Wrestling

Update on The Rock's Current Movie Grosses As of this past weekend, here are the total grosses for the three films The Rock currently has playing in theaters: -GI Joe: Retaliation has grossed $120,467,000 -Pain and Gain has grossed $46,574,000 -Snitch has grossed $42,828,000 Dixie Carter Posts James Storm Injury Update TNA President Dixie Carter has posted the following on Twitter: An update on @cowboy_j_storm. He has a slight abdominal tear but should be back in action soon. — Dixie Carter (@TNADixie) May 21, 2013

WWE Taking Concussions Very Seriously According to F4WOnline.com, WWE is taking concussions very seriously since Dolph Ziggler's recent injury, and talent has been informed to be very careful and as best they can stay away from their opponents heads. Hogan Reacts to Singer's Leg Drop Hulk Hogan has posted the following in response to singer Miguel accidentally leg dropping a pair of fans at the Billboard Music Awards: MIGUELAMANIA at least he did it right brother. HH — Hulk Hogan (@HulkHogan) May 20, 2013 All MIGUELAMANIA fans are now supposed to be following @hulkhoganbrother HH — Hulk Hogan (@HulkHogan) May 21, 2013

Detroit Places Bid to Host WrestleMania According to Blackburnnews.com, the Detroit Sports Commission has placed a bid for the city of Detroit, the site of WrestleMania 23 in 2007, to host WWE WrestleMania 31 or 32 at Ford Field. PWInsider.com reports that WWE will announce its WrestleMania 31 & 32 locations this August to the cities that have placed bids to host the events. Jerry Lawler Apologizes For Raw Comment Jerry Lawler has posted the following on Twitter: I want to apologize to Triple H and his family for insinuating that he may have had a stroke. I know firsthand how upsetting it could be. — Jerry Lawler (@JerryLawler) May 21, 2013

Spoilers for this week’s episode of WWE Superstars, taped last night: Spoiler * Brodus Clay, Sweet T, Cameron and Naomi beat The Usos and The Bella Twins in a mixed tag match. Clay pinned one of the Usos to win the match for his team. (Source)

If you know me, you know I'm all about the art of wrestling, an art that includes more than just what happens when the cameras are rolling. So when a web series about a dude having to cope with a professional wrestler as a roommate pops up, well, you know I'm supporting it. Ben and Dylan are looking to do a sketch show called Tassels and Hassles, which is about the random college roommate selection process, only one of said roommates is in the pro wrestling business. You can donate at their IndieGogo page, and as with any of these crowd-funded shows, there are perks at certain donation levels. This actually sounds like a really funny idea. Support it!

