Al

It's not like WWE struck out at developing talent over the years. But when a national promotion develops, it's awfully hard for that promotion to develop rookies as well. And the usual paths of wrestlers have tried up. Not only are the territories gone, but pro and amateur football has become lucrative to the point where it's not profitable for the washouts to pursue a pro wrestling career. I mean honesty, what is there to drive a promising athlete into wrestling? You have to either have an unhealthy obsession with wrestling or be completely unsuited to another pro sport.

IMO, they really need to stop rolling out multiple 20-30 minute matches. There have been many, many "classic" Wrestlemania matches that went less than twenty minutes. Steamboat/Savage, Hogan/Savage, Ramon/Michaels, Savage/Flair, Edge/Foley, Undertaker/Batista, Hogan/Andre, etc. I can't help but think WWE would do well to chop five minutes off most of their big Wrestlemania matches. (And 20 off of HHH/Lesnar)

Scott's success in a nutshell is right place and right time, he produced a ton of material and it was easy to find. To this day it's probably easier to find a Keith review of a show than any other.

When you say you won't spend a thousand dollars on a company unless they change a character, I think you need to seriously step back and reassess your priorities.

Honestly, they should have tossed the Nasty Boys at them. The Road Warriors did get a feud against the Nastys that nearly lasted six months. Looking at Cawthon's site, you essentially get these feuds: Demolition (Smash & Crush) The Orient Express The Nasty Boys The Natural Disasters The Beverly Brothers After Summerslam, who knows. Probably against Money Inc. as I get the feeling the Nasty Boys turned face to replace the Warriors. But what killed the LOD in the end was Hawk's unreliability more than anything else.

Hey, lets watch Bob Brown against Giant Baba, in 1986. With Ron Trongard on commentary! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fedT_WrdU6o

It's probably Michaels or Randy Savage. Savage had the Steamboat match at WM 3. WM 4 he didn't have a standout match but put out four good matches in a single night. WM 5 he gave Hogan his best WWE match, WM 7 he had perhaps the Ultimate Warrior's best match ever and WM 8 against Flair was probably Flair's best WWE match (excepting the Rumble). Four matches commonly rated around **** in six years isn't shabby at all.

Oddly, I'll be in Manhattan Saturday but not for wrestling. Just a day trip with the wife.

Yeah, I still generally pay less than that for movie tickets.

Kind of hard to get inducted at a Wrestling Hall of Fame by someone who didn't take steroids, unfortunately.

I think Arnold was the best possible choice. It adds real prestige to Bruno's induction and makes it the big deal it should be.

Speaking of Danny Hodge, what's the general opinion on him? He's usually listed among the 50 greatest on most lists. But I haven't seen much on him as a draw, he didn't seem to mix with the other big stars of his era and I've never seen a single match of his. But obviously his amateur career and credibility are beyond reproach.

The Black Sox scandal is my frame of reference there. If gamblers are bold enough to fix the World Series in 1919, chances are they have their hands in everything else.

The one difficulty I see from that era is that there's a difference between working a match and fixing a match. The work is done to maximize entertainment. The intent of the fix is purely to minimize risk of the result. When it comes to Frank Gotch's or George Hackenschmidt's "working ability," I think it's immaterial anyway. We have nothing to go on. No video footage, no opinions of contemporaries (because the people inside weren't talking openly). And even if we did, it's still the most subjective factor. But in a way it doesn't matter. Gotch isn't an all time great because he was a legitimately unbeatable wrestler. He's an all time great because he was the most popular wrestler who twice drew 30,000 fans to Chicago. And what I mean out of all of this is that while the methods are up for debate, the end goal is really the same.

Maybe Generico could work up a Councilman Jamm gimmick. "YOU GOT JAMMED!" An evil dentist? That'll never work.

Moratorium at the Sportatorium!

I fell into this two days late it seems. The funny thing about Sting is that he seems to get compared to high peak/short career guys. But Sting at this point can legitimately claim a 25 year career. I might've mentioned this before, but I see Sting compared to Steve Garvey. Fairly long career. Often seen as a Hall of Fame caliber player but when dug into, his talent really wasn't there. Seen as perhaps the face of the Dodgers (besides Lasorda) but not their best player (Ron Cey was). Never the best player in the league, but usually an All Star. As far as a Steve Williams comp, look at Warren Cromartie. Ten years in MLB, seven in Japan, with the added bonus of having wrestled a match!

Not stalling, more a stalemate. There's no video footage of the match that I know of and no one left alive who actually saw it. And even if we saw it, there's two ways of fixing a match. A complete work, or just working the end result. If a match was outright worked in that era, what exactly did it look like?

In light of that, do you think Gotch v. Hackenschmidt's matches were worked? In reading the results, it seems likely that the first match was a work (how do you have a two hour match?) and that the second match was a double cross, where it was agreed that Gotch would go over in both falls competitively but that Gotch, taking advantage of an injured Hackenschmidt, decided to put himself over quickly and convincingly. I don't feel I could make a judgment on Gotch/Hackenschmidt. But consider what a shoot wrestling match consists of between two legitimate world class wrestlers. Often it will result in a collar and elbow tieup in which neither man will budge. Check out Alexander Karelin/Rulon Gardner on Youtube. I referenced Lewis/Stecher, that match lasted over five hours and it was five hours of complete inaction. Mildred Burke vs June Byers is considered the last pure shoot match. Same story, it was the two women locked in a tieup with neither budging for an hour. So a shoot match could easily last hours. But they wouldn't have been fun to watch.

I might see a separate thread for this. Looking at the Observer Hall of Famers, there was one born in the 1850s, two in the 1860s, four in the 1870s and just one in the 1880s. Seven in the 1890s, still less than any decade until the 1970s. I wonder if that pre-1930 era is underrepresented in general.

Bockwinkel's hard to judge. He held a world title almost as long as anyone else in history, but it's AWA so it's slightly insulated from the rest of the wrestling world. We don't have footage of Bockwinkel's prime, though he clearly was a good wrestler in his 40s. And there's really no Pre-Bockwinkel AWA financial data to see if he made an impact. You could land him in a range of about 20 spots and have an argument anywhere. While Tim Hornbaker's latest book has its shortcomings, it's a great source if you're looking for general information on the pre-1920 wrestlers. There were obviously worked matches in the 1890s-1910s era, simply because it's impossible to imagine that wrestling was clean while boxing matches were fixed left and right. But I think the turning point was the Strangler Lewis-Joe Stecher disaster in 1916. That was the point where it was apparent that shoot matches were simply no longer viable as entertainment.

I honestly feel the act of writing and producing a three hour live production might be too overwhelming for the common old-school wrestling writer/booker to handle. You obviously need writers at some level to handle the load, and I think you're better off getting writers who are better at handling the minutia than the big picture. The problem for WWE is that given the show and the workload, they're highly unlikely to get writers who are very good at the job.

Lawler is closer to the back end of the top 50 when you look beyond ring work. That shouldn't really be an insult to Lawler. It's a crowded field. The Sheik against Bruiser Brody is a good argument. The fair knock against Sheik would be that he jobbed less than Brody and his act salted the earth for anyone following him in a territory.

My personal favorites, the Crush Gals and Matsumoto/Nakano actually appearing in separate matches on a show in 1986.

He doesn't bury Flair completely. He praises his work ethic but states that Flair had no psychology at all.