Welcome, to the first-ever Cageside Seats Mailbag! Over the past year or so, SBNation’s recommitted to building fan communities with fans, and together raising the quality of discussion about their favorite team or sport… or in our case, sport/performance art hybrid-thing. It’s meant new additions to cSs and its sister sites like The Feed, and new way to access SBNation communities via our app (available for Apple or Android).
Most of the names on the masthead were Cagesiders before they were Cageside Staff,
and those that didn’t are veterans of other message boards, so refocusing our jobs on starting and facilitating conversations actually gets us back to our roots. It’s also gonna move some things that have been in our idea folder into action. One of those is a time-honored way for the media to interact with the community it serves: by answering their questions!
I’m gonna be honest, though. Other than asking the team last Monday if they’d be down to answer some questions, and asking y’all to send some the next day? That was as far as I got with the whole “Cageside Mailbag” plan last week.
We did create a shared document where your questions were copied, and when work and life gave me a chance to look at said doc on Saturday night, there were answers in there from several of us. They’re just not necessarily answers to the same questions, and make for a bit more all-over-the-place than I would have liked. We’ll get better at it each week, hopefully with your feedback… and continued questions.
A lot of Cagesiders asked questions that aren’t answered below. Either I or someone else will respond to your comment before another Feed prompt goes up for next week’s Mailbag. Now, without further adieu…
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Brianmyers (screw Curt Hawkins, amirite?) gave us one a two-parter that’s actually a 20-parter:
If you were only allowed to watch matches featuring 10 specific wrestlers, while eating 10 specific meals… who and what would they be?
Sean: Gotta say, this seems like a trap. I don’t think I could ever get tired of, say, pizza and Sami Zayn. But only being allowed to watch his and nine other wrestlers’ matches while that and nine other meals for eternity sounds like hell. Anywho, right now these are the ten names that came to mind. This would probably be different by a few names every time you ask me, and certainly would have been 10 years ago, and hopefully will be 10 years from now…
- Eddie Guerrero
- Daniel Bryan Danielon
- Asuka
- Samoa Joe
- Christian Cage
- Mercedes Moné
- Sami Zayn
- Katsuyori Shibata
- Rey Fenix
- Charlotte Flair
For meals, I’m throwing dietary restrictions out the window, seeing as I’m already trapped in a Black Mirror episode or Cenobite experiment. This is also crazy hard to whittle down, but let’s say:
- A good, New York style cheese pizza
- A pepperoni pizza from Mineo’s (I like pizza, and to Mineo’s is its own branch of the pizza family, like Detroit or Chicago-style)
- My wife’s curry
- An order of Desperados Tacos with rice & beans
- A good loaf of fresh bread and a plate of antipasto
- My father’s steak au poivre
- My grandfather’s meat sauce (on any pasta or Italian dish)
- A BLT on good sourdough with fresh, in-season tomatos
- My great-grandmother’s eggplant rollitini
- Brisket and potato pancakes
Josh: This is tough, but in no particular order, the 10 wrestlers I would watch:
- Sting
- Shawn Michaels
- Chris Jericho
- Roman Reigns
- AJ Styles
- Samoa Joe
- Leon Slater
- Iyo Sky
- Rhea Ripley
- Mercedes Mone
And the 10 meals is even tougher than the 10 wrestlers, but I’d go with:
- buffalo chicken pizza
- pork chops and garlic potatoes
- enchiladas with rice & beans
- sweet & sour chicken with rice
- a cheeseburger with fries
- a scrambled egg and hash brown skillet with peppers
- chicken Caesar salad
- steak nachos
- parmesan pasta with andouille sausage and roasted red peppers
- a big bowl of sugar cereal
selanne57 had three, and of course one was a hockey question (I’m actually the only hockey fan in the “offices”, which is weird cause I’m used to their being a pretty big crossover IRL). I (Sean) took all three, in order:
Why hasn’t HBO and AEW did a Tim Robinson skit yet?
Probably because we’re pretty sure we pissed off Tony Khan complaining about how long his shows are, so when he found out about our quest to turn The Feed into a low-key Tim Robinson fansite, he put the kibosh on it.
Are the Buffalo Sabres going to make the playoffs?
You wouldn’t think they’d regress so far as to miss the playoffs after finally ending the drought with a division win last year, but the Atlantic will be a lot tougher this year, and they’re counting on a lot of young guys maintaining career best performances and growing from there, which is always risky. I’ll say they do, but as a lower seed. Which of course wouldn’t preclude an even longer run in Lord Stanley’s tournament next spring/summer.
