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The Front Row Section D boys were *smarter* than ECW Fans.

That's a difference with me. In the 70s when I came across wrestling, it was all Shitty because it was Fake Sports. I didn't want to watch it. When I got into it in 1986, it was specifically because I could see the "good" in matches, mic spots and angles. If JCP had been all Boogie Woogie vs Paul Jones' Army, I would have bailed out instantly, even while admitting that the *angles* were pretty good in that feud. It was the good of Flair and MX+Corny that sucked me in. After that, picking up on other heels being good (like Arn and Tully), because they were the ones doing the heavy lifting of making things good. It took until Windham came that I really saw a Face akin to how I saw the heels, which then led me to rethink folks like the R'nR and be prepped for guys like the Fantastics coming in. It really was always about Quality for me rather than it just being Wrestling. A big reason I wasn't a huge fan of the WWF: it's quality was quite a but below JCP. :/ Also why I instantly love All Japan and New Japan when I lucked into it at the end of the decade.

The people I discussed it with as a kid/teen did basically the same thing. We would discuss what made the most sense if it happened, what was likely to happen, and what we hoped would happen. I remember seeing Greg Gagne beat Nick Bockwinkel on TV in 1979 in a non-title match as a soon-to-be-ten year old. When they began promoting the July Minneapolis card with a Greg-Bock main event, I was already surmising that it would be cool if Greg won the title, but he wouldn't win it in that first match, guessing whether it would be a two or three match series, and knowing if it got to a cage match that Greg wouldn't win the title but he would win the match. I was doing that without knowing anything about the concept of booking as it related to wrestling, in terms of the terminology. Good post.

That's me paraphrasing his much earlier post on how the internet had a massive shift in how he sees pro wrestling. He knew it was a magic trick before, and after the internet he understands how the magic trick is done, which is the true greatness of pro wrestling. How he sees the greatness of wrestling now, how he waxes poetically about it here and on the podcasts, is a byproduct of the Interwebs and guys like Scott Keith. Unless Jerry thinks that 1995 Jerry could wax on like he does now. On the flip side, I pretty much got the magic trick and how it was done by watching Flair and the MX with Jim Cornette back in 1986.

I think that captures as clearly, and without the heat, what a lot of us are saying. Also agree on the other forms of entertainment/hobbies. And that. I just this morning ran across a 7 year old post quoting a piece that walked through how full of shit Jericho was about his SMW days in his book. So off base on so much that the person doing the walk through (a SMW employee) wonder how screwed up Jericho was on the rest of the book covering areas that didn't have first hand knowledge off. Terry Funks book, as entertaining as it is, has a similar issue with Japan: there's a variety of things that are wrong that you wonder about the non-Japan stuff.

