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At least in the mid 90s, with the singles pushes of Bret and Shawn, you were guaranteed a quality match or two on PPV. I'm also sure Meltzer was a big fan of Raw in '97 with the rise of Steve Austin as a mega babyface and Bret Hart's heel turn.

Mick is still married to Collette, apparently so happily that their family would be too boring for their own reality TV show.

Another thing: all this exaggerated talk about Hogan being a terrible wrestler but still managing to get over, yet no-one points out the pink elephant standing in the Congress room, that his appeal was in part due to his steroid enhanced physique. His very basic match always finished with a post match posing routine and you need more than just incredible psychology to pull that off.

Reading the comments to Michael Scherer's article, some of the romanticism of the past and the vilification of Vince McMahon is a bit much. Substance abuse problems didn't start in 1984 when Vince McMahon went national and he was far from the only promoter that happily pushed steroid abusers. EDIT: Link to the article for Bob.

Pritchard was actually fired once before in the summer of 1991, before being brought back a couple of years later. That he was such a long term employee isn't that surprising given that he worked behind the scenes for Houston wrestling before coming to the WWF and was brought in for a management role, not just as talent. It's a bit depressing that fat old Dusty has a good chance of outliving all of his much younger counterparts in that match.

Yeah, I don't think that answer is much worse than this one by Vince McMahon, which no-one has complained about online to my knowledge:

The problem is I don't see WWE being content doing WCW 2000-level ratings, when they are used to doing significantly better. You can't place the blame for WWE's recent hotshot booking solely on USA when WWE did a record rating on MyNetwork TV for Smackdown's recent debut on the network but they still subsequently felt the need to give away a series of major matches (including the first match between Taker and Hunter for over 6 years) because the debut rating was down 27% of what they drew the previous week on CW.

Yeah, TNA seems on course to live to regret their Main Event Mafia storyline after Kurt Angle returns to WWE, Sting retires and fans eventually reject Jeff Jarrett's superpush.

Wouldn't having their own cable channel make them even more concerned about TV ratings and advertising rates than they are now?

You have to love Dave Scherer not crediting where the information really came from. Why, of course, Dave Meltzer of Yahoo! Sports. See, this article here: Lesnar blasts UFC toward record year.

Let's not forget that Dustin's heel turn was prompted by Brian Pillman's death and that the original storyline was for Terri to dump Dustin after being Pillman's apparently unwilling sex slave for 30 days, probably the worst man-being-evil-to-women storyline they've ever done.

Actually in front of some crowds it isn't very difficult to get the fans to cheer for male on female violence. Not that the fans are all to blame, as wrestlers, bookers and promoters will happily exploit and cultivate the basest instincts of their fanbases, partly because they share some of those base instincts. The bullying of women behind the scenes, like Sunny, Sable, many of the Diva Search contestants, Lilian Garcia, etc, and that it is tolerated by management is frankly disgraceful and in such an environment it is unsurprising that women tend to be portrayed in a negative way.

This is also on the set. I think that on the whole they've done a good job with their selections.

The funny thing is that now WWE has repackaged the Great Khali as a comedy character and relegated him to the mid card, he'll probably get tons of votes for worst gimmick and still get plenty for most overrated. There's no pleasing some people...

Tim's comment was based on what was written in the last couple of pages of this thread: The greatest things ever written on wrestling message boards

I don't think that's quite fair, as the Monday Night Wars quickly spurred the WWF to start experimenting with a more hardcore and risque product too, though it wasn't as effective as Vince was clearly in two minds over whether to change directions or stay with the safe conservative formula that by and large had worked for more than a decade. At the same time WCW was experimenting with the tactics you mentioned we have Bret Hart crashing through tables and blading on WWF PPVs (I'm skeptical about Bret's claim that the blading in his match with Bulldog wasn't booked by Vince, but even if it wasn't they played up the blood big the next night on TV and even showed the climax of the match uncensored a few weeks later on free TV), Shawn Michaels collapsing in the ring on Raw, Goldust hitting on Razor Ramon leading to a vicious out of the ring assault by an irate Ramon, Diesel swearing and flipping the bird on PPV, Vader assaulting aging WWF President Gorilla Monsoon and Mick Foley debuting as a disfigured freak who had been abused by his mother as a child. This wasn't a company willing to take risks?

I think Dave's argument would be that the seeds of the collapse were already sown by April of 98 and the only thing that stalled the company's collapse was them lucking into the Goldberg phenomenon before inevitably screwing that up too. To blame Nash's booking solely for tanking the company ignores the fact that the reason he got the job in the first place was that the previous booking team were burnt out, had no fresh ideas and had been doing a horrible job for some time. Of course, the company was technically not unsalvageable at that point, but it was like a runaway train heading for a crash. That the crash was so bad was due to all the bad decisions they made in a panic as things started to go pear shaped.

The nWo angle ended in April 1998? I know they split them up into two factions then, but I wouldn't call that ending the angle. Really the angle didn't end until the spring of the following year when it fizzled out without a conclusion after Hogan took the opportunity to use his heel coolness to turn face before taking time off for a knee injury and reverting back to his Hulkamania schtick on his return. The problem wasn't so much the angle per se, but that when it came time to put over the babyfaces Hogan either half assed it (Sting), sabotaged his potential opponent to the point the match lost all of its appeal (Bret), avoided the match even though it would do big business (Nash in the late spring/summer of '98, Goldberg in the spring of '99) or used his booking power to ensure that when he did do the right thing in the ring he remained the star who the whole promotion revolved around (Goldberg). The problem with the Main Event Mafia angle isn't that the babyfaces defending the promotion won't get put over strong in the end, it's that the young babyfaces are being castrated so that the aging boss can return to save the day.

What BK said. If he wasn't there at the time, then there is a good chance he was just guessing as to why he wasn't used as a full time wrestler right off the bat, with the bias being that Vince is a creative genius and doesn't make mistakes, so obviously it must have been part of some clever plan to make Piper a bigger star.

I would take what Pritchard said with a grain of salt given that he was working for Paul Boesch in Houston at the time.

And Randazzo is an angel. I think most of us would agree that he tends to be more snide and patronising in his writing than Dave is. Part of what I wrote (the bit in brackets) was tongue in cheek and I agree that a lot of what Randazzo wrote about Pillman was quite a bit off. That said I do question whether Dave knows 100% exactly what went down with Pillman, as he obviously feels, given that he's been worked by his friends in the past. I'm sure Dave was bugged by the factual inaccuracies written about Pillman, but even if those inaccuracies had been corrected before printing I still think Dave would have been bugged with Pillman's portrayal in the book, because of the negative tone.

Lilian gets picked on again. Very funny.

Just because someone is right doesn't mean they aren't also being snide or patronising. I'm sure Matt Randazzo isn't dense enough to have already forgotten the factual mistakes Dave Meltzer pointed out in his review of his book in the Observer six months ago. The comment to me came across like Dave Meltzer got his feelings hurt for some reason (why, I should have been the one quoted about Brian Pillman and Chris Benoit in WCW, not Bruce Mitchell or Wade Keller).

Speaking of Heyman it's two years to the day of the disastrous December to Dismember PPV and him leaving the promotion. I'm starting to think that there's an outside chance he'll eventually be brought back into the fold, given that interest in the product is tanking, the Heyman haters are slowly falling one by one (Lagana earlier this year and Bruce Prichard this week) and Heyman seemingly using the UK Sun and the wrestling sheets as a covering letter for his job reapplication.