WrestleMania XIV: March 29, 1998

15 Team Cluster****: It's a shame to see Ron Simmons relegated to this match. LOD introduced as being back together and with Sunny for some reason. Kurgan interferes for some reason. Barry Windham interferes and knocks out Chainz to get rid of him and Bradshaw. In a surprise to absolutely nobody, LOD wins.

Light Heavyweight Championship: Taka vs Aguila - I don't think this match was even announced. Match starts off quick with Aguila knocking Taka out. Aguila hits a beautiful top rope moonsault to the outside. Taka suplexes Aguila outside and hits his own top rope move to the outside. Taka wrestles like a heel...Taka sent to the outside again but able to grab advantage for a second before arm dragged from the top back into the ring. Aguila flips a lot and jumps on Taka outside again. Taka almost with control again but crashes and burns. Aguila takes advantage with his own top rope stuff. Gets a 2 and then argues with the ref giving Taka the edge. Taka crashes and burns again from the top rope. Aguila flies again but misses. Taka up with the top rope drop kick. Taka hits a move but then misses from the top again. Aguila flies again but Taka hits a dropkick and then the Michinoku Driver for the win. They spent the entire ****ing match in the air! Awesome match! Solid ***1/4 spotfest.

omg Gennifer Flowers interviews The Rock! "The homeless situation in 'Murica" lol. Yes, he said that. Great interview. Rock is so smooth. Is fun watching him come up and do his thing.

European Championship: HHH vs Nugget - "The DX band" plays HHH into the arena for his match against Owen. Slaughter handcuffed to Chyna at ringside is filed under things that weren't announced before the ppv. Face takes the early control as per usual and beats down the bignosed bastard. Owen makes a mistake and is sent to the outside where he teases Chyna. HHH keeps almost getting the advantage until Owen lowers his head for the kneebuster move thingy. HHH control segment until before he throws a punch yells, "Fight back, Owen" in a spot that wasn't supposed to be heard. Owen throws some punches but winds up getting ddt'ed for his efforts. More "you talk too much" from HHH letting Owen know he's going after his legit hurt ankle. Kind of HHH really. Some cerebral work on the ankle for a few minutes. Owen mounts a comeback with punches and then kindly crotches HHH on the ringpost. Chyna and Slaughter have a game of tug-of-war ringside. Owen goes for the Frankensteiner but gets caught for a powerbomb. A count of 2!!! HHH goes for a superplex but is countered into a crossbody for 2. Pedigree countered into sharpshooter attempt. Owen hits HHH in the nuts!!! Another pedigree attempt but is countered again into the sharpshooter. Chyna blinds Slaughter!!! Chyna for the assist with the nut shot into the pedigree to see HHH retain. "Nobody's gonna get up from the pedigree"...didn't JR call WM 12?

At this point it's important to note that I took a break to watch Bryan vs Nigel from Unified where Nigel got his brains scrambled by some vicious hard to watch shots on the ringpost. I wonder if any of the rest of the card can live up to that match.

Mixed tag match: Mero/Sable vs Luna/Goldust - The good ole heel/heel vs heel/face dynamic. Luna playing the chicken**** heel vs Sable feels wrong. Goldy whips Mero to the ropes and when Mero comes back Goldy inexplicably just turns his back to him and they "collide" to give the ladies the tag. This is at the 53:25 mark of WM14. Go watch that for true wrestlecrap. Supersweet reversal of the TKO into a DDT. Frankensteiner off the top and a kickout from Goldust. Remember when a regular Frankensteiner was a finisher? TKO and Luna saves Goldy but is stuck with Sable!!! ohnoez.gif. Sable hits a pretty much deadlift powerbomb for a 2. Sable TKO and this is over. Entertaining enough really. We're going to give this 1.5 out of Bryan vs Nigel.

Intercontinental Championship: Rock vs Shamrock - Champ out first!!! The Rock flanked by the NOD minus Farooq. Back and forth action until The Rock hits a chairshot as devestating as the one a couple weeks prior. We'd be replaying that one all the time to if there were a better camera angle. 40 seconds later Rock taps to Shamrock's ankle lock. What? 2/Bryan vs Nigel. Shamrock hits the worst two belly-to-bellies consecutively on Kama and Mark Henry. Shamrock snaps and keeps the ankle lock on Rocky and then goes off on refs. Stretcher comes out for Rock because....why the **** not, I guess. Decision is reversed, Rock still champ. So everything that just happened was pointless and everything after the match was just stupid.

