Loss

Ultimately, I see this as the way to keep PWO's value as conversation generally moves more and more toward social media.

For two years after that, Dave was doing the passive aggressive, "Oh wait, I can't say that word anymore" thing until Irv Muschnick wrote an incredible letter to Dave basically telling him to use the word, deal with the criticism and stand by his choice or leave it alone.

2/1/88 WON: A reader criticizes Dave for calling a bad match an abortion. Dave explains that this is an insider term, but that there are other insider terms he does not use because they are offensive to minorities, so he will stop using this one as well.

I will mention in his defense here that Dave Meltzer basically created the idea himself of being a muticulturalist, globally-minded wrestling fan. Of course, that doesn't mean he's without flaws in how he views things.

That really borders on speculation about things that are none of anyone's business that I'd prefer we stay away from if that's ok. His work and his words are fair game.

Just that I respect Dave and there's so much more I'd rather get his take on than "Why are you biased against TNA?"-type questions mixed in with him responding to accusations that he reported things that he never reported. I also made that post days ago and it has nothing to do with the latest flare up over the N-word remarks.

It was a preference, not a demand.

Would be a tremendous hype promo if it wasn't scary as shit:

I don't buy that wrestlers never knew the difference. I can't recall anyone casually dropping N-bombs when doing a shoot interview the way they would other insider terms. I think the issue is not that Dave simply explains it, but that he explains it in sort of sociopathic way without criticizing it.

Pro Wrestling Plus, which was the Canadian version of Pro Wrestling This Week.

I think if your goal is to get a feel for how good individual wrestlers are, then yes, you can restrict your viewing to a much smaller sampling. I'm far less interested in assessing wrestlers than I am assessing time periods. I'd rather explore how which companies had the best wrestling around the world in 2003, for example, and which ones didn't, and what is different in other time periods than that that is both better and worse, than just staying in the lane of wrestlers. I enjoy immersing myself in an era much more than I do a wrestler's career. My goal is to understand what great, bad and in-between wrestling looked like in a given year or series of years. And to do that, watching a lot of stuff is pretty important. I prefer this because I prefer variety -- if I watch too much of a single company or style, no matter how good it is, I get bored.

If you have a response to something being said, say it, but please don't make posts like this. Let's keep it civil, or at least try harder.

Everyone, let's be civil. There is some good discussion mixed in all of this if we can focus on the topic instead of the messengers.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about that, personally. I think when a guy hits the John Cena level, he should do jobs sparingly and selectively, and only for people that they are about to shoot to the moon. It still feels to me like they purposely started phasing Cena down before his time was through. Maybe he didn't need to be the top guy anymore. I think in a way there wasn't much more they could do with him as the number one guy, and they needed start moving away from him. But I wish they'd made that transition a much slower one. It's like they didn't even consider the possibility that they'd have trouble replacing him. It's interesting how in the entire history of the company they have never once had a seamless transition from one top guy to the next top guy. That doesn't mean they still can't go back to Cena if they have to do that, but he just seems colder right now than he ever has. Maybe they are building a redemption story for him to get one last run. I don't know. I don't get it.

No, it's that the Road Warriors quit WCW when Hall and Nash were hired making more than they did because they felt (rightly so, even if it meant zilch in 1996) that they had the better track record of drawing and should be paid higher than them. And Lex Luger had a guaranteed contract in 1987 when he came into JCP. It was probably not the first of its kind, but it was the first one that created a big fuss. He was the first guy to hire an agent and push for insurance and that sort of thing.

It's made up for by the dismissive "one of those brothers" intro from Gary Cappetta before the match, which was hilariously backhanded.

Not sure I'd call Mick Foley rambling on about nothing for what feels like hours all that great, although there are definitely parts of WWE I like a lot more than I did a year ago or two years ago. I'm comfortable calling it better than it was for sure. Mick Foley and Daniel Bryan being around shouldn't in theory make both shows worse than they would be otherwise, but they do. Bryan has been great for The Miz, who to me has become maybe the best all around performer in the company, but still takes up too much TV time while talking about how little TV time he takes up.

I should also add that doesn't mean we should use the HOF to right wrongs, so I'm not arguing Arn to go in. It's just that we tend to look at drawing big money as some type of major accomplishment, when it's often just performers doing their jobs. Sometimes it clicks and sometimes it doesn't, and the reason is usually something extraneous.

