jdw

On WWF TV, it was a match that was taking place all over the country. Both Hogan and Flair talked about it, not just with local promos, but also in features on the shows. There was that "I acknowledge you" promo by Hogan, and a number of ones by Flair. They just never had a match on TV or PPV, discounting the MSG pair that aired on the MSG Network. On the WON item, it's kind of tricky rather than clear cut. Dave was very clear when Sid jumped that it was due to a promise that Hogan-Sid would be the main event of Mania in 1992. When they ran the angle at the Rumble, Dave's comment was that the plan always had been Hogan-Sid. There maybe be some comments after Flair jump that make that less black-and-white, but I also don't think that the WON ever got to consistently saying between Sep 1991 and Jan 1992 that Hogan-Flair was a lock to main event Mania.

Snowden's piece: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1710735...mpion-ric-flair

Fucking fuckers.

If it wasn't obvious, he was talking about SKeith.

How about... A series of shoot interviews from past members of the WWE Creative Team, talking about Vince McMahon and Stephanie McMahon and re-confirming what the ultimate goal of the Creative Team really is. Bingo.

For a boozing story, go with the Flight From Hell, where even Dave finally had to go public about The Flair Show.

I got that impression too, but I see no reason why he'd merely pay lip service and not press charges if possible. Snuka buried himself by changing his story time and again. People have been convicted for even less after more time. He changed his story at the time, and it wasn't enough for them to chase it. He hasn't talked about it since then that gives a DA anything fresh. As far as why not press charges: it costs money to chase Snuka and take him to court. There's also the risk of losing, which would make the DA look like crap. He's already getting PR mileage by "looking into it", and has the easy out that "while we have grave concerns about what happened that night, there just isn't enough evidence to convict". That plays just fine for Law & Order voters: yep, the DA thinks he's dirty, but he's one of those guys who gets away because there wasn't enough evidence. John

"Re-training" at that age is pretty funny if you've spent 20 years setting aside whatever career you had to be the wife-mother to/for someone like Ric. Now I'm not saying that Beth should get $250K a year from Ric to mirror getting "half" from someone whose made $500K a year for ages. But Ric wanted to have someone mother his children, raise them, and run his household... I don't think Ric finding some younger pussy (or boatloads of younger pussy) means it's trade in time for her and getting no support.

Is that because of watching the Bull As The Ace matches from earlier in the decade?

Depends on a case by case basis. With the last wife... I'm a bit dubious of it in a long term sense. Short term while she re-started here career, I could get. In the case of Beth? Would fully support spousal support. She basically hung up her career and life to be Ric's wife, run the household, and be probably 90% of the parent to the kids since Ric was on the road so much. That was a long marriage, so... really think it's warranted there. That would be the case for a lot of women in Beth's situation. It's a little less the case these days when both people work, and in a growing number of marriages the wife is every bit the bread winner than the husband is. In which case splitting the assets and child support (which may include some household related costs) are perfectly fine. Also have no sympathy for Ric. He's been married and taken to the cleaners enough that something like a pre-nup covering spousal support is an obvious thing to enter into. But he's an idiot. But it really is a case by case basis.

It’s worth noting that Flair owes Beems 8 months of alimony, dating back to late last year. Thus, it’s disingenuous to suggest that his inability/refusal to pay was entirely due to his health problems and bereavement this spring. In the hospital for a month? He refused treatment on it in January in Japan. Then when his WWE appearance was cancelled, he went out of his way to claim he wasn't hospitalized: http://www.cagesideseats.com/wwe/2013/3/27...clot-in-his-leg So when did he go into the hospital? Granted, Reid died a couple of days after the hospital/not hospital incident, so did he go into the hospital after that for a month? I wonder if all of Ric's bills weren't paid for the 8 months that he wasn't paying support.

"That ain't right... that's ain't right!"

I don't know if there's a good piece on that. If you're interested, you might want to drop Sean a line. He was around for the Usenet era of online sabermetrics, and of course those post-James annuals. He also could probably tell you a bit about the evolution of his site, and the other ones that are part of his network. The Prospectus folks could as well, if you find the right person. I'm not a massive reader of theirs, but suspect here's some folks who have been around for a while. On newer stuff, Tom Tango is probably an easy person to talk to. Ben around online for probably 10 years, so after BP was established. If you want to go outside baseball, you'd want to find someone at Football Outsiders. The football equiv of sabermetrics is majority post-Internet, while the majority of the foundation of baseball sabermetrics was pre-Internet and the key concepts were well established (with the exception of defense). So the Football Outsiders wouldn't be a bad place to find someone who has been around since the start of it for some insight. Clearly that's a massive evolution going on in Basketball. You can see it in Zach Lowe's writing. Confess that I don't read beyond Lowe, but would guess some here do and could point you to the equiv of BP and FO for Hoops. As an aside, I don't know how much tossing around Pro Wrestling would help/hurt with the folks you talk to. Could be fans, like Bill Simmons is. Or could put an instant mark on your forehead as, "Idiot wrestling fan" like lots of folks have looked at wrestling fans for generations. Ellias are a bunch of asshats. With some luck we'll all live long enough to see the company wiped off the face of sports.

