The Heat and the Shine

Welcome to my lawsuit.   For years I played your game.  I made a lot of money.  I had a lot of fun.  It was my choice.   But you told me that you were keeping your game safer than you really were.  Other players used drugs.  They used drugs that made them stronger.  More aggressive.  Gave them better vision and focus to hit me.  You put my health at risk.  I knew the game was dangerous.  But that was something different.  That was like handing my opponent a crowbar before he walked into the cage.   Now I’m screwed.  I get angrier than I used to.  I forget things that I’ve known for years.  People have to tell me their names three or four times.  It’s hard to keep a job that way.  Or a wife or a family.  And you’re still fine.  You dissed the rank and file fighters.  Now my fight is going to court.   You see there are two keys to my lawsuit.  You knew; that’s the first key.  You knew that my opponents were using these Superman drugs.  You knew that your testing was in

Michigan State's head coach is saying that the Big Ten champion deserves a shot at the National Championship.  ( http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/10073294/mark-dantonio-stumps-big-ten-champ-title-game )  He's right.  The Big Ten champ does deserve a shot.  And so does the SEC champ and the Pac 12 champ (and maybe even the Big 12 and ACC champs).   College football's season is so short that it is difficult to know which conference is best.  It seems like it's the SEC this year.  South Carolina beat Central Florida (the likely AAC champ).  Ole Miss beat Texas (the possible Big 12 champ).  That's pretty good.  But better than the Pac 12 with Oregon (who killed everyone and only lost within conference) and Stanford (who did the same, only with a win over Notre Dame as well)?   The uncertainty in conference quality frustrates a lot of people.  Under the BCS system only two teams can be chosen for the national championship.  Right now the major con

Far be it from Milwaukee's second Ben (yours truly) to give advice to Milwaukee's first, but if Ben Askren is not in the MGM Grand Garden Arena for UFC 167 on Saturday night, then DeWayne Zinkin should be brought up on charges of managerial malpractice. UFC is in a down period.  Talk about oversaturation or Fox Sports 1 or concussions all you want, but the reality is that the sport is cold because the big fights aren't as big.  The stars are less shiny.  The fights are less interesting.  Fans can get excited when Nick Diaz goes crazy, but crazy only goes so far.  UFC needs a matchup that is compelling. What is so compelling about Georges St. Pierre vs. Johny Hendricks?  That Hendricks might land a big punch?  That GSP might pound the tar out of him for twenty-five minutes?  Big whoop.  UFC has sold us that fight a hundred times.  Maybe it would matter if GSP was the heel we wanted to see vanquished.  But he isn't and it doesn't. What does matter is Ben Askren

In some circles Ryback will get blamed for the flat Hell in a Cell match last night, but not here.  He played his role.  The flaws in the match were out of his control. Ryback & Paul Heyman vs. CM Punk was an unsatisfying culmination to what, at times, had been a captivating feud.  Paul's entrance took too long, the match lacked heat and the denouement failed to generate the pop WWE hoped for. Perhaps all parties could have done something different to improve the ultimate result, but the bulk of the blame rests with two parties: CM Punk and WWE Creative. CM Punk deserves blame because every big star deserves blame when his angles go bad.  In wrestling -- as in movies and TV and radio and you get the point -- stars have ultimate control.  The promoter or the booker may get mad at the star or threaten the star, but ultimately it's the star's responsibility to make sure he is part of matches and angles that are good rather than bad. At this point wrestling people

Let us stand back and appreciate Carlos Condit.  For he is a great fighter.  He deserves a world title shot.  He is a psychopath. It takes at least a smidgen of mental illness to compete at the top levels of sport.  A wise man once said, "you have to be smart enough to do it, and dumb enough to think it matters".  That is Carlos Condit.  It matters to him.  You can see it in the skinny Mexican frame that's been built into a lithe sculpture of muscle and sinew.  You can see it in the scraggly beard and the lack of bunny-bait tattoos.  Carlos don't care. In part the fascination is because he's not the typical fighter/dunce.  This ain't some redass rassler or hard life thug.  He's almost a scion.  The son of a white Democratic Party operative and a Latino mother.  He fights because he wants to.  He loves the sport.  He loves competition.  He loves to whip your ass. Condit's destruction of Marvin Kampmann was in total.  And it wasn't just provi

