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I have buried in my e-mail archive a load of e-mails from Mr. Schemer from back in the day, be it directed at me, that cc'd me, or that people forwarded to me knowing what I thought of him. Hilarious doesn't begin to cover it. It gives me comfort to see that he's just a vile as he's always been.

The one major positive if that Dave admits that the NFL number wasn't worked. We also know that the Lions had several games top 80K, at least two of which were these: 09/28/80 - 80,291 12/20/81 - 80,444 They also had loads well above the 70K level. That's where we've always gone with this: If there's 78K+ seats, then how many people are on the Floor (i.e. no one is on the Floor for an NFL game). Dave has reported often that the place was Sold Out, in other words the WWF sold all the tickets they had out. If there were 78K to 80K in the Seats (and we've never been able to identify any obstructed/blocked off Seats/Sections in the pictures), then how many are on the floor? We all agree that there are several thousand on the floor... quite a few several thousand. If someone wants to tell me that the 93K number was worked, I don't disagree. But 78K is wrong. Much more likely 88K. And yeah... skim is *possible*. I think the other possibility rather than a skim is that there were a good number of comps out. Not "paper" exactly to fill the building. But instead freebies that the WWF gave for promotional use, and to local palm greasing, and other things like that. Tickets committed before they thought they really could sell out the building. Could they have "sold" 78K tickets and handed out 10K freebies? That seems like a lot of freebies. You would think that Dave at the time would have heard if 11% of the building was via freebies. But then again, Dave *at the time* thought the 93K was legit, reported that the WWF sold every last ticket that they had on the markets, and that they could have sold more if the building was bigger... that's how strong the demand ended up being. So...

Ken Patera was a Top Guy... but when you look at him in 1980, he could have been The Top Guy someplace. The tough thing is that he had just turned 37 as 1980 was coming to a close. I was thinking of him as an alternative to giving the belt back to Bock when Verne retired, but: #1 - He wasn't that young 12/06/34 Bock 11/06/43 Patera He's 9 years younger than Bock, but still not that young. #2 - Verne never would do that I mean... of course he would never do that. And it's not like the AWA didn't do good business with Nick... and Verne probably didn't think Power Heel As Champ would be something good for his territory. Which may be true, though Patera was much more than a power heel. But... Ken was really damn good.

I agree with Loss on Hall as someone who could/should. Less in WCW, since he was on a one way ticket to being a trainwreck there. But he was functional for his entire first run in the WWF. The sad thing is that his moment for it was probably 1994, but (i) Bret got pushed back to the title, (ii) Razor was used to help get over The Next Big Thing in Nash. They probably would have been better off trying to figure out a long term three way between Bret, Shawn and Hall, trying to get a feel for how the fans viewed them similar to: Hart Foundation > Rockers > Demolition Where when the Harts went against the Rockers in 1990, the Harts were the ones that fans rooted for. In turn, the Rockers still got cheers against Demo. You don't have to turn the Rockets total heels... but you do need to structure things to take advantage of which way things before. Who knows if the fans would have cheered for Razor against Bret... if Shawn would have stayed the Most Heelish in the fans minds... or if Bret would have gotten the most vocal support. But there are options to work with. Hall was solid enough in the ring, excellent on the mic, could work angles, etc. They would have been better off committing a year to the three of them being peers/rivals than waste it on Nash as champ.

I could see Dustin anchoring a territory, say if Florida in 1992 was like Florida in the 70s when Dusty got over as the top face. He'd have time to develop, work on his mic work and constantly be in revolving storylines and angles at a far quicker pace than WCW. The Ace of a successful national promotion as a face? I don't see it. Strikes me more as a Tito / Barry / Steamboat top potential as a face rather than Hogan / Austin / Rock. He didn't really get a persona that he was as comfortable and natural in as they were until he went Dust. Before that, his persona was a good generic babyface like Steamer, Tito and Barry. All of those guys had Face Ace of a Territory potential, but weren't that on a national level. As Goldust... I don't think the gimmick would have sustained a long run on top as a heel. Could I see him winning the WWF Title five times and having say 400-500+ days as champ over the course of 3-4 years? Not in a "one belt" WWF. And I liked Goldust a good deal.

