I'M GOING AWAY TO FIND MY SMILE (FOR LIKE A WEEK)

Well there's uh, one thing about me is I can't do anything halfway and I, and I come here and I hear the people and they chant uh, TH's name or they chant Steve's name or they chant a lot of people's names, and one thing's for sure, you're going to have all of that in the future, um, and that's what I want for PIZZABODYSLAM fans. In spite of, uh, what people may think about me, what I've always wanted for all these people is, is for them to have a good time reading my blog and to enjoy themselves. I've always tried to be the one to provide it whether it was on the funny side or the smarky side. But what was always important to me was the writing, was the writing so that these people, each time they reached into their bookmarks, they clicked on my name, they didn't regret it because they knew that if they saw my name in the URL they could laugh, they could sit and agree or disagree and they could do whatever they wanted as long as they had a good time.

I know we're in the middle of a time where opinionated writing is real big here in the IWC, and unfortunately all I've got right now for you is a lot of sorrow, a lot of tears, and a lot of emotion. I don't have any opinionated writing for anybody, so I guess, here you go, here's your blog (hands blog over to Vince).

And I have you to thank, and I have everybody here to thanks, and it means a lot to me and, uh, I'm gonna go to my cottage now. Okay? (hugs Vince and Gorilla Monsoon).

fin

Guys, never fear. I'll find my smile. In like a week. Just going to a cottage, as you may have guessed from my Shawn Michaels' speech. Funnily enough, I got the idea to write this absurd smile-losing speech about going away for a week and thought it'd be funny if I used the exact wording that Shawn did, but I was too lazy to transcribe it myself and surely no one has actually already done that, right? WRONG - you can count on the internet for ANYTHING! Thanks to Forever Shawn for already transcribing this speech for some unknown reason.

I'll be gone until the 29th, but, in my place, as you may have noticed me mention on Twitter, I'll be scheduling tweets ahead of time. So I will be still active, but it'll be like a ghost or time travel or some crazy shit.

I love pre-scheduling tweets (thank you HootSuite!). It's ridiculously fun and I don't even know why. So I'll be tweeting old blogs and new thoughts and all kinds of stuff while I'm takin' 'er easy at the old cottage. It's good to know that I can still talk about wrestling on the internet while I'm half in the bag in a canoe somewhere. Science knows no bounds!

So no new content on the blog for about a week, but plenty of tweets and reblogs and fake reactions to what's going on on RAW or whatever show, all from my Twitter feed.

Vince McMahon: Ladies and gentlemen... SHAWN MICHAELS PIZZABODYSLAM!!

JR: Well I'll tell ya folks, 25 years I've been doing this and I... I've never, I have never had the pain in my gut that I have right now. Good luck to you. Good luck to you.

WORD ON THE STREET (INTERNET): JIM ROSS HANGING UP HEADSET FOR GOOD

This comes from TH at The Wrestling Blog (who got it from WithLeather), with the rumour being that JR, if he returns to the WWE at all, he will be involved in talent development.

Firstly, and most obviously, Jim Ross is the greatest pro wrestling play-by-play announcer of all-time, and I'll definitely miss hearing him blowing my speakers up calling a match.

But, I would kill for JR backstage developing talent. This is no official list (since I can't find one anywhere) and it's going from complete memory of interviews and blog posts and whatnot I've heard over the years, but take a look at JR's track record for signing wrestlers when he was VP of Talent Relations in the WWE:

WRESTLERS SIGNED BY JIM ROSS

- Stone Cold Steve Austin

- Mick Foley

- The Rock

- Edge

- Christian

- Hardy Boys

- Randy Orton

- John Cena

- Batista

I could be wrong on some of these (it'd be awesome if someone could track down an official list), and I could be missing some, but the gist is (as far as I know) JR has essentially signed any legit main event star since the nineties.

Now, Orton, Batista and Cena have all been on top for about five years, and there's no real immediate sign of someone new stepping up. To put that in perspective, Stone Cold won the WWF Title in 1998, had his final match in 2003, and by then John Cena was well on his way to the top. But even with that small gap between Austin and Cena, there was still a bunch of time with Triple H, Benoit, HBK returning, etc. all keeping shit together.

As of now, no one appears to be ready to take the "torch" from Cena/Batista/Orton - the last big group of new stars JR signed. And I don't think it's super necessary or anything, but these guys have been around for a while, and you should be able to pinpoint the next guy by now.

With JR potentially stepping in to help develop talent, perhaps he could help whoever is on the cusp of the main event get his shit together, because it seems like JR is the only person able to see who the next big star is.

Except for ROH. They make stars all day long.

And maybe that's where the WWE will need to take their cue if JR doesn't step in, or even after he's retired (same for Johnny Ace).

Either way, he's the greatest of all time, so here's his Hall of Fame announcement video from 2007 that ends with a super touching (I'm not crying I swear!) ovation from the crowd:

WWE HALL OF FAME ANNOUNCEMENT

2007 INDUCTEE JIM ROSS