Select Answers: Pin break ups, defending titles from other companies, what we want more in wrestling

Welcome to Select Answers, a feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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One of my pet peeves is when a pin is “broken up” by someone making contact with the pinner, but the person being pinned still has both shoulders down with the person doing the pinning still on top of them. How is that not still a pin? Is this an unreasonable take? I’m willing to suspend disbelief (I’m watching pro wrestling after all!) but the pinfall feels like something a little more sacrosanct.

It should still be a pin, but the rule has adjusted over the years. Anymore, a physical interruption of the pin whatsoever seems enough. Quite frankly, I think this is a necessity, because wrestlers far too often wait until the very last milisecond to break it up. Unfortunately, that results in the very specific situation of which you are referring to. It sucks.

How does the booking work for cmll and NJPW titles being defended on aew shows

It is a collaborative effort. No titles are put on the line without the permission of each company involved. That actually led to a major issue with NJPW and TNA over 15 years ago when TNA did a tag title switch of the IWGP belts without permission. I've heard of no issues regarding that with AEW, NJPW and CMLL, and they seem to work with pretty good synergy. Sometimes when things are around G1, I'll hear of people trying to "save themselves" for that instead of going all out.

What do you want to see more of in wrestling?

My base line of enjoyment is simple.

Make sense. Make winning matter. Have entertaining matches and segments. If things make sense and winning matters, a lot of other things come into focus. Everything matters more if winning matters, titles matter, and the motivation is based on success. I find that to be the most fundamental ways of making a show good. If winning is important, there are stakes to everything.