Here’s something you might not realize.  No real reason for this but I found it interesting.

John Cena, AJ Styles and Brock Lesnar were all born within two and a half months of each other.  No there’s no significance to that, but AJ always seems so much younger than those two.

Unlike Daniel Bryan of course.A real B+ player is someone like Sheamus.  He’s capable of having a very good match under the right circumstances, stays over, has a good look, has a solid resume and can easily slide into the main event scene if need be.  That’s a very valuable hand to have in the company and he’s still young enough to be turned into something with a bigger impact.  Nothing wrong with that at all.

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But in this case it was written before the war ended.As inspired by a recent comment, I got to thinking about how rarely WCW got stuff right.  Much like TNA, they would get momentum and then the wheels would fall off for one reason or another.  However unlike TNA, there was a time when WCW was dominating the WWF for over a year.  Here’s the thing though:

Other than late 96-early 98, there weren’t many times at all where WCW was clearly in the lead.  Actually, there’s an argument to be made that WCW was NEVER firmly in the lead aside from that year and a half or so.  Other than that it was either even or a lead that could have gone either way.  At the end of the day, it’s almost always been the WWF’s world, at least since Hogan won the title.

This is a good sign for WWE.As I’m sure you know, Evolution (or at least most of it) reformed on Monday.  I actually don’t have an issue with this for one reason: it makes sense in the story.  I can’t count how often I’ve heard people say *insert stable here* should reform for no reason other than there are four or so people with nothing to do.  That’s not going to work and it’s the same problem with turning people for no good reason.  This team makes sense and fits the story as well as serving a purpose.  That’s a good thing and hopefully it works here, which it should.

On the Brock vs. Undertaker build.So the general consensus on the Undertaker vs. Lesnar build seems to be that people hate it.  My immediate answer to that is what were you expecting?

The build to Undertaker vs. Brock Lesnar has taken place over the last 23 years.  Maybe you’ve heard of it: it’s called the Streak.  For several years now, the story for Undertaker at Wrestlemania has been people wanting to take down the Streak.  Undertaker had four matches against DX about legacies and retirements and what have you, but it all came down to HHH and Shawn wanting to stop the Streak.  Over the years CM Punk, Randy Orton, HHH, Ric Flair, Batista and a host of others have tried and failed.  The Streak is (arguably) bigger than the WWE Title at this point.

Think about this for a minute.  The Streak started 23 years ago.  I’m 26 years old and the Streak began before I went to school for the first time.  It started when WCW was still in the NWA.  The WCW World Title was two months old.  It’s so old that the son of the man who was President when it started served eight years in office since then.  It’s over three times longer than Bruno Sammartino’s WWWF Title reign.  I could go on but you get the idea by now.

Whether you like the Streak or not, there’s never been anything like it in wrestling and there never will be again.  Undertaker is getting older now though and the wins are getting harder to come by.  Now the next challenger is Brock Lesnar, who is stronger and tougher than anyone Undertaker has faced in the Streak (yes I’m including Henry).  It’s basically Rocky vs. Drago in Rocky IV.  Lesnar is a fire breathing dragon for Undertaker to slay, but he’s going to push Undertaker to the point where it’s impossible to believe Undertaker will survive.  It happened with Shawn and it happened in the Cell so it can happen again.  They’re even using the idea that Brock has beaten Undertaker’s opponents more easily than Undertaker could.

In short, this is what the Streak matches are going to be like, and I could argue that it’s bigger than the triple threat is going to be.  It’s a built in story and one of those things that doesn’t need a big elaborate reason for the two men to be fighting.  Brock Lesnar has destroyed everything else and now he wants to destroy the one thing that no one has been able to stop.  Why do you need a more elaborate story than that?  THe match will be great (Undertaker hasn’t had a bad Wrestlemania match since……Wrestlemania 22?  And Lesnar hasn’t had a truly bad match since he’s been back), the moment will be great, and seeing the 22-0 sign will work at the end of the day.

I really don’t know what you people want, because this is what the Streak is going to be until Undertaker hangs up his boots.  They’d be crazy to do anything else.

That seems to be the general consensus I get.Today I saw yet another article talking about how WWE needs to stop using part timers.  This year’s Wrestlemania will be headlined by matches including HHH, Undertaker, Brock Lesnar, HHH and Batista (not a part timer but that’s the general consensus).  Yeah Wrestlemania has been making a fortune with Wrestlemania, they’re going to make a fortune on the TV rights, they’re making a fortune off the Network and they’re giving the fans what they want with Bryan more than likely walking out of Wrestlemania as WWE Champion, but they clearly need to plan for their future because they’re headed for a cliff because of the part timers.

Why do people think WWE is blind to this idea?  Yeah, these guys are part timers now but here’s the thing: the current roster isn’t going to be around forever.  One day John Cena, Randy Orton, CM Punk, Daniel Bryan, Sheamus and so on will be part timers and they’ll be headlining Wrestlemania just like the previous generation is now.  It’ll make money, WWE will continue to reign on high and crush whatever “competition” comes against them.

