Tweets Of The Week for January 7th 2013

Pro wrestlers are known for being the absolute best or the absolute worst when it comes to social media. But I decided I wanted to highlight some of the week’s best in a column that I call “Tweets Of The Week”, a compiled list of all of the 140 character maximum postings by pro wrestlers that made me laugh, made me think or made me question why I ever loved two people rolling around in tights in the first place. So let’s start it off.

#5: Robert Evans reiterating the fact that he is a true renaissance man. (Wrestler turned barrister manager of wresters, turned marching band wrestler, turned Mixed Martial Arts wrestler, turned cowboy wrestler, turned screenwriter)

#4: The monstrous Mr. Touchdown working on possible rehabilitation. Keep a close eye though.

#3: I give you the light sense of humor of William Regal.

#2: Chuck Taylor explains it better and more succinct than I ever could.

And at #1: I know I’m already breaking the rule for this column the first week in, but the “Tweet Of The Week” is actually gonna be “Tweets Of The Week” courtesy of the Ring Of Honor World Champion Kevin Steen. This past Saturday in Baltimore was the most recent Ring Of Honor TV Tapings, and throughout the night, Steen kept his Twitter followers updated with all of the weird on goings occurring backstage, which birthed these gems.

And the winner of all tweets for the visual alone:

So there it is, the first week of “Tweets Of The Week”, which I plan on doing every Monday. What are some amazing tweets from pro wrestlers you think I should include? What pro wrestlers are your favorites to follow on Twitter? Leave a comment below answering those questions or to tell me anything else you’d like to see me talk about.

Until then,

The Wrestlefan

Cena To Grace Cereal Boxes: A Sign Of Promos To Come

Last Years Joke About To Become A Reality

Original Story from 411Mania

In a move that should excite wrestling fans and cereal lovers alike, Post Cereal has made the announcement that John Cena will be replacing Fred Flinstone on upcoming specially-marked boxes of their signature cereal, Fruity Pebbles. Cena was originally featured on a section of the box around this time last year, with Post trying to capitalize on the promos between John Cena and The Rock, where Rock stated that Cena’s constant color changing wardrobe made him resemble a bowl of Fruity Pebbles.

Now before you go all, “Stop complaining! WWE is a moneymaking business! Blah Blah Blah”, I understand Posts decision to put Cena front and center on their products. I know first hand that when children who like wrestling, which is a lot of them, walk through a store and see anything with a pro wrestlers face on it, they will yell, scream, bite and do everything in their power to get said thing. I know because I was one of those kids. Post could very well put John Cena on the front of Bran Flakes and kids would demolish the cereal aisle in the supermarket. There is no denying that.

The problem I have is not necessarily with Cena getting put on the cover. I hold no true attachment with Fred Flinstone where I’m upset with him being shafted, especially since this is only temporary. The problem I have is that Cena would not even be considered to be a replacement if it wasn’t for last year’s very anti-climactic and redundant promos from The Rock that lead to a not-so great match at WrestleMania. Last year, instead of trying to develop build to a encounter that was to be a dream match by many, Dwayne Johnson decided that it would be better to get catchphrases and buzzwords to trend on Twitter, because it meant that he was finally back and important again.

The question I have is, does Post also realizes that besides the comments about Cena’s rainbow attire, that the extended series of promos between the two featured Rock referring to Cena as a “Kung-Pao Bitch” (Side Note: I’m not pissed, but if PF Changs tries to form a partnership with WWE as well, then I’ll be truly pissed.)? Do they also realize that their new cover athletes counter argument towards these insults was to “Blow him like a purple pinwheel” and how The Rock shouldn’t be on Witch Mountain, but Brokeback Mountain? Oh, and not to mention, that The Rock’s retort was to call Cena a “Yabba-Dabba Bitch”, a play on Fred Flinstone’s catchphrase. You know, the guy that is represented on the damn cereal box! I would think that a profitable company like Post would do some research into their entire promos, instead of hearing just a catchy buzzword and jumping on at the first smell of possible exposure or revenue. Hell, Kelloggs dropped Michael Phelps the minute it was revealed that he smoked marijuana. How are these possible PR problems any different?

