"...the WWF has realized an important thing: It's cool to act like a cowboy, but it's not cool to be a cowboy. Bradshaw can be the sheriff of RAW and that's cool, but when he puts on the cowboy hat and assless chaps... that's not cool at all."

God. FUCKING. DAMMIT! What the fuck happened? Bradshaw was badass #1, on his way to the RAW main event, and now he's wearing cowboy boots and hog-tying people in the ring? And they wonder why ratings are down!? I'm living in a coo-coo clock here! Who the fuck is clamoring to see this? Christ! It's a mockery of the very human condition! But I guess it's not the gayest Bradshaw has ever been.

Although, as mockeries of the human condition go, I'm actually glad that Stephanie is back as General Manager of Smackdown. I don't much care for her personality, her looks, her attitude, her achievements in life... but I love those tits. Man, breast fetishism can go a long way. If I'm gonna have to watch the Hogan Black Hole devour Edge every week, at least I can get some titties out of the deal. She better not keep wearing that business suit or I'm gonna be pissed.

It's weird, living through a recession. I've never lived through one before, because I stopped watching wrestling before the mid-90's recession hit and came back during the 2000 peak. But lately the show is "on the ropes", as Stefan put it. I gotta admit, the show is getting kinda stale, both because it's just not as good and because you can really only watch so much wrestling before it starts to lose you. It's inevitable that there are gonna be slumps, but in a lot of ways this one really isn't that hard to understand. When I think about what things were like when I came in, it really was a golden age.

There was Foley as commissioner, Edge and Christian at the height of their game, the E+C/Hardy/Dudley battles, HHH, Rock and Austin all going strong, Jericho at the top of his face run, even the Hip-Hop Drop was pretty cool. Like Conan O'Brien says, they had so much show for us this evening, folks. So much show. The Conquistadors, Perry Saturn hitting himself in the head, it was all gold. A lot of it was gimmick characters, but when people say modern wrestling fans don't like gimmicks, they're wrong. They just don't like bad gimmicks. I love gimmicks, I love characters, that's why I watch. I was the Hurrican's biggest fan, fuck, I even liked Planet Stasiak, but just as I started looking forward to seeing him they yanked him off tv. Thank god there's still Golddust to fill my weekly retardedness quotient.

A gimmick doesn't have to be outlandish - The Rock is a gimmick. He doesn't come out as Dwayne "Everybody's Friend" Johnston, he comes out as Rocky "Confident Asshole" Miavia, and people love it. These new guys, John Cena, Horty, they don't really have much going for them. They're just some guys. At least Brock and Batista are really, really big, which is basically a gimmick in and of itself.

Even Foley, who was arguably most popular when he dropped all his old gimmicks and let people know the real him, had a gimmick. The gimmick was to let people in on what a swell guy he was and how despite being the king of hardcore, the actual Foley loves nothing more than a dumb joke, usually at Al Snow's expense. And it worked! I love Foley, I love him to death, way more than I ever would have if all I knew about him was Cactus Jack/Dude Love/Mankind. Everybody needs a gimmick. Gimmicks are what elevate wrestling from just "two guys pretending to fight" to "two interesting guys pretending to fight".

So the gimmicks have been a little lacking lately, but the stories have been pretty bad as well. A couple of weeks ago a whole raft of us happened to get together for RAW, something that hasn't happened in awhile, and the main event was Undertaker vs. Jeff Hardy. I was excited, I'd love to see Jeff as champ, absolutely love it, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, in an attempt to shake things up, they'd do it. Fuck bringing in Eric Bischoff, give Jeff Hardy the belt. That'll get some people tuning in, and I'm sure some people would be against it, but I think they could accept it. Among my friends, few wrestlers get more respect than Jeff Hardy. What he does is so brutally physical that it seems real on a whole other level than what the other wrestlers in the company do. It grabs you in an ECW "OH MY GOD!!" way and leaves you with a definite respect for the man. Jeff Hardy should be in the upper tier, he's earned it and he deserves it. He may not be as big as the other main-eventers, but we've all seen with our own eyes the crazy shit he's willing to do, and it's more than enough to let him keep pace with the others. Those guys may be larger, but they never leave the ground. They never put themselves in any obvious risk, and Jeff Hardy does. People fucking love Jeff Hardy, but his storylines are holding him down.