Dumpster match: Funk/Foley vs NAO - Crazy fun brawl for 10 minutes until the super pg ending of it all. Cactus had a bump I hadn't seen before that I thought was incredible where he did a senton into the side of the dumpster missing Billy. Not much of a write up as I watched on my PS4/tv instead of the standard PC/notepad. 3/Bryan vs Nigel

Bro vs Bro match: Kane vs Undertaker - Pete Rose sighting omg omg!!! lol Trolling Pete trolls, "You can't win a world series!!!" LOL. Pete dumped on his head before the match. Always thought this was after for some reason which makes no sense since he loses. Got chills from the epic intro for Taker. Taker out in his Dracula cape. Kane hits a chokeslam!!! A count of 2 and he picks Taker up to inflict more damage with...A CHINLOCK, the most vaunted move of them all. These two halfway through the match have no chemistry at all and Kane is a huge stiff (no pun). At one point Kane throws the steps next to Takers leg and Taker doesn't know what part to sell so he just flops around like a fish while JR says, "right in the ribs" when they landed about 2 feet from his ribs. I'm not sure how good a match is supposed to be when both of their gimmicks were that they no-sell all the time. Taker does the dive he did on HBK at 25, misses, and flies through a table. ****ing awesome. Taker kicks out of a tombstone. Kane kicks out of one. Kane kicks out of another one!!! Third time is the charm as Taker gets 3 when Kane kicks out just a split second too late. I wonder how many times Paul betrayed Taker over the years. Kane leaves Taker lying before leaving. I guess this feud will continue. Inferno match is next month, right? 2/Bryan vs Nigel. Amazingly enough a TON of people actually give this 5* on another forum in a 5* thread. "zomg the storyline going in and storyline in the match". Makes up for it being painful to watch, I guess.

World Championship: HBK vs Austin - Absolutely thunderous ovation for Austin. Oh not this ****ing DX band again. I love that belt design so much. Come back winged eagle, fly back home. WWF is against HBK and DX!!! Should've been a DQ when HHH attacked Austin and again when HBK hit him with a symbol. This is a travesty! Austin catches HBK with a botched inverted atomic drop actually nailing him in the balls. Austin hits a slingshot, this was his finisher in WCW!!! It should be over! It's not. Michaels takes a sick face bump on the table from the apron. Big chant of "Holyfield" LOL. Austin wins via a quick count. Everybody out to get HBK. Tyson nails Michaels. jfc how many roadblocks does one man have to face?!?! Match get 3.5/Bryan vs Nigel

PPV was good. Solid 7. Only really bad part of the ppv was Kane/Taker.

Now onto 3/30/98 RAW...

Nice write-up.

I find that after Michaels guts his way through that match, I felt legit bad for him that he had to get back up and even take a worked punch from Tyson. He had already earned his multi-year break by that point in the show.

Thanks. My first "real" write-up. tbh, I had no idea I had written so damn much.

I was surprised that Michaels took some of the bumps he did. I cringed at those the way people do at things involving Benoit's head do now knowing what they know.

It really is incredible that not only did he come back from that injury, but came back to have one of the most incredible careers, even if you took away every pre-injury match he is a no doubt hall of famer.

This is disappointing.

Yeah, that sucks.

Maybe there are a lot of almost nobodies waiting for some old content to be added before they subscribe

Just get it all on there ffs

Are you kidding? If I were to get the Network, 90% of my use would be on older content.

I guess the majority of the users are really young? Weird.

WWE wouldn't understand this, but in order to really get the most out of the old stuff it has to be up in order, not a random assortment of episodes.

It's self-fulfilling prophecy.

There's so much they could do with the old content, and it'd be really cheap, but they don't / won't.

Example: remember the old I love the 90s shows on vh1? People watched the heck out of those and they were just a bunch of random people in front of a blue screen made to look like a basement saying "I remember saved by the bell, it was awesome" and then some short clips played. Repeat repeat repeat.

It would be super easy to have a wrestling show like that.

