jdw

That's the first one that comes to mind. He was pushed heavy by the Apter mags when he was in Florida as the next big thing.

There really wasn't the incentive to go on, i.e. Make Money. Wade would post some shills of the Torch on rsp-w in the mid-90s, as did Alverez. Wade's were usually invitations for someone like Scherer (or his socko group during their heyday) to take potshots at. There wasn't a lot of incentive for Wade to get involved in discussions: they just take time, and are hard to shape in a way that get people to buy your stuff. In turn, he like Dave had their hotlines which were making them good money. There really wasn't a ton of money in websites initially. Folks who made some coin were the ones who sold out to places like Sportsline, though that was a limited amount of money. Wade and Dave were never going to go that route. Wade started thinking about it in 1998/99, was pretty smart and focused on what he wanted initially, and launched with what was a decent site at the time. The net bubble burst, and ad money didn't go where one would have expected back in 1998 and early 1999, and he did a good job of adjusting over time. The problem with following the Sportline model is that you're giving away loads of content for free. A lot of the content is coming from people you're paying chump change to, or nothing to. Wade giving away loads of content for free would have taken away from what he was making his living with. Bit of a catch-22 there. Overall, he did and has done a pretty decent job of adjusting to the issues of an online presence over the years.

Kunze was the definitive Meltzerite of RSPW. There were Herb didn't see eye to eye on with the WON, but they were minor. Something like Hogan-Warrior tends to get across that Dave isn't quite the workrate purist that people believe he is. Herb was a big puro guy, and ironically Scherer was as well (and Lucha too) before going all-in on ECW. The thing is... when spending all that time going back through the RSPW archives from the years before I hit it, there was a surprising lack of depth to the puro discussions. The change came in the spring/summer of 1996, and it really was a night & day change. I recall at some point someone pointing back to some Kunze piece on the juniors as a support of some such point. When I went and read it, it was pretty jarringly mediocre/errant. Kunze was an influence of direct Meltzerism in the group. But there was also a lot of indirect influence by guys like Scherer and his gang, even if they didn't see it themselves.

On IWC, I've always found it stupid because there is no real "IWC" as some singular, homogenous entity. In the end, they're just Fans. The parallel is that there is just barely a PWO Community. There's not a ton of consensus. People come at things from all sorts of directions. There's very limited agreement on modern wrestling. There's wildly divergent opinion on older wrestling, or what we even like out of wrestling. Etc, etc, etc. That said, the posters here are quite a bit closer than what one would find if we move out further into the larger massive swamp of wrestling sites online. So "IWC" strikes me as about as meaningful as "Peoples of Earth", and someone trying to draw lines between folks in Iran and folks in Alabama. Just kind of dumb ass. As far as Dave's reasons... who knows On "smark", it's a term created by people in the business to call "smart fans" marks. It wasn't a term of affection. Not exactly sure why one would like it.

Keith was in the first wave of internet smart marks, and hardly any of them were influenced by him. Keith had influence on the wave(s) after that when it started moving to Webpages, but the influence of Dave had already taken root by then. In fact, it had taken root in Keith's own writing simply because that whole first wave for the most part were influenced by Dave. Yeah, I consider the 94-96 AOL/webpage explosion "first wave IWC" because the internet was incredibly niche before that. Keith and people like him were super influential on that generation of kids/teenagers/young adults who were getting PCs and internet in their homes for the first time. You dinosaurs who were around on RSPW and Prodigy and bulletin boards I'd consider "proto-IWC" Those are just the labels I'd use, not diagreeing AOL really didn't exploded until later in 1996 and into 1997. Even there, you had the original first generation people who ended up as the forum leaders on AOL and Prodigy (where Ryder ruled) who ran the shop, and influenced the wave of newcomers who came in when relatively cheap internet became more common. Keith was very much *of* the first generation, his being in RSPW. Then people from that generation like SKeith and Scia and Scherer and Ryder moved onto webpages, along with slews of other people who moved onto message boards like Dean & Co. Those first gen people influenced the second gen, and on down the line. It's really hard to call the RSPW and AOL/Prodigy Leaders dinos when major players out of those communities became leaders read by the generation that came after.