Now go and tell me that I can’t prove that and write three paragraphs explaining why so I can poke holes in it using logic and common sense to counter the argument of “I think it might go this way because I say so.”

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It’s about psychology today.Let’s look at Ric Flair for a minute.  Over the years, Ric Flair has climbed to the top rope for a high risk move approximately 43,392 times and has been successful on about 4 of those attempts (however he did win the NWA World Title at Starrcade 1983 in one of those attempts).

Now the question has always been why would Flair keep going up there when he knows it doesn’t work.  This is wrestling fans over thinking what they’re watching.  Flair was a heel more often than not, so he would be overconfident.  As an overconfident heel, Flair is going to think he can do stuff that he really can’t pull off.  Even though he failed so often at this move, heel Flair would think that THIS TIME it had to work.  There was no way that whatever loser he was fighting this time could slam the Nature Boy off the top.  It’s how a cocky heel would think.  Cocky and overconfident wrestlers are going to do stupid stuff all the time and the fans are going to be happy to see them be proven wrong.  Flair did the spot a lot because it made sense every single time.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: psychology is the most important thing in the ring and it makes matches so much better.

Remember to follow me on Twitter @kbreviews and pick up my new book of on the History of Summerslam at Amazon for just $3.99 at:

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Anybody remember them?Aside from Daniel Bryan, what did the original Nexus ever accomplish?  Think about it.  Of the main seven guys on the team, here are their career accomplishments:

4 Intercontinental Titles

5 Tag Titles

That’s it.  Of the original seven (Barrett, Sheffield, Young, Otunga, Tarver, Slater, Gabriel) plus Harris and McGillicutty that’s all they’ve won in their entire WWE careers.  Those guys debuted almost four years ago and have a resume that Chris Jericho probably accomplished in a two year stretch.  They never won anything significant while they were a team and once Barrett lost his title shot they were done completely.

It’s really kind of astounding that they were THE story for four to six months and had practically no lasting impact at all.  Even once Punk took over the group they didn’t do anything as Orton knocked them out one by one in about six weeks.  Even the Dungeon of Doom had more accomplishments than this.  At the end of the day, the fact that most of them sound like they belong in a cubicle at an accounting firm and had character traits that felt like they were pulled out of a fishbowl and assigned to each member (among other things) crippled them.  It’s a great lesson in what happens when you put no effort into characters at all.

They’re the boy band of wrestling: big deal for awhile, people kind of remember them, one guy means anything today.

It’s their world and we’re just watching it.The other day, someone posted a comment on here praising me for my analysis, knowledge and reviews.  I appreciated that quite a bit and still shake my head when I read such kind words written about me, but there’s something everyone needs to keep in mind: wrestling journalists, reviewers, writers or whatever you want to call us are almost all on the outside looking in.

Unless there’s something I’m unaware of, neither Dave Meltzer, Bryan Alvarez, Wade Keller, Scott Keith, certainly not myself, or any other wrestling writer have big time wrestling experience.  I’m well aware that several of them have sources inside WWE, TNA and/or ROH, but that’s the key to it: those sources are inside and reporting things to the people outside.  There are things that we’re never going to know about or understand no matter how smart we think we are, how well read we think we are, or how many reviews we browse, shows we watch or shoot interviews we download every day.

Side note: Shoot interviews are not some uncovered gospel.  There’s no one hooking the wrestlers up to a lie detector and threatening them with a bullet to the head if they tell the truth.  I can’t count how many times people have sworn something is true because it was a SHOOT.  Wrestlers make their livings lying to us every single night, but I’m supposed to take everything they say as true because they tell me it’s true now?  It doesn’t work that way.  Do you think a guy who might be able to get a job in WWE in the future is going to tell the truth and say he hates WWE’s business practices and that it would be a nightmare to work there?  Shoot interviews are another way for wrestlers to get us to pay for their stories, just like we do when we go to a show.  Same idea.

At the end of the day, I’m a wrestling fan that has watched a lot of wrestling in my life.  I have what I consider a fairly decent knowledge of modern wrestling history, but the only things I know for sure are what I’m given on screen.  No matter how you look at it, everything we know is based on what people inside allow us to know.  Take everything any wrestling writer or journalist (myself certainly included) with a grain of salt the size of a Buick.  We’re going on what we’re told, but there’s no guarantee that anything we’re told is true.

Remember to follow me on Twitter @kbreviews and pick up my new book of on the History of Summerslam at Amazon for just $3.99 at:

And check out my Amazon author page with wrestling books for under $4 at:

Again, time to take a lesson from the 80s.I’ve been watching some 80s NWA lately and one of the things you’ll hear is JR giving us the wrestlers’ stories.  This might be anything from what they did in college to something about their family to something they said to him earlier today.  It wasn’t much a lot of the time, but it gave the fans a reason to care about these people.  How many wrestlers can you think of that have almost nothing to talk about?  Make up even a little backstory so there’s something the people can relate to or care about and see how fast things get better.