kjh

Those arena holding the Mid-South shows were full of smoke. I'd like to declare Vince the winner of the evening.I'd say Vince won because he charged for his tickets.

100+ Nights 1980's WWF... People who only subscribe to the website could vote, not sure about the F4W offline subscribers.

Where we are today? You'll have to explain the link from "06/03/94 happening and guys like Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Mysterio, Psicosis, Malenko giving a visual definition to the term WORKRATE" to today's top WWE stars of Cena, Batista, Orton and Hunter.

To clarify for jdw, Dave hasn't opened up voting to non-subscribers. I'm sure Segunda Caida's pimping of the match helped, but part of it was also that it was a weak year for candidates (no Japanese or ROH matches that were universally raved about as MOTY favorites) and Panther dropping his mask was put over in the sheets as one of the biggest surprises in wrestling history and the biggest moment in recent lucha history.

Yes, for just under $300 you too could be given the privilege of working multiple jobs in the wrestling industry for free! What's particularly funny is that while perpetrating such an obvious con, they are shamelessly putting over their ethical business principles and many people over at the UKFF are falling for it.

Speaking of Cena's attitude with regards The Rock, from Sunday's Observer news update:

IIRC, Scott Keith gave it ***** when he reviewed the first Flair DVD, so the myth still persists. But that's Scott Keith for you. I actually like the match, though given the participants, the stage and the storyline it should have been a lot better than it was.

I agree that the whole "Rock needs to give back to the business that made him" argument is completely ridiculous. He gives back a ton simply by being a success in Hollywood and being a class act in general. For someone who is in the public eye, there is surprisingly few negative stories about him, which is a lot more than can be said for most of the other major wrestling stars that are household names like Hogan, Flair, Austin and Ventura.

Dylan, whenever Raw has been taped, it hasn't had a huge impact on ratings. So I agree with Jingus that there was no need to screw over the fans and arenas in Colorado Springs and Loveland. Sure running LA milks the controversy for more publicity, but at a huge expense and at the risk of testing the sympathy of the mainstream media to their plight, especially when the odds are this week's Raw will be turned into a vehicle to bash the NBA, the Denver Nuggets and Stan Kroenke.

Of course, taping Raw the night before in Denver or live in Colorado Springs would be just as cost effective, probably more, than running back-to-back in LA.

The same probably could be said about John Cena (he fell into wrestling because he couldn't make it as a pro footballer or pro bodybuilder).

Regarding Benoit vs. Malenko, I'd blame the booker for booking them to go 28 minutes in front of a crowd they knew would probably crap on such a match.

I'm not sure that's quite a fair comparison. Does the Big Bad Wolf pretend to still be the Big Bad Wolf after the show when in front of the public who have just watched the show?

Of course, that's assuming every fan who ever attacked a wrestler thought it was real, which is flawed logic. There are plenty of stories of wrestlers being challenged by the local hard man who thought wrestling was completely phony.

I think we need to wait until the book comes out to decide how far gone Irv is. Sure he's gone on a lot of wild goose chases, but some of the news items he's broken, like the Orton OD story, have been on the money.

To add to Bix's point, it's not like Irv was publishing any new material. Wrestling Babylon was just a collection of articles that he had written in the past; all of which had been available for free on the Internet at one point.

This is an awesome story:

True, but his allegations prompted several others to make similar claims. Surely they can't be dismissed as full of shit because Hodgson was. I think I have to agree somewhat with sek here. We all know the reason why the Brooklyn Brawler was employed by the WWF for so long, Sylvan Grenier too. So the chances are a few of the allegations about Patterson may have been true. The difference is Terry Garvin and Mel Phillips targeted the young ring boys, while Patterson went after the jobbers, all of whom were of age.