One of two things: * either someone else would have come along * the internet would have still exposed the business, but in a different way It's possible that someone else would have come along. They might not have been exactly like Dave, but the 80s were the era of Bill James, and other niche newsletters/publications in popped up. I recall ones on Asian cinema that you could get in newstands, and ICE popped up covering the CD business and ever so slightly the bootleg business (there were others deeper undercover that covered boots). Someone liking pro wrestling would have come along. Whether they as quickly got undercover that Dave did... who knows. But if you were a fan of any of those other types of niche publications, you'd tend to be surprised by how deep they got and how connected they got with people in the industry. ICE got published scuttlebutt about reissues, box sets and comps usually well in advance of Rolling Stone or your local news paper. You'd get obscure stuff out of the publications covering Asian cinema, where the editors/writers had a network on the other side of the world in a period before the internet made it easy. Given the popularity of wrestling, it's likely someone would have gotten into it if Dave hadn't already been in as the guy. If someone hadn't come along... The net would have quickly exposed the business. TV tapings getting reported instantly, which means angles and title changes are. Silly things like titles being defended on house shows after they changed at the tapings but before they aired. Injuries popping up. Eventually the evolves into more info, and then people getting contacts in the business. This likely would have all happened before 1996/97 when AOL went huge, gave away unlimited minutes, and the second generation of online people happened. There were enough people around in the years before that sharing info. If there was no weekly WON to crack open for news, people would have put their heads together trying to track stuff and figure out what was going on. In fact, I seem to recall coming across someone who went to the Atlanta TV tapings in the Watts era when they were doing the 2/3 fall matches, and he's post his info. So... it would have happened on some level.

Love it. Then again, I always thought the use of IWC and smark were dumb shit as well.

Yep. Again, even if Keith didn't rip off Meltzer or pattern himself in that way, if you look closely it's all there.

As someone who was actually online for the last part of the early days of the IWC, and spent way too much time back them going back to read earlier stuff... Meltzer was the Beatles, or Elvis, or both. There were people who "hated" him like Mr. Schemer, but you'd have a blast going back several years before the turn to see that they were on the same page as Meltzer, and citing him for news and who good workers were to correct others. SKeith wasn't Bowie. He didn't have that level of respect. He wasn't the Monkees since he wasn't a direct Beatles clone. He wasn't Zep because he really didn't have that level of lasting impact nor the respect. He's probably The Eagles if they happened a generation earlier. Popular, influential on some scale but not really a major one since his important elements are derivative of others. Past his prime, but trying to live off the glory years. Suspect that Keith would be perfectly happy with being the Eagles of wrestling writers. A lot of money and fame in that, even if you suck.

Keith was in the first wave of internet smart marks, and hardly any of them were influenced by him. Keith had influence on the wave(s) after that when it started moving to Webpages, but the influence of Dave had already taken root by then. In fact, it had taken root in Keith's own writing simply because that whole first wave for the most part were influenced by Dave.

Indirect, not direct. I don't think SKeith was a regular sub of Meltzer at the time Scott was posting on RSPW. The Meltzer influence in RSPW would have been more on Kunze, and Keith wasn't exactly a Kunze follower. The indirect influence was more than Keith was a member of a group of smart fans who talked about pro wrestling. They came at it from a lot of different directions. Some were WON subs, and while not Meltzerites certainly had been impacted by Dave's "methods" for a lack of a better word. Before the internet blew up with AOL, most people in that pool had some of Dave rubbed off on them whether they knew it or not. On some level similar to the impact that Dean Rasmussen has had, even among people that never read him or even know who he is.

Dave's greatest impact was covering wrestling as "news", rather than as "storyline". The "news" in stuff like the London mags was just storyline. 30 years later, Dave's global impact doesn't matter a lot to the vast majority of fans. What's going on in NJPW isn't relevant. On the flip side, 30 years later kayfabe may not be dead, but has been on life support for more than a decade. More than that, when we need to remember that when something is treated like news, it gets "analyzed". He pushed that, and 30 years later it's important.

Ebert had a massive influence on film reviewers. More so than Dave had on people talking about wrestling, which isn't to say that Dave didn't have an influence. Roger had Siskel as a foil, and it "worked" with them together. But Roger was the star. Would it have gotten over as much without Gene there to push him (in the papers) and act as a foil on TV? Probably not. But Siskel was more akin to Piper or Savage to Roger's Hogan, with Roger being the man. The only difference is that while Piper and Savage might have had their heel fan kids who wanted to grow up to be them, no one really wanted to grow up to be Gene.

Deadspins' timeline at the bottom of this is a riot. Lots of links off to other articles as well: http://deadspin.com/how-the-ufcs-biggest-show-of-the-year-turned-into-a-fia-1594743611 John

Great Bobby Fulton story.

