kjh

All it really says is that celebrities fighting, whether they be pro wrestlers, Olympic heroes, yokozunas or comedians draw money.

Moolah also does extremely well with active wrestlers, so I think part of the difference is historical perception, unless she taught the modern day Divas how to whore themselves out to management and all the top stars. Also, many of Moolah's female peers hated her guts for the same reasons Daddy's peers hate his.

Cornette's a mark for Foley, Flair, the Road Warriors, Terry Funk, Jeff Jarrett, Dusty Rhodes and Dustin Rhodes. He's not a mark for Hogan, Goldberg, Nash, Hall, DDP, Scott Steiner, etc. Given that it's his fantasy, it's not really surprising his fantasy WWF vs. WCW WrestleMania blow off card differs from what it should have been.

I think you're overthinking things here a bit. Sakuraba is in because Dave put him on the ballot and people treated him as if he was a pro wrestler. He ticks all of Dave's boxes if you pretend Pride was pro wrestling. I don't really blame the voters for voting him in, because he meets all of Dave's HOF criteria; he just shouldn't have been placed on the ballot in the first place, unless Dave was honest about turning his HOF into a pro wrestling and MMA HOF, which was the path he started going down. I think some of the old carnies who voted for Kurt probably only saw a handful of his matches. I mean it's not like Bruno Sammartino or Bret Hart are avid WWE viewers. Dory Jr. probably votes for all his old trainees on the ballot, because it puts him over. Which is why the voting structure is so flawed.

Really every criticism laid at Big Daddy's feet (crappy worker, only pushed so hard due to nepotism, killed a whole genre of wrestling) can be laid at the Fabulous Moolah's feet and she was the North American candidate who garnered the most support last year and she wasn't even a headliner of a successful territory, yet alone a national superstar. But I suppose being pushed as a legend of the business by WWE counts for a lot, if the Hall Of Fame is more about perception than truth as Loss earlier hypothesized.

Not really. How many national TV channels were there in Japan in Rikidozan's, Inoki's and Baba's heydays? Or in America and Mexico when wrestling first appeared on TV there? Not many!

I think he must assume that since you pushed for Martin Karadagian's induction last year, you must be in favour of swamping the Hall Of Fame with other campy national stars who couldn't work a lick or something. The rest of the letter was more running down of Big Daddy's household status; some of it was fair like pointing out why wrestling outdrew the FA cup on ITV, while some of it was pretty dumb like pointing out that there were only three TV channels in the UK at the time, that he was only a star due to being the promoter's brother and anyone given a similar push in that climate would have become a major celebrity.

I think Dave's analysis is heavily shaped by the voters he talks with about candidates. Athletic credentials and shooting ability are still important to the old carnies who yearn to legitimize their phony profession. If his arguments are terrible and so stupid, I think that reflects badly on his electorate more than Dave himself. I'm sure there's plenty more bodybuilding marks in his electorate than just himself. Superstar Billy Graham rings a bell? We can't be sure which wrestlers have ballots, but there's probably enough jacked up muscleheads who would have been enamored with Snuka's physique when growing up or working with him that his physique strengthens his HOF candidacy in their eyes. Speaking of you, I see Dave posted a letter by Matt Jones on the main site including this classy paragraph: When you put it like that, that's a pretty damning indiction on his HOF. I'm not sure Dave would see it that way, even though I think you're right. He saw the truth when it happened; we beseech him, in the bowels of Christ, to think it possible that he may have been mistaken at the time.

Maybe tomk spoke too soon about shooting ability no longer being an overrated quality in a wrestler.

I don't think this really proves anything, other than Jim Cornette was a bad choice to re-book the Invasion angle, given that by 2001 he was in his OVW cocoon. His personal biases don't help either.

To add to what S.L.L. said, of course Dave has the same opinions about early 90s lucha heavyweights, he hasn't got time to rewatch their matches and also thinks it's unfair to judge yesterday's wrestlers with today's standards. Dave simply isn't the person to read if you want a fresh perspective on past workers.

Really? What were these great "pure" athletic credentials that Billy Gunn had? I always thought it was a BS talking point Jim Ross made up to cover for his ridiculous gimmick and push. Most great workers in history actually have a good athletic background. I think you'd be hard pressed to name many legitimately great workers who weren't college level athletes.

I think Tim's right, as a lot of voters who are fairly ignorant about Lucha Libre may still vote for Konnan because they know that he was such a huge draw in the early 1990's, which makes it much harder for the other candidates to get close to 60% support.

Like most carny promoters Bischoff hates the dirtsheet writers until they become useful to him. I think he's irked about how his revolutionary contributions to the business have been marginalized over the years through WWE DVDs like The Rise and Fall of WCW and Bryan Alvarez's book The Death of WCW. Being interviewed by Wade allows him to get his side of the story out there. I also think most of Bischoff's heat with the Torch would be with Bruce Mitchell, not Wade Keller.

Not Wade Keller, but his assistant editor James Caldwell, annoyingly compares pro wrestling to another entertainment genre: Best pro wrestling booking on Sunday night was on MTV, not on WWE PPV.

Doesn't everyone who has been so intensely involved in the business for over 25 years?

Could this be the source of confusion:

Really? I was completely anticipating it given all the gushing praise Edge has gotten in the Observer as the hottest heel in the business over the last four years. The comp with Murdoch as a worker is a laugh, but it's not like Dave is rewatching 80's Mid South or New Japan like a lot of us here have done recently.

I think the problem is to get people to adjust their long held beliefs sometimes you have to hammer it home ad nauseum to get the message across. The danger is this leads to hyperbole and an inevitable backlash. For all the talk about people following opinions on DVDVR, it happens everywhere. Dustin of the Day, LONCE vs. Luger, Michaels vs. Henry, Jumbo is lazy, Backlund luv, etc, were all backlashes against the conventional wisdom peddled by the wrestling media and people in the business, and repeated without much thought by their followers. As OTT as the push of those views were, such a push was required when the person who is going to write the unofficial version of wrestling history, Dave Meltzer, has been conned into thinking that watching old matches is unfair to the workers because you shouldn't watch yesterday's matches with today's standards.

From there it goes back into discussion about the UFC 100 aftermath.

The Josh Gross thread started about 3 weeks after UFC 100 from a F4W poster who buried him for his appearance on Inside MMA where he encouraged UFC to co-promote with Fedor.

Just the one? You could easily come up with two dozen names that match that description. With regards the direction this conversation has gone in, I don't think anyone is morally outraged or shocked about the comparisons of porn with wrestling. We even had a seven page thread debating which business was sleazier over a year ago (http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?showtopic=5645). There is a line between what is and isn't normal to bring up on a wrestling message board. I'm not sure exactly where that line is, but plenty of people crossed it when the DVDVR board had a porn section.

As we learned tonight, apparently WWE doesn't feel the same. That's just because Mero said mean and nasty things about WWE when Chris Benoit died. Hunter's also probably still jealous that Mero got a bigger push than him in 1996. We all know that if Mero and Dustin turned up on the WWF's doorstep in 1991 looking like they both did, who'd end up getting the bigger push.

I think there was a lot more naivety about steroids in the late '80s than there is today, which is why Hogan lying about his steroid abuse was such a big scandal. That said, I don't think Rey is a guy that a casual onlooker would think as an obvious steroid abuser, even though he is one. I think the fact that he's small in height blinds people to the fact that he's actually more obscenely muscular than almost everyone on the roster.