By "Net.cop" Scott Keith

Warning: The following may or may not be 100% wrestling related. :)

Once again, my weekly roundup of all the crap sitting in my brain and ready to be shovelled onto the dungheap of RSPW.

First of all, the Bash buyrate which is being reported at 1.01. Ugh. I was hoping there were enough people out there who *didn't* have the morbid curiosity to see how well Rodman could "wrestle," but I guess I was fooling myself. He's a piece of shit, but I guess he's capable of filling the seats.

Then again, PT Barnum's freakshows were pretty damn popular, too. Maybe that's what Rodman needs to gain legitimacy -- a setting more appropriate for him. Stick him in there with the Wolf Brothers and that Scottish guy who can swallow things in sequence, and you'd have a world tour waiting to happen. "Half man, half woman, all asshole, see the dancing freak whose hair changes color BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES!" Oooo, aaaah...

Moving along, it's been said before, but I'd like to say it just to lend it credibility: Raven is being totally mishandled by WCW, and so is Curt Hennig. I mean, these guys had like a whole fucking year to figure out what they wanted to do with Hennig. It's not a hard decision -- should he be a) nWo b) A Horsemen or c) A face? That's the only three options that give him any kind of heat, as we are now finding out. Beating up DDP is a waste of time unless you're nWo -- it's been done to death. I mean, even Brutus did it. And Raven is obviously an nWo candidate -- their whole philosophy of slacking off, doing illegal substances and never working matches him perfectly -- and yet that useless piece of shit Konnan (excuse me, I meant that useless piece of shit K-Dog) gets "inducted" on Nitro while Raven is stuck sitting in the front row with no heat. The only guy with any heat potential right now is Stevie, but as a face. AAAAAGH! WCW execs: Please repeat after me, STEVIE IS A CLUELESS PUTZ. Write it 100 times on the blackboard until you realize that he gets heat by allowing himself to job to women and sucking up to those smarter than him. That's his whole gimmick, and turning him into Virgil a month and a half into his tenure will ruin him as much as it did, well, Virgil.

I mean, Virg was a pretty cool guy for most of time with Dibiase. All he had to do there was play the Angry Negro (tm Christopher Priest) role and flash around money while Teddy made 8 year old dribble basketballs for money. Not bad. It kind of ruined it when he started grinning like a pot addict, however, and hooking up with Roddy Piper.

Hint: Bob Orton is the only person in wrestling history to benefit from being Roddy Piper's friend. And even then it's kind of a stretch.

If we see skits of Stevie training with Hot Rod (Piper, not Rodman) I will retch. Swear to god.

Speaking of the supernatural, the Undertaker angle is just totally going off the deep end now. Paul Bearer's little speech on RAW this week just killed all the heat built up to that point. "Don't make me bring out Kane!" Yeah, the guy can't even decide how to spell his own name, why should we be afraid of him?

Of course, Mike Rotunda spent years waffling about whether his name ended with an 'o' or an 'a', so who knows?

The UT/Cain angle itself is just gonzo for my money. Unless they bring out the Giant in a Jason mask with Jesus Christ himself as his manager, it's gonna be a disappointment. The least they can do is have mercy on us and TAKE THE FRIGGIN' TITLE OFF HIM ALREADY at Summerslam so we don't have to see Glen Jacobs getting title shots.

I mean, I like Glen. He seems like a nice guy in real life and all, but I don't want to see him headlining PPVs yet.

Speaking of PPVs, it's nice to see Hogan finally deciding to give us peons a title match for our $30. I know it's a lot to ask, you know, the World champion defending the belt more than twice a year, but since we pay his overinflated salary, I'd say it's the least he can do.

I guess we don't actually. I've heard it's a seperate Turner contract, but I do buy a lot of DC comics, so it works out in the end.

And why isn't somebody suing somebody else over the fact that Turner has interest in DC and yet Hogan's image is owned by Marvel? Dammit, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

I mean, did you hear about the case recently where a woman tried to sue for sexual harassment because of an episode of Seinfeld? That's like the kids who shot themselves over Judas Priest. Anyone who would feel the need to take their own life because of anything Rob Pulford shrieks is pretty fucked up to begin with, ya know? And that goes double for Seinfeld, whose main selling point is the total lack of content in the show.

But back to wrestling. Sort of.

So I'm looking through Wal-Mart (aka the Evil Empire) and I notice new WWF figures out, called "WWF Bad Boys" or some shitty name like that. I withheld my immediate desire to call my lawyer and sue (netcop joke) and couldn't help but notice how shitty the figures look. Steve Austin looks terrible. But then I'm an Austin mark so I'll buy it anyway. They've got that dumb "bone-crunching" stuff going on, which I don't get. They just don't look playable. Now, the old LJM figures were definitely playable. Huge, absolutely indestructable, and came in poses that actually allowed them to be used in pseudo-matches. Great for the armchair booker. More interesting, I think, was the advertised "Manager's packs" on the back, featuring things like a Backlund/Sultan pack, Mankind/Bearer, and Crush/Mason.

A bit behind the times on a couple of those, no? I'm still waiting for the Dude Love/Mankind/Cactus Jack 3 pack w/ barbed wire baseball bat accessory, but who knows...

And why the fuck does the SULTAN get an action figure? AAAAAAGH.

I recently sent a letter to audiencerelations@tsn.ca bitching about the unprofessional comments of certain Sportsdesk anchors, which they ignored and then proceeded to answer my minor questions (FYI, they are possibly going to add Nitro in the fall, and no, RAW isn't going live again). However, if enough of us write in and POLITELY and INTELLIGENTLY state our side of this, I think they'll listen and smack the requesite wrists.

I think I was saying something about Road Wild before I got side-tracked...

Oh, yeah, Hogan v. Luger. Whoever said that Luger's contract is almost up (Scoops?) is full of shit. Bischoff himself said that Luger has two years left on it, so don't look for Luger to win here. Bischoff also said that the Nitro replay will begin airing immediately after the live broadcast, which I'm sure is setting up tons of anti-WCW jokes but I'm a bigger man than that. ;)

On the Aug. 4 Nitro, Sting will be offered a contract to wrestle, which means that this stupid angle may, thank god, finally go somewhere. The first scheduled match is at Halloween Havoc, and let me state for the record that if Sting doesn't win the title there then the whole angle is shot to hell. 800 years of wrestling history (or however long it's been going on now...) says that the Sting characters always get revenge on the Hogan characters and always win the title on the first try. (*)

(*) Note: For the purposes of this discussion, Lex Luger was never born, never joined the Four Horsemen, and has no clue who this "Ric Flair" guy is and why he would have wrestled him for the World title 500 times.

I finally got a chance to watch Halloween Havoc 1996 recently, due to a couple of girls being nice enough to leave Brother Zen and myself hanging for 4 hours as to whether or not they wanted to actually do anything that night, and I must say that Hogan-Savage is by far one of the worst main events I've ever seen. And what's with cutting off the Piper thing? It's not Nitro, nimrods, we're paying $30 for this, the least you can do is wrap it up within the given time. Ugh.

Seinfeld's on, gotta go...

As always, I remain the net.cop.

--
skeith@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca, but my friends call me skeith.
"Scott-Land! (tm)" is http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/4693
CMA member and in no way affiliated with "The New Smell of Fear."
"People who put quotes in their .signatures are lame." -Scott Keith.