As the story went, the title match came about because Jeff was getting tired of his lot in wrestling life and wanted to stretch. He wanted to soar higher, so he decided to pick the biggest guy he could find and fuck with him. He ended up fucking with the Undertaker enough that Undertaker finally gave him a match, and even though Undertaker won, Jeff would not go down. He kept insisting that Taker hadn't beaten him, despite the fact that he couldn't stand under his own power, and the Undertaker seemed to respect him. Taker held his hand in the air, in disbelief at Jeff's perserverance, and even though my cousin Dan said it was a gay ending, I think deep down he dug it. I know I did, I couldn't wait for RAW the next week.

My head was full of visions of Jeff Hardy climbing the ladder to the main event, of Undertaker retaining his begrudging respect for Jeff, and insisting that Jeff be rewarded for his fight ethic by being invited into Undetaker's RAW main events. I think that would have been great, turn every match into a Triple-Threat or a Fatal-Four-Way, and eventually have Jeff and Undertaker become a sort of duo, kicking the asses of their opponents before they tried to kick the ass off of each other. Like two friends in a bar fight, they could swing at each other week in and week out, Undertaker just barely keeping the upper hand while Jeff learned how to take a beating and keep on coming.

Taker could eventually end up taking Jeff under his wing, they could hang out backstage while Undertaker told stories about his wrestling past as Jeff listened, respectful and eager to learn. Undertaker would be leaving the company someday, but he would want the craziest, toughest son of a bitch in the company to take his place, and Jeff might be that man. Their styles are different, but their balls of steel would make them brothers. Brothers in, uh, ball steel. Matt would ask Jeff what the hell was wrong with him, why was he hanging out with the Undertaker, and Jeff would tell him that he just didn't understand, but that this is the way things were going to go. The Hardy split could be gradual and uncomfortable, the way real splits are, instead of the forced heel turn they pushed on Matt last year.

The Undertaker/Jeff Hardy pairing of teacher and student would have been some total cowboy shit, and I woulda loved it. I woulda swallowed that down by the barrelful, because like I said, the cowboy mindset is great, the idea of two bad-ass men who respect one another, but not so much that they won't try to kick the other one's ass if they think they have to. And not so much that they'd wear chaps. Man, it woulda been so cool. But it didn't happen. The next week Undertaker wasn't even there, and Jeff won the European belt. The goddamn European belt, christ. It was a mockery for Matt Hardy to carry that shitty belt, it's a fucking travesty to give it to Jeff. He could have at least taken the Hardcore belt from that lasso carrying poofter Bradshaw. Taker ain't gonna hang out with no mincy Euro champ. They shoulda dropped that piece of crap belt and kept the U.S. Title from WCW instead. The Euro belt is for losers who can't win a legitimate title.

So my group of friends as a whole lost interest in RAW again and that was that. Back in the day we used to have a ritual of jumping in the car, tossing in the rock half of Cypress Hill's Skull and Bones and driving to Burger King where we ordered something like 20 Junior Whoppers and a shit load of root beer. Week in, week out, we'd sit down for RAW with our 10 pounds of beef and it was fantastic. We didn't even get Smackdown in those days up here in Canada, so it was a concentrated mere two hours of wicked shit every week. Man, those were the days.

Now the group meets sporadically, but nobody goes too far out of their way to watch WWF anymore. I still watch both shows pretty religiously because hey, I really love wrestling. I would love to be a WWF writer, nothing would be better than that. If I ever won a Nobel Prize I'd just use it as a stepping stone to get into the WWF.

