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Nikita in 1987 may have been before folks in the business started talking about aids and juice. Ditto Dusty at Starcade at the end of the year. Was there *any* juice in the Lex-Barry matches? That was in the era where WCW was strange in delivering juice. You'd think a cage match would have it, but then they duck it. Might have been Flair. What I remember about that cage match is that Luger was in the hospital for staph, and what had been intended as a double juice bloodbath was changed because of Lex's staph. Ric still hit a gusher, though. John

Pretty fucking ridiculous. "Journalism" is fantastic these days. John

Bix: might be time to change the subject line in the first post. This seems to be more than just WC. John

I thought Judgement Day was simply to extend the feud. They'd done two matches between the two with Mania (which the rebooked into a four-way), then Rock's win at Backlash. Suspect there was something in the back of Trip's ego head at the time of wanting to match Shawn going 60 minutes. If I recall Mania '96, it was to give it a special edge. Shawn had gone long in the Rumble twice. Bret had the Iron Matches with Flair and Owen. They'd just done a cage match on the prior IYH. Not just any Bret-Shawn, but a super special Bret-Shawn. John

Good Friends, Better Enemies PPV: Cover Story has: PPV report has: And looking at the PPV "roundtable", looks like I liked that match quite a bit. John

So how does Oliver know so much dirt about wrestling? John

It's rather sad that Dave was sitting on this. We pay good $$$ for the WON to get this shit, and Yahoo pays him good $$$ to get this shit. What justification could there be for sitting on something like this? John

Corny early, but the knocks on Dunn got even stronger after he left. Heyman was a pretty obvious complainer as well, and perhaps Ross. Who knows who else. John

Sidello was sort of the "Kevin Dunn" of WCW for a lot of years: she was always get blamed for everything that was wrong in the company. I exagerate on "everything". But the name would come up all the time in the WON, like Dunn's does, when someone would have a bone to pick with not being able to do something or when something sucked. I always wondered which 2-3 of Dave's sources just hated the shit out of her so much that she always took the fall, or felt the need to toss out every fuck up of hers. With Dunn in the early 00s, it was a little more obvious. John

It picked up when they went to the Bret-Taker-Nash three way. I think it was a modest increase if anything in Dec (and possibly little when considering seasonal variation). But after they cranked up the threeway (and Shawn returned), things picked up as they started an upward swing that carried into the first half or so of Shawn's title reign. It would slow later in 1996. John

I wonder if Mr. Belts Maker (wasn't/isn't his name Parks?) hasn't joined the HD Era. John

My thought would be to ask Bryan or Dave whether it was an open secret to some in the wrestling business. They know most of the secrets in the biz. If they say it was widely, or even sorta-semi-widely known going back X years, then I'll take their word for it. Or ask Wade in PM or on his board. You're over there as well. It looks like it's an airball here, and we do have a few posters that know a fair amount of dirt here. John

I don't find the "matter of factly" very compelling. I've had people "matter of factly" say it about it. That New Jack turned out "right" with something tossed at Wade really isn't relevant. Slow down and think about it: it's not likely that New Jack is someone that Wade would share it with. If New Jack, of all people, got it second/third/fourth hand it would have been all over the place given the circles New Jack ran in. Similar to RF (pre-TV outting) and Ryder's were over the years. With Wade it just wasn't, other than the typical stuff that gets thrown at most sheet writers from people in the industy. John

On Montreal, one would have thought it was Patterson, but he's been outted for his involvement for a long time. I mean... wasn't he out extremely early in working with Bret on the specific finish of the sharpshooter reversal? Don't know who else it could be, other than perhaps Ross? Or someone who was sorta close to Bret? On Keller, I don't think it was widely known in the business, if known at all in the business. New Jack calling him gay means nothing: I've seen and read people in the business call Dave, Bruce, Wade... pretty much every writer gay. It's a meaningless throwaway line, and folks in the business think all sheet folks are non-macho. New Jack doesn't strike me as someone who would be hip to it. If anyone in ECW "knew", folks would have seen stuff written about Wade online at the volume of what we saw on RF (long prior to the Catch A Predator spot) and that we've seen on Ryder. Lord knows there were enough people in the circle of ECW that hated Wade and would have pushed it to the point of it being like those other two. I think the ins-and-outs of the WWF's and WCW's old drug testing policy and procedures is a great open question. I think most of us who followed it *know* how it worked, but it's never been nakedly exposed. On the WWF's, JJ is the one who knew where the bodies were buried. Then when he went back to WCW... he probably knows over there as well. He seemed not to be talking. Dave knows vastly more than he's ever written about it, and I doubt even he knows all the details of how they played the games, avoided testing obvious people, and at least within WCW create a system that let lots get away with it while cracked down on others. Would be interesting to know how high in the WCW and Turner organizations they knew what was going on with the policy. Obviously we know that at least one high ranking WCW management member knew how it was gamed given how often he was glassy eyes and slurring words on camera. John