What wrestler “trade” would be beneficial for both WWE and AEW (I.e. Carmelo Hayes to AEW or Okada in WWE..Who would be booked better?)”
You present an interesting one there. Hayes would definitely be better off in AEW, at least at this point in his career. His ring work would get him a shot at main events that he won’t get in WWE until he proves he can deliver in them elsewhere. And I don’t know how Okada would fare in WWE, but at this point I’m ready to see something other than this level he’s settled into in AEW (which I don’t hate or anything, but I thought he’d do more there but be the king of the midcard and dream match action figure).
Another one I’d do would be Roxanne(!) Perez to AEW for Megan Bayne. Perez will get to the top in WWE, but a run in AEW would accelerate her rise. And I don’t think Bayne will rise above the midcard title scene where she is, because TK doesn’t want powerhouses/monsters as his top titleholders.
medmode gets to one of my favorite things about the Cageside Community, the many and varied things we love and directly or indirectly share with each other:
“How and when did you get into Rockford? Do you have any other ”before your time” era shows that you’re fond of?
Kyle: This question is obviously for Sean, and I honestly didn’t watch Rockford when I was young. (I did watch plenty of Columbo reruns – that’s Sean’s other avatar.) But this reminded me that my parents loved Rockford and when I started learning piano, my father wanted me to learn the Rockford theme. Thinking back on it now, even though I don’t play any more, it probably was pretty easy, but I was way too early in my playing to be able to figure that out for him.
Sean: Swerved ya there! I love crime and detective fiction in general. Like a lot of my pop culture habits, my love of detective tv shows is something I picked up watching things with my grandfather or my mother. Pap (my grandfather) loved James Garner. He was actually a bigger Maverick guy, but he loved westerns more than PIs and criminals, and my ranking’s the other way around. Those are kinda before my time in that I mostly discovered them in reruns, but not as before my time as I’d like. As for others, like Kyle mentioned, my avatar in “the offices” is Peter Falk getting ready to ask just one more question, so that’s another big one.
Sticking with the non-wrestling fandom theme, Starvenger asked, Sean answered:
What is your go-to non-wrestling show? And what other sports do you follow?
I find TV to be pretty… not great these days. I also watch a lot of wrestling and sports and movies and try to touch grass on occasion too, so when I need a non-wrestling show its often something shorter like a comedy or cartoon. Lately I’ve been rewatching a lot of Always Sunny along with the new season, which is still remarkably strong imho. I also rewatched Samurai Jack before it left HBO Max (grrr) earlier this year, and just finished the second season of Bruce Timm’s new Batman animated show on Prime which has me wanting to go watch some old BTAS or Justice League stuff. If that’s still on HBO Max (grumble grumble).
Sports-wise, I’d follow everything if I had time. I just love them, they routinely evoke reactions from me I only sometimes get from my other favorites pastimes. Week-to-week it’s really only the ones where I have a team I care about, the NFL, MLB, and NHL. I follow the NBA, but grew up a bigger college hoops fan, and don’t see a lot of what I loved about it still present in the modern version of college basketball — but I still keep tabs on it and do a bracket or three every March. I really love American football, although I’ve struggled with that a great deal morally/ethically over the past decade or so. Baseball used to be my overall favorite, but at this point its third behind hockey.
Most of the staff are football (U.S. version) fans, except Cain who I believe is pretty strictly a baseball fan. Most of us are also baseball fans, with Kyle and Cain being the biggest. Claire does not do sportsball.
And there’s no categorizing this, but deedee asked it, and I’ll let you guess which Cageside staffer was bold enough to answer:
“WWE, AEW and TNA. F/M/K?”
Manolo H. Pizzazz: I don’t have the stamina to go six hours in one session, so I’ll marry AEW. WWE has the production value of a high-class call girl, so F them. TNA can’t be killed, which means this is a trick question.
The Lance Storm Section
Darkerthanblack8 asks:
Pick 1 title that you would get rid of and 1 title that you would add for AEW and WWE.
Kyle: I think AEW should get rid of more than one title in that men’s division. Having a TNT, International, National, and Continental is crazy. If I had my druthers, I’d keep the TNT and the Continental and that’s it – one midcard and one more pure wrestling one. But if it’s just one, it’s the newest National title. Sorry, Andrade. I don’t know what I’d add to AEW who has so many titles as it is. I’d have to be on the women’s side. It could be a Continental like title/ROH PURE title like, but I don’t have some strong desire for that.