No matter this story, I’ll still continue eating Fruity Pebbles, mainly because they taste like a rainbow exploded in your mouth and it is the king of soggy cereal. But, with the high possibility of “Rock Cena 2” happening again, this also seems to be a sign of more pandering, more attempts to make idiotic lines trend, and the mind numbing promos that will be occurring for the next 12 weeks of build to this years WrestleMania. The Rock returns this Monday just in time for his “well-earned” title shot at the Royal Rumble, so I hope I am proved wrong, but I do not expect to be.

What do you think? Leave a comment below telling me if you agree or if I’m full of it. And remember, there’s no in-between on the internet.

Until then,

The Wrestlefan

A Great Wrestler Does Not The Indies Make

He's Not The Greatest Because He Did It For Less Money

In case you didn’t know, this is Antonio Cesaro, the current United States champion of the WWE. And if you follow me on the internet, you will know that he is one of my favorite wrestlers currently on WWE television. I’ve said before that I will wait throughout whatever WWE wants to place in front of me for three hours on a Monday Night (including John Cena quite literally pooping on peoples parade), just to get to the Antonio Cesaro match and watch him go straight beast mode on someone. He has brought great matches out of some not so great wrestlers, to the point where I am actually excited for the match he is having on Main Event with The Great Khali of all people. But as many of you know, Antonio Cesaro use to go under a different alias. He was once Claudio Castagnoli, former multi-time champion in companies such as Ring Of Honor, Chikara, Pro Wrestling Guerilla, Combat Zone Wrestling and many, many more. And in those companies, Claudio exhibited all the traits that made me such a fan of him currently.

This brings me to the point of this post. I follow independent wrestling a great deal, to the point that I am the spear-header for the indie wrestling news segment on the Wrestling Mayhem Show. When my fellow Mayhem Show co-hosts bring up a name of someone they have heard of for the first time, I am usually able to give them a brief synopsis of the stuff that they have done and some of their attributes. It’s very pro wrestling hipster-esque of me, but I like to share my knowledge with other people. But let me say that just because I spend a great deal of my time following independent wrestling and wrestlers, does not mean I automatically think that all indie wrestling is great.

Normally, I tend to get behind certain wrestlers as opposed to certain companies. While certain companies on an independent level can be defined as better than others, there is great talent intermixed throughout, and that also goes for televised wrestling products. However, I do feel very strongly that in order to develop your own opinions about what is good and what is bad, you need to see a little bit of everything. I watch everything from WWE, to TNA, to local promotions, to promotions states away, to international promotions, because your best pro wrestling experiences and your worst teach you about what you love and appreciate. That being said, not every indie wrestler is the greatest pro wrestler in the world. I’ve been to small independent shows where the best on the show is still not as great as WWE’s worse and vice versa. At the same token, just because a wrestler is on television does not automatically make them better than someone wrestling in front of only a fraction of the crowd.

And just because you have wrestled for those smaller crowds does not mean you are automatically my favorite. Take for example Dean Ambrose, the newest arrival from the independents to WWE television. As much as I appreciate Ambrose, while I followed his stuff on the independent scene, I was never that compelled by his work in the way most other fans were. A large portion of it occurred in Combat Zone Wrestling, and looking back on his matches, they were no different than a lot of the infamous wrestling that occurred in CZW at the time. Then there are his widely talked about promos, where he pulls his hair, rubs his face, talks in a mumbling voice and then starts to scream, and at times I found them more comical then truly serious. One of my favorite examples of this is a promo he cut for a IPW storyline he was doing with Drake Younger, where Moxley continually harasses and gropes this female interviewer and says weird stuff to make you think that he is crazy. When I watched it for the first time, I couldn’t help but laugh the entire time because of how ridiculous it was, which was not the goal of the promo. Rather than me thinking he was a deranged psychopath who is dangerous, I thought he was ridiculously hilarious and over the top. And just because something makes you laugh in wrestling, doesn’t always mean its good.

