By "Net.cop" Scott Keith

Okay, so I hate WCW. Get over it.

I mean, with some of the letters I get, you'd think I was legally bound to be held to a higher standard of journalism than the rest of the internet, just because my website gets a lot of hits. I mean, get over yourself. Objectivity bites and I'll proudly state my opinions until I'm blue in the face unless either major fed starts paying me not to.

With that being said, I don't automatically like everything the WWF does. Just because I don't say much about the WWF doesn't mean I automatically condone everything they do. In fact, I hate a lot of things about the WWF...

- Al Snow. What an over-rated clod this guy has turned into. His Leif Cassidy stint was a brilliant bit of parody (which, sadly, no one got) that allowed Al to showcase his brilliant ability to make even the worst wrestlers look like, well, wrestlers. He got dumped in ECW, and developed a bush league gimmick and suddenly started thinking he was a star. Here's a clue: He's not. The Head is over, Al is not. Al has gotten immensely lazy (I guess a year of being around Shane Douglas will do that to you), to the point where his strength lies in the garbagy style that ECW popularized. People who train UFC fighters should not have to rely on moonsaulting off the guardrail to get a crowd reaction. As for the Head; the joke has a shelf-life of about two months. The people realize the joke ("Hey, he's talking to the head"), they act on the joke ("Head! Head! Head!") and they move on. That's why the JOB Squad was brought in so fast -- to capitalize on Snow's popularity before it burns out. And it will. Snow gets, at best, a mid-card reaction at this point, akin to what HHH was drawing at his height as a heel. Speaking of which...

- Hunter Hearst Helmsley. Okay, here's one of the secrets of wrestling that NBC didn't mention: Bad wrestlers make better faces than heels. Why? Take HHH: The biggest cricism levied against him is that he's a good seller, but is limited to four offensive moves, two of which involve using his knee. So why is he suddenly being carried to watchable matches by guys like Rocky Maivia? Because heels control the match. When HHH was a heel, he'd get beat up for the first minute, take control for the middle portion, and then fall victim to the face's big comeback for the end. So Helmsley had to fill in the middle portion with an actual offense, and the fans noticed how shitty he was as it. Fast forward to the present, and HHH's face turn. Now the situation is reversed: He gets to beat up the heel for the first minute with two of his offensive moves, spends the middle portion selling for the heel, and then makes the big comeback with his Pedigree to win. This style is much more suited to him, because it means we don't have to watch him struggle through the offensive portion. However, a formula match is formulaic for a reason: It's boring. Who the hell wants to watch HHH do the exact same match 20 times a month because he's incapable of doing anything else? That's why he'll never be a World champion (and thank god for that), because he's simply not as adaptable as a Steve Austin, Mick Foley, or Shawn Michaels. Ken Shamrock is a pretty adaptable wrestler, but I hate him too.

- Ken Shamrock. Geez, this guy's been in the business a year and a half now, you'd think he'd learn something outside of UFC submission stuff. If Ken's stagnation is indeed due to the loss of Bret Hart as a trainer, then that makes me respect Hart's training abilities that much more, because Shammy hasn't developed since his heel turn. The interview skills are non-existant at this point, which is going to bite him in the ass eventually because he's in the wrong federation to let the ringwork do the talking. The Corporate thing is cute, but unless Ken develops a personality *yesterday*, he's going to be taking a big fall soon. The storyline involved in the Corporation angle is getting too complex to rely on Ken's "It's knuckle-up time!" interview over and over. He either needs to go full-bore Robo-Shamrock and destroy everyone heartlessly (like the I-C title tournament foreshadowed) or do another face turn and work on the interview skills. Either way, I couldn't care less about him one way or the other at this point, and that's a bad sign. At least he knocked off the Outlaws...

- The New Age Outlaws. Wow, what happened to these guys? Last year at this time they were a couple of charming, backstabbing idiots who stumbled into the tag titles and defended them by hitting their opponents with the belts. The face turn was the worst thing to happen to either guy. For one thing, Jesse Jammes is utterly unsuited to being anything but the underdog. The guy is simply not a believable threat as a wrestler, which is what made their first tag title reign so neat -- you knew under normal circumstances they'd get slaughtered, but the challenge for them was to find new ways to cheat to win. Now he's being booked as the guy who takes the beating in the tag matches, only to come back and score the clean win. Clean win? From the guys who dumped Cactus Jack off the stage in a dumpster, just to be cute? It's a very unsettling and just somehow...wrong...image for these two losers to be out there standing for Good and Justice. And then Jammes got ahold of the catchphrase and now he even uses it in singles matches to make sure the crowd doesn't forget about him. Well, Jesse, if that's a concern, then you probably shouldn't be out there doing upper-card matches before you know how to properly work a crowd. At least Billy Gunn seems to grasp how to properly play a babyface at this point, and he doesn't overuse his catchphrase, which is probably why he's getting the I-C title from Ken Shamrock in two weeks. But then at least that division is in better shape than...

- The Women's division. Wow, what a spectacularly huge load of crap. Give the WWF credit for realizing that no one in North America cares about women's wrestling, but the suspects are some of the most annoying ever: Jackie, Terri and Sable chiefly among them. Have you ever HEARD Jackie try to give an interview? She's been attempting to learn English since she started with the USWA in the late 80s and she STILL hasn't quite grasped it yet. And she's certainly not a wrestler, as her "matches" with Sable proved. So what can she do? Can't interview, can't wrestle...well, she's got huge breasts. Yeah, that's worth 10 minutes on RAW. Then you have Terri Runnels, who's even more useless, if that's possible. She was a bad actress back in 91 in WCW, but then everything sucked by proxy then, so I can forgive that. But her attempts at "acting" (and I use that term very loosely) have resulted in her being reduced to jiggling at Val Venis to make sure she didn't talk. That's why Marlena worked so well -- she didn't say a damn word. Terri couldn't even manage to convey sexual pleasure while covering a guy with whipped cream while his genitals were in a C-clamp. I think Terri and Jackie are supposed to be implying a lesbian relationship, but they're both so bad at acting that there's no way to tell exactly what the relationship is supposed to be. And then there's Sable, with a voice roughly equivalent to Freddy Krueger scraping his nails on a blackboard, who then gets time ON THE STICK. Why do they let this woman talk? Because the audience is actually concerned about her as a person? Okay, let's get real: Debra MacMichael is at least savvy enough to realize exactly what the two reasons she was hired are. Sable may be objectifying herself by posing for Playboy, but she's a shitty wrestler and an irritating interview, so that's about all she's good for anymore.

I'd continue on with stuff like lack of clean wins, constant DQs and run-ins, stupid skits taking the place of wrestling, and a hundred other things, but it's the same stuff I complain about with WCW so it'd get kind of redundant. Besides, it's much more gratifying to bitch about WCW because their fans are more fun to annoy.

And isn't my enjoyment what's really important?