JerryvonKramer

Ah, the anti-Dave Meltzer point now. Gotta love it. Well, first, Jim Cornette and some other guy whose name eludes me invented the star rating. So there. And if we have to blame Meltzer for something, blame him for *us* then. Also, I love the idea that a crowd full of people actually having fun is a bad thing. Really, I'm annoyed as anyone by some of these chants, but the line has to be drawn at some point too. Pro-wrestling is entertainment. People going to a pro-wrestling show and having fun *with* or *against* the show are entitled to do so. What about those "smart marks" chanting "We want Flair!" at the GAB 90 ? Were they guilty of being corrupted by "Evil Meltzerism" already ? Of because they were chanting for Flair and shat on a crappy show, they were decent old-school fans still in the "Garden of Eden of kayfabe" ( ) ? And yes, kayfabe existed. Form the pro-wrestler's point of view. But let's not pretend the people ate it up without thinking. I never, ever "believed" in pro-wrestling, not for one second. The Evil Meltzerism Theory is one of the dumbest fucking things ever. Less evil Meltzer and more every Tom, Dick and Harry with a keyboard thinking that they were Dave Meltzer. Even you could manage the subtle distinction between those two things. Perhaps. Hey, remember that time you and Meltzer went to Tokyo!

Pro-wrestling was better when you could cheer for sexual assault. Also nothing like running a sexual assault that's "okay" because "she wanted it". Loving the 90s reunion lads. But what point is being made here? Are you suggesting that Tully vs. Magnum is a feud we should not rate highly on moral grounds?

Have they no sense of shame?

Guys, we are not long till the annual renewal date. Some people have sent in donations, and very grateful. We are not that far from target. Anything you can send will help, even if it's a couple of bucks. Many many thanks in advance.

What is the real difference between Austin and someone like Magnum TA or even Dick the Bruiser? There's a certain streak of American individualist values running through them all. No one tells any of them what to do! Libiterian heroes pretty much. So we're meant to cheer when Magnum steals a kiss from Baby Doll (she LIKES it!), or Bruiser grabs a chair and smashes it over the head of that stuck up Bockwinkel, or Austin when gives a stunner to his boss. Also, Mr. McMahon -- much like Tully Blanchard or Bobby Heenan -- was a lying, scheming and cheating coward. I can't think of many readings of Austin's main feud in which he doesn't come out as the more morally upstanding one out of him and the various Corporation members. He might have slugged beer and shown the middle finger, but he wasn't a coward and he stood for freedom against oppression. I think Austin's novelty value is much overplayed. There's ALWAYS been that sort of babyface anti-hero in American wrestling.

I'm saying let's not critique pro wrestling purely within the bubble of pro wrestling. There were/are broader trends around irony for irony's sake, self-conscious narratives and a general distrust of sincerity (especially when it is clear that the sincerity is false - in a TV show, ad campaign or pro wrestling match). You've supplied examples of that shift, and how mainstream that shift became. It would be easy to do the same in music, fiction, advertising, politics, "real" sport, even. How people consumed popular culture, and what that popular culture became, were greater influences on pro wrestling than, say, some guy writing a newsletter. I don't necessarily disagree with this, but it still doesn't mean that you have to book to pander to heel fans. I mean, think of old surfer Sting -- slightly earlier time, sure -- but there are plenty of annoying smart ass elements to his character. It occurred to me during one ep of WTBBP that Sting is essentially a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ... his personality is basically Bart Simpson. Yet, Sting, despite being a smart ass, could still be booked as a proper babyface. I mean for all the excesses of the Atittude Era, even Austin was booked as a proper babyface -- just one with attitude. You can harnass things like irony or sarcasm or whatever, without making the "dick fans" feel like they are the most important people on earth.

She was to Hogan in the 90s, what Molly Ringwald was to him in the 80s

I think irony and cynicism went from being counter-cultural to just plain cultural in the late 80s and 90s. I think it might be worth re-reading David Foster Wallace's take on TV, fiction and irony to see if it resonates with this discussion. It is not just a case of wrestling following the "sign of the times", more that the audience, and popular culture, had fundamentally changed. Cynicism towards wrestling had always existed, but by the late 80s/early 90s one of the primary methods of consuming popular culture was to view it through jaundiced, cynical eyes and popular culture either adapted (with more post-modern or self-aware content) or looked horribly out-of-date. I'm not sure knowing how to book was enough when playing it straight was increasingly not an option, and even if you did, the audience would just view it through the prism of irony, not sincerity. So you're saying don't blame Heyman, blame Seinfeld, Beavis and Butthead and Clarissa Explains It All?

