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Staring at the Lights - By The Cynic

How High?

So, the story is that Nick Dinsmore, or Eugene as he will probably always be known, has allegedly been sent to rehab after he collapsed following a match in Manchester…

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Staring at the Lights - By The Cynic

The Rock Rebuff

So he’s gone. I didn’t cry. There was no rending of garments. Hell didn’t freeze over. The Rock left without a whimper. It seems that there was an administrative error that allowed his contract to reach its end, and the WWE didn’t bother to renew it. Let’s look at that again. It seems the WWE allowed the Rock to get away…

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Staring at the Lights - By The Cynic

Randy Orton: The icon that never was

So Triple H won the title again. Tiresome, entirely expected and really bad for the WWE. We know this. Figures won’t pick up until this obvious preferment ends, and not just in storyline either – watching Raw at the moment is like flicking to the last page of a book…

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Staring at the Lights - By The Cynic

Natural wastage?

Well, it happened. Just as we knew it would, really. It’s a plot twist you could see coming on page 5. The pink slips, P-45’s, brush offs, whichever euphemism you want to use for it. Sackings. 10 of them. Wrestlers and a writer. And more to come. People seem shocked. But why?

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Staring at the Lights - By The Cynic

Ric Flair – Living in the past

Close your eyes and think back. It’s 1992. Ric Flair enters the Royal Rumble third, and takes bump after bump before winning the whole thing; it’s a brilliant performance. Now remember Flair leading the Four Horsemen in the mid to late eighties, the blueprint for all subsequent heel gangs in wrestling. And think back to the fantastic rivalry between Flair and Sting at the turn of the 90’s…

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Staring at the Lights - By The Cynic

WWE Diva Search 2004 – Failure of 2004?

They pout. They preen. They giggle. They wiggle. No-one cares. They gather together for warmth. And perhaps to avoid the tumbleweeds. At this point, they could all lie on their backs and fire ping-pong balls at Eric Bischoff, and we still wouldn’t care…

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Staring at the Lights - By The Cynic

Rock steady Regal and the second chance

It was good to see him on Raw – getting a good pop, trading barbs with revitalised big boy HHH, challenging him a match, getting a jump on him early on, blading and juicing like a geyser and taking both knucks and sledgehammer. It was quite clear – Regal is back and being pushed…

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Staring at the Lights - By The Cynic

Laughing at the fat kid

You may remember that my first column for this website was called “Inches From The Mainstream”- if you missed it, it was recently rerun in the Newsletter as a “classic column”. And so it should be. In it I discussed Vince McMahon’s desire for the WWE to be taken seriously as a mainstream commercial/entertainment company in its own right, and suggested that he was thwarted in this by his own staff writers-the WWE’s racist, sexist, tasteless angles having no place in the modern corporate world…

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Staring at the Lights - By The Cynic

Little Big Men

“I say it here, it comes out there”, to quote Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News”. In my last column, I suggested that there was a big change afoot in the WWE-the smaller men were about to take the Fed into a new era. I also urged the WWE to give Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero a chance with the big straps. And what do we see post-Wrestlemania? Chrissie and Eddie and legitimised champs. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if someone at Stamford was reading this column for ideas…

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Staring at the Lights - By The Cynic

And the sneak shall inherit the earth

I’ve just spent the last 2 months without wrestling. Of course I had access to the net, but no Sky! And in a four star hotel too! It’s terrible to have to live in sumptuous surroundings, with only my enormous bank balance and talent to keep me warm at night, but I survived. And just as I return, something extraordinary has happened…