The  Triple H interview  on Grantland is well worth a read.  Of course a long interview with a powerful WWE executive is going to be interesting.  Of course a publication like Grantland will make sure the interview stays a shoot, which makes it even more interesting. Most interesting (at least, to yours truly), is what Triple H reveals about himself through subtext.  Namely that he is a wrestler in full: wise, savvy and paranoid. Triple H is wise in that he gets what a lot of hardcore wrestling fans choose to ignore: the fact that WWE offers opportunity.  Bray Wyatt is the example he cites in the interview, but there are dozens of others.  WWE wants wrestlers to get over because over wrestlers draw money. There are exceptions to any rule, and that applies to WWE's promotion of wrestlers.  They screwed up Goldberg.  They probably could have handled Scott Steiner better.  It always felt like Shelton Benjamin could have been something more.  But by and large Vince has good tas

It's done, and just in the nick of time.  With about 72 hours to go until an embarrassment of Crystal Pepsian proportions, the deal got done for Fox Sports 1. On Saturday, that means fights.  But what does it mean today?  One thing it means is that Fox took a heck of a hit in opportunity cost. Fox Sports 1 has attractive programming scheduled beyond UFC.  On Saturday night, Fox imports Dan O'Toole and Jay Onrait, witty ex-anchors of TSN SportsCentre, for the nightly highlight show, "Fox Sports Live".  On Monday afternoon, Regis Philbin begins a studio show, "Crowd Goes Wild".  And one week from next Thursday, Fox Sports 1's marquee property (sorry, UFC), college football, kicks off. The problem is that they're all too late.  Today, O'Toole and Onrait don't mean squat. (sorry) And Regis means even less. (not sorry) College football means something, but that is two weeks away.  And the sum total of all of it is too close to nil in the ga

The ratings are in for the July 18th iMPACT-as-PPV experiment, and it was a success.  The two-hour show, headlined by Chris Sabin's first World Championship win over Bully Ray, drew a 0.5 18-49 demo rating (up from 0.4 the week before) with 1.49 million total viewers (up from 1.19 million). It's great news all around.  A relatively large audience saw their new torchbearer get his win.  The result was unpredictable .  The show was well received .  TNA won the night, and that is good for them. But what of the future?  Conventional wisdom is that WWE is number one, and always will be.  And that TNA is struggling and that Spike TV is the only thing keeping them alive and a half dozen other problems piled on. If there is one thing that fans and followers of the wrestling business can agree upon, it is that TNA must start doing something different to survive and (some day) thrive.  It must be better or cooler or more fun than WWE.  It must be 2001 Apple. Apple is the largest

Against all odds, they did it.  The twenty-nine year-old with a thin resume is a threat to the Greatest.  Betting odds on Anderson Silva have fallen.  The whispers that Chris Wideman could win have become boasts that he will.  All for a man without the impressive string of victories that so often precedes a championship win. This bridge has sold before.  Cooney was a threat to Holmes.  Spinks was a threat to Tyson.  Tito was a threat to Chuck.  The public wants to think that the dominant champion is vulnerable.  The people want to suspend disbelief. But what if the truth mirrors the hype? When a twenty-four year-old Manny Pacquiao challenged Marco Antonio Barrera in 2003, HBO play-by-play announcer Jim Lampley warned the world of what was to come.  Pacquiao was 37-2-1 with an unimpressive list of victims.  His first thirty-four fights were in Asia against names that were unfamiliar to the mainstream of boxing.  Five of Pacquiao's next six fights would end by knockout, but hi

