#i mean i understand the concept of money pits but also cars are *fucking* expensive

[andromeda3116]

"transmission replacements are one of the costliest car repairs, costing upwards of $5500 in some cases"

ok but like that's cheaper than a new car or even a decent used car and keeps me from having a note, as long as i can come up with the cash up-front and to be frank is also not significantly more expensive than the down payment on either kind of said car would be so like......

[thesportssoundoff]

What Happens When You Take A Bad Idea And Make It Worse? LET’S TALK ABOUT THE BRAWL FOR ALL!

Joey

March 11th

The Mother Fucking Brawl For All.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd actually get around to this but there are miracles around us and what better time than now? The Brawl For All is generally regarded as one of the worst ideas of all time in a business with an entire genre dedicated to grown men and women smashing each other with fluorescent light tubes and slamming one another on beds of nails and thumbtacks. In a business that up until the mid 80s featured nazis goose stepping around and up until 2003 or so regularly and routinely featured women wrestling in their bloomers, the Brawl For All is the one idea that every human being unanimously believes was a disastrous failure. It's the one unanimous tire fire that not even it's most ardent supporter can put out. Not even WCW's junkyard battle royale which featured multiple injuries due to WCW not gimmicking the cars and just having guys taking bumps onto cars and through glass windshields is hated this much. The Brawl 4 All is one of those things people can't even sum up with "It was bad!" and move on. You have to go through layers and layers and levels of badness. You have to view it almost as an affront to your sensibilities, as a personal attack on you as a fan. Hell not just as a fan but as a human being!

Vince McMahon and company have failed in previous ventures before and ventures after. The XFL, the World Bodybuilding Federation, the ECW relaunch, 65% of the undercard Attitude Era angles, their really expensive WWE Films attempts. Some could even argue that the brand split originally was a failure in some respects given that Smackdown never really got going on its own and Raw declined sharply from the brand split onward. That said those failures at least had SOME inkling and morsels of promise behind them. Not the Brawl For All. It was a bad idea from the start, a bad idea during and made even worse by what happened afterwards. Also? The Brawl For All is one of those things that every wrestling fan and every wrestling personality has a hard opinion on, the kind of shit that lends itself to so much gossip, rumor and conversation. Over the next few weeks, I want to discuss the Brawl 4 All a bit more. I want to delve into it because it's as close as we'll ever get to a universal no hope no spin failure by the WWE and because...well...it's one of my favorite fuck ups of all time. It's always been something that fascinated me from watching it live as a casual fan to laughing at it as a smart fan when I stumble across it to making a near yearly pilgrimage to youtube to watch every single fight of it I can find before it got yanked. It's one of those wrestling stinkers that like December 2 Dismember or the Heroes Of Wrestling card that I'm magnetically attracted to. Every wrestling fan FEELS for the Brawl For All even if those feelings are utter disdain for everyone involved with it.

The Concept And How Fucked It Was From Jump

To get why this even happened, you have to go back in a time capsule. Despite catching fire in 1998, the WWF (for the purpose of being as thorough as possible here, we're gonna call 'em as they were when this happened) is still struggling to keep track with WCW Nitro. They're in the midst of an 83 week long ass eating from Ted Turner's Atlanta based wrestling promotion and "good ideas" are running dry. Understand that at this point the WWF has the single hottest property in the business but that sole property isn't enough to get over the hump vs the NWO, the cruiserweights, an ascending Bill Goldberg, Bret Hart, the return of Sting and what was genuinely just a better overall card. Even if Wrestlemania 14 gave birth to so many great stories going forward (Austin vs McMahon, the hard reboot of DX as a faction, Kane vs Undertaker's first match), WCW is in the midst of its highest grossing year ever. Vince McMahon has James Harden putting up 50 points a night and winning on his back but he's still looking up to the Golden State Warriors. Making matters worse, both companies are in the pro wrestling equivalent of an arms race.  Remember how when the UFC and Bellator in 2014 and 2015 signed anybody with a pulse because they were trying to fill up two insanely bloated schedules? It's a bit like that. Anybody who is good (and not a walking flag factory so to speak) is either in WWE or WCW at this point which means if you ONLY have two hours of content, you've got a lot of guys doing nothing.

