Loss

Here's a thread of Memphis bumper reactions, circa 1980-1981. Click through to see more because I think I compiled just about all of them here for 1980. I could strangely watch these for hours. The biggest joy in all of these was finding a pre-wrestling career SHERRI MARTEL looking a total superstar while just being there as a fan.

Some of his views are outdated which I'm guessing even he would admit, but they also serve as a great time capsule for conventional wisdom at the time. John's podcast Stick To Wrestling is great, by the way.

So what I've been doing the last several months is trying to make sense of my personal collection of footage. That has meant compiling everything in a chronological way, finding the versions of things that aired using the best possible quality and the most complete version, and all of that. Putting together a global chronological footage timeline for pro wrestling. I did this off the radar for the pre-80s a few years back, and while I do still have a few gaps, I'm fairly confident I've accounted for about 95% of what exists. As I'm doing this, I'm also trying to eliminate filler. To be clear, my definition for filler is pretty low and doesn't mean "only keep the 4* matches" or anything close. If it is competitive (or even if it's not, but is interesting or important), I'm trying to keep it and eventually build a master list. Here's how I explained it all on Twitter a while back: "When I first came online, one of the most fascinating sites in the world to me was the old John McAdam site -- he was a tape dealer who had these really amazing matchlists of things I didn't know existed & offered witty opinions and cool tidbits of info next to each match. Anyway, it has made me eventually want to do something that stands not as a site to sell tapes, but just as a tribute to that format. Listing a curated list of matches in chronological order (as he usually did) and providing 1-2 lines of commentary for most of it. The goal would simply be to create a place for wrestling fans to EXPLORE. I've been watching since I was 3 or 4 years old and have been a massive hardcore fan for probably the last 25 yrs or so of that. And I *still* regularly get blown away at matchups that exist on tape I had no idea about. I don't have any thoughts about the right format or place to do it & I don't even see it as a profit venture necessarily as much as a labor of love. And hopefully I can one day make it a reality in some form." I've been using Twitter to do random thought dumps or observations as I go through this footage. To be clear, I'm not really sitting and watching matches in full but I am going through what I have and trying to make sense of it, and in doing that, you pick up on a lot of peripheral things. So don't think of this as a thread of match recommendations but more as a thread of general observations going through footage. I'll try to share them here and on Twitter as I come across them. Some things that may be of interest that I've already uncovered or said I'll cross-post below just to put it all in one place. When I'm done here, I'll do this and then the 90s, and then the 00s, and then the 10s, and then we'll see.

I have an idea for a thread at least.

To me, Voices of Wrestling is more tapped into the current "watch everything" fan climate than any site. In five years, some will have moved on and some will still be there. In 10 years, more will have moved on, but some will still be there. In 15 years, most will have moved on, but some will still be there. And there will be changes in wrestling during that time that some will love and keep up with and some will instead more fondly remember wrestling from the late 2010s/early 2020s. Then they'll join us old-timers, only their frame of reference for "old school" will be something that seems almost unrecognizable to us. That pattern happened many times before us and will happen many times after us.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned but ... I'm really hoping for an actual super-sensationalized Sami Zayn documentary on the Network eventually.

I guess to his credit, he does praise Sami Zayn now. However, he has to point out EVERY SINGLE TIME that Zayn wasn't nearly as willing to play ball then. We get it.

I appreciate the modern mat wrestling recommendations. I want to check out those shows now. 2020-21 shows are difficult for me with no crowd, and I'm curious if in five years we'll be talking about anything from this time period or if it will all subside as this little blip in wrestling history.

I like the idea that there's something out there for everyone now, but is there? I like matwork. I know about Daniel Makabe. Who else?

I don't think Cornette in particular has ever been good at giving people he doesn't like credit for much. He's a reactionary engaged in a constant cuss fight. You say whatever gets the person you don't like the angriest and you give them credit for nothing.

I think it's possible, but I don't know how to do it in Admin CP, where I could give someone that authority without giving them authority anywhere else on the forum.

I like AEW and want them to be successful. I love some of what they do more than other stuff, but I think competition is generally good for pro wrestling and I do see them as the fan-friendly group. When AEW strikes out, they seem to pick up on it and adjust in real time instead of doubling down and saying it's the fans who are wrong. That's their best quality.

