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We all know that there are people who will defend Brody to the end of time, such as Dave.

Overrated: Brody, still Underrated: probably Baba Not saying Baba is a great, great, great worker. There are plenty of mediocre matches of his out there. But we've spent 30 years letting his "awkwardness" get in the way of the fact that he was a pretty good worker, knew what he was doing in there, and worked pretty well within the limitations of his body.

Lebron James? Messi?

What Snowden is saying.

In turn, I don't think the majority of fans think in these terms: "I really wish that Cesario was booked in the mid-card rather than booked in the prelims. If he's stuck in the prelims, he's never going to get to the main events. Fucking Triple H!" Instead it's more likely to be: "I like Cesario. I really wish they did more with him and he was in the title hunt. I'd love to see him take the belt from Orton." I don't think the majority of fans talk about booking like the do on places like PWO.

I actually think fans are smarter than you're giving them credit for: They don't need the Internet to tell them it's Fake and that Matches Are Made (i.e. booked). And that they didn't need the Internet to tell them that back in the 90s, or really even the 80s.

There are more people online all the time. There are always going to be more people wrestling that stuff. More people read about sabermetrics now than in 1999 or 1989. Hell, more read online now then read Moneyball. It doesn't mean that the revolution started today, or with Moneyball, or with Rob Neyer getting hired by ESPN (which some people point to). That's the general point. But it's not an "internet explosion" thing. It's something that's developed in last 3-5 years. Mainstream sports and pop culture sites (BR, SBN, Uproxx, Grantland, etc) doing wrestling coverage is probably part of it, but I'm not sure that explains all of it. Which was my point: more people were reading smarky stuff in 1999 than in 1995, and again in 2005 than 1999, and again in 2014 than 2005. Grantland reaches a wider audience than SKeith did, who reached a wider audience than Dave did in the WON, who reached a wider level in the National Sports Daily than he did in 1989, and in turn he reacher more people in 1989 than in 1982 before he started the WON and was just exchanging letters or phone calls. BR, SBN, Uproxx, Grantland and an extension of a process that had Mayhem doing something local in the Carolinas, or Canoe up in Canada integrated into a large website, etc. That's the reason I tossed out Neyer and Moneyball. In sports you can get more info and quicker contact than you could earlier in the revolution. I can get United info fast over on blogs, and tactical analysis, and scouting reports on kids and transfer targets. But part of something that has evolved over time rather than just waking up one day and the world had complete changed. File sharing changed and destroyed the music business. But... it didn't invent music sharing. The music business had thought cassette tapes would do it, and CD's and burning CD's. File sharing on some level is the revolution, but we can't really ignore that it's an extension of prior copying and sharing. Nor ignore that it really wasn't the concept of file sharing (such as Napster) that killed it, but the eventual technology change (massive increases in Download Speed / ISP Connenction along with massive improvements in Cheap Large File Storage especially on Portable Devices) that really took what had been a "less dangerous" concept into the truly deadly concept. Pretty similar to pro wrestling content. It wasn't the traders of the 80s and 90s who were dangerous, or really even the early 00s. It was Fast Internet and Mass Storage that took the earlier infringing concepts and made them cheap, easy, fast and relatively *not* very dangerous. John