And by "point" I mean as examples of what you're talking about on where wrestling data collection could go.

This is a very good article, Chris. If you ever do a refresh of it, you may want to point to sites like on the "data collection" side: http://www.baseball-reference.com http://retrosheet.org The first was started by Sean Forman in the "early" days of internet websites... though for a lot of us, 2000 isn't that early. But at the time, there wasn't a good historical baseball reference site for just basic stats. Sean created that, and a interlinking database to run it. Boom. He has over the years kept adding to it, while also making it rather straight forward and simple. Sean was a stat-guy from the generation of writers after Bill James, writing/working on one of the annual series that came up after him (not Prospectus but the other). RetroSheet is the "historians" site, springing up because Ellias doesn't share shit. The goal was to find the equiv of box scores for every game, and create simple things like splits and game logs that we take for granted. Data from the mid-80s on forward was available from various sources, like Project Scoresheet and it's successor STATS. But earlier stuff... a bitch to get it. Heavy labor, the work of a lot of folks. Now one can look that stuff up. In turn, they shared the info with folks like Baseball-Reference.com rather than keep it locked up like Ellias. We're never going to get *that*. There just isn't enough stuff in old papers, and we're unlikely ever to get inside the WWE archives to fill in everything even for them from the 60s on forward. But as you say, as far as we've come with things like what Graham does with historyofthewwe.com, there's more out there than can be compiled. It's just a real bitch to do it.

Low Ki

Didn't know this was a hard rule. A number of folks toured with IWA before later working for All Japan or New Japan. Gladiator moved from FMW to a high profile AJPW match. Not saying it was common, but suspect we could think a bit about them and come up with some. Is this an 00s rule?

Probably. It's a bit like me starting a "Shawn is a Douchebag" thread, and starting it with as minor thing as this thread. It would come across as Ax. To. Grind. :/ Not a massive knock on Loss. I do think he would be best served by moving on from defending the concept of the thread, and the weak initial example he tossed up. There are more defensive posts that Bret's Ego posts. If you think Bret had a giant ego, damn the torpedoes and go to fucking town on it. It's Bret: there are plenty of other example you can toss up, and just ignore whether folks thinking it's Great White Whale territory.

Damn... I wish that aired back in 1984-87 when I could have been stoned out of my mind to watch it.

Do the NTV website versions have a logo / watermark? The one n youtube doesn't. Also the quality isn't high. Makes me still wonder what the source is for that.

The part where he promenades his "victim" around the hall right before it's executed. Whatever do you mean? Three counters before they hit a spot. Do-si-do...

I'm scratching my head over anything in the quotes being surprising, new or that big of a deal. On the scale of Wrestling Talking Shit, that's pretty tame.

It makes for an insane Word file, the formatting is a bitch (especially thinks like quoting), and eliminated searching across multiple threads. Also talking about 100+ matches/threads per set... lotta mess. I get trying to save it that way. It's better than nothing, but someone would need to spend a lot of TLC to make it useful and presentable, then finding a place to toss it up in a useful format. Word ends up Large. PDF is less space, but bitchier from a C&P standpoint and... I've done these before and it sucks. Even something as "simple" as pulling CMPunk's old NWA/JCP/WCW set lists and turning them into Word documents was a muther-f-er to try to format into something I'd want to read, let alone what I've ended up sharing with others like here when questions have popped up. Years ago I put together something on the ECW vs The Torch Plumbers threads from RSP-W, and that was batshit to try to format with all the old Usenet formatting. It is worthwhile to save. The GWE stuff done got blowed up, and all we have left are the results. I don't want to say that those are meaningless, but I'm also sure that anyone who contributed and posted in those threads would say that the true value of the project were the Threads and Discussion not the List. Dittos the WWF Matches poll, which just had all sorts of interesting tangents in the discussions (like the whole Tito stuff where folks really went off on Tito vs Valentine for the first time), where the List ended up being interesting... but not as interesting as the discussion as a whole.