Yep, Cole really cares about his jobPhoto Credit: WWE.com"Who even goes to the library anymore?" -- Michael Cole. That statement on RAW last night lit a powder keg on Twitter that surprised even me. I didn't know how many people were still library devotees outside of those I follow who happen to be librarians. However, their outrage was right. WWE likes to pump up the fact that they're socially conscious, even though their whole involvement in B.A. Star is hypocritical and ineffective. Part of this community service outreach involves their WrestleMania reading challenge. They love to pump up the fact that they get kids to read, and you know what, that's a noble endeavor. Everyone should be able to read, because knowledge is power.That's why discounting libraries is so awful. That's the best place to go to get books, even nowadays. I know that the rise of e-readers and stuff you can read on the Internet burgeons large and threatens to make libraries extinct. To someone like me or Cole, yeah, going to a library might seem superfluous because we have the resources to bypass that physical building. There will always be people with the resources to bypass the old stuff who will cling to it though, but even discounting them, there is a whole group of people who still have to rely on the library, whether public or at their schools, to get reading materials.Poor people don't have the luxury of buying e-readers or tablets. Some of them don't even have access to the Internet, which in this day and age is kinda ludicrous if you ask me, so much so that the United Nations have deemed it as a basic human right. So, in order to learn literacy, curious kids who need books to read pretty much have to go to the library. Hell, even well-to-do high school and college age kids need libraries in this day and age of paywalls and scholarly journals needing subscription fees. It's still way more cost effective for a library to have research materials to offer for free than it is for the individual families to shell out money for these increasingly expensive journals and books.The last time I checked, super-rich people are called "the one percent" because there really ain't a whole lot of them comparatively speaking. WWE's fanbase probably cuts across all social lines, but statistically speaking, most of their fans probably don't have the disposable income to where they can totally eliminate the need for libraries. That means promoting literacy means promoting libraries. That's why Cole's comment, as much of a throwaway as it seemed at the time, was yet another example of how damaging the commentary has been for WWE in the last few years or so.While Cole and his cohorts are better at their jobs than, say, Kevin Kelly, Mike Tenay, or Tazz, it doesn't mean they're good at their jobs. Wrestling announcers, as their first job, need to get things over, whether that means wrestlers or company initiatives. Cole oftentimes is too goddamn glib to get anything but the main talking points over. This isn't solely his fault; no company that has the good of its performers in mind would dare give an announcer like Jerry Lawler the talking point of "These guys are boring!" and start a feud over it. Yet, part of the reason why Michael McGillicutty needed a character reboot in the first place was that Lawler's job was to say how uninteresting he and David Otunga were as Tag Champs. I can tune the announcers out, and I really have gotten good at it. That's why I wasn't as horrified at their sexist commentary towards Summer Rae when it actually happened. However, looking back at it, how the fuck am I supposed to expect WWE to give women agency when all three commentators treated Summer Rae as some combination of sexy cattle and stupid bitch? No one was the voice of dissent to say "Hey, she doesn't deserve this, she's a human being, and she even helped Chris Jericho and The Miz win their match!" That's why I can defend ACW's commentary. No matter how disgusting wrestlers i

Curtis Axel's Two Big Backstage Allies We have been reporting for quite sometime now that Triple H has always been very high on Curtis Axel, and he is said to be the driving force behind Axel's new push. However, after the way Axel was booked on Raw last night, F4WOnline.com is reporting that several people backstage were left wondering how much HHH really helped Axel. In related news, it should be noted that The Rock is also a very big supporter of Curtis Axel, as the two trained together to help The Rock prepare for his last few PPV matches. Kane Shoots Down Senate Run Rumors In a new article written for The Tennessean, Glenn "Kane" Jacobs shot down rumors of a possible United States Senate run by saying the following: "[I have] no plans on running for political office at this time.....things get a little carried away on the Internet sometimes."

AS I SEE IT – Finally Addressing Concussions in Wrestling Bob Magee Pro Wrestling: Between the Sheets http://pwbts.com First, word on a long-overdue but welcome step by WWE to address the issue of concussions in wrestling. This past week, World Wrestling Entertainment contributed $1.2 million over three years to further research aimed at developing a treatment for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. CTE, which has been seen in athletes and wrestlers suffering repeated concussions, and is linked to depression and dementia. This fact and the liability for it has notably challenged by the class action lawsuit by 4,000 former NFL players against the league. CTE has been linked to depression and dementia. The gift is being made to the Sports Legacy Institute, a Boston non-profit addressing the effects of concussions in  .” The WWE says the gift is a continuation of the Talent Wellness Program it started in 2006, which now includes the same neurological baseline testing used in the NFL and such pro wrestling-specific mandates as a ban against bashing an opponent over the head with a metal chair. Notable in the changes in addressing concussions in WWE is seen even this past weekend when Dolph Ziggler recently sustained a concussion after getting hit with an errant kick that was supposed to be in the chest and instead got hit on the chin. He was pulled from last night’s Extreme Rules pay-per-view. WWE’s donationt will be used by researchers at Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy in a new investigation aimed at studying the effectiveness of potential treatments for CTE. Nowinski suffered a concussion while wrestling and in the attitude of the time, kept right on going.  Nowinski said of his situation in USA Today: “…I lied about my symptoms for five weeks and kept going. … I had a headache and was nauseous every time I got my heart rate up, but I fought through it as best I could.” In the same USA Today interview, Paul “HHH” Levesque stated pretty openly about the goal of pro wrestling: “The goal in what we do is first and foremost … protect your opponent. Without him you have nothing. … Our whole goal is to make something look as devastating as possible and as impactful as possible with as little impact as possible. It’s really the art of what we do. We really work on that with talent. If John Cena and I are in a story line together and I hit John Cena hard and he gets injured, and he’s out, it hurts me as much as it hurts him. He’s out; now my opponent that I’m in a story line with is gone and my storyline just ended.” The research figures to benefit other sports, but Levesque noted that WWE often gets its wrestlers from other sports: “We recruit a lot of our talent from other contact sports, NFL, NHL, rugby and the Olympics. … It’s important for us as to where they’re coming from and what has happened to them prior to them getting to us because it’s … in essence what we’re getting as a talent.” Now, in contrast, here is news on a fan campaign to help pro wrestler Michael Paris (aka TNA’s Zema Ion) with his medical expenses. Paris was recently rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with appendicitis, after suffering from severa abdominal pains. It may well have been the most fortunate attack of appendicitis ever, as while examining his condition through CAT scans, doctors discovered a five centimeter tumor located on his colon. As of this writing, it is unknown whether the tumor is cancerous, Paris will soon have to undergo another surgery to remove it. In the meantime, fans are trying to help pay his growing medical expenses. He does not have health insurance, so the costs for these surgeries and hospital will be expensive. Please help us to afford this effort and pitch in any way possible, It’s notable that there’s been no word w