There are lots of super talented performers in wrestling -- not just in-ring but talking and carrying themselves as stars -- that weren't really major draws. And if you look at why that is in most cases, it's because they weren't in the right place at the right time to fully capitalize on their talents. For me, personally, that's why I like to keep drawing in perspective. It's not like Steve Austin was a drastically different worker or talker than Arn Anderson, or that he understood some great secret to captivating the masses that Arn Anderson didn't. It's just that he was in the right place at the right time. It's why I feel like so much of the drawing money stuff is happenstance.

To play devil's advocate and potentially reference a monkey's paw, this is "Positive Impact?" Purely asking. It's an interesting question, and I don't want to answer this, but I do want to say that every person who has drawn huge has also had a long-term negative impact in other ways -- Hulk Hogan was the center of a drug scandal that sent the WWF off the rails for years and Steve Austin's swearing fostered a more adult presentation of the WWF that turned off sponsors in a way that they still haven't really recovered from. The same elements that caused WCW's greatest success destroyed it. Ric Flair is simultaneously the best drawing and worse drawing NWA champ of all time according to a Dave post a while back. We don't tend to look at the downside of people who were successful draws -- all the shows they've headlined that bombed, or that WCW declined quickly in 1999-2000 with Hulk Hogan on top. We only tend to remember the positives. So I wonder if we should hold everyone to that standard.

I'd also like to talk more about Bryan Danielson as an indy figure, and put in context what guys like he and Punk and Low Ki and Homicide and Super Dragon accomplished after WCW and ECW folded, and we were left with an American monopoly. If you look at the first six months or so of indy shows after this, they may have someone like Low Ki around, but the U.S. indies are generally are trying to copy the ECW style. King of the Indies changed that and gave birth to Ring of Honor. The shift in WWE culture I think has roots there, so this is something that has been built from the ground up for nearly 15 years. The questions that are important I'd say is if that indy boom was going to happen regardless because of all the talent WWE wouldn't pick up, or if the indy boom can be attributed to the quality of the talent. If so, Danielson may not be the #1 guy on that list (he might be), but he's absolutely in the conversation. Now, there are guys who don't sign with WWE because they've found a way to make more money working the independents. Imagine that 15 years ago. I can absolutely see the argument for Wrestlemania 30 as something that should have launched a Hall of Fame run instead of ending a career, but if you look at WM30 as something that was in the making since King of the Indies 2001, it comes across as more of a culmination and Danielson's case seems much stronger. It wasn't just Danielson's journey there, but what the possibility that he could take that journey represented in a changing landscape.I don't know the answer to all of this, but I would like to ponder if Bryan Danielson made indy wrestling something bigger and more viable with a higher profile than it was in the 90s. It definitely meant way more than it did in the 90s -- the question is what made it mean more. Or, who made it mean more? Who ultimately gets credit for building up the profile of independent wrestling so much? It is late and I am tired and I am probably not making much sense. I don't even really have a strong opinion on these particular factors right now. I just think there's a lot more to Bryan Danielson that's fun to talk about and weigh than his career match resume and the WM30 main event. Those are on one level where his case lies, but the environment in which he built that case really says none of that should have ever happened.

I agree that wrestlers are very likely doing the least amount of research, but with that said, I can easily see the older, pre indie boom types totally disregarding Bryan (and anything ever done on the indies altogether) while muttering "that little dork never drew dime". Same for Punk (who I didn't vote for, just to be clear). I think as time passes and more & more of the voter pool is made up of people who came from the indies, there will be a natural shift in the voting patterns of the wrestler component of the voting pool. Those wrestlers would be in a different bucket though, right? It seemed like he was getting support from guys who are currently active in wrestling. It genuinely surprised me.

I've already filled my bug Dave quota lately on Twitter, so does someone want to ask him how ROH's overall business was in 2006 compared to other years in that decade?

Glenn Greenwald recently did an interview with Vox about the role of journalism in a free society, specifically in an election season. http://www.vox.com/2016/9/15/12853236/glenn-greenwald-trump-clinton I only link it here because there is one passage that I think really sums up my view on watching wrestling, not when I'm just casually watching for fun, but when I'm watching with the goal of writing about it or discussing it in a critical way.

Sorry for the third post in a row, but I think "drawing" would have to be looked at in ROH as DVD sales, not live gates. The goal was to do great shows and create buzz that could be used to sell the shows *after* they already happened. Every live gate was an intentional loss leader. It's an inverse from the traditional wrestling model where shows are hyped *before* they happen. That model was short-lived -- only PWG is still doing it, and opinions vary on how wise that is -- but sadly, we don't have access to the number of DVDs sold for each show. Perhaps if Gabe Sapolsky was still in ROH, he would provide them for the purposes of HOF consideration.