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| Most Over-hyped/-rated/-exposed Of All Time! | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Oct 9 2009, 12:38 PM (6,453 Views) | |
| marioesco | Mar 16 2015, 03:44 PM Post #91 |
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Oglethorpe
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Most overrated goes to Jin Tao. Hands down. 🙌🙌🙌 |
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- Mario Escobedo Yeah, that Mario Escobedo | |
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| JRuss | Mar 18 2015, 06:43 PM Post #92 |
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Sharko
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This thread has officially jumped the shark with a Jin Tao sighting. |
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| phmachine | Apr 17 2015, 09:57 PM Post #93 |
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Jiggle Billy
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Hi, comment from four years ago that I somehow missed! ![]() Going from e-w to indy wrestling is not that hard. If you have a couple of thousand bucks and the desire to potentially risk breaking your neck on an elementary school gym floor doing a dive that you really shouldn't be doing to a plumber who's idea of catching you is to flail their arm up, go "EEEEE!", and elbow you in the back as you smack into the first row, you can do it too. ... not like I know from experience or anything. |
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| OnceStyles | Apr 18 2015, 06:15 AM Post #94 |
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Tetsuko
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First of all, Frankie was a wrestler long before he was an e-wrestler. He also worked for the WWF for a while, he was on their MTV show (the one before Tough Enough). Second, if it is so easy to become an indy wrestler, then try it. Join a legit wrestling school and let's see how easy you find it. If you've ever done it, I think you'd have more of an appreciation for the craft and not see it as "not that hard." |
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| phmachine | Apr 18 2015, 08:16 AM Post #95 |
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Jiggle Billy
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Did it for five years (and was trained by a guy who is still on WWE TV to this day, that legit enough for you?), then spent another six years as support staff. It's not that hard to break in. Is it physically tough? Sure. Is it hard to find a school and work a couple of local promotions and beat your chest about being this big bad indy wrestler? No way. You know what I appreciated more than the "glory" of calling myself an indy wrestler? Being paid in something other than hot dogs and being glad that I didn't have to wrestle some goon who's idea of making a match look realistic is to punch me dead in the face. |
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| BigPoppaBuyrate | Apr 18 2015, 10:11 AM Post #96 |
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Poppin' Buyrates Since 1996
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Mic drop. |
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| OnceStyles | Apr 19 2015, 07:48 PM Post #97 |
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Tetsuko
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I go by the theory, "if it were that easy, everybody would be doing it." If you've done it, then I'm sure you must be in some sort of physical shape and have some ability behind it. FYI, Frankie made it further than 75 percent of indy workers, even competing on television, and made a living out of it (as in, made enough money to pay his bills). So you have to give him that. Meanwhile, what are the percentages of wannabe wrestlers who find an indy school (as you point out, it's not that hard to find) and actually make it through the school and into a wrestling ring? |
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| sychosys | Apr 20 2015, 04:43 AM Post #98 |
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This Space For Rent
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I doubt that most people would do professional wrestling regards of how easy it was. |
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| MatFindlay | Apr 22 2015, 11:43 AM Post #99 |
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Kung Fu Treachery
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Based on some of the indy wrestling I've seen in the past, neither of these appear to be a necessary requirement. |
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| OnceStyles | Apr 22 2015, 03:05 PM Post #100 |
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Tetsuko
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Maybe there's just a larger standard where I'm from. We have some really bad indy wrestling leagues, but there still has to be some semblance of ability and athleticism before they're let into a wrestling school, let alone put in front of a paying audience. |
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| MatFindlay | Apr 24 2015, 02:19 PM Post #101 |
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Kung Fu Treachery
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I think it depends mostly on the promotion. Some places will want to see a certain level of training and athleticism, and others will... well, put Mass Transit in the ring, for example. Also, from what I've heard and read, the pro-wrestling industry has a lot of parallels with martial arts in that there are lots of guys out there willing to take your money and train you but not all of them care enough to train you well. Some are even incapable of training you well on account of them being full of shit... A pro wrestling equivalent of a black belt mill. Honestly, I suspect that a lot of the regulation we believe is a part of the pro wrestling industry is a work. |
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| OnceStyles | Apr 24 2015, 04:40 PM Post #102 |
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Tetsuko
