Bix

It does mesh with Dave's "Vince was more lucky than a good promoter" post a few months back.

The weekly Ft. Worth shows were at the Will Rogers Coliseum, with the Will Rogers Auditorium used when the Coliseum had another event. They ran major shows at the Tarrant County Convention Center.

There was a a Honma-Jun Kasai match from a comm. tape that was really good. Has anyone here seen Yamakawa vs Usuda? Always wanted to see that but never got the chance.

Right. It's a bigger deal than the figure since that was to head off Jakks, but it's still not a deal with WWE that requires Vince or anyone else in the company to work with him. I don't think it's the public association that was ever an issue. We wouldn't have ever gotten the DVD that way.

Still not a direct deal with WWE presumably but more telling than the Jakks deal since there's no competitor to cut off.

The WM19 match takes everything in the WM17 match and does it better. The 15 minutes of listless, loose brawling is gone. Rock's sloppyness is gone since he's a much more polished worker at that point. The finisher kickouts are still there. WM17's advantages are just being in Texas and being the peak of the boom period.

I don't think anybody here has criticized the idea that Bryan's doing the show, just that the stated reasoning is goofy and the idea that he's insisting on moderating the forum for the related topics and nothing else is ridiculous.

Think about how many people couldn't figure out how to set the clock and program the timer on their VCR (which, after they started using on-screen displays, got MUCH easier). Does Dave really think that these people were messing with splitters and A/B switches so they could record one show while watching another (granted, Nitro had a replay...)? DVRs add a second tuner and simplify the process to a ridiculous degree.

Wut. Heaven forbid that anyone sully the faux Coast To Coast AM discussion! You must behave when Bryan starts a ("secret" because it's not in the podcast feed even though it's on the main page...huh?) show about conspiracy theories! Also, should they really be referring to "Sgt. Karl Stern" when that's not his real name? Karl Stern isn't a police officer, his real name that I forget is. To anyone who braved this thing, did Bryan forget to capitalize "black panthers" or was he talking about actual big cats? I'm really afraid of the results if Bryan and the "Dragon King" were actually talking about The Black Panthers.

He's not insulting you, just pointing out that most of the time you come off as a Todd Martin sock puppet.

That wasn't really a personal attack on Bryan, especially by the standards of Dylan saying things about Bryan. On the scale of things that *do* warrant personal attacks on Bryan, there are worse things, but this is bad.

Beast, you're missing the part where Bryan doesn't think it's a scam. That's why there was no follow-up about it being stupid to give Mantell time to plug it.

