from Dixie Carter (even though he and Hogan were already pretty much in charge anyway) all came together.   Here's what the folks on the boards thought of the ingenious plot –

The Chosen 1
it's mind numbing... They're just talking in circles, showing the stuff that we keep calling logic holes and saying things that SOUND like the end of the sentence is gonna be the explanation but then never getting there. It sounds like the beginning of a story over and over

"You wanna know how we did this? How we pulled this off? It's easy. Take a look. [shot of Abyss killing Jeff Hardy] It was so easy how we did this. From day one. We liked Dixie Carter, but we knew what would have to be done. I mean if you look at the tape you can see pieces of it coming together. We knew we needed Jeff Jarrett [Jarrett being humiliated by Eric]. Jarrett: It was so easy how we did this. You wanna know how we did this? I couldn't TELL you how. I'd just have to show you [Shot of something that makes no sense]"

Repeat for ten minutes.

It Would ALMOST ALMOST ALLLMOST make sense if they were trying to say that it was AFTER the inconsistencies on TV that they got together. That Hogan & Flair didn't get together until AFTER Fortune beat the shit outta Hogan but they aren't saying that yet. It's almost like they're kind of hinting at that but then a second later you'll hear someone else say that everyone was together since day one. It's like they just filmed all these different people and had them riff on what they thought the storyline was. So there's 20 different views all different thoughts on what happened

Bundorama
Spike aired a replay of Reaction late last night.(Funny how they won't do it for Impact anymore, but they'll do it for the after show) Anyways, a big plot point in the explanation by Bischoff was the Impact in which Dixie Carter compared EV2 to Hulk Hogan, which apprently angered Hogan enough that he got on board with Eric's plan to take TNA from under Dixie. It wasn't actually that bad of an explantion/reveal, except for the fact that, like I already stated before the show went on, they stuck to the story that Jeff Hardy was "in on it all along", which really makes no sense considering he fought Abyss at length several times leading up to BFG. I think the "he was a game time accquisition" explantion would've been 10 times better than what they offered, but I digress....

The Chosen 1
Yeah I just got to that point and so about 15 minutes in they finally start making sense about what the hell they're talking about. In other words they just spent 15 minutes doing the thing you're supposed to do in the first minute or so of a show like this... Why wait this long to start actually giving some kind of answer.

So far these are the things that kind of make sense from ReAction:

Eric Bischoff got Flair to join up with him and Hogan some time after Dixie said that EV2 were as important to the 90's as they were to the 80's. So any fights that happened before that were real fights between Hogan/Abyss & Fortune.

ALL of Sting's heelish behavior was a result of him sensing some kind of conspiracy on Hogan & Eric's part but he wasn't sure just who was involved in the conspiracy, hence why he targeted RVD, thinking he was in the Jeff Hardy spot. (God RVD would have been such a better pick for this whole thing than Hardy, up until he vacated the belt)

They never just come right out and say it for some reason but just by my own interpretation of what the hell they were saying, Abyss being the lunatic Anti-Dixie he was needed to seem completely unaffiliated with Hogan & Eric as humanly possible, thus they told Abyss he needed to beat up Hogan a lot. Same goes for Abyss & Jeff Hardy. Okay at the end Eric says he stuff with Jarrett was for the same reason.

In the middle about there's about a 10 minute piece of the show that's missing... so I don't know about anything else.

Average
As much as I've been enjoying the angle, it really says something when they feel the need to take an entire hour to explain exactly what's going on.

clifffside
They used to explain plots during the Golden Years too, it's just that because wrestling isn't as hot, we aren't willing to stop micro analyzing and start enjoying things for what they are.

My favorite wrestling angle of all-time was The Rock's second heel turn. The following night after Survivor Series 1998 The Corporation took up about a half hour segment telling us how the master plan unfolded. The difference then and now (besides the wrestling business being a thousand times hotter) is that the WWF had TWO great babyfaces who the crowd could get behind to fight the super power heel group. The Immortals are just as talented as The Corporation, but does TNA really have anyone as talented as StoneCold and Mankind to play off of them in a babyface role? I think not.

But it's an intriging angle nonetheless and is getting results so far.

Sprout1883
TNA has precisely one face he can battle them that fans will get behind and beleive in and that is Angle. RVD doesn't have a serious enough attitude, Joe would need a major rebuilding job, has he has been made to look like a complete fool. then we have lies of Anderson (yeah right), Pope maybe.

Perhaps the Guns alongside Angle maybe

This is just a taste of what you're missing on the Boards. Why don't you come by sometime and check it out for yourself, eh?   You never know when something you post may end up being the next Hot Thread.

http://s14.zetaboards.com/Wrestling_Insanity


*****

Mike Johns, imbued with special, shameless self-promotional powers the likes of which haven't been seen since the height of DX's self-fellatious babyface run in 2006, is a contributor to WorldWrestlingInsanity.com and ClubWWI.com, single-handedly responsible for WWI's coverage of All Things TNA.   In what spare time he has left, Mike produces and records original music under the name 'SaviorSelf.07.05.98' as well as remixes and mash-ups of far more popular songs under the name 'TMJ'.

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