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The wrestling leagues here, at least the ones I'm familiar with, spend day one stretching out their students big-time. If they can't handle it, they're out. Basically, they have to show they can handle the pain and punishment before they even begin to get any sort of training. An overweight couch potato who has never seen the inside of a gym will not make it through a wrestling school and end up in the ring in front of an audience. At least not here on the East Coast. Now, granted, the training in these schools are for athleticism in the ring and not for character gimmicks...as such indy wrestlers as The Trekkie and Wayne the convenience store guy prove. |
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| phmachine | Apr 25 2015, 09:06 AM Post #103 |
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Jiggle Billy
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So in my experience out of my eleven years in the business, there are four kinds of schools. 1) As Mat called them, belt factories. They don't care what shape you're in or if you hurt someone while you're training, as long as you show up and pay your weekly fee, you're in. People can start whenever they want because there is no formal syllabus. After six months or so, typically they start hitting the indies. 2) The kind that Mark is referring to, where they either squat you to death on the first day of training or they stretch you. Typically these schools take a non-refundable down payment (usually to the tune of a third or a half of "tuition"), then intentionally injure someone every once in a while. Who cares if you broke some dreamer's shoulder, you just made your rent for the month. Same as #1, no formal syllabus so people can start when they want as long as they make the first payment. 3) Actual formal training courses. They have dedicated start times and end times, they limit class size, and they don't allow drop-ins. Mike Quackenbush's Wrestle Factory is like this, as is Lance Storm's school. If you absolutely positively must get into this stupid business, I'd suggest these two. They'll train you right, but you'll have to wait for a class to open up. 4) Bug a veteran enough to take you under their wing and they invite you to come train in the ring they keep in their backyard or a storage unit. This is not recommended because most veterans don't have big hearts, but sometimes veterans take interest in people and take them under their wing. I'd say schools #1 and #2 make up about 95% of the schools out there. That's why the indies are in such a horrible, horrible state. The worst part is that these schools are EVERYWHERE. That's why it's easy to become a wrestler these days. Those schools don't care what shape you're in, they care about how much money you have and how much they can squeeze out of you. There have been an absolute explosion of wrestling schools since the internet started becoming an actual everyday thing. I had my first match in 1999. I didn't start seeing schools explode until 2001, when a deluge of people who went to Mat's belt factory analogues and started flooding the indies. By sheer coincidence, that's when I started running into goofs that had misguided ideas about the business and would wind up injuring me doing simple stuff and just not listening because they went to a belt factory school and were just trained wrong. The last straw for me was when I had my shoulder torn out of socket doing a reversal on a whip into the ropes. I did the initial whip, he reversed, he held onto my wrist, then tried to yank me in for a short clothesline that he didn't call and I wasn't expecting. I (rather unprofessionally, I admit) didn't bump or sell the clothesline, kicked him in the face as hard as I could, then soccer kicked him in the head six more times until the referee finally woke up and stepped in to stop the match because the dude was clearly knocked out. I'm glad it wasn't taped because it would've wound up on Wrestling Gone Wrong or something. It really wasn't the dude's fault, he didn't go to a school where someone taught people how to, you know, call spots. And also, yes, Mat is correct, there is absolutely no regulation of the wrestling school business, short of having a business license in the jurisdiction. This is also the same for being an actual wrestler, by the way. Some states, like Pennsylvania and New York, used to require a standard sports physical before they would issue a license. Some states, like Virginia and Maryland, just ask you to pay a yearly fee. They used to be more strict, such as asking for a physical and a reference letter from a licensed wrestler to confirm that you knew what you were doing, but since wrestling became sports entertainment those requirements got dropped. Some states, like North Carolina, don't have any regulation whatsoever. I worked roughly 200 matches (after a few concussions I don't remember how many they were, but that number sounds right... did I mention I started in 1999 and that was when everyone wanted to hit each other with chairs to mimic ECW?), and I can count on one hand how many times I saw a doctor at a show, but still have enough fingers left over to pay tribute to Arn Anderson. For the record, I went to school type #4. (Sorry everybody, I'm not dropping names.) I used to go to indy shows up and down the state as soon as I got my driver's license. Someone noticed that I would be at every show that he worked and he'd always try to play to me because he knew I'd give him the right reaction whether he was baby or heel. After six months of that, he'd give me the iggy to be prepared for something. I eventually asked him if he knew where I could start to train, and he gave me his address and said he'd train me himself. I'd go up to his place on Friday, train Friday night, tag along with him to whatever booking he had on Saturday where I'd be a crowd plant, come back, train Sunday morning, then go home. He charged me the ludicrous sum of no dollars, because he knew it was something I wanted to do, plus he knew my minimum wage grocery store job wasn't exactly bringing in the money. He would also bring in people who were of similar size to me for me to train with, which is how I started getting trained by the aforementioned guy still on WWE TV. He also did it because even though I didn't have a ton of talent, I cared a lot about the sport and I had a good mind for it. The whole reason I was support staff (I hesitate to say that I was an agent because it was the indies) and I was able to start doing commentary was because I was trained by who I was trained by. I'm glad that the last match I called featured him because it truly brought everything full circle. In a way, it's more old school than schools that will stretch