Second example: all those podcasts that review old shows are awesome and make people want to go watch old stuff. There should be a show where some hosts talk about a new old show every week.

They just have no imagination. If they did it right they could get a whole new generation into the retro stuff. It's like they don't want to actually monetize the library at all, and instead want to just have the bare bones available so they can claim it's there.

If WWE wanted to make the Network be as great as possible they would have everything in chronological order by year and by company. So I could start in 1985 if I wanted to, be able to see angles and story lines develop and understand why so and so were fighting in the upcoming PPV. Instead I have to watch random old stuff and sometimes I forget the lead up.

They do have a couple shows like this currently. They have the Countdown show. I know it isnt exactly what you are talking about, but its close. Maybe as time go by and viewship goes up they will add more stuff like this. I have no knowledge of this, but Im guessing one of the problems with the Network is that they only have a certain amount of storage space so they need to keep what is most popular up. Maybe as they can afford it they will increase this amount and we will get more older stuff.

I've been doing this a lot recently with the posts itt and LKJ's thing. Basically my sole motivation for keeping the network is the convenient access to the backlog. I would cancel if I was only getting the recent stuff since NXT is on cable here.

This is what a lot of people thought the Network was going to be when it was announced and it would have been amazing.

That's why I fell in love with that watchwrestling.ch site or whatever it's called. I could follow the stories and know who was fighting and why they were doing it. That's exactly what I thought the Network would be like, disappointing that it isn't. I understand not uploading everything at once, but why not put a year's worth of Raw episodes up a few months at a time?

I was reading on another site, and some guy said he e-mailed WWE about more old Nitros. They told him that new Nitros would be going up every two months. He sent the e-mail seven months ago and no new Nitros have been added.

Seriously, A WWE Network seems like it should be the easiest thing ever, but they seem to be screwing it up.

Meltzer had an interesting comment on Flair's podcast about the old content. He said he rarely has time to watch it, but when he does he gets frustrated because it really clicks at a different level than current wrestling, so the current wrestling looks less good when he is reminded of how good old wrestling was.

Randomly have on Primetime since it's on Network now. Mr T: "Since that thingy happened February the 18th..." Great intro there, T.

edit: threw on Warrior/Hogan at WM VI. That star "thingy" with Warrior and Hogan is awesome at the beginning.



Attitude Era is on hold atm I guess. Kind of wrestlinged out after a couple of weeks of nonstop watching.

I've said it before but I loved the crowds that NWA/WCW had in the late 80's/early 90's. Crowds were elite for everything. Insane rabbits.

Random thought out of nowhere: Remember when Savage hit Warrior with the scepter at RR 91? That **** looked like it hit so hard it would've given a concussion.

I Hogan.

Ventura says that Warrior should conserve energy while coming to the ring. The next year, he walks out to the ring. Coincidence? I think not.

I'm not sure what thread it was but there was talk about Slaughter vs Patterson and then talk about Shiek/Slaughter. I couldn't find that one anywhere but upon mentioning this in a thread elsewhere, somebody uploaded it to DM. Here it is if interested. About to watch this match that man people call 5*.

Did you see the subtle rib to the NWA there, among the "images appear" in the stars were a scorpion and a Unicorn(or something cant remember exactly) obviously signifying Sting and Flair/Luger, but the STRONGEST FORCES IN THE UNIVERSE ARE HOGAN AND WARRIOR!!

I watched RR91 recently and I winced at that sceptor shot

Macho needed to clock him good for it to seem realistic that Warrior would get pinned by Slaughter

I missed that. Good catch!

Would give Slaughter/Sheik north of 4 stars. Really fun and crazy blood bath.

Good article on Jim Cornette:



http://www.popmatters.com/feature/19...lina-classics/

so i got an email from wwe today with a survey asking why i cancelled the network, i did find one question amusing, namely "how many pay per views do you plan to watch: 1, 2-3, 4-11 or 12" and wasn't sure if they meant each year or each month

Burn.

lol

Pretty moves to watch

Pat Tanakas blind swivelling flying forearm

Arn Andersons spine buster

Any Rockers double team

Just watched Flair/Steamboat from WW 89. One of Flair's chops sent chills up and down me. As a kid I never realized how hard he hit people. Match was ok.