I guess Leagues are promotions and Teams are "stables"? Since he has jumped stables, and taken success with him from one to the next. The World Cup is an odd bird: Wreslemania Starcade Rumble all together. Zidane to a degree was the Hogan of 2006, though the funny thing was Italia and Pirlo kicked out of the legdrop to get the win.

I think one could argue it's passed Hockey. I don't know if I'd go quite that far... but a reasonable case could be made.

Not really. Dave was defensive about criticism of his rating of matches and wrestlers outside the context of "this is what wrestlers told me". Christ, I recall Yohe telling him that Hansen carried the Brody & Hansen tag team after having recently watched a number of their matches. Dave disagreed, not because some wrestler told him about how good Brody was, but because *Dave* watched all that stuff back in the 80s. It really had nothing to do with what he's throwing out now that "you can't judge old stuff". Really, this whole judge old stuff tangent of his is something that he came up with a decade or so ago when a lot of people started watching old stuff and not agreeing with him. 5-10 years before that you could actually have a conversation with Dave in a small setting about that. It would usually end up with: Dave: "Well, I liked it." But on occasion you could get him to think a bit more about something. As far as the notion that he's always watched something, hit a rating and then never rewatched something and given it a new rating... that's actually nonsense. I talked to him on the phone for most of the 90s. We'd go back and forth on ratings. There were a lot of times when the next time we'd talk, he'd mention watching a match again while dubbing it for someone and it either wasn't as good as he initially thought or was better. There were plenty of star ratings that changed between the first time he watch something and they got into the WON. Hell... I sat next to him at shows and our conversations resulted in changes. "The moment" means a hell of a lot to Dave. It did then, it did before (look up what he says about Warrior-Hogan in 1990), and it has since. It means a good deal more to him on most matches than it did and does to me. So I'm not going to deny that it doesn't mean a lot to him. But he use to get a little reflective on shit, in ways that aren't really consistent with the position he's staking out.

This is an area where you and I differ greatly. I respect what you're saying, but I feel objectivity has no place in art. It stifles the medium and hinders discussion. If things are objective then there's really no need to talk about them beyond a few sentences/posts. I hate the Ultimate Warrior. Flat out hate him as much as any wrestler ever. If someone could use some "white out" to write him and all of his performances out of wrestling history, in the big picture it would be no skin off my back. But if I watching Warrior-Rude from Summer Slam, and then writing it up, I ended up being pretty objective about it. To the point of spending time to get across that it wasn't a Rude Carry Job, even if that's what my non-objective biases recalled about the match and went into a re-watch looking for. As Loss says, there is very little 100% objectivity. The reason I liked that match is because it did certain things that I'm biased *for*. Same with Warrior's performance. Same with Rude's. Same with likely Patterson laying the thing out. But if I didn't try to be objective about Warrior's performance in the match, I would have been lying my ass off through the write up.

Eh... depends. I found The Wolf of Wall Street to be witty and intelligent. I know others found American Hustle to be witty and intelligent. Too soon? Midnight in Paris and The Artist were two year before that, both extremely witty and intelligent in two wildly different ways. Too soon? Up was two year before that, witty as hell and supremely intelligent in telling an Adult Story in the wrappings of a Kids Film. It gets harder going back from there because there was a long aversion of the Academy to nominate great comedies for the Best Picture. You'd have the occasional Fargo, that hid its wit in drama/suspense and intelligence in a collection of dumb characters, and sliding the smarts one of them into a slow/methodical personality that hid her smarts. Good lord... scrolling back it's a long ways to Hannah and Her Sisters... yeah, the Academy just hated witty movies. Then again, there's Prizzi's Honor the year before. It's more a function of the Academy. There remain witty and intelligent movies, and always have been.