Also: People have complained about the FCW tryout camps being scams. Anyone who's ever charged anyone to work has been branded a scammer/conman. Frank Goodman was largely reviled for his dependence on ticket sellers who had to sell X amount of tickets to work the show and were often untrained (when an untrained ticket seller in his first match was paralyzed from landing on his head taking a German suplex, Goodman fled NY for Florida.) Also, assuming Ryu Nakata's gonna be there, it's highly unlikely that anyone who's bothering to do this would be good enough to go to Noah. I decided to take the time to transcribe the F4D discussion for reference since I'm planning on doing a post at Cageside post about this mess... Bryan: "Anybody who thinks this is a scam does not know what a scam actually is. I don't see the difference between this and, for example, WWE running a tryout camp where they bring in 80 guys and one of them is going to get a contract; who they probably knew was getting a contract before they even arranged this whole thing. You're gonna fly yourself in, you're gonna pay several hundred dollars, and you are going to get nothing out of it except maybe advice from John Laurinaitis about how you need to work on your size. In this...this tournament, you fly yourself in, and you pay $250 to enter. However, if you win, and granted, this is very unlikely, you're going to get this...this championship belt, you're gonna get the flight to New York, to the hall of fame, and...and all of the stuff that goes along with that. Which, granted, is not a whole lot of stuff but it's still something. For everybody who does not win, for your $250, you're going to get a chance to compete in this deal, and potentially work several matches...in front of a large crowd of people. And granted, I don't know that there's going to be 50,000 people watching the matches, I'm sure there will be 50,000 people at the Germanfest, but if there is wrestling there, you're gonna draw a pretty damned huge crowd to watch your match, which if you're an average indy guy, for example here in the Pacific Northwest, this will be by far the biggest crowd you ever work in front of. You get to do it three days in a row, several times, perhaps, per day. When it's over, you're not just gonna have John Laurinaitis telling you 'Ok, you need to put on some size and get a tan.' You're gonna have every single one of these judges, and as Lance noted, there's a lot of them, they're gonna write up a sheet with a lot of helpful advice for you. You're gonna get helpful advice from a variety of different people telling you what it is you need to improve if you need to go farther. Furthermore, on the entry form, it tells you exactly what's going on. You must pay $250, fly yourself down, and that's all you're guaranteed to get out of it except for these things from these judges. There's no scam here. It's not like you're...you're...you're going to be told something that isn't going to be delivered or you're being promised money you won't get, those are scams. This very clearly says what you're going to get for your money and if you don't wanna do it, you don't have to do it. So, the idea that this is a scam...anybody who calls this a scam has not been around wrestling very long, because there are a shitload of legitimate scams in professional wrestling and this is not one of them. This is essentially a clinic with a lot of big names that are going to evaluate you and maybe at the end you're going to get a flight to New York; most likely you're not going to get anything except the experience, and as a young worker, this is very valuable for you. Lance: "Yeah, you can argue if you want that it's not worth it, but you certainly can't label it as a scam if he's telling you ahead of time 'You pay money to come do this, this is what you get,' then he's being up-front and honest, he's not scamming anybody. If he's promising people that they're going to get contracts and this and that, then yeah, he's scamming people." Bryan (interjecting): "Which he never did." Lance: "I listened to the show, and it's...you get to come here, you get to see...all these legends will see you work, they will give you some feedback, and again, one guy gets to go to the Hall of Fame thingy at the end of it all. So yeah, he's being completely up front. If you think paying to go wrestle at this thing as silly, then don't go." Bryan (interjecting): "Yeah." Lance: "There's a chance that you might actually have Harley Race or...umm...Danny Hodge...or...Stan Hansen or any of these other great veterans out there to see you, even if you just wanna get to meet them; there are a lot of guys that'll pay money to go to a meet and greet, you'll get to see these guys, some of them will see your match and offer you some feedback, so you can certainly argue it's a worthwhile chance...and like you say, guys spend more money on...on other things that aren't gonna be any more productive for them, so if you think it's worth it, then go for it, have fun!" Bryan: "I mean you guys have to think about wrestlers and what they do nowadays. I mean some of them have to drive quite a ways for no money to work...to work in front of no people. [Giggles] You know what I mean? I remember when I used to drive down to Portland...every single weekend I would drive the 200 miles or whatever to Portland. I would work for Tito Carreon in the hardest fucking ring I've ever been in in my life, absolutely free, in front of like 20 people, just so I could get some experience. If I were a young guy that was actually trying to make it nowadays and I knew...alright: For a plane ticket and 250 bucks, I can go potentially have matches all weekend in front of a big crowd of people, and have guys like Harley Race there that are gonna give me advice afterwards? I'd jump at that opportunity." Lance: "Yeah, I think, too, it's sad, because again, paying someone to work is a sad situation, but if you are someone who is just breaking in and is only able to find a booking a month or a match every couple months, this is a chance a chance to work several times in a short period of time...uh...not the end of the world. Y'know, even if you were just looking at...say you were hoping to...y'know...get enough experience to get to a WWE tryout at some point in time at one of these tryout camps and y'know, if I go to this thing I might pick up a half a dozen or ten or I don't know how many freakin' matches you have to have, but it is an opportunity to get lots of matches and work different people, umm, so it certainly could be beneficial, 'cause that's another hazzard of, again, if you're career is once a month in Tululip Championship Wrestling where you wrestle the same dude every month, y'know, you log 2 years in the business with 14 matches with one guy." Bryan: "Yeah." Lance: "And that's not exactly the world's greatest experience builder. So if...umm...if you feel this is worthwhile, again, especially if you live close and don't have to fly in, then it might be worthwhile. And again, at the end of the day, it's each person's option, and, like you say, this dude's not lying to anybody, he's telling you you gotta pay the money." Bryan (Interjecting): "No one's forcing you to do this tournament!" Lance: "Mmm-hmm."

Even if he intends on delivering... ..this is what I was thinking: It's clearly a sold show. He has no risk. He's using this gimmick to make extra money while booking enough guys to be able to constantly run matches throughout the festival. He's already picked up an extra $16,000. The seminar is just to keep it from looking like more of a con and it can't be close to a worthwhile seminar with so many guys.

After looking over everything a little more, I saw that there is a seminar with the judges (included in the entry fee) on the day before the festival starts, which is something and not overpriced as far as those things go, but with so many people attending, how good could it be?

This is such a blatant con that I'm puzzled as to why they would give him the time of day.

He had 900 subscribers already in early '85.

Sometimes I don't think Dave really gets wrestling fans, especially WWF/E fans: One of the biggest angles of a period where the company was huge, which led to an even more memorable moment (Jake's sunglasses coming off revealing the white eyes after he DDTed Brother Love), ran for many months when the company was still huge, was blown off at a Wrestlemania with a new to the WWF gimmick match that had a ton of heat and he thinks nobody remembers it? Really?

With the money Dave was making (and spending on trips and phone bills easily) and how broken his typewriter was for the last year or two he was using it, it's amazing that he didn't get a computer (or at least a standalone word processor) until 1991.

FWIW, Loss accidentally deleted the Lessons of 2006 folder instead of merging it.

Depending one's definition of getting over in a number of territories, Lawler has: Memphis Knoxville Alabama Georgia Florida San Antonio Hawaii Dallas AWA NJ/PA indies in the early '90s SMW (Separate promotion in Knoxville area two decades later) WWF But he's no Dominic DeNucci!

"The Memphis fans are used to a completely different brand of wrestling than the rest of us. It's not really wrestling, it's more wrestling with a comedy flair. For the most part I've felt the same way about Memphis wrestling as I feel about Indoor Soccer. I love soccer, and indoor soccer is not soccer, but I actually like it better than soccer."

There was definitely going to be WWF involvement in the UWF. The belt Maeda won at MSG said "UWF" on it.

I'm still a Sheepherders fan, but as someone who's seen the whole Crockett Cup match w/ the Fantastics, the legend of that match, seemingly their best, is in fact a lie based on just the end of the match and the post-match brawl being included on the home video. Even the brawl wasn't as good in the context of the match being disappointing.