Those guys are generally full of shit. I think people for years have been telling you that all those shoot interviews that you use as a basis point for you understanding of pro wrestling and pro wrestling history are screwing with your mind. Terry Funk talked about getting "smartened up" when he got into wrestling. I think we all can generally see that as bullshit: if I'm smart enough in the early 70s to see Pro Wrestling Is Fake in my first viewing of it, there no way that a Son Of A Promoter could be around if for years, week after week, and not see it's Fake. And know a majority of ways that it was being faked. That's just old wrestling bullshit. There *are* elements of "tricks of the trade" that a wrestler will learn when he gets into the business: how to properly throw that Fake Punch, how to Bump, the best methods for selling, how to run the ropes, how to apply holds, etc. Those really aren't terribly relevant to a Smart Fan. I could give a shit about how to throw a fake punch. When guys are getting all worked up about the various awesome ways that Jerry Lawler throws a punch, do you really think they care to ask Jerry, "So... technically, how to you get your punches to look so awesome?" Some perhaps, but most Lawler fans don't give a shit: the fake punches look awesome is all they care about. I don't get why you're unwilling to admit that the changes in fandom have been happening for decades. You first started trying to point to Scott Keith and the late 90s. When people pointed out to you there was an Internet before that, and he was a part of it, you blew that off. When people pointed out to you that before the internet, there were the newsletters, you blew that off. When people try to tell you that *they* as fans thought that way before reading newsletters and/or the internet, you blow that off. Basically what it comes down to is how *you* were, Jerry... and you believing that you are representative of All Smart Fans. You happen to look back and see that you we're terribly smart to pro wrestling before you came online and found people talking in Hardcore Smart Fan ways. Ergo, no one could possibly have been Hardcore Smart Fans except in the way Jerry became a Hardcore Smart Fan. Which is... Bullshit. Some people *did* follow the same path as you. A pretty fair number, though still a small number of overall wrestling fans because most wrestling fans truly don't give a shit about wrestling in a Hardcore Smart fashion. But there are also fans who didn't. They became Hardcore Smart fans through the newsletters, or the old hotlines, or through friends at shows who read the newsletters. There also were some, pretty clearly like Lee as he's walked through, but also like me and certainly like Yohe, who simply because Hardcore Smart fans because it was nakedly obvious to them what Pro Wrestling was all about. And they still loved it, in fact for some of those very reasons of what it was all about. They'd think about the quality of matches, and which wrestlers were better at putting on good entertaining matches. They'd notice who made people look better. They'd fantasy match make / promote over a long period of time, not because they were thinking Lex might beat up Flair if they faced, but what cool matches they could put on for quality, drawing and storyline. They would get pissed off when the Varsity Club broke up and Rotundo became Captain Mike because the Varsity Club was a cool gimmick, and Captain Mike with that stupid had was a dumbass one. If they saw Nash as Oz prior to reading the WON, they thought it sucked because... it SUCKED, but because Nash could or couldn't beat someone. Gator Scott Hall? Fucking stupid gimmick. And on and on. I get that you needed the Internet to figure out the greatness of pro wrestling, Jerry. Just please don't be so ego-centric to think that everyone else needed it... or even needed Meltzer to figure out the rich, wonderful, stupid greatness that is pro wrestling. Of course I was 20 when I got into pro wrestling, and looking back it would have had to be dumb as a fucking brick not to see what it was.

This is important because the fans expected Inoki vs Choshu to be the big epic match on the card. Instead they got this at the last minute: Antonio Inoki beat Riki Choshu (6:06) via DQ Big Van Vader pinned Antonio Inoki (2:49) In back-to-back matches, which pissed them off into a riot. It wasn't that Vader beat Inoki quick that pissed them off. It was the whole clusterfuck of how they felt ripped off by what the promotion was doing. They got fucked out of the match they wanted, it was treated as a throw away, and then the main event was horrid. Time to ripped the joint apart.

Jerry, you make it sound like that sort of stuff is a byprodcut of an era that has long since passed, and that's just not the case. It's not a regular occurance, but that kind of stuff still goes on nowadays. Shane Douglas grabbing Gary Wolfe by the Halo, any of the Dudley Boyz riots in ECW. Concrete and I have told the story on this board before, of Brodie Lee KOing some dipshit who took a swing at him in the parking lot. Not to mention that there have been fights and riots at concerts over the years. I toss that out so avoid the expected response if I were to mention Heysel: "Well... that's soccer and it's Real. That proves my point: fans only get violent when it's Real, not something they know is Fake Entertainment!" No... people get violent when they're fuckwads and pissed off at something.

You lost me at the mythical 1968 smart fan part. How do you know there weren't smart fans in 1968? Just because you imagine there weren't doesn't mean it's true. I could just as easily convince myself that there were smart fans in 1968 simply by stating so. This is true. If you talked to Yohe, he'd tell you he was the same general type of fan back then when he was heading off to Nam as he is now. In fact, most of the backstage stuff doesn't mean a whole lot to him. But thinking about work and booking, even if you had different names for them (or even no real names for them)... that's what he was all about back then. For the most part it's still what he's about. Edit: as a side note, it's also how he tends to look at wrestling when doing historical research. He's looking for patterns in the booking, what's is doing well, what isn't, who is drawing, who is bombing. If you ever get him talking about Ed Lewis, in very short order he'll start talking about how Lewis was a boring wrestler (i.e. mediocre / uninteresting / poor worker), and how it was pretty well spelled out in the newspapers by the writers covering his matches, and if you read closely in how they describe the fan reaction to him.

