Cross Face Chicken Wing

Nice obit on Sir Oliver Humperdink from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. http://www.startribune.com/local/west/119035219.html

Does the WWE do a lot of freebies these days? A friend of mine at a radio station had access to bunch of freebies through the station the last time WWE was in town for a house show. He said they got a lot more than they were expecting for giveaways and promotions. Didn't Meltzer talk about a decent number of WM9 tix being given away on casino floors?

Depends on your definition of minor I guess. In my view, there are a lot more freebies than most people assume. A good chunk of those empty seats you see in lower level corners are freebies where people didn't show. And I've always been told the announced attendance is number of tix "distributed," not "sold." Freebies have been a fairly common practice in the NBA for years, but that's changed some recently. Teams are realizing that getting more people in the arena for free just diminishes the product's value. And people that use the freebie seats are not likely to become long-term fans unless the team starts winning consistently. Of course my view on the prevalence of freebies is probably a bit skewed. My beloved Wolves still love the freebies. You can get a pair of seats for buying a can of corn at the local grocery store. You can get season tix for joining a local health club. And you can get a partial season package for various other things. Anyway, WM 3........

As someone who covers sports for a living, I can say with 100 percent certainty that attendance numbers are worked. I don't think a building's capacity is ever worked, but the number of people that attend each game definitely is. When you ask team officials about this, they say they count the number of tix distributed for the event (tix sold, given to radio stations or corporations for contests, given away to charity, given to sponsors, or just plain old given away to whomever wants one). Whenever I cover the NBA team in town and attendance for the night is announced, we all look at each other and roll our eyes. Working the attendance figures makes each game feel like more of an "event" than it actually is. It's done to create buzz. Obviously, there are several teams out there that do just fine w/ attendance and don't need to work the number, but there are several that do. I've always believed that the 93k number for Wrestlemania was a work, but now I'm not so sure. If the Lions said the football capacity for the Silverdome was 80k, I believe it. I have never heard of a team lying about how many fans its stadium could hold. 80k in the stands and 13k on the floor would make sense.

True fans of wrestling are no different than true fans of any team in a legit sport. Fan of the Red Sox or Cowboys bitch, moan, complain, rant, rave, and go crazy if their team loses. Sometimes they're not even happy if their team wins. But that sort of negative emotional reaction does not mean they aren't fans, it just means they're passionate (and a little unreasonable). They invest a lot of time and money into following their team and they want some return on that investment. The only time to get worried is when there is no reaction at all. Negativity still means fans care, apathy means they quit paying attention. I fell into the apathetic category with wrestling about 10 years ago. The fact that there are still so many people "complaining" about the state of wrestling today is a good thing. It shows there is still a good chunk of people that care.

Has anybody read Road Warrior Animal's book yet? Just wondering if it's worth picking up.

I guess it kind of makes me feel good that the typical day for a WWE writer is pretty much like mine.

My buddy's mom went to high school w/ Rude and Hennig. She doesn't remember much about them, besides that whenever there was a party at somebody's house who had a pool, Rude and Hennig would always get completely bombed, take the refrigerator out of the kitchen, and toss it in the pool.

This match absolutely had to be on the set. Loved it when I was younger, now not so much, but there's not way you could leave it off a comprehensive '93 set. Also, why would White submit to the figure four when nobody else ever has?

It was around 1993 that I first truly discovered WCW. I was 12 years old and grew up a WWF and AWA fan because that's all we got on TV in small-town Minnesota (we were too far out in the boons for cable). My mom would buy me a wrestling magazine every now and then which allowed me to at least be aware of WCW, but that was the extent of my knowledge. The only time I ever got to see the product was if we happened to be on a family vaction and the hotel had TBS as part of its cable package. A co-worker of my father's would usually record WWF PPVs and send them home with my dad because he knew that we enjoyed wrestling. My dad brought home a tape one day and we popped it in, hoping to see Summer Slam. It was not Summer Slam. It was a WCW PPV instead (can't recall which one). At first my brother and I were pissed, but as we watched, I recognized some of the wrestlers from the magazines. I also fell in love with the product pretty much right away. My love of wrestling grew over the years and morphed into trading VHS tapes in the late 90s and gobbling up any 80s footage I can find today. Would I enjoy wrestling as much as I do if not for that fateful day in 1993 when I got a WCW PPV instead of Summer Slam? Who knows. Either way I'll be forever grateful to my father's co-worker. I plan on waiting a bit to start purchasing these yearbooks because I would like to try and watch everything in as close to chronilogical order as I can. Plus I have a lot of other stuff I need to catch up on first. But seeing the lineup on this '93 set really brings back memories and I can't wait to watch it one day.