So exactly where were they full of shit?

What about publically building the expectations of how the Network is going to do on a study that said there are 100 Mio. (or whatever it was) wrestling fans in the US? There's a difference between fraud and being full of shit. I don't think Vince & Co. were full of shit. They were delusional.

What about publically building the expectations of how the Network is going to do on a study that said there are 100 Mio. (or whatever it was) wrestling fans in the US? The WWE can point to that being an independent study.

This is just funny-bad from our favorite bad wrestling writer at Grantland: http://grantland.com/the-triangle/wwe-stock-crash-vince-mcmahon-sports-business-analysis

It may not have been important, but I'd just like to reiterate that it did happen. Here's the picture from the Chiba training camp: And here's a picture of Misawa's group from a telephone card. The kanji says Cho Sedai-gun. Daniel: no one has said a photo op didn't happen. You claim it that the Chiba Training Camp was EARTH SHATTERING IMPORTANT~! My point is that it wasn't important. Look at the first picture. It's rather obvious why it wasn't important. The Dude on the far right on the bottom. He was teaming with Jumbo in the very next Misawa-Jumbo match after this. The promotion didn't even bother to run an angle of having Taue team with Misawa and turn on him that night, similar to Choshu turning on Fujinami in a tag and Khan turning on Sak in a tag to create the New Wolves. Instead, Baba just said: "Aw fuck it... Taue's teaming with Jumbo. Misawa keeps everyone else he's been teaming with since May. Let's hope some other asshole doesn't jump."

Totally agree. Though the Footloose outfits haven't ages well, even if they were the first things I saw Kawada in. The Black & Yellow kind of became iconic for him, similar to Misawa's Green & Silver being so "Misawa" that his Tiger outfits feel odd.

$13M would be a lot of money to "build" a house, as opposed to buying one.

I ran through the Japanese Wrestling Journal. Cho Sedai-gun, the big meeting of the minds and the forming of a new group in August 1990 doesn't rate a mention. In contrast, he does spend some time explaining Kabuki double crossing Baba in jumping to Tenryu's group. He also talks about Yatsu jumping when that happened. He also talked about Baba being surprised by Fuyuki jumping given Tenryu and Fuyuki having some heat with each other. He talks about both shoot angles between Tsuruta and Misawa. He talks about Gordy's issues leading to the vacating of the titles. He even was talking about Tenryu's "problems" *before* he left All Japan. He talked about Doc's coming to All Japan, and the reasons Bigelow worked some shows. Even lower level things like Furnas and Kroffat both getting hurt and knocked out of the All Asia Tag tourney were things he talked about. This isn't me, or Dave... or even my Japanese co-worker at the time who was walking me through what was going on. This was a Japanese wrestling fan writing about the stuff. Pretty much at the peak of his writing at the time. Someone who went to a lot of cards in Tokyo as well, ones that tend to be obvious if one pays attention closely to the write ups. It simply didn't rate to him. It wasn't important, Daniel. Misawa's partners were clear before August. Jumbo's was evolving because assholes kept jumping. As I mentioned earlier, even the notion that he was teaming with "old guys" wasn't explicit since he teamed with a number of peers of Misawa's guys in those first two series. The obvious reason it didn't rate is because on the very next card after the Really Big Group Forming, Taue started teaming with Jumbo. It rendered the whole nonsense moot. Whether the promotion pushed it didn't matter. Misawa was teaming with the same dudes he had for two series, with the exception of the guy who went over to be Jumbo's #2. That's how fans saw it. That's how my co-worker saw it, and how the guy writing up the JWJ saw it. Sorry if I'm a dumb gaijin who saw it the exact same way they did. As far as ring outfits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs1F717fMWY Misawa is in the same Green & Silver he'd been wearing since May. Kawada wasn't in the Black & Yellow. Kobashi wasn't even in the match, but what I recall of his August ring outfits, it was the same Orange trunks. Since Misawa wasn't wearing his jacket coming out to that match, I went back to his Triple Crown match against Hansen in July and then forward to later in the year to the famous Kobashi Bleeding Nose Match... and it's the same Silver Pro Collection Misawa jacket. So... yeah. John

