______________________________________________________________________ I do not offer subscriptions to a mailing list! I do not e-mail images! ______________________________________________________________________ - The Hardcore Wrestling Federation (HWF) put on a show named "Banned In The USA" on Sunday, August 20. Yes, the HWF puts on shows in a small southern Ontario circuit including my new hometown, Guelph. Now, it's hard to believe that I would even considering attending a wrestling show put on a by a promotion with the word "hardcore" in its name, but, hell, the show was less than a five-minute drive away from my home, and it was the first show they put on since I settled into my new house. What the hell. Now, this promotion uses a few guys from ECW as drawing cards in main event matches and fills the remainder of the card with their own guys and some out-of-work "legends." While we don't have the magic of having a wrestling show put on in a bingo hall, even if it is the most well-known bingo hall among the 0.5% of wrestling fans who care to track these details, we do have the luck of having the show take place in a small club/bar called "Club Denim," either way hardly places you would really want to be caught dead in. Nonetheless, I decided to head over to the club, arriving about 25 minutes before the scheduled bell time of 8:00pm. Now I have to confess that I did not go over to check out the HWF home page, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this show would feature the awesome talents of Jerry Lynn, Rhino, and Steve Corino, according to the promotional flyer posted in the window. (As I typed the last sentence, my tongue planted itself in my cheek right after "Lynn"). I parked a mere fifty steps from the club's door and was surprised to find a line-up of about 180 people waiting at the unopened door. Got in line and continued reading the novel I'm working my way through. Struck up a conversation with the guy beside me. Turns out that the promotional slips of paper that they papered the city with said that bell time was 7:00pm, so these poor buggers had already been standing in line for a good hour. Luckily for them, though, the doors opened promptly at around 8:20pm. I wondered whether we had missed two matches. In we went, oh-so-slowly. They actually carded everybody on the way in, largely because there were a lot of 14- to 15-year old boys heading in and they wanted to ensure that the bar staff didn't have trouble determining whether a patron could order alcohol or not. To that end, they constructed a very complicated surefire system: alcohol-approved patrons had a black "X" drawn on their right hands. I can think of no way anybody could beat that system. I made my way up to the raised area to a nice spot. They had plastic chairs around ringside, with maybe 1.5 feet between the edge of the ring and the knees of ringsiders in those chairs. Hmmm, there was one break in the wood bar, which, I guessed, would double as the entryway and the one spot for any topes. Lots of superstars in attendance selling their wares. Besides loads of ECW merchandise, you could get photos and gimmicks from these superstars: Barry Horowitz, Ed Leslie, and the Iron Sheik. Wow! I heard loads of wonderful stuff from fans as I walked around and had some great conversations as well. The Road Warriors are drunks, I was told. Jerry Lynn is a great main event wrestler. Brutus Beefcake is a hell of a great guy, from the era when wrestling was great, I was told. Back to my post. The show opened with an announcement that Tony Parisi has passed away. Although they didn't announce it, he died from a heart attack. The HWF guys were called to the ring to give tribute to the Cannonball. As they came out during this solemn moment, some fans starting yelling "jobbers! jobbers!" Parisi's spirit was surely touched. Well, on with the show. What's the hottest thing to do in wrestling these days? Hmmm, Vince McMahon, Shane McMahon, Mick Foley, Vince Russo...yeah, that's it! Let's have a commissioner who has issues that preclude fairness or invisibility. I'm sure every indy promotion is doing the same damn gimmick, and maybe some of them are actually delivering better matches because of the gimmick, but I find that second hope hard to believe. This time out, Sexy Baby Jamie Jackson came out to explain that he was acting commissioner for the evening. Jackson and Custom Made Man form the team of the Hollywood Hunks, managed by extremely-short-but-not-midget manager Otto Bahn, who wears pimp gear. Jackson announced a bunch of matches for this night, with names just flying past me. Just like every RAW show, this event started with a good 20-minute interview and confrontation segment. Now, "good" in the previous sentence is meant to modify my time guesstimate, not the quality of the performance. When Jacson neared the end of his shtick, a big garbagy wrestler came out. Turned out he was the Notorious T.I.D. and he was angry he doesn't get a title shot. With all of the 14- and 15-year olds in the