By "Net.cop" Scott Keith

Netcop rant - July 15, 1997.

The following may or may not be wrestling related. Place your bets, take your chances.

Now, I don't want to go off on a rant or anything here, but first of all, let me reiterate that Dennis Rodman barely qualifies as a human being, let alone a great athlete. As if wrestling needed to be lowered any further in the public eye than it already is, now we have to tolerate his presence on a regular basis, too. So he can do a leapfrog over the Giant, so what? He's a basketball player -- if he couldn't do a 6 foot standing leap on a mat that's practically a trampoline then I'd be worried.

As a Canadian, I can barely get up the impetus to care about the two teams we have in the NBA as it is. Newsflash: No one in Canada watches basketball and no one cares. Especially not about Rodman. Now, put Marty McSorley in there and you've got another thing.

The whole Nitro effect of the Bash is particularly irksome to myself, as a Canadian. We of course do not get Nitro, so we have to wait until the next Sunday, if we get to see it at all. And even then it's a chopped version (badly chopped I might add) with a retarded host. I know I'm probably offending the retarded members of RSPW by comparing them to Mark Robertson, but sometimes you just have to speak the truth.

I already ranted about Bash at the Beach in a seperate post (thumbs down was my concensus, and really, what other review do you need?) but there were quite a few cool points.

Raven is cool. Okay, correction, Raven and Richards are collectively cool. It's a symbotic relationship. Raven by himself is stupid and boring, Stevie by himself is boring. I mean, that Serious Wrestler shit just didn't wash with me. He's a clueless putz and always will be. Memo to Bischoff: I know you want to sign the Meanie. You might as well, he's dead in the water in ECW now without Larry and Moe to be Curly to. I was commented to Brother Zen recently that in ECW, Raven's t-shirt has the Voltaire quote on it, and if he jumped to WCW, it would be a Dr. Suess quote. And lo and behold, the poetry read by him at the Bash sounded like a Dr. Suess book. I am the greatest.

That being said, I'm looking into getting an ECW Raven shirt as we speak. I was offered a bWo one, but turned it down. I work in mysterious ways.

The Blood Runs Boring tag match was the best match of the night, and that's not saying much. Bryan Clark has always impressed me.

Okay, so the Nightstalker sucked, but the *gimmick* was pretty cool.

Okay, so the gimmick sucked too, but the *axe*, yeah, that was cool.

Anyway, Wrath Bomb or whatever you want to call him continued to show improvement, and here's hoping he doesn't get totally lost in the WCW shuffle.

Speaking of being lost in the WCW shuffle, it's a pretty sad indictment when Steve McMichael is a more appealing wrestler than Jeff Jarrett. Even if he does sort of suck, it's refreshing to see Mongo put in a good effort every time out. Jarrett is an over-pushed waste of money who should have been taken out to the parking lot and been beaten senseless by the Horsemen to end the freakin' storyline once and for all, but yet he remains alive and US champion. If it were 1986, I assure you Arn Anderson would have broken *at least* two of his bones by now.

Chris Benoit is the opposite, sort of. Benoit has now lost a year of his life that he could have spent doing, well, anything. Instead he spent it fighting Kevin Sullivan ad nauseum in a pretty much meaningless feud. I mean, if there were some title on the line, I could understand it, but by January there was just no logical reason for them to be fighting anymore. Benoit deserves to wearing the belt around Jarrett's worthless waist. I doubt it'll ever happen.

Whatever happened to Dean Malenko? Remember him, short, well built, greatest wrestler on the face of the earth? Welcome to WCW: US champ one week, milk carton subject the next. I'll add his case study to my book "1001 Perils of Having 650 Wrestlers in One Federation." Due out this fall.

I couldn't help but notice while surfing the cesspool again this afternoon that certain misguided individuals are yet again attempting a moderated RSPW. It won't work. Honest. My advice is to just let it go. There are just too many clueless knee-jerk reactionaries on RSPW who will shoot it down when it comes time to vote. Not to mention the News.Groups Cadre Conspiracy against us. The truth is out there.

Is it just me, or is the current Undertaker angle setting new records for being the slowest advancing storyline of the 90s? Maybe Vince is trying to catch up to the 8 months and counting Sting storyline which is going nowhere equally fast.

