JerryvonKramer

Cheers. do you happen to know what the new Classics aired by G+ are and where they’ve been uploaded. Been trying to find Hansen vs Yatsu from 1988 discussed on the OP’s first podcast but to no avail.

This may be of interest to you:

Could you maybe link it?

Some dweeb came up with a rating system in 2016. Also Matt, you should have fun with Pat Patterson. One little detail from the AJPW stuff that was surprising was that he help to train Yatsu. No wonder I love Yatsu.

Terrific find!

Wow that Truepenny Show looks good. Cheers for finding that!

Legit question though: did WCW make any more money for a high TV rating when Turner owned the station? I seem to remember from the WONs that the gates in the late 80s were not brilliant -- not as bas as they'd become in the early 90s but not competitive either -- and surely the multi-million dollar weekends the WWF there doing were still ultimately driven by live gates no? From pure business perspective, surely Scott was right to be concerned about turning around the live shows, no?

Just to say thank you so much for this. One of the greatest threads I've ever read. Many mindblowing details. I'm still recovering from learning that Sato from Orient Express was the booker for early 80s AJPW.

Yes, I have vague memories of us calling that "the George Scott finish" back in the day reviewing those shows. His run was actually much shorter than I thought.

My sense is that this varied strongly depending on who it was. Dusty was a creative. Dory Funk Jr purely someone who brought in talent and "booked" them -- literally for Baba in AJPW but also when he did runs in JCP. I seem to recall reading somewhere that Dory ran a committee sort of thing for creative since it wasn't his thing. Everything I've read about Scott suggest that he was a guy who focused on working style and match details as well as locker-room discipline. I'm kind of interested in the idea of deliberately "retraining" the fans -- Mid Atlantic was a tag territory that worked a (for the period) go go style before he came in, and he basically force-fed them Johnny Valentine who "took 15 minutes to warm up", much more about building up the match from a slow start to a hot finish plus big chops -- I only imagine this is how Johnny Valentine and Wahoo worked based on how Greg Valentine and Wahoo (and Flair) worked under Scott later on. I also find it interesting how badly shit on Scott is for WCW 1989 when from a fan-perspective it's one of the greatest years of all time for match quality.

The things I have read -- mainly from dedicated old-timey Mid-Atlantic types from ye olde internet circa 2001 -- suggest that Vince Sr brought in George Scott as Vince Jr was somewhat overloaded in 84 being a commentator on literally every show. However, Vince is Vince. And he and Scott had some disagreements over their vision. Scott brought in a lot of the old JCP talent, brought in incentives for higher workrate, fines for no shows, and, perhaps most interestingly, sat down with workers to give them input into their own finishes. You hear a lot about Savage being a guy who wanted to go over details, but apparently Scott drove a culture of ensuring guys took the layout of matches and their finishes seriously. More importantly, Scott changed the classic Vince Sr loop booking for heels -- where a heel would come in, go over jobbers and established guys, work the three-match loop with the champ, and then job on the way out to Strongbow or Putski or whoever, Scott worked on giving them more stuff to do. Think of someone like Paul Orndroff AFTER the Hogan run and the stories he was a part of. Scott is credited with ensuring guys up and down the card were invested in their characters, stories, direction etc etc. In many ways, the polar opposite to Vince Sr. Where he clashed with Vince is on the big picture stuff. Scott reputedly hated the TNT stuff. Tried to stop Butcher Vachon's wedding going on air. Wanted to tone many of the more outrageous comedy skits etc, and all that other classic Vince Being Vince stuff from 84-6. He obviously lost out on that battle, but did manage to convince Vince to drop some of the shows he was doing, which is why you get some other commentators coming in. From memory, Mean Gene and Jack Reynolds and maybe Lord Al too. I only spent an hour or so digging around, but it seems Vince has put over Scott fairly big a few times after the run as being a key guy for running the show in that crucial period. Another element is the sheer number of shows they were running -- sometimes 3 shows on the same night -- and Scott seemed to be able to handle logistics like that too. Just what I've picked up, although I'd say they are all from somewhat "pro-Scott" sources, just as much of the stuff on shoots is from "anti-Scott" sources. Steamboat seems very fond of him also.

