Even though OVW stands for Ohio Valley Wrestling, the operation is actually based in Louisville, KentuckyThis sounds to me like you think it's strange that something in Kentucky should have "Ohio" in its name. But note the Valley part -- as in, the valley of the Ohio River. And a quick search on Google Maps will confirm that Louisville, Kentucky is indeed located on the banks of that river. (It forms much of Kentucky's northern border.)
I realise that, but I suspect that many non-US readers will understandably assume that this "Ohio Valley" place that they've never heard of must presumably be in Ohio somewhere.
I haven't been interested in wrestling since it's heyday in the late '90s (the D-X, Triple H before he married Stephanie McMahon and switched hero/villain roles with the Rock), but it just seems like the company is on life support. I read your takes and just try to fathom how they seem to be in denial about the state of the wrestling industry.
I remember watching that PPV in junior high when Owen Hart died and they still went on with the show, and I just couldn't see wrestling the same after that, and quit watching. To mock that event with a comic-like death where no body is found seems to truly paint the audience as idiots who will watch anything.
Lashley having to forfeit his title is silly for other reasons. Raw and Smackdown champs switched shows with their belts intact in a prior draft without much issue, despite being drafted on separate days. And Lashley had been defending the ECW belt on Raw the prior months anyway.
The Matt and Jeff situation has other silliness as well, as JBL and Cole had to try to sell the seriousness of the draft by saying tag teams could be split up if wrestlers ended up on different shows. Except Matt and Jeff had reunited as a tag team while on different shows, then won and held the Raw belts. All while Matt was on Smackdown. So why should guys like Kendrick and London fear the demise of their team? And even in this draft there was Boogeyman & Little Boogey, where when Boogeyman was drafted, Little Boogey simply went with him.
Chris Benoit is dead. He, his wife and 7 year old son were all found dead today in their home. Police are not currently looking for suspects.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Sports...=3315501&
page=1
Yeah I saw that, such horrible news. Especially since he was one of the few that I used to watch on WWE almost religiously along with The Rock back in the 'old' days.
I'm not a wrestling fan, but I do read Paul's take on it. So if I'm flipping through the channels and WWE is on, I'll stop and watch it for a while, just to get some context for Paul's reviews.
Thanks to this, I caught some of the show the other night when the wrestlers were talking about Benoit, his wife, and kid. At first I thought they were talking about Vince McMahon's "death." Then I thought that they liked this story so much, they decided to expand it to include this guy and his family.
It took a while to realize that this was a real tragedy.
I don't know if that's a problem with me, or with wrestling.
To be fair, they did open the show with Vince McMahon addressing the camera and stating quite clearly that this was not a storyline. But yes, they'd written themselves into a horrible corner that they couldn't easily get out of. I'm sure that's the major reason why they sent the crowd home and ran links from an empty arena, rather than doing a straight tribute show as they have with previous wrestlers - they HAD to do everything in their power to distance themselves from the storyline they were running.
Reportedly, the current plan is to go back to normal shows with tonight's ECW, which strikes me as very ill-advised indeed. If I were Johnny Nitro, I'd be begging them not to send me out there to celebrate with the ECW Title.
They are probably in a pretty tough spot over the whole thing really, regarding going back to normal, or doing more tributes, given that all the information at the moment seems to say that Benoit killed his wife, his child, then himself.
I can see them not wanting to run more tributes, really.
Plainly, if these reports are correct (and they're well sourced), Benoit has had a mental breakdown of some sort. But yes, there's an obvious difficulty with running a tribute show to a man who's just murdered his wife and child, however powerful the mitigating circumstances. But if I were them, I'd duck out the rest of the week and put on a "Best of" show.
The apparent plan is to run Smackdown and ECW with no storylines or backstage segments; a short explanation of what happened at the opening of the show, and then nothing but straight wrestling matches.
Also, this presumably kills the Vince McMahon angle stone-dead. The only realistic move for the WWE at this point is to abandon the storyline completely and have him stay well away from television for a couple of months.
Utterly horrifying news; Benoit is literally one of the last people in the world I would expect to read something like this about. I live in Edmonton, and am not looking forward to the inevitable heavy media coverage of this over the next few weeks.
I agreed, the "Vince is dead" angle and the much rumored Whodunnit storyline are dead meat now, with no plot momentum whatsoever (not that WWE's writer actually cared about it anyway) behind them.
Despite what the public consensus are regarding the tragic incident, I'm all for a straight week of Chris Benoit's tribute shows including Smackdown! and ECW.
Benoit's the kind of great performer that commands such treatment. A tribute of honor for one who dedicate his life to the business.
Not that I condone the killings, though.
The immediate suspicion being reported now, with the nature of the deaths and Benoit's job, is that steroids played some sort of role in Benoit's breakdown, though no one will know for sure for several weeks until lab results come back.
If it does, though it makes me wonder if it will be enough to drag professional wrestling into the steroid embroglio that's been going on in professional sports in the U.S. for some time now. Wrestling, despite it's well known connections to steroid use, has largely been given a pass because there's no competition of any sort involved in it.
If it is connected to this tragedy, however, I wonder how or if that will change things, particularly given the WWE's unwritten policy of not giving the time of day to anyone under 250 lbs.
The cynic in me thinks that even if there is a proven connection between steroids and Benoit, nothing will happen beyond some lip service from WWE, which will count on the fact that public outrage usually has a short memory, even for tragedies like this.
With all of the hollering that Congress has done in the US about steroids in baseball, I don't see how this will escape their notice. Reports say anabolic steroids were found in the home and if toxicology comes back saying it was in Beoit's system, this very well could lead to a lot of drug raids on WWE and other wrestling offices and workout centers. I have a feeling this could kill the WWE and wrestling in general in the US for some time to come.
Steroids were, if anything, more obviously implicated in the death of Eddie Guerrero from heart failure in 2005. They introduced a drug-testing policy in the aftermath of that, although how strictly it's enforced has long been a matter of debate.
The WWE certainly knows better than to get involved in steroid distribution - Vince McMahon was prosecuted for it in 1994 and acquitted. They may well be turning a blind eye to it, but they won't be directly involved.
Interestingly, the WWE website has now dropped its Benoit tribute pages entirely, and has come out swinging on the suggestion of steroid-induced rage. Perhaps the most remarkable paragraph in their analysis:
"4. The physical findings announced by authorities indicate deliberation, not rage. The wife's feet and hands were bound and she was asphyxiated, not beaten to death. By the account of the authorities, there were substantial periods of time between the death of the wife and the death of the son, again suggesting deliberate thought, not rage. The presence of a Bible by each is also not an act of rage."
This is... staggering, really.
It certainly looks like the WWE had pretty much dropped its pretense of a drug policy. More so than when they rewrote the policy so that they could keep Randy Orton on-air.
I noticed Chris Masters, the current WWE poster boy for steroid abuse, is looking a lot like his old self again.
Yes, Chris Masters' physique is a useful measure of how seriously they're taking the drugs policy at any given time.
They're now suggesting that the WWE will be apologising for Monday's tribute show on tonight's ECW show - and to be fair, it did contain some "loving and devoted father" type stuff which, with the benefit of hindsight, is clearly deeply unfortunate.
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