I've decided to fuck this WWE shit, I'm calling it the goddamn WWF.

The last thing I want to do is complain about wrestling, especially considering how easy it is for every internet jackoff to lend their brilliant insights once the mistakes have already been made, but shit, I'm gonna do it anyway. There have been some pretty obvious problems lately. Recently, I think things can be traced to Hogan. The WWF really buckled on that one, and the fans knew it. The fans don't want to be cow-towed to, they don't want everything handed to them on a platter. They want tension, they want conflict. That's the very essense of wrestling, a never-ending ball of conflict. They chanted for Hogan and they got Hogan, but imagine how much better it would have been if Hogan had stayed with the nWo? People would have cheered for him, they would have loved him, and he coulda said "Yeah? Well fuck you! This ain't 1986, I ain't coming back! You can wear your red and yellow, I'm not touching it. Fuck all y'all!" They coulda sold red+yellow merchandise so that fans could show their love for Hogan, to try to draw him back from the darkside, and he coulda told them all to suck a cock. A million times better.

But the worst thing Hogan's face turn did was ruin HHH. The Rock and Hogan as friends, sure, I can see that. But HHH? It's like the Devil being friends with God. It's stupid. A few months ago I wrote a nice, impassioned piece about HHH's return, about how much ass he kicked and how glad I was to see him back, but I really don't care anymore. When the Rock left after Wrestlemania HHH was the man who was supposed to carry Smackdown, and they turned him into a pussy. A total, complete, Hogan-whipped, boring piece of shit pussy. I don't care what HHH says, I don't care what he does, I don't care who he fights, and I can't be the only one. HHH was set, he was ready for his reign as returning King Of The Assholes, made that much more hardened and bitter by his 8 months away, and instead he's wearing flowers in his hair and licking Hulk Hogan's rectum. Big, loving strokes. Jesus, I don't wanna see that. Nobody wants to see that. Who the fuck thought we did?

The Rock came back last week, and nobody cared. Some of that had to do with his premature return on RAW after Austin left, which killed a bit of his return heat, but ultimately I think it's another lack of conflict. Rock strolls into the show like nothing, and it doesn't feel like he's even really there. Nobody's giving him too much shit, nothing seems to be bothering him too much, Kurt Angle came out and chin-wagged but Rocky didn't seem to care too much about that either. There's no tension. Me and my friend Mark used to say they should make a Pay-Per-View called "Rock Vs. The WWF" which would be three hours of the Rock fighting every other wrestler in the company, and in the end he'd be standing on a pile of corpses, sweating and breathing heavily but retaining his composure, raising the belt and posing with his eyes closed as the fans take pictures and go wild. The Rock can overcome any obstacle, but he's gotta have an obstacle to fight. Kurt Angle's no obstacle, he's got his place, but he's basically a glorified mid-carder. They shoulda had a whole shitload of guys pissed at The Rock for whatever reason, maybe because he left to go to Hollywood, and he'd have to find a way to deal with all of them. Have some odds to overcome before he runs his mouth. If he just runs his mouth into the void, nobody cares.

Thinking back, I think the Invansion storyline was the true beginning of their current problems. The concept was fantastic, the Invasion PPV did great numbers, but its outcome had no real consequences. I can't even remember who the fuck won, but there were only two ways they could have gone with that storyline, and they went neither. Firstly, they could have tried to bring in the big names like the nWo and Goldberg right off the bat, and then people wouldn't care what the fuck else they did. It woulda been so cool that everyone woulda swallowed it up.

That wasn't likely and didn't happen, so the only way to make the rag-tag of mid and low carders they did end up with impressive would have been to make the domination of WCW near-total. The WWF should have become a WCW run war zone, everything in disarray, everything in total chaos. A malfunctioning TitanTron, lights flickering, everything falling apart, one giant mess where WWF refs and officials wouldn't dare show their faces, WCW wrestlers would flourish and WWF wrestlers would fear for their lives. Each and every week WCW could roll into town and for whatever reason the WWF would be completely incapable of stopping them from wrecking the backstage area, from destroying the locker rooms, but blowing fuseboxes and bringing whole arenas into total insanity. The WWF wrestlers could have one locker room somewhere in the back as a refuge, with the rest of the rooms and corridors filled with blood-lusting WCW wrestlers completely glorying in the act of destruction.

