QUESTION OF THE DAY: Under what set of circumstances do you feel it is OK for WWE fans to hijack a match?
This week, The Doc is fighting off the blues. He went into Extreme Rules thinking good things about the possibility of being pleasantly surprised by a card that did not look particularly noteworthy on paper beyond a very few matches; as is stated in the podcast’s opening monologue, Doc felt like Sunday’s PPV needed to be of comparable quality to Money in the Bank to give WWE some much needed consistent momentum during what has now become a long creative doldrum period that some are calling the worst in the company’s history. Unfortunately, that did not happen; get used to the word “unfortunate” being tossed around a lot on this show. It is what it is, folks; hopefully Summerslam will deliver and set WWE on a better long-term path
Please take a moment to like the Facebook page for The Greatest Matches and Rivalries of the WrestleMania Era (which will be released two weeks from today on August 1st!) for excerpts from the book such as “For Davey Boy Smith and England, for WWE itself, and for Bret Hart and others like him, The Hitman vs. The British Bulldog at Summerslam ’92 was a milestone. Davey Boy would main-event numerous PPVs in the 1990s and have a handful of other classics, but his career peaked that night in London. WWE was never quite the same; as much as Dragon vs. Macho Man had set the standard, Hitman vs. Bulldog embodied the old adage that “a rising tide lifts all ships” and prompted four-star matches to eventually become an expectation instead of a once-per-year (or so) phenomenon. Bret, meanwhile, used the chance that McMahon took on him and his brother-in-law as a springboard to one of the ten best careers of the WrestleMania Era. Despite all of his amazing matches, many of which are still yet to be discussed on these pages, during his Hall of Fame speech in 2006 he singled out the one with Bulldog at Wembley as the favorite match of his career.”