I'm no Heyman fan, but I think this is too simplistic. He just harnessed a Philly crowd who always had those inclinations, and made that behaviour more acceptable and mainstream. But considering how irony soaked the nineties were (in the wider culture, not just wrestling), that was probably inevitable anyway. After watching dozens and dozens of Philly cards from the Vince Sr era, it is true that the crowd was a little snarkier than the average. There was a contingent who cheered Larry Z even while he was feuding with Bruno. There were Backlund booers, and Billy Graham cheerers. Vince Sr, a booker who understood that he and HE alone dictated what the crowd got never once wavered, not ONCE, in giving in to that crowd. He basically grabbed them by the scruff of the neck and pushed their faces in the sand and said "screw you, I don't care what you do, you're having THIS. Cheer this guy, boo this guy" And if you watch those shows, the dick element in the crowd is mostly silenced by the end of a title match. The idea that Philly crowds couldn't be tamed is patent nonsense. I've watched them give Backlund plenty of ovations and I've watched them boo the shit out of Sgt. Slaughter and even ostensibly "cool" heels like Don Muraco "the beach bum". Paul Heyman -- lacking the strength and conviction of Sr, more desparate I guess to create SOMEthing -- just pandered to those elements in the crowd rather than moving to curb them. The internet, not knowing as much as it thinks, mistook lazy, bad, gutless booking for something innovative. It wasn't innovative, it was a booker trying to give a crowd what it wanted. Yes, he created a nice cult atmosphere for a while, but history shows it's not the way to do business. And ECW failed. Also, the idea that it was simply wrestling following the "sign of the times" is pretty ridiculous to me. The 60s, 70s and 80s all had their fair share of popular counter-culture and anti-establishment types. And wrestling promotors harnessed them in every decade. What they didn't do is lose control of their crowds because ... they knew how to book.

And so we come to the inevitable slew of counter claims: kayfabe never existed, and people never believed; Russ Davis and Joe Garigiola were both a bit nudge-nudge wink-wink on commentary; wrestling is actually really good now; the 70s and 80s are outlier periods in the history of kayfabe; there were newspaper articles exposing the business; people always mocked wrestling; coal miners in the 1930s actually discussed workrate; and so on and so on and so forth. And blah blah blah. None of it changes the fact that if you watch wrestling before 2001 you generally get crowds who cheer and boo, and who seem genuinely invested in what they are watching, while if you watch it after crowds seem more interested in getting themselves over and voicing their two-bit opinions on "booking direction". To pretend nothing has changed is to be blind to something so obvious and plain to see that it should not really need pointing out. Sometimes we don't need more than vernacular intuition to prove a point, and in this case, the evidence is so overwhelmingly in favour of what I've said, that objections should be treated as token jobber offense. "Fight forever, fight forever" - on reflection, that match was a cornerstone moment in wrestling history: perhaps the largest spontaneous act of posturing ever witnessed, as 9,000 people in Dallas at once want to be seen as knowing who Shinsuke Nakamura actually is. A bizarre moment in which a crowd en masse shows off it's "smart" credentials. Yes, Dallas, we respect how smart you all are. Let's apportion some specific blame: Paul Heyman - chiefly responsible for the self-aware crowd that gets itself over. Eric Bischoff - chiefly responsible for destroying Southern wrestling and giving Vince a monopoly. Vince Russo - chiefly responsible for inculcating insufferable cutesy post-modern presentation in which wrestling becomes a knowing parody of itself. Dave Meltzer - chiefly responsible for producing Scott Keith, CRZ, The Rick, and a hundred other fans who knew better who in turn created many thousands more fans who knew better. Gabe Sapolsky - chiefly responsible for commentators and wrestlers acknowledging and pandering to "critical acclaim"

If you read carefully I made no such causal connection.

I think it's less about the specifics of knowing wrestling is / is not real, and more about a certain type of self-awareness, a loss of innocence. A child is cute up until the point where they become cognisant of their own cuteness; perhaps worried that they are no longer getting the attention they once were, the child hence "acts up" and thereby, paradoxically, ceases to be cute. The wrestling audience is that child. And the wrestlers and promoters themselves are the parents who give the attention-seeking child what they want. Unfortunately, there is no going back after that, as the child goes on to become a stroppy, and spoiled teenager -- ironically losing that newly gained self-awareness, but never regaining the innocence. As Vince Russo, Paul Heyman and Eric Bischoff conspired to trash every single old-school principle there was, a whole generation of wrestling fans found the internet and mistook mere athleticism for good work. They forgot that wrestling was a morality play. They forgot that you need storytelling and grand themes of good versus evil or establishment versus rebellion as well as suplexes and backflips. They saw Benoit and Eddie, and demanded Daniel Bryan and AJ Styles; they didn't understand that wrestling was just as much about the The Crushers and Bruisers, Strongbows and Hogans. Just like Russo, Heyman and Bischoff, they thought they were smarter than the people who had been producing wrestling for the past three decades. The super-indie scene brought the workrate but forgot about the booking, the power of an angle, the vitality of strong character, the importance of out-of-ring values writ large on the moral canvas of the wrestling ring. And in this way, the heart and soul of wrestling was lost. As Jim Cornette and Jim Ross ranted, a legion of the so-called smart fans wrote them off as grumpy old men failing to move with the times. And in this way, the lessons of the past were forgotten.