The Brawl For All on its surface and without malice seems like an awful idea to try and remedy that. Pit sixteen dudes in a shoot tournament and let them go at it with set rules in place. It gets guys on TV, gives them something to do and at the end, in theory, the winner doesn't just get a big financial prize but come out in the end as a star. It's a chance to do something with a section of guys who are doing absolutely nothing at all. Sounds good, riiiiight? Well now let's break into some sexy rumor mongering about what this really was about:

-We can start with the mastermind! Vince Russo is the man who apparently concocted this concept which should be somewhat redeemable if what I laid out above was entirely 100% accurate. It's not entirely the case, even according to Russo's own words. Per Vince Russo, a large reason the Brawl For All came to be was that he had a beef with one of the wrestlers (Bradshaw aka John Bradshaw Layfield aka that guy who got flattened by ring announcer Joey Styles) consistently bloviating that he was the toughest guy in the locker room. Right off the jump, any sort of noble designs are whittled away. Now often in pro wrestling, there's 100 different stories to the same single event often shared by people IN the same room. Imagine how pronounced it is that a) everybody agrees that it was Russo's idea, b) everybody is under the impression that it was over a tiff with a pro wrestling with no shoot fighting experience and c) EVERYBODY agrees it was one of the worst concepts imaginable. The Brawl For All's entire seed was planted not so much out of a design to get guys work and on TV but out of wanting to see a loud dude get punched up. That's insanity out the gate.

-The Brawl For All was by invitation only and depending on who you believe, the process to select wrestlers was rather...exclusive. Bruce Prichard discusses in his podcast with Conrad Thompson that he was the guy who had to round up the talent to fill enough spots in the tournament. Prichard says he had to play to the egos of wrestlers and in a separate interview, Bart Gunn talks about how he got recruited basically by another member of the writing team as well. The name Bart Gunn will become pretty important down the line so jot that down in your notebooks real quick. Wrestlers were recruited with what seems like a pretty easy enough pitch and one I'd imagine that the UFC uses today  with their fighters; basically a "I mean don't you believe you're the toughest dude here?!" and a "We'll pay you!" and we're off to the races. Despite this, the Brawl For All struggled to get people to fill in the spots in no small part due to the fact that no star is going to partake in an absolutely stupid concept like this when they can just make their money being a star. The Brawl For All isn't even a TUF; it's a PFL tournament where all the dudes nobody else wants are lumped into a tournament format with the golden carrot of a $100,000 prize at the end of it.

-Perhaps worth more than the $100,000 prize was the either legit or illegitimate golden carrot of the winner getting to work a program with "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. Understand that no one single act was as hot and drawing as much money at this time as Steve Austin was. He was the it guy, the biggest star in the business and noway near close to peaking as a talent either. The Brawl For All $100,000 prize? That's cool and all  plus that was basically the downside guarantee for a year's worth of work. The opportunity to work with Stone Cold on a pay per view? That's the big money ticket. That's the opportunity to be a made man like how working with Hogan in the 80s was. For top guys, that opportunity may come along at any given point. Again going back a bit to TUF and the PFL, imagine if the UFC offered eight of its guys the chance to compete in a tournament for $100,000. Enticing! Now imagine the winner gets to fight Conor McGregor on a PPV. Tell me if it doesn't get every guy not named Khabib and Tony Ferguson jumping into it. That would be a great no doubt can't miss opportunity!

EXCEPT

-It was probably a lie. Scratch that. We can factually tell that any sort of Austin match for the winner was a lie since every person involved (sans one) says it was real and the winner never actually got said shot. Imagine if the tournament wasn't build on anything truthful but instead on a "The winner will be in the mix" from Dana White. While Bruce Prichard says there was no official plan for the winner to face Steve Austin, everybody else involved from talent to wrestling guru Jim Cornette seems to suggest there WAS a plan in place for the winner to win. That is, assuming of course, the winner was the guy they thought was going to win all along. More on that in the future but just know that the Brawl For All's fighters were flirted with a hush hush unofficial promise of facing Steve Austin that was probably never going to be fulfilled unless won by a specific party. Bart Gunn says he was told the winner would face Stone Cold and well....more on that at another time. Let's just say sports entertainment and combat sports have a long storied history of perhaps listening to the matchmakers a bit too closely.

