Loss

Does it matter what it tried to accomplish, or just what it did accomplish?

The road to hell is often paved with good intentions. In the case of pro wrestling, the road to heaven is often littered with dead bodies. I want to make the best pastry ever. A professional pastry chef will wake up and make a better one than me without even trying that hard. My intent didn't get me very far.

How do you apply something like this to Japanese wrestling or lucha libre?

The reason to view matches is so you can make compare and contrast wrestling on a global scale. If there was something all wrestling across eras, countries, styles and promotions had in common other than having matches, I'd be in favor of widening the criteria. That doesn't mean nothing else is important. That means that if you're going to include more than matches, you have to limit your scope. If all wrestling happened in America and America only, I think looking at the bigger picture would be appropriate.

I don't think this is an issue worth criticizing Dave for at all, but by his own standards, I will say if he doesn't watch all wrestling as it happens, then he's looking at it through an out-of-context lens. Standards change constantly, even from day to day after all.

I can't believe I just watched that. Just ... what??

Need a wrestler to weigh in, but is he wrong? The logic in wrestling has always been that guys are responsible for taking their own bumps.

It is an incredible run, but I believe the WCW number was net profit and those numbers are gross. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I just know Dave cited that number for years and years as the biggest profit year ever.

Also, I have to ask a few questions about the initial rankings: - Where did Bill Watts not have mastery over his crowd? What is the difference between an 8 and a 10? - How does 80s Vince get a 10 for mastery over his crowd during the same period when Watts' cards tended to be more heated from top to bottom? - How does 90s Vince get a 10 for talent spotting? He let Hogan, Savage and Piper go at a time when they all had plenty left in the tank. He had failed experiments with Luger and Diesel. - Why is mastery over crowd so low for Dusty and Crockett? - Eric Bischoff turned a $55m net profit in 1998, which I believe is still the most profitable year a wrestling company has ever had. I realize he had money losing years too, but how do you come up with 2 in that category? Surely, having the single most profitable year in wrestling history has to count for more than a 2, right? It's especially something I don't understand when Heyman comes out higher in that category.

I think the idea of creating new stars is a post-territory construct. It became necessary at that point to build talent from the ground up because the old farm system of the territories was gone. Before that, the focus I think was always more on rotating in fresh talent to keep the matches fresh, but not necessarily creating a new star. So in that sense, I'm not sure how much it matters that Watts created Dr. Death from scratch where he didn't with Ted DiBiase, Terry Taylor or the Rock N Roll Express, all of whom ultimately meant more to Mid South. I think about the Freebirds -- they were new stars in Georgia and Texas, even though Watts "created" the group. Of the people who were out there and available, Bischoff actually did a great job identifying the talent who could contribute the most to a WCW turnaround, so I don't think a '0' score there is fair.

One more point: I think if we look at most territories and their successful periods, most of them are based on people new to the territory, not necessarily brand new stars that were created from nothing. WCW did the same -- they created a boom based around people that were new to their territory. That's mainly relevant in the sense that if we are evaluating guys like Watts and Vince Sr., it is more of a common denominator.

I also think some context is important. Yes, he built his turnaround around WWF castoffs (who I'd add were all cast off way too soon), but he also repackaged them in new and interesting ways. The whole idea behind creating new stars is to create fresh matchups with people who aren't stale. At his best point, Bischoff used established stars to do that for sure, but he presented them in a very fresh way where they might as well have been "new" stars: - Hogan was not a Bischoff creation, but he wasn't a Vince creation either. Hollywood Hogan was the most successful Hogan endeavor since probably 1989. - Hall and Nash became stars in the WWF, but they became bigger in WCW than they ever were in the WWF. - Savage was put back in the ring and revitalized. The WWF had really diminished him post-1992. Bischoff made him a relevant, money-drawing headliner years after he had been written off. - Piper probably falls in that same category - Sting was a national star who never really was successful in a huge way. He was reimagined under Bischoff in a way that prepared him to become a superstar, even if they did not follow up on it properly. - Luger was more over than he had been at any point since 1988. He became a viable headliner where by the end of his time in the WWF, he was a midcard tag wrestler. I think creating new stars is important and needs to happen almost constantly to keep things fresh. It's definitely a black mark against Bischoff that he didn't seem to realize this wouldn't last forever and didn't build for the future at all. But I think it's important to also evaluate bookers/promoters on their ability to get the most out of what they have. Within that, you can evaluate the ability to create new stars. Vince could have had all those guys and would have never been able to create the success Bischoff had because his promotional concepts were outdated.

All people I'd say Bischoff did more for than Jericho who went on to become stars to varying degrees, and it's hard to argue he made any of them stars: - Chris Benoit - Booker T - Rey Mysterio - Eddy Guerrero

Always seemed like when they did push Del Rio, he was never over at the level they wanted him to be.

Winner gets an upgraded treadmill.

One thing that perplexes me about some of the early names selected is that they seem to be promoter ratings instead of booker ratings. Bill Watts had a booker who worked for him. So did Vince much of the time even while being heavily involved in conceiving plans. I don't know how involved Vince Sr. was in the actual booking or if he delegated that. Eric Bischoff was never a booker. Should we call this promoter ratings? I think it's important to distinguish the two roles.

I'm only beginning to read the thread but this doesn't seem particularly constructive or nice.