Speaking of the WWF, I'm sure most of you know that I was in attendance with Brother Zen and the rest of the CMA at the Edmonton RAW on July 7th. I would've been at the Calgary show, too, but my vacation plans were cancelled due to complications at work. And just to add insult to injury, Brother Zen called me in the wee hours of the morning to inform me he was having drinks with Shawn Michaels' girlfriend. I of course killed him the next day.

As for the show itself, I attempted to be a good mark and cheered vociferiously for the Harts and booed the heels (faces) at the appropriate times, but it was pretty obvious that the crowd in attendance was not really a wrestling crowd. So due to our frustration with security and lacklustre crowd response, Brother Zen and myself quickly degenerated into obnoxious ECW smark fans. It wasn't until the Shotgun tapings had commenced, however, with the exception of our "Hunter takes it up the ass, doo dah doo dah" chant which I'm told can be heard by dogs if the TV is turned up loud enough while watching RAW for that week.

I have now officially had it with Shawn Michaels and his whiny attitude. He'd better turn monster heel soon or he's going to end up like Bret Hart (before his monster heel turn). It's becoming painfully obvious he'd rather be in WCW with his bum-buddies in the nWo, and no matter how much they pay Shawn, it'll never be enough to shut him up. The fact remains that he's still under a long-term contract with Titan and no matter how much he bitches about not being able to have group sex with Nash, Hall and Syxx every night anymore, he wouldn't be able to go to WCW for a long while.

And no, I'm not jumping on the "Shawn is Gay" bandwagon, I'm just insulting his manhood in a more general sense. There's a difference. And don't Hall and Nash spend a *lot* of time touching each other while they pose? Just a thought. :)

Let me get this straight: Jim Ross acknowledges the life history of Mick Foley, even calling him that on many occasions, the WWF acknowledges the existance of the USWA, ECW and Japan (as a wrestling entity, not a country) and yet the big angle surrounding Brian Christopher is whether or not Jerry Lawler is his father? That's like the first thing taught in "Being a Smart Mark 101." Every kid in America with any kind of access to the 'net has known that Brian is Jerry Jr. for years now.

What I *really* want to know is whether the stuff about Paul Orndorff being related to Shane Douglas is true.

Rhetorical question: After personally sinking the resurrected NWA, then possibly being the champion as ECW fades into FMW-territory as a non-factor in the mainstream, would there be *anyone* left who will sign Douglas? And on a more general note, can the ECW survive another year? Paul E. needs to find a *big* source of income and fast, because the "Train the rookies/Build them up/Watch them jump to WCW/WWF/Find new kids to replace them" cycle is going to kill the federation pretty damn quick. Any organization that rests itself on the shoulders of Terry Funk and/or the Sandman is dead on arrival in my books.

And let's something straight: It requires ZERO wrestling talent to do the dumb shit Terry Funk does nowadays. For my money, Terry Funk retired in 1989. What was so great about his match at Barely Legal? He did, like 3 wrestling moves and the rest was taking bumps and using foreign objects. His famous triangle match with Sabu and Shane Douglas was carried almost single-handedly by Douglas and was certainly not worthy of the superlatives piled on it by the people who probably didn't sit through the damn thing for the whole 60 minutes trying to stomach Sabu blowing spot after spot because he burned out 40 minutes ago. Luckily Sabu has improved enough to do very good 20 minute+ matches with Van Dam and the Elims on a regular basis.

I hope Dude Love was just a one-shot thing. Steve Austin and Mick Foley as a team I like, however. Austin and Michaels were a good scientific duo, and Austin and Foley are a great brawling duo. The fact that Steve-o can adapt to either guy that easily speaks volumes about how talented he really is.

Wouldn't it have been cool if the WWF had picked Bret Hart as his partner? Just a thought.

I now see why TAKA Michinoku rates all caps.

And finally, for those of you who are wondering where I got to, I have two words: WCW called. I'll be teaming with one of Teddy Long's guys against Joey Maggs and Hector Garza on a PPV sometime in the near future. Eat your heart out, Dennis Rodman!

But that's just the way I see it, I could be wrong.

As always, I remain the net.cop...