Doesn't appear so http://www.insiderslab.com/PR4/WWE/ It is striking how much Stephanie dumped last year. The story that the money was being used to build a house always seemed fishy. Would make more sense if she was flipping it into safer investments Steph has just been selling off the options that she exercised: http://biz.yahoo.com/t/97/7437.html 15-May-13 420,000 WWE Option Exercise 01-Aug-13 328,000 WWE Option Exercise 02-Oct-13 505,000 WWE Option Exercise The sales are just automated (which is not uncommon for insiders), and if you subtract the sales from the options, the end result is 0 shares. Nothing fishy there. It ended up being a tidy $13,791,575... though if she hung onto them and sold them when the stock was at it's peak, she could have bagged more. About $8.5M came when the stock was in the $9 to $11 range.

Good luck on the fraud. It will be pretty easy for Vince, and the rest of the people involved, to say that they truly believed they were going to double their US TV deal. I also think it's going to be hard to identify anything fraudulent that they've said/release relating to the Network. Lastly, I don't think there's anything out there on Vince and any of the other people involved dumping an unusual amount of WWE shares when the stock was up around $30. You might find some executive selling shares / options that they just exercised, but that's not terribly uncommon. Agree with Winged that these are just trolling lawsuits. You have them in a variety of areas, such as shareholder lit trolls and patent lit trolls (probably the largest).

I would categorize NHL and MLS as JTTS sports. Sure, they're staring at the lights for MLB and the NBA, and getting squashed by the NFL, but don't tell me they wouldn't hit their finishers on the Arena league and Major League Lacrosse. Arena League and Lacrosse aren't jobbers. They're backyard sports.

If we're talking about participation, it's quite possible that it's already #2 behind basketball. We need to remember that football is a one-sex sport, so while a large chunk of boys play, close to 0% of girls do. But participation is of middling importance. Soccer isn't going to be doing the $$$ that the NFL, NBA, MLB and College Football are. Not in 10 years in the US, and unlikely in the lifetime of any of us. The comment about "I've been hearing that since the 70s" is a perfectly valid and reasonable one: I have been as well, and I was playing soccer starting in the mid-70s. That said... It's reached a stage in the US that I thought was impossible once the NASL blew itself up. MLS has the potential to overexpand again, and their moves in that direction are worrisome. But attendance around the country is a positive. The building of quality soccer-only facilities, especially with realistic capacities, has been a major positive. TV deals have been a positive, and the decent popularity of the National Team (womens as well come WC time) is a major positive. Most striking is that futbol clubs, nations and competitions outside the US have become surprisingly popular. When I wear my Duke gear, I don't get many comments these days... and thats gear of the most popular college hoops team in the country. When I wear one of my United jerseys or Barca jerseys, I get comments. I've been in Home Depot browsing for something and have watched a 10 year old kid jumping up and down pointing to one of my jersey's telling his mom: "XAVI~!!!!!!" My dad gets comments when he wears his United hat. I've been with Hoback when he's wearing his Spurs jersey and dudes comment on it... and Spurs aren't exactly United, Liverpool, Gunners, Chelsea, etc. That shit wouldn't have happened in 1979 if I was wearing a Dalglish jersey. So... There are limits to how big soccer will get in this country. It will be rather huge in 2026 when it's highly likely that the US will either be the host, or share hosting with another CONCAF country (Canada and/or Mexico). But... it's not going to be as big of $$$ as the NFL, NBA, MLB or College Football. I would be perfectly happy if it becomes a strong #4 supplanting the NHL and/or College Hoops. That would be pretty awesome to have seen in my lifetime. John

I'm not sure how they pull it off. My thought would be to consider how much of what is successful (i.e. making shitloads of money) in Geek Culture is well thought out & planned, and how much is just stone cold luck that something got popular? On some level, pro wrestling was geek culture in the 70s and 80s before people even thought to dub things geek culture. It's been successful for the most part.