This thread has gone pretty far off since I last read it. I will respond to the posts made directly to me soon. In the meantime, I have to point out that Chris Jericho was genuinely hated by most fans in 2008-2009 while still being a good worker and the best promo in wrestling. So what exactly has changed since then? Jericho had his best run copying Bockwinkel's promo style and Memphis and Mid South angles. There wasn't a hint of meta in his act. So someone tell me why that worked if this doesn't work anymore, or maybe explain how wrestling has changed since then?

Doesn't TV have filler every week? And is that a rule? And who made that rule? And when was it made? And why was it made? And was it a choice that was right on the merits? Was it conscious? Was it well thought out? I'd like to explore that.

I don't think kayfabe means fans once thought wrestling was real. I think it means that wrestling always presented itself as completely and totally real up until a certain point in time. We're at a weird point where pre-shows and post-shows on the Network are in character, but documentaries or podcasts on the network are not. Fans are sort of expected to just know the difference rather than it being a clear, consistent application across every platform.

I just don't agree with this. I don't think the 60s/70s comparison works because we don't have nearly the same amount of footage for those decades that we do for the 80s. It's less an issue of being uninterested or deeming it irrelevant (although admittedly some of that was probably in play) than it is that there just isn't a huge amount of that stuff out there and accessible. (It is now more so than it was then because of things like the Chicago Films project and the emergence of French catch.) It's interesting that you say the 80s stuff just isn't the relevant older wrestling people look back to, because I don't think that's the case for 1990s or 2000s wrestling either, nor am I sure it's even the case for wrestling that is more than six months old. I can't recall a time when historical comparisons of matches were more out of style than they are now, or where people can give a match ****+ and it's considered old news within a month. I also didn't say the old stuff isn't remembered, I said it's resented, and to an extent, I do believe that to be true. I can like or not like the disposable approach to even the best wrestling matches that seems more common now (Do people still talk about something like Tanahashi-Suzuki or Styles-Suzuki?), just as I can like or not like that higher value is placed on All Things Current than All Things Good. (If you've never seen a match, why does whether it happened two days ago or two decades ago even matter in determining whether it's worth watching?) But it's hard for me to deny that either is the case. The constant focus on the here and now is ironically a concession to the Dave Meltzer approach to watching wrestling that so many in our circles have critiqued for years. And in that constant here and now focus, you get false assumptions about previous eras from people that should know better, like the 30-minute headlock comment goc mentioned or in a more benign example, Dave calling the 2014 G-1 Climax the best tournament in wrestling history without even attempting to identify other great tournaments that have happened and make side-by-side comparisons. *** So I wrote the above post then immediately questioned things about it, but I still decided to post it because it captured something that even if it's not entirely right is worth sharing, because it allowed me to flesh out my thoughts. But then I started thinking about it more and it's not so much that there's a bias against old people or old matches. French Catch caught fire at PWO, as did the Chicago film archives project. It's that there's a bias toward uncharted and undiscovered wrestlers and matches, many of which happen to be current. I even have that bias to an extent in that I get excited if I find a match from a long time ago and it looks interesting on paper, yet I've literally never heard a word about its quality. I don't think ageism in wrestling is ageism in the literal sense -- I think it's more ageism of any time-tested beliefs about wrestling's matches and performers. That can manifest itself as ageism, and has for sure at times during the Vader-Ospreay debate. But there's probably a better term for it. We live in a time where people have tremendous distrust in institutions, so I think it's a logical extension of that. In a larger sense, Vader forming the conclusion he did about Ospreay isn't much different than Bill Clinton claiming Bernie supporters think everything would be okay if we would just shoot every third person on Wall Street. Both are ill-advised broad statements based on skewed undersampling. However, the one thing that is lost is that I think it's perfectly valid to form whatever conclusions of a wrestling sequence after seeing the wrestling sequence in GIF form, which is what *most* of the critique was.

It's my understanding that they could choose to roll over his contract indefinitely since he never fulfilled it in terms of matches.

Wrestling has changed a lot. I think I was in denial about that for a long time, and it really hit me with Wrestlemania this year just how much it is different. I'm still making sense of it, but I realize that fighting it is futile. I hope I grow to appreciate it more over time so that I can continue a hobby that has brought me so much entertainment for so many years. But yes, it's rare that people engage people on the merits of whatever opinions they espouse. The messenger gets far more attention than the message, and that's not exclusive to old wrestlers, but I hate it. There is something I want to say that is going to age me soooo much but I'm thinking it so I might as well put it out there. I don't remember hardcore fan types in late 90s/early 2000s resenting the previous era and the way wrestling used to be as much as I think many newer fans resent it now. And I'm not saying that so much as a "back in my day" thing, although it sounds that way. It's just something I want to understand and wrap my head around. In the early 2000s, the Ric Flair DVD was an enormous success and paved the way for countless compilations released by WWE. Now WWE is hesitant to upload more footage to the network because no one watches the old stuff. Not to mention that they've gone from ignoring all of their history prior to 1984 to ignoring all of their history prior to 1993 when RAW debuted. There's a mentality about old stuff that has changed in the past 12 years and I'm not sure when or how or why that happened. I don't think it's even the majority (it may be), but it's a decent number of people nonetheless. I do think being a wrestler should be something that people do who are mostly in their 20s and 30s, just like the real sports they have always aimed to emulate.

Can't remember ever hearing this. Do you have a source? (Not calling you out or anything, just curious.) It's in the WON the week after Extreme Rules.

Talking about Donald Trump can't go anywhere good. At least not here. :/