I thought reading hard copies of old WONs was difficult because of Dave's peculiar sentence structure, smashed together spacing and small typewriter print. Then I downloaded a bunch of old WONs and reading them on my computer screen in .jpg format is even more difficult. We need to ask Congress to pass a law requiring somebody to re-type all the old WONs into a double-spaced Word .doc with size 12 font.

A lot of my friends were raving about the Rock's return a couple weeks ago so I watched his promo online, liked it, and decided to DVR Raw for a couple weeks in an attempt to get back into wrestling. WARNING: This is another "Why I Don't Like Modern Wrestling Rant" so stop reading if you can't bear seeing another one of those. However, I need to get this off my chest, and this is the one place I could come to do it Anyway, I haven't watched Raw for probably 8 years at least. I caught snippets in the run-up to Flair's "retirement" and after Taker/Shawn from WM, but that's it. I DVRd the last two Raws after the Rock's comeback, and I think I'm already done with it. Is Vince purposely trying to prevent the product from getting as big as it did in the Attitude era? Here's what I can't figure out: *So the Rock comes back and people go absolutely insane. Apparently he's only going to "host" WM, whatever that means. Either way, why was he not on the show the week after his comeback, and why did he do a lame satellite interview from his house this week? *Apparently John Cena is the company's biggest star these days (right?). Why are you bringing back the Rock to bury him before he goes back to Hollywood? Or is the lame sattellite interview and Cena's decent response a sign that they're trying to turn the Rock heel? *Does anybody actually buy a ticket or PPV to watch the Miz? What am I missing with this guy? I'm not seeing it. *Ditto for Randy Orton. He might have the most annoying mannerisms of any wrestler I've ever watched. *The only thing that held my interest each show was the Jerry Lawler/Michael Cole bits. And I can't figure out if it was because they were actually good, or I just enjoy Lawler because of my love for 80s wrestling. *Why do people cheer for Triple H and boo the Undertaker? What am I missing there? *There is nothing "Raw" about the show. There is nothing about it that feels organic or "real." Everything is such a major production that I don't feel connected to any of it -- not the workers, not the angles, not the words being said, nothing. Wrestling used to be organized chaos. Now it's just...organized. Ok I'm done now. Sorry to rant about a topic that has likely been ranted about thousands of times.

$5 for a set of four issues.

So how many subscribers do you think Dave had in, say, 1986? And has he ever gone into detail about how he was able to build so many sources throughout the world that would feed him results and information?

Ditto. I got my hands on some original copies from '84-86. They're fun reads, but take forever to get through. Part of the reason is the lack of spacing between lines on Dave's old typewriter. Other reasons include Dave's "unique" writing style that features run-on sentences, confussing grammar and the ocassional use of white-out and scribbling.

Someone needs to read them all out loud like an audio book. I would give my left one to hear Vince read the entire 1985 set.

About how many old WONs from 87-95 are on Meltzer's site or PWT? I own hard copies from 84-86, but have never subscribed to Meltzer's site or PWT to see what they have online from past WONs. Do they just have sporadic issues posted, or complete annual sets? I used to do Loss-style recaps from my hard copies, but stopped because it's very time consuming.

Ditto. The Wrestlemania IV tourney was huge the 9 and 10 year old minds of me and my friends in 1988. I remember renting it when it came out on VHS and absolutely going bonkers when Hogan whacked Dibiase withe chair in the last match.

http://www.mmafighting.com/2010/10/23/ufc-...1_lnk3%7C179709 Anyone catch this interview w/ Undertake after the Lesnar fight last night? Was there bad blood between Mark and Brock? Is this setting a return to the WWE for Lesnar? Someone please explain. Thanks