crowd, filled with smoke, T.I.D. starts off with loads of "fuck you"s and the like. Really charming and really responsible. When the ring finally clears, we went to our first match, at roughly 9:05pm, meaning that bell time was 1:05 after the flyer's time and 2:05 after the marketing stub time. * Tornado pinned Jack Damage: Damage drew chants of "jack off" from the crowd. Tornado has a Mexican gimmick, complete with a bottle of tequila bottle in his tights. He has a good physique, but he's short. Lightheavyweight potential? Perhaps. He actually did a few good quick moves. Damage managed to hit a few good power moves, but there was no denying that I was at an indy show. For indy work, Tornado was good. He did Manami Toyota's roll-through to escape a power bomb, tumbling down behind Damage and getting a roll up. He also did a tope suicida and a somersault tope. The 14- and 15-year olds chanted "holy shit!" and some even chanted "ECW!" Oh yeah, I'm ready for da Arena. Tornado scored the win with a school boy. This was actually a good opener, and some of my sense of dread lifted. * Pitbull pinned J.C. Owens: J.C. Owens was called "fatboy" by the announcer and seemed to be in his fifth match. Pitbull is a little guy that just gets angry. Match was horrible beyond words. Pitbull got the fans to chant "you fat fuck!" at Owens; mind you, the fans would have chanted pretty much anything to be part of the promotion. Owens yelled at people to shut up and then cracked smiles at the same time, unable to keep a straight face. Pitbull pulled out a table, with the crowd chanting. Keep in mind that when I say that the crowd was chanting, it means that maybe twenty or thirty of the 200-250 in attendance were yelling. It ended when Owens, for no real reason, climbed the ropes with his back to the ring, obviously set up to get dumped through the table. Well, he was actually punching Pitbull in the corner. He climbed onto the bottom ropes, then the second ropes, and then the top ropes. It was beyond stupid, because Pitbull is short and by the time Owens was on the second rope, he had to almost roll up into a ball to be able to punch Pitbull. Table, 30 orgasms in the crowd, and a pin follwed. Horrible match. Crowd chanted "Rikishi!" and "stinkface" at Owens. * Magnus Van Steel pinned Saint Peter: Magnus Van Steel was introduced as "the Real Fucking Deal." The match was falls count anywhere. They did a snap suplex on the floor, with poor Pete blading. He took a DDT on the floor too and was pinned out there. I wasn't all that impressed, although Magnus was one of the two or three big guys in the HWF and the small crowd perceived him as a star. * The Luminous Warrior pinned Sledge: Sledge was billed from Calgary, but he was the heel, a little in-good-shape guy. Warrior was billed from Dallas and was a total Ultimate/Dingo Warrior knock off, juiced to the gills. To get over as the face, Warrior told us he has wrestled all over the world and "Canada is the greatest fucking place on the map." The crowd catcalled the whole match. "Boring!" "You suck!" Sledge tried hard to make it passable, but Warrior doesn't just look like that other Warrior, if you get my drift. Bad match, ending with a really sharp power bomb for the pin. I'll mention that the wrestlers often came out after their matches and strolled through the bar, mingling. Well, Warrior was sitting out by the bar when the show was over and the crowd was leaving. One drunken fan yelled, "It's the Luminous Warrior! Luminous, man! I get it! He lights up!" * Danger Boy Derek Wylde & his valet (Arianna?) beat Gord Rease & Angel Kiss: The guys were lighter weight. Derek hit a somersault tope to a good pop. He was alright; reminded me a bit of Sean Waltman years ago when he worked as Lightning Kid in bars similar to this one. The girls wore five-inch heels. Neither of them compared in any way to any woman on TV wrestling, but neither of them have spent $20K to get that look. One nice spot during the match saw one wrestler dropkick the other during an attempted in-ring quebrada. It ended without the women tying up, as Derek rolled through a cross body for the pin. Those 30 guys in the crowd chanted "we want puppies!" throughout the match, with a smaller "catfight!" chant. Sure enough, the women rolled around a bit. * We had a fifteen-minute intermission. I strolled around a bit. I learned that wrestling used to be good years ago, but now the matches are all screwed up because the lawyers demand certain results. I heard this more than once. Other people said that a dive off the balcony into the ring would be "a great spot," obviously not caring at all if it was actually worked in as a sensible part of a good match. The stuntman effect. I talked pretty much like I write here. During the earlier match, when I said that Sledge was doing the best he could to carry his match, I drew raised eyebrows, with somebody saying that the little guy was getting pounded. When people around me praised Brutus Beefcake, asking for my opinion, I had to be frank. But Beefcake