I think everyone knew deep-deep-down, but like Loss I'd try to find ways of proving it was real as a kid. My dad was always highly critical, always tried to demonstrate the ways it was fake and to this day will say "you don't still watch that shit do you?" However, I do remember a time when there were hot playground discussions about whether it was real or fake. But it was more like a wild rumour or something. So there was an inclination there that this was all fake. But coming online was revelatory. I remember being absolutely fascinated in the late 90s reading about the insider terminology, and it was genuinely quite thrilling to piece together things that you'd vaguely figured out as a kid; having it all broken down and explained was something of a shift in the way I thought about wrestling. And this is what I'm talking about ultimately, it's shifting to a more analytical mindset where you're thinking about booking decisions, and work and so on. That just didn't happen in, say, 1995 -- when admittedly most kids I knew had just stopped watching period. I reckon in 95 I was still pretty much a mark kid with my own "theories" on how it worked. By 97-8, after reading online my perspective was completely different. I have no idea how old you were in 1995. If you were 12+ years old and still didn't know it was Fake, color me surprised. If you were 18+, color me stunned. I never worried about "theories". The punches were fake. I'd watched enough boxing and fights in school and the neighborhood to know pro wrestling punches were laughably fake. One could move onto other stuff that was clearly acting like you'd see in the movies, but it really wasn't something I needed to roll over in my mind to determine if it was fake: crappy play acting punches were enough. Never had it, so I don't bother trying. In fact, quite the opposite: accepting it as Fake Entertainment allowed me to look at it as Entertainment when I hit 20. At which point it struck me as wildly funny Entertainment when watching half baked. Then when I sobered up in a few years, it still struck me as entertaining Entrainment. Week in-week out? I never thought pre-internet crowd reactions were always mind numbing week-in, week out. In turn, in the internet days they're up and down. Not wildly different. Go to an indy show with a host of much more Smart Fans in the building and get an idea of what a real mass of them are like. The last time I went to a WWE house show, they weren't lose to the same of what a PWG show was like. The reaction was because they all thought they knew how it would be booked, not because they thought Taker was invincible. I think the fans didn't think Taker would Lose, not that he wouldn't be Booked To Lose. Despite knowing it's worked, most fans in the stadium don't really think in terms of Booking. They're going to a show to be entertained, think about who they like and want to root for, who they don't and want to root against, and who they think will Win and Lose. A kid cheering Taker today really isn't any different than a kid cheering Hogan in the 80s. It's not like PWO is full of 8 year old posters. I still don't see how the impact of LOTS of fans being exposed to insider terminology and the inner workings of the business can compare with your old man saying "you know it's fake son right?" It's not the same thing. I really don't think it's lots and lots of fans. In a build of 10K, how many do you think really know or care about terms like Work, Workrate, Shine, Heat, Bumping, Blading, etc? Has it impacted a number of fans? Sure. But so did reading PWI and knowing that the WWF ran the same card with the same results night after night after night. Or the TV shows exposing wrestling as fake, or Vince himself admitting it. It's changed the way that *some* fans engage the product, and different fans in different ways. Seriously? If we'd gone to a WWE card say four years ago before the WWE made Trips' behind the scenes power a *storyline* (i.e. via CM Punk), do you really think if we polled those 10K fans in the building that many of them would be talking about Triple H's "booking"? As far as kids talking about the concept of Booking without knowing the word Booking, I gave you an example of people in the 90s thinking that way without the internet feeding it them: a 12 year old explaining to us why Vince was booking Nash to the WWF Title.

So you're not going to admit when you knew it was fake? The age you were, the year, and whether it was because of the Interwebs? Okay... I think crowd reactions evolve over time. I've seen reactions in the Internet Era that are pretty much the same as ones I saw in the pre-Net days. It's easy to do the same thing today. Work and injury angle, send the guy home for two weeks off television. Which is essentially what they did back in the day. Ric Flair wasn't really in the hospital after the Bounty Hunters took him out. They just worked an angle. So what about the fans who were stunned at Mania when Taker lost? They knew it was fake. It's the Internet Era. There were people doing the equiv of crying. So... Yeah, that's what I thought. Wrestling fandom is constantly moving along. The tech changes as well. When you look at it in an extended way, it's largely incremental changes building off what came before, rather than sharp revolutionary changes. People want to see the sharp changes, and tend to lose sight of the elements shared with what came before. Which is why we have discussions like Hulk & Vince vs The World when people try to raise what Steve Austin did above Hogan. They see a revolution with Austin, while missing that pretty much every element in Austin's "revolution" existed before him, and the vast majority of them had been laid down in the Hogan Era. This Internet Revolution? The vast majority of it is just a continuation of what had been changing over the prior decade or two. Which to a degree built off some of the things that came before it. It's a wheel rolling, not an on/off switch.