I tend to agree with what Will says: if you want to talk about current wrestling, talk about current wrestling. You have lots of options to deal with in a thread you start on it: If no one responds, don't worry. You're enjoying current wrestling and posting your thoughts. Don't worry if someone else is agreeing or disagreeing. Just have at it. If folks respond, ignore the negative *if* it's just busting your balls and the product. If you're tired of arguing with folks on the current product, don't shut up about it... just shut out the folks that annoy you about it. If folks respond positively, there's the folks you want to talk with. If you can handle the critical thinking about the product, and have some criticism of it as well, then wade into it with people you can talk to and again ignore the folks that you'd end up arguing with. That's what the other thread was about: watch what you enjoy. Don't be shy about posting/writing about it. If there are folks you don't want to talk to, ignore them. If there are folks that you like talking with, do it. When they don't exactly agree with you, don't go on a bender about it: none of us agree on everything. There really isn't any reason why if someone here likes Raw, SmackDown or NXT that they couldn't start a weekly thread on it. Dittos TNA, ROH, etc. John

Not terribly surprising. I think if you look at each sport, it's fairly obvious why they break the way the do. I think a good person looking deeper in the numbers (such as Nate Silver) had the full internals of the data, they'd point out the age, race, sex, income and regional area of the supporters of each sport and show how they tie in with other known data. Wrestling fandom is *largely* younger people, especially relative to say Golf. Younger and likely much lower in income to golf. More mixed racially than golf as well. That all break more for Dems, and the "less likely to vote" is very telling. Older voters are more likely to vote, while younger voters are less likely to turnout (2008 election notwithstanding). The only ones that are moderately surprising are Grand-Am racing (which really doesn't matter as it doesn't have a pot to piss in... unless the GOP pollster that ran this thinks Indy is Grand-Am racing, inwhich case there might be a Danica factor) and Monster trucks (don't have a clue on that one... would love to see the demo breakdowns). The rest are pretty obvious things, often (like Golf) several pretty obvious things. Baseball and the NLF come so close to the middle because of the broadbase of fans across the country, and also how they drop major teams in pretty much every major population base. I suspect the only think that keeps the NFL at a +8 rather than in the Dem column is that woman viewership pales compared to male. If one were to compare the male numbers for the NFL with the national male numbers... I wouldn't be surprised if the NFL is *less* GOP than the national norm. Simply because of pulling in strong northeastern numbers, and also being urban based (Houston for example is more Dem than the rest of Texas). Hence college football being so high for the GOP: Nebraska and OK and Alamaba may not have a strong NFL base, but have a huge college football base. Skews. I'd quibble with the conclusion of the piece at the National Journal. I don't think they're thinking deeply enough about this. Spending the majority of your ad money if you're the GOP on things like the PGA and NCAA Football and NASCAR is preaching to the choir. It's like spending ad money on Rush's show: these folks already buy your bullshit. You need several ad strategies: * aimed at your base to help their turnout (fire them up) * aimed at the alleged indies to either pull them over to you or turn them off the opponent and stay home * aimed at the other party's voters to discourage them and keep them home We're much less likely to see folks cross parties lines these days than say in 1972 or 1964. If we were, Obama would have been up over 60% of the vote when you slow down and think about it. So the GOP spending money to try to draw over Dem voters (and the opposite for the Dems trying to draw over GOP voters) is just blowing money. In turn, running tons of advertising in your base isn't needed. You want to spend there enough to keep people engaged, and better still fired up. But those folks are going to vote for you anyway. You're looking to spend money on the middle one. When people study the "indies" deeper, the more it's seen that they aren't in the majority "indy". Most of them are "leaners" to one party. The GOP Leaning Indies frankly are GOP Voters. They're often people who've been GOP for a long time, but things in the past X years have made them less hardcore about the party. When they don't like the GOP candidate, they simply don't vote rather than vote for the Dem. It's not disimilar on the Lean Dem side of Indies, but a bit moreso on the GOP Leaners because that's where a good chunk of the increase in Indies has come from over the past 4-6 years. You want to spend your money on media that has a lot of these folks: you want to give the folks who Lean Your Direction a reason to turn out. You want to give the folks who lean in the other direction a reason to stay home. You want to sway the true indies who swing from one side to the other to not only turnout, but turnout for you. John

I use to use the phrase "The Shawn Show". Match laid around for a while (say Shawn-Jarrett), then it was time for the Shawn Show down the stretch. I don't recall a lot of people at the time saying that Jeffey looked great in the match. It was Shawn having another good match. A contrast would be Jeffey-Benoit from Starcade. Most people thought at the time that Benoit carried. I haven't watched it recently enough to offer a different opinion on that. But there was the thought that whether Benoit carried it or not, Jeff looked *good* in the match. It was a good Jarrett match. John

I only watched the second Rock-Hogan once, way back in 2003. I recall being disappointed by it. But I loved the Mania match (still do on rewatch), so it may have been in relation to that it was disappointing. John

One might add that Shawn was probably ripping on Kerry as well. John

Shawn crapping on Hogan was fun. Even more fun was Hogan never jobbing for Shawn. John

Another version, which was posted earlier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyN5sAShqOA Most of the same stuff, though a few different ones. Rock vs Hogan > Shawn vs Hogan + Shawn vs Flair That said, I like the two Shawn-Taker matches at Mania a good deal for "current" WWE product. John

Chris Jericho has/had problems? I recall the arrest earlier in the year, but Jericho's end of it was pretty minor. The was the issue with GLAD a while back. The brawl with fans, though it looked like the fan(s) were jackasses there. Unless I've totally forgotten something, I don't think Jericho has ever raised to the "Eddy" level of having problems... or even several levels below that. John

John

I can't remember Dave ever going to the "go fuck yourself" spot before. John