Don’t get me wrong though. I am very happy for Dean Ambrose’s recent success and opportunities in a company that pretty much every pro wrestler desires to be in. But I tend to hear a great deal about how bringing in Ambrose to the main roster is a way for the WWE to make the internet wrestling community “wet in the pants”, and for me, that’s just not the case. The same goes for Cesaro, who I would be enthralled with whether he was wrestling in front of 18,000 or 180. Claudio Castagnoli and Antonio Cesaro are the same phenomenal wrestler and no sole company that he has worked for has defined him. However, I am still devout in keeping up with the independents and talking them a great deal. But that is because they are the ones that need people talking about them. WWE doesn’t need us on the internet discussing their on-goings to be successful. In fact, they may be more successful without. I am lucky enough to see amazing independent athletes like ACH, Davey Vega or Rachel Summerlyn every month, and I make a strong effort to tell as many people as I can about them. But they are as much my favorite wrestlers as the likes of Cesaro, Damien Sandow, Daniel Bryan, Cody Rhodes and so many others on TV.

Overall, the moral somewhere within this is to love the wrestlers you wish to love, no matter how the environment around those wrestlers defines them. Great wrestlers are great wrestlers and bad wrestlers are bad wrestlers. I encourage you to explore all of the wide variety that professional wrestling has to offer and decide for yourself which are which.

Those are just my thoughts. I would love to hear what yours are so leave a comment telling me what you think. What equates a good wrestler? Do you tend to follow wrestlers or follow companies?

Until then,

The Wrestlefan

Why Am I A Wrestling Fan?

Hello people of the internet. You may know me as Eamon, that guy who 95% of his posts on Facebook and Twitter are wrestling related and you get irrationally angry about it. If that describes you… then go away. But if you follow me on the internet and don’t completely hate when I talk about people rolling around in tights and kneepads, welcome! This is the place where I will now post all of the things going on in my head in wordy paragraphs and I hope you enjoy it and have some fun. Because that is what it’s all about. I spend my Tuesday nights talking about this sport, or art, or this fake thing that’s super gay and is not as cool as MMA or whatever you believe, and I want to continue doing that and this is my vessel to do so. So lets tell some stories, share some memories and have a conversation about this multi-faceted thing that is pro wrestling.

I thought it would be good to start off by going over my journey to becoming a pro wrestling fan, something that has become a very important and long running descriptive quality of me.

I’m pretty sure a lot of fans are able to pinpoint the exact moment where they saw it for the first time and became enthralled with it. Getting to know a ton of people who became wrestling fans back in the late 80’s-early 90’s, they’ve mentioned to me that seeing guys like Hulk Hogan or Randy Savage for the WWF, or guys like Ric Flair or Sting for WCW sucked them into loving pro wrestling. In case you didn’t know, I did not grow up in that generation, and because of that I tend to get tons of crap, as young wrestling fans usually do. The reason I tend to not care too much about the downfall of the legacy of Hulk Hogan in TNA is because I never grew up as a “Hulkamaniac”. Hulk Hogan truly never mattered to me when I started watching because I was never able to understand how at his age he could still hold his own with the tough stars of the WWF/E at the time. As you could see, even at a young age I began to show my narcissistic personality at times, but let me explain the reasoning behind my immediate love for wrestling. I was flipping through channels in early August of 2002 and stumbled upon an episode of Raw in progress, where Triple H and Shawn Michaels were trying to figure out who attacked Michaels on a previous episode in the parking lot and slammed his head through a car window. I remember them showing the image of a bloody Shawn Michaels being put onto a gurney and sent to the hospital and, being barely 9 years old, thinking how gruesome it was. Then Triple H was in the ring to talk to Shawn Michaels via satellite to try to figure out who had done this to Shawn, when Shawn revealed that police officers gave him footage of the attack from one of the security cameras. After showing the grainy and unrecognizable footage, Shawn noted that due to the advancements in technology nowadays (which is immensely funny looking back at it in 2012), he was able to enhance the footage to reveal that his attacker, was none other than…wait for it… TRIPLE H! They then cut back to a stone-faced Shawn Michaels who says, “It was you, Hunter”, which Triple H rebuttals with a line that is engrained in my memory to this day, “You’re damn right it was me!”, said in his very own Triple H way.