The newsletters and WON specifically were a major change. Though Mat Results, which pre-dates the WON by a year or so, didn't work Kayfabe. It just didn't bother about working/booking too much, and instead was focused on sharing news from around the world, largely results based. We're so far removed from it that I suspect it's not something Dave gives a lot of credit to. But the ability of that first year / 18 months of Mat Results to sustain being able to send our news on a monthly basis covering both the US and Japan likely played some role in Dave doing the WON and taking it to the next level.

So you think that Dave just woke up one day in late 1982 and suddenly understood pro wrestling? He had been thinking that way for a decade, and talking with fans/friends that was for years. That no one had an idea to make a hardcore magazine/newsletter doesn't mean that there weren't hardcore fans. It takes a lot of effort to make and sustain a publication. In turn, hardcore fans have always been a small niche, and one that's not been easy to communicate with in large numbers until recently. That's the change of the Interwebs: mass, quick, wide scale, wide spread communication. Via the web in 1996, I could communicate instantly with someone in Japan, someone in Georgia, someone in Virginia, someone down the highway in California. I could toss some up, and get instant feed back on it. But going back... I could pick up the phone, ring Yohe and spend 3 hours talking about pro wrestling with him. Same with Hoback. And I'd been calling them for years before I went online. Hell, I went to Japan with Dave before I got online, and talked to "smart" hardcore wrestling fans over there.

This.

Watch Clash 1. Those fans dressed in suits rooting for the heels? They were the legendary Front Row, Section D and they existed in the Carolinas before there was an rsp-w and "IWC" nonsense. Yes. And I was with my brother in the 80s. Yes. As did I with my brother when explaining why Flair and Cornette were great. Did I use the term "selling"? No. I'd use terms like "making the good guy look good." Or point out what we now call selling and say Flair was great at taking a beating. Yohe has talked to me about who he liked in the 60s and didn't like in the 60s, and a lot of it comes down to work. He's a Destroyer Fan, after all. When ever Dick Hutton's name comes up, Steve will talk about how he didn't think much of him in the ring. For years Steve would talk about Baba being good, and we'd just shine him on that Baba was a crappy worker. When we started finally watching older Baba matches and saying Baba was a good worker, Steve would get "That's what I was fucking talking about and you guys never believed me." Not to me. When Dave started writing in the National Sports Daily, I thought: "Fuck... finally someone who thinks about this shit like I do." When I subbed to the WON after that, it was more of the same. That's why I keep trying to get across that the "IWC" wasn't some on/off switch. The WON itself wasn't fully an on/off switch for anything other than Coverage of wrestling: it hadn't really been done that way to that scale. But Dave himself didn't suddenly start thinking that way when he began the WON. He'd been thinking that way for years, and had a circle of friends who thought that way. Enough that Dave eventually got the idea of doing the WON and selling it to them. In turn, a good number of WON subs in the 80s and early 90s came to the WON already knowing the general concepts that Dave was talking about. I know that was the case for me, Yohe... it was the case for Bruce Mitchell and his crew in the Carolinas... for a fair number of other people.

Well, since the original concept was that the Internet Changed Everything, it seems like I can now point you to a 1983 edition of the WON as evidence of people discussing wrestling in a way that the IWC does and be done with it. But to be consistent: There has been a long, on-going evolution of how fans view pro wrestling. It's not a binary evolution that was 0 before the Internet and a 1 after some point in 1998/99 websites started popping up or when you came along. Nor do those of us who were hip to hardcore wrestling fandom prior to the internet claim it was a 0 prior to the WON and a 1 after that. The evolution is probably far closer to 0 to 10 or even 0 to 100. The 0 is probably the very first pro wrestling match, and the 1 is probably within a few days when some people knew it was worked. I exaggerate only a bit, as those of us who have gone back and researched pro wrestling into the 1800s have found discussion of Wrestling Is Fake in major papers all the way back to that point... and frankly keep finding it the further back one wants to look. There is no definitive 1. I'm sure Snowden would agree to that notion when he was looking at it. People are always finding new stuff, though for the most part aren't even bothering to look for it since we proved long ago that it was worked *and* exposed as a work far longer than people thought or wanted to admit. The WON isn't 2 or 3 or 4 or even 10. RSP-W, Prodigy and AOL Grandstand Wrestling weren't 80, with Website 90 and PWO the magic 100. It's all a continual evolution.