My god they dug Jim Herd up! Amazing

When did Scott come in exactly? After Starrcade?

But this is what I’m trying to say: Scott deliberately tanked shows in 1973-4 as well. And it was seen as insane then too. He may have had a method. What did the Midnights draw for JCP? Starrcade 87 had them in a well hyped gimmick match and drew 8,000; Starrcade 88 drew 10,000 so there’s not much in it.

Right but that’s pretty much the standard take. If George Scott had been fired from Crockett in early 1974 people would have said he was out of touch with the times.

Not entirely sure when exactly the run starts but Flair vs Luger in 88 was hot. But I’m thinking less of his actual successes and more that the criticisms against him are unfair because he wasn’t given the time to work his vision. It’s similar in a way to the Bill Watts run: I can see what he was trying to do. Only — different from the Watts run — there are some really awesome matches also.

I’ve been reading around George Scott as a booker: how he transformed Mid-Atlantic to be a singles territory built around Johnny Weaver while being instrumental in bringing in new talent including Flair, Steamboat and Piper. So the story goes Scott made Flair study tapes of Buddy Rogers to become the Nature Boy when he wanted to work a cowboy gimmick. Scott literally “tore down” the old territory to build it back up again: retraining the fans to appreciate a new style. It took at least 8-9 months. Later in his WWF run as booker, 84-86, he also “retrained” the old New York crowds: upping the work rate, bringing in NWA guys (Funks, Steamboat, Piper, Bob Orton Jr, etc) who worked a different style from the old Vince Sr promotion. Again this took time. It seems his GCW run in 83 was cut short after 2 months before the Scott “retraining” of the fans could set in. It strikes me that we might say the same thing about what he was trying to do in WCW. The knock is that times had changed, he didn’t want to give away free matches on TV (Flair vs Steamboat), that he was too old school and had failed to move with the times, but what if he was simply trying to retrain the WCW fans as he had done once before? He was coming in after Dusty hotshotting. In many ways Flair vs Steamboat was a throwback sort of feud to get the promotion away from gimmicks and back to the hard-hitting work rate Scott Mid-Atlantic style. If Turner had given him more time we might have seen him develop a hotter promotion and reinvigorate the live shows. Can anyone say the committee was better? Furthermore, consider that Scott didn’t do any shoots that I know of or write a book: fans have heard about his run almost exclusively through his enemies like Dusty and people who flat hated him like Cornette. PWO was once the home of revisionism and re-evaluation. Can we give Scott a fairer shake?

What I'm really lookin for is a podcast that covers the history of AJPW in-depth from the start, but this doesn't seem to exist. I've looked everywhere including in Kris Zellner Patreon archives. This needs to exist.

Any particular reason Abby never worked New York? Seems like he'd be a totally natural Bruno / Pedro / Backlund opponent for the normal loops at MSG / Philly.

My prediction is that this won't be the last time Corny resigns / gets fired from a pro wrestling promotion.

DiBiase vs. Rich at the Omni!!!

Amateurs! Everyone knows you can see all the dates Dory Funk Jr worked in his entire career here: https://www.midatlanticwrestling.net/resourcecenter/results/pages/results_funkjr.htm

I'm going to put money on Ivan being the guy to take the Scaffold bump in that match.

There is obviously something to this. In the other direction, you sometimes see old footage where the crowd is old guys into the idea of wrestling as a legit sport mostly sitting on their hands as if watching a chess match. There's also a difference between the rowdy Southern 80s crowds and the typical WWF crowd (i.e. not Philly or Baltimore) which was full of kids.

I also randomly watched Bischoff vs Flair from December 1998. Holy overbooking! Crowds in 1998 and 2002 were HOT compared to the ones I saw in 2008. I forgot just how over Hogan was in the 2002 run.