made wrestling, I was told. I pointed out that he's never had a great match, and maybe been in a good match or two, perhaps the WrestleMania tag match years ago with Greg Valentine vs. British Bulldogs. But, no, Beefcake vs. Hulk Hogan was surely his greatest match, I was told. I mention all of this because people these days like to point out that wrestling fans all know what wrestling really is and that old-style, junky 1980s WWF stuff is passe. Honest to god, walking through this bar to see the 200-250 fans crazy enough to come to this place for a purely indy show, the number of remarks that suggested people don't know what wrestling is was damn large. I guess the argument is that the casual fans understand what wrestling is better than the serious fans, who want to believe? I don't "get it." Intermission was highlighted by the Iron Sheik coming to the ring for $10 polaroids. "Poor bastard" was all I could think. Does he really need to come out to this place, in front of this crowd, to hawk $10 photos? Really, really sad. Twenty years ago when I was a 13-year-old kid who liked to go to Maple Leaf Gardens to see the hybrid promotion that Frank Tunney threw together, I vividly remember walking to the arena door and realizing that the man in front of me was the dreaded Iron Sheik, who would challenge the late Angelo Mosca for the Canadian title. I remember him being so much taller than me with a neck as thick as a telephone pole. Well, on Sunday, August 20, 2000, he looked like a broken man. Incredibly overweight, with knees and hips so bad that he needed a footstool to climb into the ring. He never put his left foot heel-flat on the floor. He could barely walk. Thinking about the limited sort of risks that he took, you have to realize that this damage can only be attributed to "routine" strain on the knees and hips from bumping and working. I certainly feel nervous about the shape that some current young guys will find themselves in when (some would say "if") they reach Iron Sheik's age. It was almost enough to make me hit the ring and get a polaroid of me in the camel clutch. * Barry Horowitz pinned The Anarchist: Anarchist came out and did a timely "you old farts should retire" speech, directed at Sheik. Horowitz ran in, bounced Anarchist, grabbed the microphones, and told the "smart marks" that he was going to kick Anarchist's ass for real. Oooooh, a shoot. Horowitz is an uncharismatic good worker. * The Hollywood Hunks beat Reggie Marley & J.Q. Public to win the HWF Tag Titles: Marley & Public are a black team. They scored the pin in short order with a backslide. But Jamie Jackson was commissioner, right? So you know the angle. "This match is now two out of three falls." No problem, they scored another pin. "This match is now a submission match." No problem, they got submission moves on both Hunks. Gord Rease ran in. He whacked both champs with a wrench. The referee protested, but Jackson grabbed the mic and said "this match is now a handicap match," which apparently made the wrench legal. They scored the pin. It was atrocious. And believe it or not, I was actually interested in seeing whether Public could work, since I had read about him before. Disappointing crap. * Notorious T.I.D. pinned Bad Boy Batty Bat: T.I.D. came out with a plunger wrapped in barbed wire. If T.I.D. lost, he was fired from the promotion, said Jackson. Hmmm, never seen this before. Bat was a masked man, probably one of the lighter guys from earlier on. He was pinned after a headbutt in short order. But Jackson brought out another guy. * Notorious T.I.D. pinned T.J. Harley: Harley was horrible. T.I.D. used his finisher in short order again. His finisher starts like a fisherman buster, a suplex where you hook the leg on the way and drop vertically. T.I.D. then drops down on his ass for a neck breaker like spot, I guess. The crowd liked it a lot. Jackson wasn't done yet. * Tyrant pinned Notorious T.I.D.: Somebody interfered and T.I.D. was pinned. It was bad. The announced that T.I.D. was now banned from the promotion. He laid out Jackson afterwards. None of this made me care about any of these guys. * Brutus "the Barber" Beefcake beat Chico Rodriguez: Beefcake came out in full barber regalia, drawing the first star reaction of the night. He signalled that he was going to give Chico a haircut. That was all of Beefcake's offence, except for the sleeper to get the win. He was so bad. He has dyed his hair blond and tries to comb over his bald spot. He cut off Chico's pony tail. Chico actually seemed like he could have some potential. * Tommy Twilight pinned Donovan Morgan to retain the HWF Title: First referee bump of the evening late in the match. Twilight has a haircut like Stunning Steve Austin used to have. He's a thick guy. After the bump, Morgan had Twilight pinned, but there was no referee. He woke up the referee, only to be pedigreed for the pin. Twilight reminded me a bit of Chris Candido before he became so muscular, since he was basically a guy too short for the mainstream and really thickly