Falls Count Anywhere

12-14-04

I've been disconnected.

Part of RAW
OK, so I lost my cable on Sunday and it still hasn’t returned. My regular taping guy didn’t get all the show either. So I can only actually go over some of it. Sadly, I liked what I saw. I missed the first hour or so, which I understand was built around the World Title sitch. Supposedly, Orton and Edge had a match which was kinda slow but well booked. HHH and Flair did a segment, Snitsky did something with the Divas and Lita announced that Kane was returning to kick his ass. Htista beat Jericho and Benoit when Batista pinned Benoit. I caught the last moments of this match, which looked pretty good. Batista getting the pin may be the first step in trying to make him the next Orton, that is, the next guy turned at the wrong time to feud with HHH. Batista is 36, so his time is limited.

Mick Foley returned and got a solid ovation, though not as big an O as he got the last few times. My guess is that all things wear out eventually. Mick plugged his new book, announced that he was going to Iraq with SmackDown! and brought up his politics. That was a little weird, but I still love him, even if he’s a commie pinko liberal. Muhammad Hassan came out and they had a little thing where Hassan spoke against the war and called the soldiers gutless cowards. Foley dared him to step in the ring and Hassan left, saying he wouldn’t fight someone he didn’t respect. Not a great segment, but it was better than it could have been.

The WWE Brain Trust. Vince should be so lucky...

In a match that I rather enjoyed, Maven scored an upset pin on Shelton Benjamin in a tag match that also featured Christian, Tyson Tomko, William Regal and Eugene. It was a fun match, with Eugene trying to use Mr. Socko. Benjamin missed a Stinger Splash that looked like a really painful miss. Maven got an OK reaction, and so did Benjamin.

The ending was the announcement of what they were doing with the World Title. They will decide it in an Elimination Chamber match at New Year’s Revolution. It’s Benoit, Jericho, Edge, Batista, HHH and Orton. That should be a solid match, and if they pull the string and have Batista do the turn on HHH there, it’ll all be golden.

NEWS
Mick Foley and Ric Flair had a little scuffle backstage at RAW. Not a big one, but the heat over Flair’s comments from his book is still there. Flair threw a punch, but Foley wasn’t hurt by it.

Sadly, I lost my cable during Armageddon and only got to see part of it. It has been getting some of the worst reviews of all the WWE PPVs and was certainly far less entertaining than the TNA PPV last week. My cable held out through the segment with Kurt Angle and Santa Claus. Anytime you see a Santa beat up, it’s art. The Tag Title Match between Kenzo and Rene Dupree against Rey Mysterio and RVD was solid, though there were parts that weren’t great. RVD’s pairing with Rey is actually one of the better things for him, as he doesn’t have to bring all the flying to the match, as Rey can handle the off-the-charts stuff and RVD can do his signatures and worker slightly less recklessly.

Kurt came out and did a great promo. He said that Tazz needed to go to the North Pole with the rest of the elves. He also said that Santa was out of shape. Then he beat him with an ankle lock. Funny, funny stuff.

Sadly, that was all I managed to see. Looking at the reports, it sounds like the rest of the show was pretty bad and poorly booked. Perhaps the big problem on SmackDown! right now is that they don’t know what they have or how to keep it in the ring. Kurt can’t go all the time anymore, so that’s gonna hurt overall match quality, but he’s still a good talker and they’ve been making use of that. They have a ready to bust huge John Cena, but they sent him off to do a movie right when they needed him around the most. Jesus went down to a serious injury. So did Carlito, though by keeping him on TV, they’ve managed to keep some heat on him. They have cruiserweights, but they never use them right. They could be putting on a show with three great matches and then a top match that may not be good, but that takes advantage of the strengths of the performers like JBL’s ability to tell a solid, in-ring story.

They need to bring in a few new people. That’s not easy. HHH on SmackDown! would be interesting. Same could be said of Orton or Batista. But RAW is still seen as the more important of the shows by those in charge, so they aren’t going to move off the big show for the little show, especially HHH who would be a great addition.

Frankly, ratings are stable, which no one expected, and that’ll probably mean the status remaining quo for a while.

Tough, yet feminine.

FlashBack!
I’ll do the Magnificent Mimi on Friday so that today I can talk about Terri Power. You’d probably know her as Tori from her days in the WWF, but she was the star of LPWA in its early 90s days. The reason I wanted to talk about her was that she is the best example of how women’s wrestling has changed over the years.

When Terri Power first arrived, she was a huge and muscular lady. She stood about 5’9 or so and looked as if she had just stepped off the floor of a gym. She would break at times and give the double bicep and it would scare ya to see. Her face wasn’t great, in fact, you could argue that she looked a touch mannish.

LPWA did their first PPV where Terri beat Lady X for the LPWA title. It was a pretty decent match, and Terri looked tough. By the time she was asked to make the video, which by the way is hilarious for Terri’s intros to the tape, she had changed her look a good deal to correspond with the changing attitudes. She had lost a fair bit bulk though gained definition. She may have had a boob job in between. She looked far hotter, with a much more feminine silhouette. She looked much more like the girls who were starting to pop up on RAW and Nitro.

By the time she arrived in the WWF, I think 1998, she had lost even more mass, though she had a figure that just kicked ass. She was the hottest chick on the roster at the time of her arrival, easily, and she started as Sable’s admirer, bringing her a rose and saving her from a beat-down a few times. She had obviously had a little work done, and eventually she ended up working with X-Pac of D-Generation X. She eventually injured her shoulder and had to sit on the shelf for a while. But when she came back, man-o-man.

Feminine, yet surgically enhanced.

Somehow, for the short while after her return, she looked far more attractive, and far less slutty, than any of the women in the WWF at the time. She had slimmed down, had lost most of her mass and was simply 100% toned. She certainly looked like one of those hot babes who do nothing but Yoga all day. She wasn’t around for long, but she looked good.

I haven’t heard about Terri doing any wrestling of late. She’s pushing 40, but others have worked well beyond that. I saw a photo of her from a signing a couple of months ago and she still looks great.

Women’s wrestling used to be dominated by brawling women who seemed tough. Donna Christanello and Judy Martin were never super hot, but they knew how to work and wrestled a good match. The 1980s brought in the era of the super-buffed wrestler, and woman’s wrestling was not immune. That changed as wrestling wanted to add more spice to their shows and wanted gorgeous women, even if they couldn’t work a lick. You see all that in the plight of Terri Power.

That’s all for this short edition. Thanks for reading.

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Chris Garcia