I suspect that the entire country didn't care that Yankem was Kane. Nor, ironically, has it really matter over the past 15 years that Kane was Yankem. The WWE has largely gone on the Kane character for him, and fans largely look at him as Kane. Even more recent ones like Cesaro/Claudio: other than the elite 1% hardcores, who really cares at this point? It's not terribly different from the Six Faces of Darsow. A number of fans in the 80s got that Krusher Khruschev went to the WWF and became Demolition Smash, even if the WWF didn't acknowledge it (and I don't recall JCP ever taking an explicit shot at it in the other direction). Did the Apter Mags say something about it? Maybe... I don't recall. But there were times when things were kind of obvious, and Khruschev-Smash would have jumped out at me regardless. Kayfabe? Eh.

I get that it's closer, but it also leaves little margin for error. If a loaded up Summer Slam doesn't pop a good number of new subs, then you have NoC as a fall back to run another hot match/angle for. The WWE doesn't seem to get regularly pushing things to sustain numbers. You look at HBO, and even with Game of Thrones being the current huge monster draw, they're constantly looking not only for the next biggie, but also for other shows that fill in the balance of the year to give viewers the belief that they're getting good content in those stretches.

On Jesse's comment about Barnwell... good god has he had an awful run of articles since the end of early part of Free Agency in the NFL. The FA pieces had been solid, and pretty informative of who was out on the market, who fit where, what teams might be overpaying, etc. Then... He ventured horribly over into Soccer. He did an awful piece on "fixing" the first round of the NBA playoffs without bothering to look at whether the 1st Round differs greatly from Later Rounds over the past decade or so. He's dabbled in baseball, not of it very good. He ripped off Simmon's gimmick to do a Pitching Championship Belt which was terrible. This week it's The Battle for the Best Sports Movie Villain of All Time, which is brutal. Rather than stick with a core strength of Football, he's trying to be Simmons and write about everything, and work gimmicks. It's the NFL... there's enough material to write about 52 weeks a year. If he wanted to stretch himself out as a Writer (rather than as an Entertainer which seems to be his desire), he could work on a major feature piece a month in the off season while letting someone else (Mays) cover the weekly beat. Instead, it's places like Deadspin that have put out strong feature pieces on Football. It remains disappointing since I thought his work within the season had been good.

Summer Slam is the key Big Show around the time the six-month subs were up. It looked like the most natural spot to try to get in new subs to offset those who don't renew: load up a show, do a free week leading into it where you can also push the PPV.

Who said the Internet didn't affect the business? That's quite a different claim you're raising not compared to what's been talked about in the past. Is this another Jerry Morph Job? It's been imagined for 90+ years. I mean... wrestlers complained about Meltzer killing Kayfabe back in the 80s and early 90s, before the internet mattered. We use to laugh at it back then, and point to Vince admitting it was fake. Take youself, Jerry. How old were you when you knew pro wrestling was fake? How did you figure it out that it was fake? Did you need the internet and a site like PWO to tell it to you? Again, I'd be happy to point to that old thread so that people can see that you were wrong from the start to the end of it. I was hardly the only one point it out in that thread, either.

Right, by "everything" I was really referring to everything from the big two. I don't know about other countries but in New Zealand you could only rent NWA tapes from the late 80s and nothing from WCW, not even a single commercial tape. It wasn't until they started showing delayed free-to-air coverage of the 1997 WCW PPVs that we saw WCW events. So, I definitely remember Keith being a source for past WCW PPV info, and of course his FAQ was influential. SKeith had a project of going back to do "Rants" on old PPV that happened prior to his time of during current Rants. And yeah... it was a useful resource. A number of other people/sites did the same thing, trying to backfill their content. It was cool, and would get people to talk about old stuff. Though... SKeith's "history" relating to those older shows often was a laughable mess.

That's the dude that got catfished for months by someone pretending to be Tammy Sytch, right? I still remember the revelation on 411mania (I think) like it was yesterday. Must have been ten years ago. 411mania... that was the thing. I'm trying to recall if the morphed out of another site as well. There really were a ton of them... Rantsylvania? I know Keith (and possibly Hyatte) were there, before he (they) went to 411mania. I think Rantsylvania, or the predecessor to that site (can't remember what it was called) was where I first saw Michinoku Pro. Someone uploaded a low quality video file of the famous 10 man tag from October 10th, 1996. Was blown away (while watching it on a tiny video player at my local public library). Yeah... Rantsylvania was one of them. I couldn't remember if Rantsylvania was before 411, or after it. And if there was something before Rantsylvania that SKeith wrote for in the even earlier days of websites. There were tons of sites. The ones that were large size, which in turn spawned others as folks broke off from them. There were guys who moved all over the place, like Zach. There also were tons of Geocities and AngleFire sites. If was a sprawling thing.