Dave Scholler , UFC's head flack (technically Director of Communications, but I view the ol' Variety-style term "flack" for PR people with some fondness) took me to task a bit on Twitter recently because I wrote that UFC scaled the pricing too high for the UFC pay-per-view in Milwaukee on August 31.  Dave correctly pointed out that tickets had yet to go on sale to the general public, so my criticism was unfair.  My point was that anyone who wanted to but a UFC Fight Club membership for about $80 USD could gain the right to buy tickets, so essentially the event was on sale with an extra $80 tax added to each ticket order. Tickets to the August 31 UFC pay-per-view in Milwaukee are on sale now, and sales are meager thus far.  The Ticketmaster arena map shows that the cheap seats on both the upper level ($70 plus fees) and lower level ($150 plus fees) sold pretty well.  The best ringside seats ($400 plus fees) have also sold.  The problem is that the other sixty perce

The highlight of Raw -- tonight, definitely; this year, probably -- was the Mark Henry retirement angle. Everyone loved the speech.  Everyone loved the swerve. The speech was beloved because it was real.  Henry may not have had time to recap his dark days of bag craps and storyline fetishes, but he really does have a career to be proud of.  Many thought the 10 year deal he signed in 1996 would be his last.  Few thought he had potential after he spent the first half of the deal in sputtered starts.  Yet he became a reliable performer who at times elevated himself into being one of the more entertaining wrestlers in the promotion. Cena being swerved was also well done.  Cena's skepticism kept him from playing the impotent babyface.  It made sense for Cena.  He kept his guard up until Henry had the audience duped.  Keep the babyface in step with the audience and the babyface keeps from looking dumb. There was one problem with the turn: it didn't make a whole heck of a lot o

WWE Monday Night Raw starts in about sixty minutes.  In ninety minutes, Raw gets obliterated. The irony is in which network will be doing the obliterating: TNT.  A shade over twelve years after Vince McMahon's pyrrhic vanquishing of WCW, the Miami Heat and Indiana Pacers will cause TNT to smack Raw down to a number that belongs in the pre-Attitude era dark ages.  That TNT is paying the NBA an average of $445 million per year over their current contract is all the more delicious.  If WWE was booked for intelligent adults, Stamford wouldn't be left slurping the gruel of a USA network contract that draws about 10% of that. I submit that more 90's wrestling fans will watch the latest vanilla babyface try to vanquish basketball's monster heel tonight than will watch WWE's flagship wrestling show on the other channel.  Pity, that. Back when Vince fashioned himself the big dog (or other d-word) on the block, he'd have never gone down like this.  He'd have pu

Stone Cold Steve Austin had a lot of memorable moments during his WWF/WWE run, but my favorite happened fifteen years ago today.  May 31, 1998 was the WWF Over The Edge pay-per-view featuring Austin vs. Dude Love (a.k.a. Mick Foley/Cactus Jack) for the WWF Championship with Mr. McMahon as referee, Pat Patterson as ring announcer and Gerald Brisco as timekeeper.  Richard Hattersly has a long writeup on the match at Collar and Elbow  detailing the events leading to the match and how the match went down. I found the match memorable for several reasons.  It was in Milwaukee (where I grew up), and even though I was living in Los Angeles at the time (I was working a summer internship between my junior and senior years at U.S.C.) I still always go out of my way to watch wrestling from Milwaukee.  May 31, 1998 was also the date of an epic NBA Eastern Conference Finals Game 7.  The Chicago Bulls had won five of the last seven NBA championships while the Indiana Pacers had flirted with an NBA

Chael Sonnen vs. Jon Jones is shaping up as the biggest fight in UFC history.  Not in the octagon and not at the box office, but in the political arena. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial on Friday illuminating the games that Zuffa and the culinary union have been playing as New York state has considered legalizing MMA.  The Journal's editorial board -- a group that looks with jaundice at almost every union -- takes Sheldon Silver to task for ostensibly allowing the Las Vegas culinary union stop New York city and Buffalo from holding events that would supposedly generate economic activity for the state of New York. There is reason to doubt that UFC events in New York would boost the economy at the $16 million dollar level claimed by Zuffa, but that's not the point.  It is unclear if the $16 million number considers the possibility that the two hundred bucks spent on a UFC ticket that supports Dana White and Jon Jones might have been spent at a local bar or res