Loss

It was in the WON this week that they are starting a slow transition to Cena as 1-A and that Roman Reigns is about to become the #1 guy. No one knows until these things play out, but my gut tells me Cena still has some huge years in him, even though the fan backlash against him is at an all-time high right now. That said, he's also getting older and his body is breaking down, so prepping someone else to eventually take over that spot is a good idea. Reigns still hasn't been tested in a long singles match, so I think grooming him for that spot seems premature. He's going to need an assembly line of strong heels that WWE doesn't seem to have at the moment. I'm also not sure he can move merchandise like Cena unless they tweak quite a few things about him. He's definitely a guy that can hit his spots and look great when he's set up to look great, but he hasn't been put in too many situations where he's had to do more than that. What does everyone else think? Is Roman Reigns ready to replace John Cena as the guy WWE builds around?

This is going to sound silly and it very well may be, but I'll still put it out there. I sometimes wonder if not for Dave, would the Internet not expose the business so much? It's possible it still would have, but I wonder if we would be more PWI than PWO otherwise - talking about win-loss records, winning strategies and that sort of thing. As far as knowing the difference between good and bad, I knew the difference between Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan as a child. But again, that wasn't something I came up with on my own, that was Apter mag influence. Even then, they talked about Flair going 60 minutes and Hogan not having the stamina to do that. They talked about scientific wrestlers and I liked scientific wrestlers, but I just saw it as one of many styles a wrestler could take on instead of the preferred method of working. There were also the muscle/power guys, the brawlers and so on. PWI had such an influence on me that I didn't think it was any of my business if the Horsemen attacked Dusty in a parking lot. I didn't know everyone personally, so who was I to judge them? I tried to watch more like a sporting event, but one where it was common for tempers to flare and things to get carried away.

Can you provide an example of what you mean? I'm not saying I disagree, I just want to make sure I understand.

Whether you read Scott Keith or Dave Meltzer in the mid-90s, you were influenced by Dave Meltzer, because without Dave Meltzer, there would be no Scott Keith. His impact doesn't have to be direct to still be there.

The Snuka story I think explains Summerslam '97 more than it does King of the Ring '98. It obviously influenced Foley as a performer throughout his career, but that doesn't mean it was to the exclusion of all other possible influences, one of which was hardcore fandom and an emphasis on match quality. I'm with you on getting some older perspectives.

That's an interesting question because I don't think Foley takes the bump in the first place if not for Meltzer influence. That's not to say Dave was advocating wrestlers taking dangerous bumps every week in the WON, but Mick has claimed many times that his motivation for doing the bump was fear of having a bad match. Most guys working madman gimmicks 20 years earlier wouldn't have cared so much about that, or if that was their concern, they may have just juiced a little more than usual or something. It's hard to answer for sure, but I think hardcore fan influence is what made Foley feel like he had to take the bump. The bump was canonized by WWE for years and helped him become a star, which was the promotion being influenced by Dave ("Hey, we respect this guy for sacrificing his body to entertain you. Not to win a match, but to entertain you.") Foley talked openly on WWF television shows about being apprehensive about another Undertaker/Mankind match and worrying about having a bad match as a result. This type of marketing of the bump made fans respect the bump and respect Foley's willingness to sacrifice. This makes wrestling fans start slowly thinking differently about who they like and who they don't. We could probably go year-by-year and really track the progression, but ultimately, it slowly rolls forward to what we saw with Daniel Bryan in 2014. I don't even think that's just limited to Mick Foley and his bump. Similar things were happening at the same time in all sorts of situations. Commentary became focused in TLC matches on how all the guys are putting their bodies on the line, but it was framed more as because they have passion for what they do than because they are desperate to win. My point is that encouraging fans to think about wrestling in those terms is something that originated within the WON. The WON played a part in the erosion of kayfabe. People within wrestling stopped protecting trade secrets as much as they had before, so because they stopped thinking about wrestling like it was real, things like that would eventually slip through the cracks, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. It's a messy lineage.

Here's food for thought: In 1998, when Foley took the bump from the top of the Hell in a Cell, fans in the building chanted Undertaker's name. If that spot happened now, Foley's name would be the one chanted if a wrestler's name was chanted at all. There's a shift there.

It's also worth noting that the idea of matches being good or bad is something that originated within wrestling. The WON talked about wrestling the same way that people within wrestling talk about wrestling. So to be clear, what we're discussing is the idea of wrestling fans thinking that a match can be good or bad. People within wrestling obviously always looked at it that way. They may have had different standards for that, but they thought about wrestling in those terms.