people on day one. A vet would take interest in you and train you himself. Schools were extremely rare and you had to be recruited to get into them. And even then, there would be vets who would ask for money and hurt you intentionally so you'd go away, or take your money and skip town. I'm lucky that I got in the way I did. I'm sad that more people didn't go to a school with the quality of training that I received or trainers that gave a damn. People complain about WWE not hiring indy workers and starting up their own training center so they can train people from scratch, but wrestling on the independents is a complete and total joke. For every Chikara, there are a dozen promotions full of out of shape people who don't know what they are doing, but they went to a belt factory school that took their money for a year and said they could wrestle. For every Ring of Honor or Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, there are dozens of indies that feature some guy in a clown suit pretending to be Doink or ripping off a WWE star. People that don't have a problem calling themselves Dick Foley or Dubba Ray Doodley and don't see anything wrong with it. TL;DR: Everything is awful. |
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| OnceStyles | Apr 25 2015, 09:30 PM Post #104 |
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Tetsuko
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Thanks for all the info on wrestling schools, it was well told and educational. I understand what you're saying about the "taking your money and run" as I have a friend who experienced that. Not as a wrestler, but by the promoter of an indy fed my friend and I used to go to and even got to know the league's owner (since he also ran a wrestling store in the area). He invited my friend to join him in running a show. What running a show meant was paying for it. The promoter made a profit and ran with it, taking my friend's "investment in the show" with him. To this day, friend is owed around 7000 dollars from that promoter. I'm guessing he'll never see it. Still, my point from the beginning is that my friend, who is 5'5 and 110 pounds soaking wet and never goes a gym because he thinks watching using DDP's yoga DVD twice a week is good enough, was never invited to actually wrestle, or learn how to wrestle. For that matter, I don't think I've gone to a show where I've seen a guy who looked like me (a regular guy who has no noticeable muscle tone and couldn't even do a somersault let alone a plancha or moonsault off the top rope). Even the shittiest of wrestling schools require, at the very least, a lot of hard work to get through and then get to the point of being able to compete, money or not. Now, could I hit the gym, work out, diet and get myself into the shape where I could enter a wrestling school and learn the trade? Maybe...but I probably (definitely) won't be putting in that type of commitment like you, pmmachine, and Frankie have. I respect you both for seeing your dreams through. For me, it was always a dream I could only accomplish in e-wrestling. Frankie Starz, however, made himself a semi-successful career in the wrestling business. That should count for something to a guy like you, phmachine. I would think you would have some respect for what he's done seeing as how you both shared the same dream and went for it at some point in your lives so you understand better than any of us the level of commitment and hard work it takes. Obviously, I don't know what level of success you've had, but either way, I"m surprised to hear you turn your nose at someone else's. I take your criticism of Frankie with the statement of "anyone can become a wrestler" in the same light when people comment on my published novels with "anyone can write a book and get it published." Sure, anyone, potentially, could write a book and get it published, but it takes a ton of work that most people aren't about to commit to and then it still has to be good enough (or the author has to be marketing savvy or lucky enough) to succeed. Even with that time and effort, you may or may not get published. I've seen books I thought were terrible make it far further than mine...but I don't have anything but respect toward my fellow authors for their success. I would hope they'd have the same level of respect for me and my work. |
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| phmachine | Apr 26 2015, 05:55 PM Post #105 |
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Jiggle Billy
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Please tell me where I said my original post was about Frankie Starz. You seem to think I'm attacking your friend and keep redirecting this conversation back to him. I have no idea who he is, and I wasn't talking about him. My original post was that it's not hard to become a pro wrestler because there are a litany of opportunities available. To use your point about publishing... it's not hard to get published either. I can write 200 pages and self-publish on the Kindle Store. That means I'm a published author. That doesn't mean anybody's interested in the product I'm putting out. Inasmuch as you can go to Wrestler X's Wrestling School in a strip mall, spend a couple of thousand dollars, and wrestle a match in front of 10 paying fans. Guess what? Now you're a wrestler. If you've been compensated then you're a professional wrestler. Can anyone do that? Sure. Re: success, I try not to define what someone else's success level is by my own metric of success because whether or not you feel successful is a personal measure. I worked a show with a kid who was working his first match and he retired immediately afterwards. All he wanted was to do just one match. If he feels successful, then great for him. The same with your book analogy... if I wrote a book and put it up on the Kindle Store, for me, I'd be thrilled because hey, I did that, awesome. If someone buys it, even better. I'm not the kind of person that thinks you have to make a living out of something to get something out of it. For example, my wrestling career. Did I make a living? Nope. I actually lost four times more money than I ever made in wrestling (gear is expensive, dude). I also lost my interest in wrestling. I did, however, make a connection to what I'm doing now and, except for occasionally dropping in on you nerds, I consider my wrestling time to be part of my past. |
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9:37 AM Jul 11