I got my copy of Fall Guys before I started reading the WON. Ran into it in college, checked it out over the summer and made a photo copy of it on a good copier at my father's office.

On specifics: I agree to a point. But with knowing that Pro Wrestling Is Fake, it's more akin to knowing the Magician Didn't Saw The Lady In Half. It really isn't all that important to know how. I mean... a lot of it is obvious in Pro Wrestling: those punches don't land. Those kicks don't land. The heads don't hit the mat on a piledriver, except when it's an accident. :/ But the specific mechanics of how to land a suplex without hurting someone... well... in the 80s it's not like a lot of them looked like they hurt. More tricks were exposed in 1998. But really... think about pro wrestling in 1930. How many tricks really needed to be exposed in wrestling? Or even watch some 1950s wrestling with Russ Davis announcing. What tricks aren't there to be seen? :/ Again, I could pop in Backlund vs Valentine from MSG in 1981... and I'm not sure what deep, hidden secrets I couldn't see? There were things that later became a little more common, like chairshots to the head. Well... guys getting hit *always* looked up, saw the chair, and put their arms up to block the blow... then sold like they took a chair to the head. We invented the term "unprotected chairshot" when idiots stopped doing that. But the process of protecting one's self from a chairshot exposed that it wasn't a really knocking of a guy out with a chair. It's why stuff like Dusty's chair to Big Bubba was a "holy shit" moment: they used a worked chair and Bubba didn't put his arms up. We were so use to protected chair shots that when one wasn't protected, the instinct was "holy shit"... until we watched it again and got that it was a movie-style worked chair. Is it suppose to be a trick on how you apply a chinlock or headlock without hurting the opponent? Kids figured that out on their own. If you were an adult, it looked obvious. More complex things that we talk about now such as "building heat", "shine", "hot tag", "face in peril"? Those are wrestling conventions like movie conventions. Do you really have to know about movie structure to know that movies are some form of storyline? Do you need to know how a Stunt is done in a movie to know it's a Stunt? That's what pro wrestling was like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hC3o20LgPs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdqrEcUhWNE That was 20/20 back in 1984/85. It never was as popular as 60 Minutes, but it averaged about 14M viewers a week, and probably spiked for a show like that given pro wrestling was semi-hot. Given the lawsuit, it's also likely it got re-run at some point. Anyway, there have been various things like that over the years. That's the most famous, but there have been all sorts of articles.

Dory is the least boring he's ever been against Horst Hoffman on 12/15/75. And it's Hoffman who is making that happen by forcing Dory out of being pure Dory. Seriously, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhfTJ9RPvqI Fantastic match.

What one can do is compare Brody's selling in that match with Hansen's. One can also compare Brody's "working with" the opponents with Hansen's. When you do that, Brody's nonsense is nakedly obvious. The only thing that surprises me is that why everyone wouldn't find it nakedly obvious. Two monster heels on the same team together against the same opponents in the same match... it's right there in front of one.

This, and the rest of Childs' post.

