Tagged: wrestling

Darkside's Back Baby!

Darkside’s back! How I started loving pro wrestling again

by

There was a time, where I was kind of a big deal.

I’ve loved wrestling my whole life, it’s been a close one/two between wrestling in comics. My buddy Ryan once walked into my bedroom in college where I had wrestling playing on TV, and I was drawing comics. He said “Dude, you are living your 12 year old self’s dream life!”.

In 1997, I set up a wrestling website on TSN.ca to provide coverage for TSN’s professional wrestling programming. I covered WWF and WCW, occasionally ECW and some independent promotions. As our audience continued to build, I started getting footage from WWF’s developmental group, and I got to follow the earliest appearances by guys like John Cena, Dave Bautista, Shelton Benjamin, and a young man named “Brock Lesnar”.

At one point, my columns were read by over a million people a month.

I was a guest on The LAW, Live Audio Wrestling many times, and I met a young lady named Trish Stratus on that show. Continue Reading

So long Edge

by

Adam Copeland a.k.a. Edge

Adam Copeland a.k.a. Edge

This week one of the guys that I’ve followed since the very beginning of his career retired from professional wrestling, and in a lot of ways it kind of closed the chapter on a period of my life. WWE’s Edge has retired from active duty as a WWE wrestler after an amazing 14 year career.

There was a time where I was TSN.ca’s defacto wrestling guy, and my columns “Tales from the Darkside” regularly brought in a couple hundred thousand page views. Continue Reading

BretHart.com is CRAPTASTIC!

by

BretHart.com is CRAPTASTIC!

Wow. The new Bret Hart.com redesign is just as craptastic as the old design…just even more craptacular. You would think that the site would be semi-decent, I could throw a dart and hit a half dozen fanatical web freaks who would LOVE to build the guy a site (hell, I could toss the dart straight up, and still hit a guy who would do the site for free).

The site’s built in ASP, but I don’t see any server side technology being used…yet the site is PAINFULLY slow!

Damn. Maybe it’s time to revitalize WrestlingSites.com too! SquaredCircleSites.com is available. Too bad that wrestlers are some of the hardest people to get cash out of.

An eventful weekend!

by

I got a lot done this weekend, in addition to working on the big idea that Ryan and I are working on, I managed to get a little bit of re-design for HeadsDown done, and managed to figure out a layout, content schematic, and roughly work on the style sheet. With a little persistance, I could probably pull it off by the end of the week…but a more reasonable expectation is the middle of March.

Char and I bought a new DVD player this weekend. It’s a Panasonic, nice and silver, and the best news is that my reciever actually decodes Dolby Digital with it! For some reason my PS2 stopped working in conjunction with the reciever. We watched !gby Goes Down last night, and I watched some of Star Wars Episode II just to experience the awesome surround sound.

We saw Daredevil on Saturday night with Tim, it was a pretty solid movie, one of the better Super Hero films, but not as good as The Matrix, Superman or Spider-man. Better than all four Batman’s though.

Saturday morning I wrote a piece on Curt “Mr. Perfect” Hennig’s passing called “A Perfect Tribute“. It’s probably my best recieved article I’ve written this year. I’ve recieved a lot of positive feedback on it, and it’s nice to see that I wasn’t the only one who appreciated what Hennig did.

That’s it for now. Only six days to go until Vegas. Woo Hoo!

Putting the debate to rest

by

It’s come to my attention that Jeff is STILL debating the fact that his team didn’t win the award for “most jobbers” in this year’s Royal Rumble. I thought it best to break down Jeff’s Team in order for him to see that it was a pretty frickin’ decent bunch of guys (oh, and Jeff has the nerve to argue this despite the fact that he won the award for guy who lasts the longest in RVD).

Bill DeMott – Former U.S. Champion in WCW. The U.S. Title was the equivalent of the Inter-Continental title. This guy loses his first match since his re-intro TONIGHT! That’s two months of squashing guys…jobber my @$$!

RVD – Multiple InterContinental champion in WWE, ECW TV champion, ECW Tag Team Champion

Rosey – Former Tag Team Champion WWE

Rikishi – Former Inter-Continental champion WWE, former Tag Team Champion WWE.

Kane – Former multi-time inter-continental champion. Multi-time tag team champion. WWE Heavyweight Champion for 24 hours in 1999.

So just to recap, every single member of Jeff’s team has held gold.

Team Darkside however had exactly two guys who have ever tasted gold in WWE (Booker T, the 5 time, 5 time, 5 time, 5 time, 5 time WCW Champion, and who held all the gold in WCW at one time or another, who was tag champ with GoldDust, and Tommy Dreamer who won the now defunct Hardcore belt, and had a couple of belts in ECW). Nowinski, Cena, and Maven are rookies who haven’t even SNIFFED gold yet, and who won’t for at least another year.

