Ok, so I just got done watching WWE RAW from this Monday. I tend to watch it live (or at least semi-live, on a half-hour delay so I can skip most of the annoying adverts) but I had Uni on Tuesday and there was no way I was going without sleep.right

So yeah, you know if I’m talking about WWE RAW on my blog then it’s bad, right? But this week it was amazingly bad. They forced the whole Jackass thing down our throats to a ridiculous degree and had them plug their website about fifty times. Yeah, we get it, you’ve got a website. If I didn’t care the first ten times, why would I care for the other forty?

Plus they had “The Boogie-Man” and “Hornswaggle” on RAW again. For those who don’t know, “The Boogie-Man” is a guy who comes out from under the ring in red and black face paint and pretends to be the man for whom he’s named. Hornswaggle is a midget (political incorrectness ftw) who they parade around because someone somewhere finds him funny.

If that wasn’t bad enough they continued this Cryme Tyme vs. Miz/Morrison thing AGAIN, and this time Miz/Morrison just pretty much reused every insult they used last week. Obviously they couldn’t be bothered to write anything new. Wonderful entertainment right there. Then we were privileged to see “Kelly Kelly” and… um… the girl who sings really badly as her gimmick (I do know her name, I just can’t think of it right now, but then that could be because I’ve repressed the memory of most of her stuff. She’s not even good looking!) joining them for a six-person tag match. Yawn!

Batista and Shawn Michaels had a match, but that was so long and dull I wound up fast forwarding through most of it.

The little facts told me that RAW was the most watched “entertainment program” on US cable last week for the third week in a row. I can only assume it was a very short list of “entertainment programs”.

They announced that it would be The Undertaker vs. The Big Show at Cyber Sunday, just further reason not to ever buy a WWE PPV since that’s YET ANOTHER match from last month that they’re doing again this month. Remember when after a PPV match happened people would move on in to different feuds to keep things interesting? Vince McMahon doesn’t. They also showed the footage of Big Show beating down Undertaker again, because the seventy-five times they’ve showed that weren’t enough apparently.

You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? I’m not. They show that footage every ten minutes on Smackdown. I kid you not…

They played the “text this to that” bullshit for people to vote who they think should face certain people, and of course it’s only available to “US cell phone subscribers”, once again screwing the rest of the world who also watch the show live out of the ability to do something. But then I’m getting used to that by now, WWE’s competitions are always to US only. Not even Canada, who also watch the show live. And yet they expect the foreign fans to pay even more than the US ones to come and see them live? They can take a long walk off a short plank for all I care, I quit buying WWE PPV’s quite a while ago due to the crap with all their offers being to US citizens only.

There were, however, three highlights. Charlie Haas imitating Hulk Hogan as “Haas Hogan” was pretty funny, until he got squashed by that idiot Bradshaw. Santino Marella was HILARIOUS, but then his comedy is about the only decent thing on any WWE programming right now, and Chris Jericho took on CM Punk. If anyone hasn’t seen RAW yet and wants to know what to watch, just check out those three things on something like YouTube and save yourself the mental pain of having to sit through the rest.

Other stuff probably happened as well but whatever it was it made so little of an impression on me that I don’t even remember it.

In conclusion I leave myself wondering why it is I still watch WWE. Somebody help me out here, there must be a reason!

That is all.

Ok, so just a short post today about a little wrestling fact I found out today that’s annoyed me considerably.

A few years back a young female Canadian wrestler named Gail Kim got her big break in the WWE and managed to capture the WWE Women’s Championship in a pretty quick time (in her debut match I think) but lost it four weeks later and basically spent the next two years losing constantly and being sporadically involved in rather pointless storylines. Basically she became just another person lost in the mix in the WWE like so many are, and then bam, they fired her in 2004 for no reason apparently giving the reason they “wanted to take the Women’s division in a new direction”. What other direction for a women’s wrestling division is there but women’s wrestling? Whatever it was apparently it meant firing probably one of the top women wrestlers in the world. Bravo WWE.

So in 2005 she popped up in TNA and initially didn’t do much. She joined Planet Jarrett, as every former WWE employee did around that time when they joined (probably to make Jeff Jarrett feel special that he got to boss around people who used to get paid more than him) and became the manager of both Jeff Jarrett and America’s Most Wanted. Eventually she stopped managing Jarrett and continued on with AMW, getting massive ovations from the fans for some of the high-risk stuff she’d do to help them win matches. Whether heel or face she worked great with them, and when AMW eventually broke up she broke out on her own, and eventually TNA began to build a women’s division around her. She was the centrepiece, the top face and the first ever TNA Knockout’s Champion (in TNA women are “Knockouts”, in WWE they’re “Divas”).

Even when she lost the Knockout’s Title to Awesome Kong she remained the top face, the most pushed woman in the company and even when injured remained in storylines and was involved in every pay per view that I can remember. I don’t ever recall her NOT being at a pay per view event. To me that says she meant a lot to TNA Wrestling and that they were giving her plenty of television time and, I’d imagine, quite a nice contract. More importantly she meant a lot to the TNA fans, who cheered the building down for her.

Earlier this week she left TNA to rejoin WWE.

Now I don’t know what happened with TNA, I’ve read that her contract expired but I can’t believe that TNA wouldn’t try everything they could to keep her and offer her a new contract. Apparently however the money that Vince McMahon could throw at her to be eye-candy and a serial jobber on Raw or Smackdown means more to her than being a successful, innovative and headline performer in a smaller company like TNA. What does that say about her, honestly?

All I can say to the woman who helped establish the Knockouts division in TNA (which is fifty times more interesting than anything WWE do since most of WWE’s matches, even now they have half-decent wrestlers, are still hair-pulling and shitty, botched moves done by girls without two brain cells to rub together who are hired just because they look good – and I’ll contradict myself in the future when I talk about Mickie James, Katie Lea or Beth Phoenix, all of whom can actually work, but still the many talentless outweigh the few talented) is so long, good riddance and don’t come back when you’re fired in six months, ala former TNA wrestler who joined WWE Chris Harris. His career in the WWE went so well, he made about 10 television appearances and was then kicked to the curb. And yet Gail Kim, who used to manage him in AMW, still wants to work for them.

*sighs*

TNA will most definitely go on without her and in all honesty they’ll probably give more opportunities to those who were held back so that she could have as much of the spotlight as she did, which will only help TNA grow. So yeah, her leaving is probably a good thing but the fact that she’s going back to Vince McMahon because of the money just sickens me. Thank god for AJ Styles, one of the few men who have told Vince where to go, and Christian Cage, who actually left WWE to join TNA rather than sign a new contract. Long live the few wrestlers who care more about the fans and their careers than the money!

That is all.