I think I see where the confusion lies. Maybe this will help. I don't want to say he invented it only because I'm sure if we poured through old 1970s newsletters, we would find at least one writer who talked about seeing good matches and bad matches, or talked about wrestlers as workers. That has nothing to do with the quality of what is said. It's more about just viewing wrestling within that paradigm at all. So I'm guessing it happened before the WON. I think for all intents and purposes he did invent it, but I'm trying to avoid saying that in case Billy Bob Newsletterwriter called a match "good" in 1975.

I don't want to say he did it because I think it was more about him helping change the way people look at wrestling, both inside and outside of the business. So there are people who have been influenced by Dave Meltzer that don't even know Dave Meltzer's name. It's a movement that is bigger than him as an individual, so that's why I hesitate to say that he did it. He didn't even start it. He gave it momentum though. "This is awesome" is generally speaking a commentary on match quality. There are often "Match of the Year" chants at indy shows and even in NXT. Those chants started in US indy wrestling. Most indy wrestling fans are hardcore fans. Most hardcore fans are either WON subscribers or go online seeking news that is taken from the WON. That's the connection and influence. We're just like the "This is awesome" chanters, it's just that we type our commentary instead of chanting it and we choose different words.

He popularized. He didn't even define. He was the first guy to prominently talk about wrestling matches as being "good" or "bad". He was the first guy to prominently talk about wrestlers in terms of their talent and ability to deliver good performances instead of their won-loss records. Others did it before him, but on a very small and limited scale. He reached a much bigger audience. Then people copied him. Eventually people copied the viewing dogma but started going in different directions with their opinions and weighed things differently than he did. But the whole idea of thinking of wrestlers as workers is not something that people really did all that much before the WON.

He didn't invent anything. I've said that twice. But he is why we are all critics. Even casual fans are critics now, even if they don't post at message boards. "This is awesome!" isn't deep criticism, but it's criticism.

Yes, we will crank this up again soon.

I think Dave's greatest impact even more than that is that aside from a few people here and there, I don't know that most people with power in wrestling looked at it in a global way. Sure, they knew Japanese wrestling existed, but does a wrestling promotion ever come close to taking concepts that were successful in Japan and adapting them for an American audience if there is no WON? Does WCW co-host (or co-promote ... whatever you want to call it) an AAA pay-per-view without the WON? If the WON didn't exist, I suspect wrestling promoters would still be trying to recreate Hulkamania and the Four Horsemen and not understanding why it no longer works. Hell, many of them tried doing that over and over even with a WON around.

I didn't say he invented it. I said he popularized it. Yes, Dave is a product of 70s fanzine and early VCR tape trading culture. That's what led to the WON. He was not the only guy doing what he did, but he was the most prominent and long-lasting guy doing what he did. I wouldn't even say he defined the importance of workrate. Well, he did, but I think it was more broad than that. He defined the idea of good-and-I-enjoyed-this versus bad-and-I-did-not-enjoy-this as it relates to pro wrestling. Before him, I would say the common wrestling fan frame of mind was something like, "What do you mean good? Dusty won, so yeah, I guess it was good."

The short answer is ... yes. And it's not just limited to Scott Keith. Even when we have wildly divergent opinions, Dave influenced how most of us at this board watch wrestling -- from an artistic/critic's point of view instead of cheering our favorites to beat our least favorites. The concept of viewing wrestling critically at all, at least for fans and in the way we do it, is something Dave deserves most of the credit for popularizing. He also influenced how wrestling is presented on a national stage in a huge way. Not to plug, but the long answer is ... the focus of the prologue in the e-book I am working on. I tried to walk through the entire hardcore wrestling fan history as best I could.

Here's a fascinating tidbit from the latest WON:

I still have major hope that there will be a segment with Bo Dallas giving The Miz career advice.

I see it less as grumpy and more as truthful. I say that only because most of your 90s AJ opinions lined up with mine. Then again, maybe we are both grumpy old men.

I haven't seen Sasha Banks in the ring, but I hope she is better there than she is as a personality with the awful overacting.

The WWF wanted everyone to be as over as possible until HHH got to the top and Jericho showed up. It seems like the games started from there.

I do think there's value in breaking it down, because I think Austin's stardom is often conflated with his working ability. And it should be, at least to an extent, since they aren't entirely mutually exclusive. But everyone loved the guy so there isn't the same level of discussion around him that there is, say, Shawn Michaels.

WWE does well-produced video packages for different wrestlers during Black History Month, yet I don't expect to see a comparable two-minute video explaining the history and appeal of SNME and showing various clips, wrapping up by saying that the entire archive is now available on the WWE Network. I don't understand why they aren't doing something like that for different archival content that is on the network every single week.