Hell, a better case could be made for Team Josh, who had two guys untouched by gold in WWE, and who’s other players have held; Rey: Tag Gold, Matt Hardy: Tag gold, Inter-continental, Jeff Hardy: Tag gold, Hardcore, European.

So once and for all, Team Darkside held the most classically defined “Jobbers”, guys who have not held a belt, and who are regularly beaten on TV to get other guys over.

I’m number 95!

by

I’m number 95!

I was named to 411Wrestling.com’s 100 most influential wrestling writers list, and I’m number 95! My TSN.ca/Wrestling co-writer Josh Shiaman was named number 60 on the list.

Doesn’t mean a whole lot, I mean I’m not going to get a raise for it or anything, but it’s pretty cool anyway!

The Royal Rumble

by

The Royal Rumble is by far my favourite WWE PPV of the year, I love the whole concept of the Rumble.

For the last couple of years, my friends and I have got together and made a few bets on the outcome. We all throw in five bucks, and draw numbers from a hat, the numbers correspond to a guy. This year there were four prizes.

1st prize: The Winner of the Rumble

2nd prize: The guy who lasts longest

3rd prize: The guy who eliminates the most wrestlers

4th prize: The team with the most jobbers.

Larry Woo won the first and third prizes by having Brock Lesnar, the winner of the Rumble, and third prize for guy who eliminates the most wrestlers by having Chris Jericho.

Jeff Styga won the guy who lasts longest with RVD who came in 12th, and left 26th, 14 spots later. The closest guy was Chris Jericho who came in at number 2, and left at number 14.

Yours truly won the crappiest team, with the stellar grouping of Nowinski, Dreamer, Cena, Booker T, and Maven. I managed exactly 1 elimination when Booker T managed to eliminate Eddie Guerrerro. Jeff had the nerve to argue that his team was worse, but the stats back up my argument, come on, tell me how a team could be crappier than mine?!?

Here’s all the Rumble stats:

Order of entry: 1: Shawn Michaels, 2: Chris Jericho, 3: Chris Nowinski, 4: Rey Mysterio, 5: Edge, 6: Christian, 7: Chavo, 8: Tajiri, 9: Bill Demott, 10: Tommy Dreamer, 11: RVD, 13: Matt Hardy, 14: Eddie Guerrerro, 15: Jeff Hardy, 16: Rosey, 17: Test, 18: Cena, 19: Charlie Haas, 20: Rikishi, 21: Jamal, 22: Kane, 23: Sheldon Benjamin, 24: Booker T, 25: A-Train, 26: Maven, 27: Goldust, 28: Batista, 29: Lesnar, 30: Taker.

Order of elimination: 1: Shawn Michaels (by Jericho), 2: Christopher Nowinski (by Mysterio), 3: Mysterio (by Jericho), 4: Demott (by Edge), 5: Dreamer (by Jericho and Christian), 6: Tajiri (by Jericho), 7: B2 (by Edge), 8: Chavo (by Edge), 9: Christian (by Jericho), 10: Edge (by Edge), 11: Jeff Hardy (by RVD), 12: Rosey (by Kane), 13: Eddie (by Booker T), 14: Jericho (by Test), 15: Goldust (by Charlie Haas), 16: Booker T (by Benjamin), 17: Test (by Batista), 18: Rikishi (by Batista), 19: Haas (by Lesnar), 20: Benjamin (by Lesnar), 21: Matt Hardy (by Lesnar), 22: Cena (by Taker), 23: Jamal (by Taker), 24: Maven (by Taker), 25: A-Train (by Kane and RVD), 26: RVD (by Kane), 27 Batista (by Taker), 28: Kane (by Taker), 29: Taker (by Lesnar).

Most Outs:

Jericho: 6

Taker: 5

Lesnar: 4

Kane: 3

Batista: 3

Edge: 3

RVD: 2

Booker T: 1

Test: 1

Haas: 1

Benjamin: 1

Rey: 1

Christian 1

Teams:

Team Benson: Chavo, Test, Jamal, Benjamin, Taker

Eliminations: 7

Team Curtis: Edge, Christian, Tajiri, Eddie G, A-Train

Eliminations: 4

Team Darkside: Chris Nowinski, Tommy Dreamer, John Cena, Booker T, Maven

Eliminations: 1

Team Josh: Rey Mysterio, Matt Hardy, Jeff Hardy, Charlie Haas, Batista

Eliminations: 5

Team Jeffro: Bill Demott, RVD, Rosey, Rikishi, Kane

Eliminations: 5

Team Woo Tang: Michaels, Jericho, B2, Goldust, Lesnar

Eliminations: 10

Still confused.

by

This week I picked up my new motherboard, a KT3 Ultra. I’ve been basing everything on buying the MSI K7T266a, because I didn’t think I’d be able to find the KT3 at retail for another few months since it was only officially released at the end of February. However, on Friday before Axxess, I popped in to Canada Computers, saw that they had the K7T266a for $193, and checked out a new store called PC Periphrials. They are the only store I’ve seen with the KT3, so I picked it up. However since I hadn’t read enough on RAM and stuff like that for the KT3, I figured I’d hold off on buying the processor and ram until I figure out a little more. So I’ve read most of the manual (which is really well written), placed everything in my case by eye, and am almost ready to commit to my processor (an AMD 1700+ XP) and some RAM, my only confusion is do I go with the 266, or the 333? I can only find one type of 333, and it’s the same price as the 266…but I don’t know the company, so I don’t know how good it will be.