My First Memory

Now if you listen to me today, I tend to give those two guys a lot of crap (mainly Triple H who even after losing an END OF AN ERA WAR with The Undertaker has been back and is still gonna be back to kick the diverticulitis out of Brock Lesnar, but that’s for another blog post), but that moment kept my young eyes glued to the television and captivated me in a way nothing else had before. There was drama, a line between good versus evil, gruesome imagery as I mentioned before and I became hooked. It’s funny to see how I’ve advanced from mostly only caring about the drama played out in the ring, but the thing that got me into wrestling were two guys talking to each other. However, they followed up with more drama and intrigue in an amazing street fight at Summerslam 2002, which I still believe is one of the best matches those two have had. Those images that were stuck in my head of a bloody Shawn Michaels in the parking lot, were followed by Triple H raising up his sledgehammer and striking down with vengeance across the back of Shawn like something out of Gladiator. But since that moment, I have never waned from the product or had a period where I stopped watching, whether people told me to or not.

My Inspiration

So that brings up the question of how my parents reacted to this newfound love of pro wrestling. Well, as it is the case most of the time, they reacted very differently. My father, the minute he saw that I was interested in it, jumped completely on board. While I was following the modern day guys that I was seeing on television every week, my dad was showing me videos of his favorites when he watched, guys like Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes and The Von Erich’s. He shared stories with me about how when he was working as an orthopedic cast technician, he made the cast for Sting when he tore his patella tendon at Clash Of The Champions 10. He always promoted and encouraged my love for it, whether it was sitting with me every Monday night to watch Raw, taking me to any event that was in town, or just sitting down and discussing the current storylines and where we thought they were going. He was usually right and I was usually wrong. But because he spent his time doing those things, not only did it fuel my love for pro wrestling, but also it gave the two of us a connection we probably would not have had otherwise. My father passed away over 5 years ago from pancreatic cancer and I still feel that connection I felt with him while he was still with us, due to having wrestling in my life. I honestly feel that if I didn’t spend my time engrossed in following this crazy interest, I’d end up on a completely different, and probably not well-adjusted, path.

While my father encouraged my love for professional wrestling, my mother was not as positively receptive, as should be expected with most mothers. Funny enough, she actually took me to my first live wrestling event ever, which was a Smackdown house show in 2002. The reason she took me was because the company that she worked for was sponsoring the event and she was able to obtain free, floor seat tickets, which made me a happy, young child. If you ask her to this day, she will tell you how that was the first, and the last time she will go to a show with me. Since that day, I would have to go with either my father or our old next-door neighbors who had a daughter who’s favorite wrestlers were John Cena and Randy Orton because they were so damn oily and ripped… so you can tell whom I preferred. And I feel that the reason my mother disapproved of this interest of mine wasn’t even because of the violence that was involved with it. To my parents, I always tended to be considered the promising one. I always came home from school with good to great grades, focused a great deal on my schoolwork and would at times be very hard on myself for not achieving the best. And I think that my mom felt that if I focused my time on something that she did not understand the point of, I would be losing all of that. When I was younger I got upset with her over thinking that, but now I am able to understand it. My mother never went to college and was lucky enough and worked hard enough to gain a successful job where she was able to support her family, and she did not want her children to have to struggle the way she did to gain that success. Luckily, nowadays my mother is more approving of this thing that I am passionate about because she has seen how much it has done for me, especially the stuff I do every week with the Wrestling Mayhem Show. She has understood the joy it has given me, the great people I have met because of it and the fact that it keeps me very happy. Whether she supports it or not, I still love her to death, because your family is definitely much more important than the things you like, but involving myself in following, watching and studying pro wrestling has given me something to appreciate, and it makes me happy to know people who I hold so highly, approve of the things I hold so highly as well. Now as far as getting her to another wrestling show, that may take some more work.

Well that’s it. That’s a start to this fun project I plan to contribute to once or twice every week. There are still tons to talk about and discuss and I hope you will be there to discuss it with me. Feel free to leave a comment telling me what you think, and also you can always send me pro wrestling you think I should watch for a little column I like to call “What Wrestlefan Watched”, that I will be doing on this site.

Until then,

The Wrestlefan