-The rules for the Brawl For All? Well those were a mess. According to Bruce Prichard, the rules were still being worked out the week of. According to Steve Blackman (a dude who Bob Holly admits would've won the whole thing), there were plans to allow leg kicks and those rules just happened to get yanked the week of. The glove size seems to change depending on who you ask as the WWF says they were 16 ounce gloves but Bart Gunn argues repeatedly they were 22 ounce gloves. Some of the guys admittedly didn't even think it was a shoot fight either and at least one fighter fought thinking it was a work. According to Bart Gunn, even halfway through the tournament he kept expecting it to be a work suddenly.  The "official" Brawl For All rules had points for takedowns, points for a knockdown and points for more punches thrown across three one minute rounds. The scorecard part doesn't even matter at this point. To be honest, it didn't even matter then.

So let's talk about the big problem here

So imagine putting together a tournament designed around the concept of "Who's the toughest guy!" in a show where the audience is conditioned to believe that the toughest guy is the world champion or if the champion is a heel, the toughest guy is the babyface chasing said champion. We already in theory know who the toughest guy is or at least we're willing to suspend our disbelief. Also if we're to believe that the winner of the tournament is the toughest guy in the company, why aren't the big name tough guys we've been told are the tough guys competing in it? The concept falls flat right there on its own but the hole isn't deep enough. We gotta go from six feet to nine feet so now imagine that you've come up with this concept that pees on the first rule of your product. Make it worse. Make it so that the audience is being told to believe that what they see HERE AND ONLY HERE is legitimate.  NOTHING is as frustrating in pro wrestling as "a shoot." For those not addicted to sports entertainment meth, a shoot is something on the program that the audience is led to believe is real. Now for something to be "real" on a show that's already "real" then that in turn means what we're seeing is fake, right? So a "real fight" on pro wrestling ultimately means that what we're seeing is fake. Now most wrestling fans since the 70s and 80s have probably believed wrestling in some form or fashion is/was not real. We accept it as entertainment and as Jerry Jarrett once lovingly put it "theater of the illiterate." The key is to not remind us that what we're seeing is clearly fake (a problem wrestling fans seem to be having right now with Ronda Rousey). Reminding the audience that what they're saying is predetermined scripted fakeness and then asking them to invest into the REAL portion of the product that breaks their illusion only works if a star is doing it. It doesn't work if a bunch of random dudes and mid carders are doing it. Imagine if in the middle of one of those UFC Embedded gimmicks, we saw Conor McGregor rehearsing the press conference lines and then he went out to try and sell his beef with Cowboy Cerrone as legitimate. You've already hurt the audience's feelings and the Brawl For All actively did that at a time where all WWF fans wanted was to watch Stone Cold kick ass and DX make inappropriate jokes. You've brought DOWN the segment.

So now we're nine feel into the hole. Let's go sixteen feet deep. Nope! Let's go from here to fuckin' middle earth on this bad boy; pro wrestling is a TEAM effort. It requires two or more able bodied people to work together to create a magnificent fake fight spectacle that tells a story and ends with you becoming emotionally invested in its finish and what's to come. That requires participation. Now come up with a tournament where guys are going to beat the holy shit out of one another FOR REAL and then have to go back to participating with one another as if nothing happened! Every single wrestler involved in the Brawl For All has spoken about the bad blood and residual effects the Brawl For All had. Also remember these are not trained fighters either. Some of these guys are amateur wrestlers who probably haven't done that for years. Some dudes dabbled in kickboxing or BJJ on their spare time or in years outside of wrestling had some formal combat sports . Some of these guys were bodybuilders by trade and some of these dudes were just pro wrestlers who happened to have a few "So and so cleaned out a bar room with one hand and six beers!" type magical fishing trip stories. So you're taking a bunch of ego driven (some chemically enhanced) guys and sending them out there to beat each other up on a Monday or a Tuesday and then magically get over it in time to make the house show loop where they're going to team together. We've officially come out the other end through China, folks.

And yet despite all of this very obvious right in front of our faces warning signs, the Brawl For All existed.

Next time we'll talk about who was in it a bit more---and why IF the Brawl For All had a true tertiary motive designed to elevate one guy to superstardom, it was an even bigger failure than humanly possible.