I would define the moment as being from the first "this is awesome" chant.

I do not think the trend Loss is talking about is unique to wrestling, it is an affliction that taints all interests. I call it Sproggism because it is the pursuit of the sprog: a ribald disrespect for the classics in worship of the Cult of the New. Some areas have it worse than others. Board gaming, for example, has a particularly bad case of the Cult of the New. There will always be people who want to go back to the sands of time, and to understand something from the ground up; who are not afraid to get stuck in to the dirt of history. But the vast majority of others -- the sprogs, the unwashed masses, the riders of the steam train -- will content themselves with ignoring the past to live in and only in the present. They do not care about the past and their attiude acts as an automatic defence mechanism which wards against them ever actually getting to know it. Of course, the same is possible the other way around and those so disposed can create a hermetically sealed past beyond which they need never look. This is especially true in music fan circles, where it is common for even the most obsessive fans to have a "cut off" year beyond which they do not explore. In almost every field, just as sproggism, this is a bad thing. The sole exception to this is wrestling, because wrestling is quantifiably, demonstrably, and undeniably worse after the death of kayfabe. It is broken and can never be fixed. I actually view it almost in Biblical terms. The Era of Kayfabe is somewhat like The Garden of Eden -- innocent mark fans getting lost in Paradise, for they know not what they possess. The post-Kayfabe era is a time when fans are Fallen: the smart fan, having eaten the forbidden fruit, now knows too much. They live in a Paradise Lost, and in time, they know not what they have lost.

Do you give Watts or Dundee the creative credit for MId- South ? or both ? You'd have to give some credit also to Buck Robley, as well as Ernie Ladd. But Watts was the point man, whose attention to detail insisted on internal consistency. His run arguably represents the pinnacle of logical storytelling in a wrestling framework, and since bookers came and went, I'd have to give overall credit to him.

Outrageously hipster.

JCP / WCW 83-94 - Highest match quality US wrestling promotion ever WWF 84-93 - Vince / Pat at creative peak Mid-South 82-86 - Watts at creative peak AJPW 73-98 - greatest wrestling company of all time NJPW 79-96 - legendary angles, big time matches For me, everything else is secondary to these five pillars of wrestling greatness. If I never watched another second of wrestling in my life outside these five places and times, I could probably deal with it.

I broadly support ageism if it is directed at younger fans, especially those around 18-25.

Is that the match where SD Jones is an honorary killer bee?

October, 1985 1st Dub over Dick Graham and Kal Rudman Spectrum commentary for Best of WWF, Vol. 1 2nd Go to booth again, dub over Dick Graham and Kal Rudman Spectrum commentary for WWF Tag Team Champions 3rd Ask Monsoon to remind Kal Rudman to stand further back from workers during interviews and to remember face / heel divide. 4th Ask Monsoon to find Strongbow and Skaaland something to do. 5th Memo to Lord Al Hayes: write out some cue cards and bullet points for TNT so you have something to say. 6th Meeting with Pat, re: Piper allegations. 7th Fine Fuji, $50. Rib on Muraco.

The reason stiffness is mostly awesome:

Well, the place was getting a bit dull. Needs a shake up.

This exchange has gone some way to proving that GOTNW doesn't understand basic heel psychology.

GOTNW's staggering contempt for good US wrestling of the 1980s should rightly be treated with disdain and stamped on until he is made to see sense. No theoretical school in history has been able to establish itself first as a heterodoxy, before that one needs orthodoxy with a long period of gestation. Maybe when he reaches the age of 78, when the positions are so ingrained that the grandchildren of current posters are mouthing them by rote, we might -- maybe -- get to the point where we can start questioning the primacy of 80s US wrestling, or adopting positions contrary to the idea that Bobby Eaton is a brilliant, all-time worker. Until that day, his position must be treated with the special disdain that the Ancients reserved for the Epicureans, which united even the Stoics and Academic Sceptics.