In the WWE, I’d easily nixed one of the tag titles – probably the Raw ones because I like the look of the SmackDown ones better. They have one set of women’s tag titles and they don’t need double that for the men. While I’m not dying for another WWE title, maybe a low level TV title that truly is only defended on TV at least twice a month and something for lower card guys to feud over.
Manolo H. Pizzazz: For AEW, the International and National feel the same, so I would dump one of those. Any new championship should have a clear distinction. For example, the Continental is my favorite title in AEW because of the rule preventing interference. That doesn’t mean no cheating. Just no outside interference, which gives results a feeling of accomplishment. I think I would go with a hoss fight championship. One of AEW’s weaknesses is using hosses as more than fodder for the stars. This would force AEW to push meaty men. I wouldn’t be too strict on the division criteria, because we don’t want to wear the matchups thin. I’d stick to a hoss fighting spirit. Does the wrestler pass the smell test? Mike Bailey and Jack Perry do not. Adam Priest is short, but he would fit.
A two-parter from Drew World Order, but only JVJ took on both parts:
Should wrestlers be larger than life or be more normal size to be relatable to the audience?
Jon: I don’t think all wrestlers should be larger than life, even though there is something impressive about seeing huge stars being dominant. Some of my favorite matches are between smaller wrestlers, and “David & Goliath” scenarios can also be fun. I think some of my favorite Brock Lesnar matches in the later part of his career were against smaller guys like AJ Styles.
Manolo H. Pizzazz: Ideally, a promotion should have both larger than life and relatable size. To be clear, relatable size means someone who is still obviously an athlete, like Nic Nemeth or Will Ospreay. I’m not looking for Beanpole Jones. For the Tubs McGrub belly, they have to be thick too. King Kong Bundy had value. Back to the question at hand, one group makes the other group stand out. I’d lean more toward larger than life, so that the relatable size is the underdog. Those underdogs need to have a special skillset to overcome the larger than life, like Rey Mysterio’s lucha libre quickness or submission specialists Bryan Danielson and Dean Malenko. There are a thousand different ways to tell David versus Goliath in the ring, and that’s why the story rarely gets stale.
Is having a long career in WWE a relic of the past?
Jon: I don’t think long WWE careers are a thing of the past. Maybe our sense of long careers is warped now, but I don’t think most WWF stars of the 1980s or 1990s had particularly long runs with the company. Natalya, Charlotte Flair, Bayley, Seth Rollins, and Roman Reigns are among stars who’ve been with the E for well over ten years. Others like Cody Rhodes and CM Punk left and came back. It’s less likely that we’ll see someone with a career like The Undertaker’s, but who knows? Roman is already a part-timer, and if he scales his schedule down further to just working WrestleManias, he could extend his time out for another 10-15 years.
And I’ll close out this ill-planned, hodge-podge first attempt at a Mailbag with an answer to a question I (lightly and lovingly) trolled TheManTheyCallChef about:
What’s the corporate structure? How are people hired? What’s the compensation schedule?
Cageside is a part of SBNation, which recently became a PMX brand. Within SBNation, we’re part of the Combat Sports group. Geno and I are full-time employees who report to MMAFighting’s Bryan Tucker, the Combat Sports Executive Director, who reports to SBNation’s Head of Network John Ness— and that’s as far up the chain as I worry about. The rest of the team are all independent contractors, but for real and not like in wrestling (everybody can write for other places, even about wrestling, they just can’t submit work they publish at Cageside to other sites).
I won’t go into compensation too much, but I’ll say the question is more “how do we continue to earn money/make a living writing online?” and not “how can I become rich writing online?” Almost everyone who’s worked here since Geno took over (around I wanna say 2011?) has either been an active member of the community or someone who responded to an on-site call for submissions. Most people come the former route, because we rarely have available budget for new hires. But we have had success getting a few more of those human monies to hire and retain folks who’ve contributed to growing this little community we’ve made together here.
And that’s our first Mailbag! Hopefully it was worth a read, and I hope you’ll help us continue to make it a better and better one each week. If your question wasn’t answered above, look for notification of a comment reply soon.
Now give us your thoughts on these answers below, along with tips for next Sunday and beyond. And look for a new Questions prompt on Tuesday!