I agree with Loss, you need to see the match to see how credible his comments are, as 25 years is a long time, memories fade and people misremember things from so long ago, not to mention all wrestlers are workers to a degree. I'm sure Jumbo was difficult for Martel to work with due to the language barrier, different styles of working and the fact that he wasn't a well known star to the AWA fans. But there's a difference between being easy to work with and having quality matches that stand the test of time. For example, Martel puts over working with Jimmy Garvin (easy heat perhaps), yet no-one remembers their matches together, while people still talk about his matches with Jumbo. I mean if we were to believe Martel, Japanese fans always sat on their hands and were quiet during a match, yet he and Flair were so great they could draw heat from such a stoic, unmoving crowd. I'm also surprised Dave's brains didn't explode with the praise for Bob Backlund as a great wrestler.

I like how his best comeback is how he doesn't deserve to be put down because he's been subscribing to his site for a year (as if Dave realizes that). If Dave couldn't put down any of his subscribers, he'd be left with very few people he could put down, as his newsletter is so widely read in the industry.

TNA lost a ton of money during the weekly PPV days because the costs of running live PPVs on such a regular basis was so high, the price of the PPVs was too low ($10) and too few fans bought them despite the cheap price. Going to three hour, monthly PPVs instantly increased revenues, while cutting costs too. But they still lost a ton of money because they were paying for their weekly TV slot on FSN. Getting on Spike TV, saved the company, as Spike covered the costs of producing Impact. I would say a significant proportion of the increased revenue comes from Spike TV, as they started on Spike TV as late night one hour filler programming that they hoped would keep UFC viewers tuned to the station, while now they have their own two hour prime time slot, so consequently their TV revenue must have at least doubled since they started on Spike TV. And as Kenta Batista points out, TNA have diversified and have a lot more revenue streams now: overseas TV deals, domestic house shows, tours of the UK, polaroid pictures with the stars, DVDs, etc. Really very little of the increased revenue is directly attributable to any of the big stars, outside the record TNA PPV buy rates they drew when Sting and Angle entered the company.

The difference between a 0.9 (what TNA was drawing before the acquisition of more star power) and a 1.3 (their best ever) rating is pretty insignificant. They are both good ratings for Spike, but the ratings are still drawn by a pro wrestling show, so the ad revenue will be pretty poor either way. Even with the increase in ratings Spike TV would have little incentive to pay substantially more for TNA's programming unless another TV company wanted Impact and they were willing to enter into a bargaining war to keep it. And the odds of that are pretty slim even averaging a 1.3. So a small decline in ratings isn't going to break the company, just like their recent small ratings gains isn't going to make the company.

Yeah, Bob's right. There will always be a fairly consistent supply of former WWE stars for TNA to pick up. Even if we suppose Angle, Sting, Foley, Nash, Steiner, Booker and Jeff all leave/retire within 18 months and they weren't able to pick up any big name replacements, they would save a ton of money on talent costs, which would offset some of the potential drops in their revenue streams from losing all of their big name stars over such a short period of time. But it's not like those big name stars are drawing significant money at the moment, as PPV business in general was better when they were on FSN several years ago and they average just over a thousand fans for their house shows.

I thought wrestlers running and booking wrestling companies was the norm (see Inoki, Baba, Choshu, Hashimoto, Misawa, Mutoh, Gagne, Watts, Lawler, the Funks, the Von Erichs, Ole Anderson, etc). Really, for all the criticism Jeff Jarrett gets, I think it gets lost what a huge deal it was for him to secure such great financing and a great TV deal. Despite having a much hotter product and being a slicker wheeler dealer, Paul Heyman wasn't able to do it. Long term, the company should survive, as it runs on a shoestring budget, barring ratings going into free-fall and Spike canceling them. The chances of that happening are pretty slim though, as we've seen that a badly booked wrestling show with some star power is guaranteed to get good ratings for Spike. Really, TNA's biggest problem may be that they have little incentive to shake things up, try a new booker, push new stars, because their future is pretty much secured.

I don't know how much of the credit for copying ECW should go to Bischoff when his booker Kevin Sullivan used his wife, Nancy, who worked for ECW until the spring of 1996, to crib ideas to experiment with on Monday Nitro, and I think was even in direct contact with Paul Heyman at the time (who IIRC supposedly pushed for Eddy Guerrero to beat Big Show for the World title).