There were Casual Smart Fans before the internet go big. We'd run into them all the time when going to WWF and WCW shows. We (as in Yohe, Hoback and I) would be talking our hardcore talk, and part way through the show some of the fans around us got the idea that we Knew A Lot. So they would start peppering us with questions. They weren't Mark Questions. They were Casual Smart Fan questions. They knew it was a work. A decent number of them could read-between-the-lines on the booking. They had an understanding of "pushes" without knowing the word. Some we "work" fans, without knowing the term: "I like Wrestler X because he does a lot of shit in the ring..." One of my favorite wrestling memories was a teen explaining to us who the next WWF Champ would be, and why. It was 1994, and he said Diesel... and then went through very non-mark reasons of why Nash would be champ relating to his push, what the WWF liked out of champs, etc. Kid was spot on, and the funny thing is that Yohe, Hoback and I hadn't thought of Diesel as the next champ at that point, but really should have. Kid ended up bring right, on pretty much everything he said. And he was like 12 years old. The same type of 12 year old was the guys we were posting with in 1999, and eventually mophed from Casual Smart to Hardcore Smart... probably really fast given how sharp that kid was. This really isn't Casual Smart. Guys like CRZ fit into this, and he was a Hardcore Smart Fan. As were countless guys we talked to in RSP-W, AOL GSW, and on message boards after that. The fan base was "smart" long before the internet. I never was at a show where I didn't seem people who knew it was a work, or who didn't toss "smart" stuff at the wrestlers. They weren't all WON readers, or even very many of them. I can't remember any fan in the 80s asking me if I read the WON. The net simply made it easy for those fans to find others like themself, in places like RSPW and AOL, etc. Star ratings? The word "work rate"? I doubt the majority of fans online right now give a shit about using those things. It remains a small number, just like it was in the 80s and 90s. The WON made it easier to find other people who viewed wrestling like you did. In turn, the Usenet did as well. In turn, AOL and Prodigy did as well. In turn the websites did. Now the podcasts and youtube and everything else do as well. It's just another cycle on a wheel going around and around on down the road. When? As long as I've been a fan, which is back to 1986. I was that type of a fan before I started reading the WON, and before I started watching Japanese wrestling. How? Because Pro Wrestling is fucking Worked. And it was fucking obvious to me, and I found it entertaining as all fuck. When I went to shows, it wasn't hard at all to look around and see that there were people just like me having the same type of fun. How Many? Who the fuck knows. We don't even know how many wrestling fans there are right now in the world, and how we'd throw them into buckets. About the only thing we know is that there still are very few wrestling fans Like Us. Not even 1%. When did Kayfabe die? Vince admitted on National Television in the 80s that it was fake. There were other national pieces on it being worked. There was no Internet in the 80s. Beyond that... I know wrestling was worked in the 70s, even when I didn't watch it. I've also dropped a quote on these boards from the 30s by a Hall of Fame promoter in a major newspaper admitting that it was fake, and that his job was to give a fan something that entertained him no matter how he saw it: fake or real. Kayfabe has been dead forever. Much of the business was too silly to admit that the majority of fans knew it was a work. I'd be happy to use Mr. Searchy to find the thread and point people to it so they can determine whether your specific claims turned out to be correct, or staggeringly wrong over and over again. Jerry: the business was always exposed because people could see that all the punched were FAKE. I knew that when I was 6 years old. I don't claim to be the smartest kid in the world, so if I could see it... a hell of a lot of kids (and adults) could see it. Do I have any additional evidence from the 70s? Not a single kid in my rather large circle of sports friends thought it was real. They all knew it was fake. Their older brothers did as well... as did their fathers. If wrestling ever came up, which was extremely rare, it was met with a "Fuck that fake shit". The business was exposed back in the 1800's. We've found it in newspapers. It was exposed throughout the early period of the last century when cities and states forced the matches to be called "exhibitions". Etc, etc, etc. Well... since Vince talked about the screwjob on TV ("Bret screwed Bret"), you probably did unless you were stone cold stupid. The average fan knew how wrestling worked: It was fake. Wrestler A was picked to win the match. Wrestler B lost it on purpose. Wrestler A and Wrestler B weren't really trying to hurt each other, and just trying to have a match together. Wash, rinse, repeat. There always has been Smart Fans: those who knew it was a work, generally how it was worked, and still loved the shit. They generally got concepts like guys jumping to the WWF because it was bigger then the promotion they had been in. You couldn't be in AWA Land and not get the clear notion that Vince had gone to war with the AWA, was stealing their talent, and out to destroy the AWA. You didn't need the WON to explain that to you: Hogan and Mean Gene and Heenan and others were over in the WWF now, and the WWF was moving into AWA Cities. Again, I knew that shit years before getting my first WON. It was nakedly obvious to me what Vince was doing. If you want to invent a new phrase Casual Smart Fan and think it's something new, you need to understand there were plenty of us back in the 80s and we really were just Smart Fans. Hell, Yohe would explain that he fits the bill on that, and would have back in the 60s. Newsletters, and then the Net, made it easier to find others... and to go further off the deepend on insider info and shit to watch. Hardcore Smart Fans popped up as they got exposed to the WON or other sheets, and later when they got deep into the pool online like most folks here. The majority of the audience still doesn't talk about star ratings, workers... and probably doesn't talk about "heels" either. They just think the heels are Assholes or Pussies. Sceptical is the wrong would. It would be like calling someone "sceptical" of Santa Claus. People knew the shit was fake. And they still liked it. Or... the never watched it because they didn't care to watch Fake Sports. Star ratings still are something that the Hardcores really only care about. Even most Smart Fans don't care about them. John