The worst part about all of this is how long my computer could be out of commision for…it could be a very scary process indeed!

Tonight is WrestleMania at the Skydome. Joachim, Jeff and I are going to the Paramount to watch the show, which means we’ll get to see it with commentary and the like. Should be way fun. Hopefully a lot more fun than Axxess was ($40.00 to go and stand in lines to possibly see wrestlers…wooo, what fun that was! At least we got to see Funaki and The Hurricane wrestle a short match, and got to listen to William Regal berate the crowd a bit).

Royal Rumble Pool winner

by

The Royal Rumble Pool was a ton of fun, but it didn’t exactly turn out as I had hoped. Why not? Take a look at the much vaunted “Team Darkside”, and then compare it to that of my competitors.

The winner: Benson’s Brigade (along with the order in which the wrestler emerged):

2 – Goldust

13 – Christian

16 – Godfather

22 – Triple H

25 – Mr. Perfect

29 – RVD

First Runner Up: Larry’s Wooriors

4 – Bradshaw

8 – Undertaker

12 – Scotty Too Hotty

18 – Saturn

23 – Hurricane

26 – Kurt Angle

The Losers:

Team Darkside:

6 – Al Snow

10 – Jeff Hardy

17 – Albert

21 – Test

24 – Faarooq

27 – The Big Show

The Enraged Puffins

1 – Rikishi

3 – Bossman

7 – Billy

11 – Maven

19 – Steve Austin

30 – Booker T

Jeff’s Jobbers

5 – Lance Storm

9 – Matt Hardy

14 – DDP

15 – Chucky

20 – Val Venis

28 – Kane

Order of Entrance:

1 Rikishi, 2 Goldust, 3 Bossman, 4 Bradshaw, 5 Lance Storm, 6 Al Snow, 7 Billy, 8 Undertaker, 9 Matt Hardy, 10 Jeff Hardy, 11 Maven, 12 Scotty 2 Hotty, 13 Christian, 14 DDP, 15 Chucky, 16 Godfather, 17 Albert, 18 Saturn, 19 Stone Cold Steve Austin, 20 Val Venis, 21 Test, 22 HHH, 23 Hurricane, 24 Faarooq, 25 Mr. Perfect, 26 Kurt Angle, 27 The Big Show, 28 Kane, 29 RVD, 30 Booker T.

Elimination:

1 Bossman, 2 Lance Storm, 3 Bradshaw, 4 Goldust, 5 Al Snow, 6 Rikishi, 7 Billy, 8 Jeff, 9 Matt, 10 Undertaker (thrown out by Maven!), 11 Scotty 2 Hotty, 12 DDP (who’s exit wasn’t even shown on the monitors because the cameras were too busy catching Godfather’s 24 minute, 3 ho-train entrance), 13 Albert, 14 Godfather, 15 Christian, 16 Chucky, 17 Saturn, 18 Val Venis, 19 Test, 20 Hurricane, 21 Faarooq, 22 The Big Show, 23 Kane, 24 RVD, 25 Booker T, 26 Stone Cold Steve Austin, 27 Mr. Perfect, 28 Kurt Angle. The winner: Triple H.

It’s important to note that there was some chicanery going on in that the reason there were 30 entrants, but ony 28 exits is because technically Maven was never eliminated. Undertaker went back into the ring and hurled Maven out over the top rope and then took him to school in the back before munching on some popcorn to seal Maven’s fate. In my humble opinion, the real loser here is Curtis who had the $20.00 pot STOLEN out from under his nose! Very weak indeed.

Royal Rumble Pool

by

Thirty men enter. One man leaves.

Here are the official Royal Rumble Pool Rules:

Thirty numbers will be placed in a recepticle (be it hat, or popcorn bucket), and each person will take a turn drawing a number until all numbers are taken.

The number will represent the wrestler who arrives in the ring in accordance with the number. I.E. number one will represent the first wrestler who arrives in the ring. Number 30 will be the last person to arrive in the ring.

The person with the number corresponding to the second last wrestler to leave the ring will win 20% of the pool, while the person with the number corresponding to the last wrestler to leave the ring will win the remaining 80%.

In the case of a tie, the portion of the pool which the participants would have won will be split. I.E. if three people are sent out of the ring simutaneously at the end, all three people will split the 80% pool.

Those are the rules. I didn’t make them…oh wait, yes I did.