The Heat and the Shine

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