The rest: I don't think there's any thing wrong with giving thought to people from an earlier generation, even if your pimping from the earlier generation might not hold up. When I was 13-15, I thought Jim Rice was a great, great, great baseball player. The stats backed it up: he averaged .320-41-128 in those seasons with another 31 2B and 12 3B thrown in to boot (or .320/.376/.596 if you're looking at BA/OBP/SLG). That's a whale of a hitter. And he was recognized as such at the time: 4-1-5 in the MVP voting, an all-star, etc. What fewer people paid attention to in that era: .350/.405/.699 Home (Fenway) .290/.347/.498 Road Or putting it into Triple Crown numbers, dividing the three year totals by 1.5 to give a "season": .350-55-153 Home (Fenway) .290-28-102 Road Which isn't surprising given Fenway was an excellent hitters park. Rice wasn't a horrible hitter on the road, but he also wasn't a .320/.376/.596 hitter. Those overall loaded numbers were a function of playing in Fenway. Was Rice a Bad Player? No. He just was overrated. Quite overrated. Does it ruin my early-to-mid teens to have discovered that? No. It's good to know. In turn, some of the other guys that I liked turned out to be better than I thought (such as Ron Cey), and some that I thought were great were born out to be historically great (Mike Schmidt). Jim Rice was thought of as great in his time, by fans and sports writers. He eventually got into the HOF. That doesn't mean that one can look at him and factually point out why he was overrated. Or point out that his two old Red Sox OF mates, Lynn and Evans, were quite likely better... well... most high end analytics would probably say that also is a fact. There's nothing wrong with that, similar to looking at Brody over the past 15-20 years and finding the old consensus about his greatness as a worker to be lacking. The rethinking of Brody has been around since the late 90s / very early 00s when his old matches started getting circulated more, along with the old matches of his peers like Hansen and Terry Funk. That included the famous tags you point to. A decent number of people watching them for the first time, along with a decent number of people watching them again for the first time in a while, found his work to be pretty lacking. It was going on long before the 80s AJPW set was done. I'm pretty sure over on WrestlingClassics is a copy of the write up I did of Brody & Hansen vs Steamboat & Youngblood, probably from 2003 or so, and I pretty much ripped the living shit out of Brody in it. Again, significance is important. But Hogan-Andre was significant, and you'll get a wide variation of what people think about the match. Back in 1987, Dave thought it was dogshit. It's possible he's changed his mind since then, which would be ironic given this discussion.

I'm not sure if Dave really meant argue that Brody is an indisputably great worker Dave would call Brody one of the greatest working big men of all-time. You'll never be able to talk him down from that one. I've been there in person when someone said to Dave that Hansen carried the team and Brody wasn't as good as people thought. It went over like a ton of lead bricks. The last few times I've read Dave talk about Brody, he does not appear to have changed his mind.

The entire WWF Golden Tag Era from 1985-91 was overrated. I would have been happy to simply get "solid" matches out of them. As an example, that's all I wanted out of Hogan, and I tended to get more solid matches out of Hogan than the tag division.

I wonder what the financial planning benefits would be for the WWE to be sold now rather than go through the Estate when Vince and Linda drop dead. Of course it depends on whether Steph & Trip and Shane want to stick around controlling it after Vince and Linda are dead. Since Shane appears *not* to want to, there's an interesting trust question if he wants to cash out. It's strange to ponder why Vince would want to sell off his baby when he seemed *not* to want to Joint Venture through the years on stuff like the Network.

Good points by Mike and Lee. There are levels to understanding pro wrestling. There's the initial one: This is some Fake Shit. That really doesn't take long, if say you've watched people punching each other. Be that in Boxing, or just in real life. Wrestling kind of stood out pretty quickly in that regard, especially in the days when wrestlers worried a lot less about being stiff on their punches. Then you wander into one of the secondary directions: How They Do It Why They Do It The first are things like guys "catching" the other guy, or the guy getting suplexed "jumping" into it, or the guy getting gorilla pressed exerting his own muscles to press down and "help" maintain the press: There are countless things like that that pop out to you if you're paying attention. Eventually you pick up on guys stomping their foot down when punching to get a nice sound that plays to the crowd. Do you pick up on Blading, even without seeing the Blade but figuring out what's going on? Or do you know it's *not* blood caused by the Punch or Posting, and instead roll through your mind the various ways they might be doing it? And on and on. The Why They Do It gets to Booking. If you know it's Fake, then you know the Storylines are Fake (even if you don't know the word Storylines), and you start wondering why shit happens. Why did Orndorff turn on Hogan? So that they could have Matches. Steamboat ate the move on the cement against Muraco, and the ring bell against Savage... it was to set up matches. When the Dream Team held the titles, Good Guy teams challenged for the title. When the Bulldogs held the belts, Bad Guy teams challenged for the title. Etc. John