NWA Power was campy. It wasn't their intent, but that's how I saw it, with people seeming to boo on cue and the silly commercials. I don't think 2020s wrestling should look like 1980s wrestling, but I do think there should be a through line. New Japan seems connected to its own history and like it's the next logical step in their evolution, whether I love everything they do or not.

Most criticism of wrestling presentation is based on the idea that it should be a TV show that doesn't know it's a TV show. I think that's a better way to say it than it seeming "real". But the idea that overproduced segments, obvious scripting that doesn't sound like real-life conflict, etc. is bad. The best 80s wrestling TV is the simplest -- jawjacking leading to unscheduled brawls while everyone in the studio screams.

Aspects of wrestling are better and aspects of wrestling are worse, but I will say in their defense that the vast majority of people weren't going off of memory when saying these things. If someone thought old wrestling was better, in most cases it was because they watched old and new stuff and that's what they truly believed. I've watched a lot of 80s wrestling in recent months and I don't think it's fair to say it was "better". It's more that different things were emphasized in the presentation, which some might appreciate. To me, the best quality of 1980s wrestling more than the match quality is that it truly feels like it's part of the pop culture zeitgeist of the time. I would argue that was less true in the 90s than the 80s, less true in the 00s than the 90s, and less true in the 10s than the 00s. But yes, there are probably more 4*+ matches than ever. It's a matter of whether you care more about content (quality of matches) or presentation (booking and atmosphere).

I think GWE was a great project but my problem with it in hindsight is that we were ranking real people and not ranking their body of work. It's much easier for me to say a match is better than another match than that a human being is better than another human being. There are also a lot of legendary pro wrestlers I don't necessarily want to endorse as people. And I had trouble articulating that for a long time, but ... there you go. What I like about whatever wrestling exploration I've done since then is that there are no stakes. I don't have to ask if what I'm enjoying is really better than Terry Funk or whatever else. I can just enjoy it on its own terms.

I don't think it was ever too much of a bloodbath around here. It's just that avoiding even low-level conflict is how I'm holding it together 11 months into staying at home with small children.

That was true for a while. Politics + the pandemic has made it harder for me to focus on pro wrestling at times. I never saw wrestling as escapist as much as it was something I just really loved. That has changed in the last little while, probably.

I've needed a break because I found that message boards had too much arguing and that I didn't have it in me to defend my positions. It's rare that anyone on Twitter really asks me to do that, where here it's expected. I didn't think I could contribute to this board at the level that is generally expected, particularly because my way of dealing with this pandemic has pretty much been to only take part in conversations that are always positive. My personal tolerance for disagreement right now is very low, which is why I've avoided the board. It isn't fair to expect that, where with Twitter, if someone is disagreeing, I don't feel any obligation to engage. A weird answer, I know, but a truthful one. I will set up your subfolder, Dr. Dunk.

In Flair's book, he talked about having to fly to Savage's home to practice the WM8 match, which really bothered him because he had never practiced a match in his life.

I think it came up on one of the Roundtables that the joke in WWF locker rooms when they heard Savage and DDP would be working together was that they'd never make it away from their notepads and to the ring for their match.

"We used to work. Now we perform." - Steve Austin I'm fine with either approach and sometimes the exchanges are complex enough that I think they would be awfully difficult to pull off on the fly now. That said, the best matches are probably the ones that have a happy medium -- they go in with a pretty clear idea of what they're going to do, but if it's not working, they're aware and skilled enough to shift gears on the fly.

He's not even close if you're looking purely at in-ring, but for ability to change with the times and reinvent himself to stay fresh while also being perfectly acceptable at a top level in the ring, it's hard to think of anyone who has done a better job of constantly adapting to the landscape than Chris Jericho. Bryan would be my pick too, but I wanted to throw another name out there that I think should be seriously discussed.

Why do only some matches require that contracts be signed? If they all do, why are only some public? And why do they announce matches before the contracts are officially signed? And why does each match need a contract if they are already under contract? How come they don't have to sign contracts for weekly matches on TV?