Source: KineticFix.com A few days ago, one half of Bad Influence and former TNA World Tag Team Champion and TNA X-Division Champion Christopher Daniels talked with the team at KineticFix.com. During the interview, Daniels talked about how he became a professional wrestler, the Best Moonsault Ever, and other topics related to healthy living. Below are highlights of the interview, though you can read the entire interview by clicking here. Enjoy! On How He Became a Professional Wrestler Well, I grew up in Fayetteville, N.C., where I became a pro wrestling fan at an early age, watching people like Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes, the Road Warriors and Sting wrestle for Mid Atlantic Championship Wrestling. But those men seemed a lot larger than I thought I’d ever become, so I didn’t envision becoming a wrestler until a lot later in life. After I graduated college, I moved to Chicago and did some children’s theater, telling my girlfriend at the time (who is now my wife), “You know, if this acting thing never works out, I could always try to be a pro wrestler,” never actually meaning it. Little did I know, she found a local professional wrestling school (Windy City Pro Wrestling in Chicago) and made an appointment for me. She says that I came out of that meeting with a look in my eyes that said, “I’m going to do this!” Because I grew up a fan, I had a frame of reference and finished my initial training in three months. In my third match, I won my first championship, the Windy City Lightweight Championship, and I just stuck with it until this slowly became my career. On Eating Clean and Lifting Weights I do admit that the hardest facet of my fitness routine is eating clean, especially in terms of carbs. I have two kids, so I’ve always got snacks and sweets around and it’s hard to be super-strict, but I do try to keep my protein intake as high as I can to offset whatever carbohydrates I may consume. When I’m home, I know that my job is to hit the gym at some point during a day, so it’s very rare that I take a day off. I usually try to do a four-day split in a given week – a day each for chest, back, shoulders and arms, plus leg exercises each day in-between sets. On Perfecting the Best Moonsault Ever It was a two-part process. First off, the moonsault itself (for non-wrestling fans, basically a back-flip off the top rope landing on your opponent chest-to-chest) I initially saw watching the Great Muta, one of the most famous Japanese wrestlers ever to compete in the US. It took me a while to get confident enough to try and back-flip without worrying about landing on my head…and even longer to learn how to do it by leading with my head instead of one of my shoulders, which keeps me going straight over instead of leaning to one side or the other. Then, the unique way I do it, bouncing first on the second rope and leaping straight up to the top rope before executing the moonsault, I learned from a Mexican wrestler who came through Chicago to train with us. After a bit, I decided to put them together, and the rest is history.

Tonight, WWE is taping this week's editions of Smackdown and Main Event from The CenturyLink Center in Omaha, Nebraska. The following has been announced for the tapings: -Wade Barrett (c) vs. Sin Cara for the Intercontinental Title will headline Main Event -Dean Ambrose (c) vs. Kofi Kingston for the U.S. Title will take place on Smackdown As always, WZ will be posting complete spoiler results from tonight's tapings, so be sure to check back to the site often throughout the evening as results become available!