built. But, no, he didn't have Candido's ability. * Jerry Lynn pinned Rhino: Those 30 fans chanted "ECDub!" This was a good short match and Lynn was so clearly the best worker on the show. He hit his piledriver for the pin. Crowd really yelled at Rhino, who looked less than pleased to hear those 30 fans chanting "Cookie Monster." I had the feeling that they went home early because they hated the crowd. Overall, it was a needed night out and, for $15, it wasn't too bad. There wasn't one great match, not even on an indy scale. There were a couple of guys that looked promising, but more that looked depressing. Everybody from the HWF (except J.C. and T.J.) tried pretty hard, so effort wasn't the issue. It's just that they had no sense of how to put together a good match. No transitions whatsoever. It's not they are trying to learn that sort of stuff either, if you know what I mean. And those 30 fans really screwed up the psychology of the matches, in the sense that by being vocal they made the wrestlers do other things. I find this to be a problem on a larger scale, in fact. It seems like fans don't just want to be part of the audience watching a wrestling show that is put together by a booker/promoter. No, they want to be part of the wrestling show. The majority of the chants that get started by those who like to chant are attempts to show how smart or inside they are or, even more sadly, how vulgar they can be. I can't relate to that. Chances are good that I have seen more wrestling from more eras and more regions than anybody who was in the crowd on Sunday, but I don't feel the need to show that off by being belligerent to the guys I'm watching at a live show. The situation gets more complicated by the sad fact that the promotions feel the need to cater those fans. So we get dives off of balconies that really don't in any way fit into the wrestling match at hand (if we can even call the ongoing construction a wrestling match). We get ladders and chairs and stuntmen spots that get praised as awesome wrestling. We get vulgarity like never before, despite the large number of kids that watch and despite the fact that promotions target children in their marketing. We get Vince Russo thinking he has to recreate the 1997 Survivor Series main event doublecross at every PPV rather than slowly develop loyalty and trust with whatever small fanbase he has left. Everybody talks about "grapefruits." Oh, what Vince Russo would give to get his Nitro audience chanting "asshole!" as loud as the WWF's weekly RAW audience. And that says it all. - What of the current North American scene? Well, I find it to be mostly cause for more depression. WCW is in the toilet. It's made worse by the commentators praising everything so heavily, wrestlers doing interviews saying that the promotion is rebuilding and heading in the right direction, and the upper echelon storyline involving crappy older guys and crappy soap operatic scripting and acting. WCW just signed a five-year contract extension with TSN, this amidst the worst-planned visit to Canada in my memory. There is just no excuse for how WCW has handled Lance Storm in Canada and afterwards. WCW Nitro was slated to take place in Toronto on 09/25, but they have apparently moved it to just down the road in Kitchener. As longtime readers will recall, I went to the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium a while ago to see a worldwide taping. I'm not even going to bother to go there for Nitro; I can't imagine anything worse than being stuck in an arena for a WCW TV show. And WCW does a promotional tour deal with Pizza Pizza, a pizza outlet. A while back, I met Chris Benoit at one of those events and mused that Benoit is the only guy I would bother to get in line to talk with. Well, shit, now they advertising that Kevin Nash will be at one such event in the near future. Now, I hardly want to meet Nash, but it might be interesting to ask him what it's like to be known as a locker room cancer. I'm sure that the WWF is enjoying much praise from online fans, and the promotion certainly delivers more good matches than WCW (since it couldn't deliver fewer). But there's still so much badly acted soap opera crap and so many run-ins and screwy junk that I'm often too numbed to enjoy the five minutes of great wrestling on the average TV show. And if anybody can explain exactly what the promotion is doing with Chris Benoit, I'd appreciate it. And I suppose I don't understand the point of the Right to Censor gimmick. Poor ECW seems to have lost its access to Viewers Choice Canada. With the demise of the TNN show, the promotion is not on TV in Canada, so VCC decided to drop its PPVs. I suppose that decision could change, but I'd doubt it. ______________________________________________________________________ If you have any feedback regarding my web pages, please send me e-mail. Don't forget to delete the leading "x" from my e-mail address; that "x" is my web spider spam guard. ______________________________________________________________________