That's the dude that got catfished for months by someone pretending to be Tammy Sytch, right? I still remember the revelation on 411mania (I think) like it was yesterday. Must have been ten years ago. 411mania... that was the thing. I'm trying to recall if the morphed out of another site as well. There really were a ton of them...

This is true. We ate a lot of shit for it. On the other hand, in some circles it remains the same: Puro Snobs is a term people on this board have addressed in this decade. SKeith really didn't review everything. He didn't do weekly Japan TV, or even the big shows. His stuff on Japan was limited to the WCW-NJPW shows that were PPVs over here. I don't even think he did weekly ECW. He certainly never touched regular Lucha reviewing. SKeith was your standard Big Two-centric writer, who at least initially was a big WWF guy.

I forgot about Hyatte, and had been trying to remember his name as well.

There are more people online all the time. There are always going to be more people wrestling that stuff. More people read about sabermetrics now than in 1999 or 1989. Hell, more read online now then read Moneyball. It doesn't mean that the revolution started today, or with Moneyball, or with Rob Neyer getting hired by ESPN (which some people point to). That's the general point.

I think you are completely missing the dynamic that existed at the time. Battle lines were drawn all over the place. There was no such thing as consensus. Michaels and Hart, in particular, were both part of vicious and continuous debate for as long as I can remember. Not only were there vocal critics of both men (5 moves of doom, etc) but the other man's fans certainly weren't acknowledging his rival as an all-time great. Add in the fact that WCW fans would shit on both reflexively—and you hardly find consensus. Exactly, on all three points: * there were the Super Hardcore Work Fans debating Bret vs Shawn This would be in the same context of debating Kobashi, Benoit, Kawada, Flair, Liger, Hokuto, etc. Similar to the type of discussion seen in the big SmacksChoice poll, or that people talk about here. * there were Bret Fans vs Shawn Fans Mostly the WWF Fan brigade, but you'd also get the US Fans who'd cross over watching both programs. You're Bret Fan typically hated Shawn, and your Shawn Fan hated Bret. * WCW Fans vs WWF Fans How generally hated the guys in the other promotion until they jumped.

Those people would be politely asked to lurk and learn. Good lord... I haven't heard that one for ages.

It's almost as amusing as "Manami Toyota was a lesbian because she wasn't interested in me backstage." I'm glad I didn't write that one.