The WWF wrestlers would have to learn to band together and fight back, not against some phantom WCW threat, but against a very visible and obvious problem. Only WCW announcers, refs and ring announcers would be active, all WWF belts would be abolished, WCW everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Tell me that wouldn't have been cool. Tell me that wouldn't have grabbed your attention. Tell me that wouldn't have been awesome. Wrestling is not a story of subtlety, wrestling is a living shonen manga, wrestling is the old west, wrestling is so fucking nuts that you can't pull yourself away. The WWF doesn't have the luxury of making the physical aspect go comepletely out of bounds like ECW did, so the WWF needs to take the mental path. You need to watch the show and think "Holy shit, that guy is fucked. Those guys are fucked. I have no idea how they're going to get out of this. They're going to have to fight like they've never fought before. This is so crazy that I'm not even gonna change the channel during a commercial in case I miss something!"

The WCW invasion was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and with the odds stacked high enough people would tune in every week to see how the WWF was gonna get out of it. Key figures could defect to the opposite side, misinformation could be spread and it could have really meant something, it could have been a war. Then, when it was over, people would feel satisfied with a chapter well done, instead of vaguely disappointed at the drawn out, undramatic story that actually took place.

But again and again, the WWF dropped the ball. Invasion, wasted. The ECW turn, wasted by merging with WCW that very night, and that one had potential. That ECW turn gripped me by the fucking balls, I thought about it all night. Just a second before it actually happened I thought to myself "Hey, those guys all used to be in ECW," and then they turned around, against their WWF brand-mates... it gave me shivers. It was the greatest thing I'd ever seen in wrestling. It wasn't a match, it wasn't a high spot, it was a story. They got me by the brain and I loved them for it. But, wasted. The "Poison of the nWo", wasted. Jeff Hardy's one man trek to the top of the mountain, his solitary journey into the great unknown of the high-carders, his personal test of his own strength, wasted. Fuck, WWF. Fuck.

I've been thinking a little bit about what Austin could do when he finally comes back. I think it'd be a great opportunity for him to turn heel again. Heel Austin was my favorite, but it only lasted something like eight months. That should have gone on for years, it should have been a near permanent change. There was nothing I liked better than seeing guys with "Austin 3:16" painted on the back window of their trucks watching a ppv at the bar and wondering what the fuck was going on with Austin. That was gold, but there was no real way to go back now that he's turned face again. But now if he comes back, he can tell the fans he hates their guts, that he hates this whole business, that he's only back for the money and that we can all go fuck ourselves. His matches could get sloppy, he could practically sleep through his ring time, people would hate him. It'd be great. Finally somebody could snap him out of it, enough to get his heart back into the wrestling at least, but not enough to forgive the business and the fans that drove him out.

Or he could join one of the smaller companies like NWA:TNA, but they'd have to bring him down a notch. He's too big a star for them to pit him against any of their talent. It would be like when he was the anchor for RAW -- no one could touch him, he was just too big. So they could take a spin on the same situation, but have him come back as a drunk. Steve Williams, former great, now a happy, violent drunk, but sloppy enough in the ring that his matches would have some credibility against lesser known talent. Man, I wanna be a wrestling writer. Damn. That'd be the best.

Anyway, thanks for reading my ramblings, and if you're getting disillusioned with WWF, stick with it a little longer. Or give it up, but come back in a few months. Don't give it up for good. You know they're just in a slump, and they'll be back eventually. It's the WWF, it's the Greatest Show on Earth, they cannot be stopped. It's just a matter of time.

Oh yeah, and hey. Welcome back, Steph.