So he just burned every bridge there? :/

Aja was mentioned earlier. A little surprised that Bull wasn't, since her work that made the 1990-92 YB's was pretty strongly praised if I recall. Hansen is something of a classical big man, but people in the business kept getting bigger in his time as a wrestler that by the 90s our minds probably think less of him as a big man. Perhaps one of the defining moments of that is his match with Hogan... where we tend to forget that Hogan was a Big Man early in his career when teaming with Stan, and over the decade transitioned into being "HOGAN" rather than someone who fit into any bucket of wrestlers. So Stan... hard him in a bucket. Agree with Childs on Taue. He worked as "big man" against Kikuchi. He didn't against Misawa, Kawada, Kobashi... really didn't against Jun and instead just worked as "vet" to Jun's young guy. Treating Taue as a Big Man would force us to treat Jumbo as one, and Jumbo tended to fit into too many different buckets in his career to be classed as a big man.

Ryder still is? I know Scherer has his site. Kudos to him for making a living off of the business. There is some irony to that given how he use to frame Meltzer and Keller in contrast to his own "I'm just a Fan" nonsense.

That was a hoot. Bob took him to local court in Louisiana with one of the dumbass complaints that I've ever seen.

Dave likes what he thinks is "good wrestling". For both him and the overwhelming majority of his readers in that era, Japan and the NWA were better wrestling. "Mark" would be strong, since he bagged on wrestlers who lost it regardless of whether they were in Japan, the WWF or JCP/WCW. If you asked him now about Yatsu's career, there's a 95% chance that he'll talk about how great a worker he was early in his career, and then how he got fat and lazy in the 1987 range. It's little different from it sticking in his head that Macho took nights off on house shows. He's as likely to bag on Waijima as a worker as the Warlod if you bring up the names to him. That's the case with everyone looking at other people's rating of matches. I like the 1981 Backlund vs Murcao match in MSG and their 60 minute match in Philly. Will doesn't agree with me on those, rather strongly. It doesn't mean that we don't both like the heck out of the Bob-Buddy matches. Or we could bring up the Bret vs Owen cage match, where folks have disagreed and scratched their heads over people's ratings for two decades... and not just Dave's. It's ratings... people disagree, and people have biases. Same goes for music, movies, etc. I've seen quite the opposite when sitting next to him at a show. We could be at a card that's a total mess or a total disappointment, then two guys (or four guys in a tag) come out and rip the house down. And he digs it just as much as say Dragon vs Ohtani, which in contrast was in the middle of a card that he liked a good deal. It's really hard to pigeon hole Dave on stuff like that. He's seen more than a hundred cards where only one match really tickled him, and he'll give it a really good rating. Never saw it at any house shows I went with him to. I remember one card we were at where all of the wrestling press we were talking to was saying that a match that night was the best they'd seen all year in Tokyo. Dave thought something else was better, and didn't move off his ratings. I've seen wrestler trying to explain what they were doing in their match, kind of getting across the brilliance of their own work... and it having no impact on Dave. On the flip side, I've see a pair of high end workers shrugging off a match of their from earlier in the day, one saying he was half asleep in it until a certain point, and the other not thinking it was anything special. That didn't get even a 1/4* cut from what Dave had rated it in the building, and instead became something of a running joke between us that workers don't always know what's working well in a match. Dave doesn't break match down, then work through how it all adds up. He takes notes as he goes along, takes a pause at the end of the match to think about it, might a quick look back over his notes to see if anything key jumps out that wasn't at his mind at the end, and will jot down the snowflakes he thinks captures what he thinks about a match. On occasion when I watched stuff with him, he'd have a number in mind but perhaps think it was borderline and ask for your thoughts before before jotting down a number on his pad: DM: "****1/2?" jdw: "Maybe ****1/4. Hash-Choshu felt better..." DM: "Yeah..." But that was rare. Much more likely is he shared a star rating (without others asking first) was that he'd be happy with a match, give it a happy star rating, and that happily toss out the star rating to the people with him. I recall one where it was 4 vs 1 (Tenay & Yohe & Hoback & jdw vs DM) on thinking Dave was over-the-top on a star rating, and he stuck to his guns while the rest of us shook are heads and laughed. But either way, he doesn't review/recap/write up matches like a lot of us do. His always going to have people who disagree with him on matches. It's the nature of the beast: folks disagreed with Roger Ebert on snowflakes for movies. John

I am aware of him doing that in the past. My recollection is that it was the wrong person, wrong company, and the results were hilarious. He's just a vile human being.

Someone probably should have asked Dave about the "likely". It's... odd for him to put it there. I tend to agree it might have been without thinking, but I'm pretty certain that Dave has been explicit over the years that Chris killed Nancy.