I actually think if they wanted to find a formula that might have a snowball's chance in hell of appealing to a more wealthy demographic they should do the exact opposite. Turn up the misogyny, run with racism, go batshit with homophobia, transphobia, et....but make it all part of a transparently fake "evil" that to be overcome by a complex, but interesting, "babyface." Of course the key here is that you can only do this with much better writing, you would likely alienate a lot of current fans, and it very well could backfire. But making wrestling a live action Breaking Bad, or something that hipsters could feel comfortable fetishizing to the same degree is the only way I could see a wealthier demographic pulled in. Which is another way to say I think it's impossible. I'm binge-watching Breaking Bad right now. My general thought is... WWE Creative couldn't pull off WWE Breaking Bad. Worse: You could take the most talented writers/creators in entertainment like say a Vince Gilligan and even they couldn't pull it off. That's setting aside the issue that we don't really know yet if Vince really is just a one-trick pony who shot his wad with Breaking Bad similar to Chris Carter with X-Files (and in contrast to Carter, Gilligan was smart enough to cap Breaking Bad while there was something in the tank rather than running it into the ground like Carter did). The WWE can barely pull off smaller, short term arcs. They also have to deal with things like Bryan going out, Punk quitting, investing significant resources on things that get over in mixed fashion (Batista, Brock), etc. It's... hard. * * * * * I'd also point out that the WWE is closer to a more sprawling type of TV like The Wire than it is to Breaking Bad. One of the things that works for Breaking Bad is that it's largely a three character series of arc: Walter, Jesse, Skylar. If you want to push Walter, you can... but he's really more of a mid-carder who is lucky enough to be invested with some growth and development during the show. The rest are support, even those that are exceptional like Gus. They are all there for largely Walter, but at times Jesse and Skylar to play off and reflect the arcs of those three. The WWE is a sprawling mass of storylines like The Wire. We might think that at anyone one point there are some wrestlers getting more storyline, as guys like Cena are always going to be getting their programs. But in contrast to Breaking Bad where you're never saw a new character truly get the level of development that Walt/Jesse/Skylar were invest with, in the WWE you're *always* going to have new people forced up to the top mix. Punk was a major, lead character for more than a year. Bryan has had a "season" where he's been a top character. Brock came back. Etc. This is much more like Marlo showing up in Season 3, and by the end of the season our lead character on that "brand" is dead (Stringer) and Marlo is it. Bunny comes in Season 4, gets a major push with a major arc to be told... and is done by the end of the year. All the Harbor cats of Season 2? Washed out by the end of the year. That's really hard to pull off, especially when so much is out of the control of Creative due to injuries and who gets over or fails to get over. That's setting aside the fact that WWE Storylines don't even rise to the level of Bad Soap Operas, let along Breaking Bad. :/

Steph was Creative for more than a decade. It didn't improve the portrayal of women at all. I suspect we are all 100% certain that over time that have been various members of Creative who were LGBT, even if we're limiting it to the post-Pat era. You just can't have the level of turnover that they've had in the past 15 years without having someone gay in on that staff, even if they're deeply in the closet. I don't think the lack of women or LGBT is a massive problem in growing the business: it's not really where they're growing, and unlikely to (other than gay people who just happen to be fans of wrestling because it's Wrestling). The ethnic diversity... that's a bigger problem. That's an area where they really could have grown the business in the past decade or so, and have been mediocre. We can all point to Rey being a "star" for more than a decade, and Eddy's time on top. But... it's still been mediocre.