JNLister

Looking at the figures for Brits this year and seeing Pallo didn't get any bump as leading candidate once McManus got in and "freed up" a spot I suspect it may be many years before anyone gets in. With Daddy on 38% (a big rise), I get the impression that a fair proportion of the European voting group is split between "would never put Daddy in" and "will always vote for Daddy ahead of anyone else, often as the only UK pick". In turn that creates a logjam that Daddy won't get in, but eats up enough votes that it makes it very hard for anyone else to get on 60 percent of ballots. There appear to be 120 people voting in the Europe category, which is staggeringly high. It's also amazing how many people on the ballot (in all categories) got identical or near identical percentages to last year.

My biggest problem with the idea of getting a million subscribers is that even if every single US person who bought WrestleMania this year buys the network, you still need around 400,000 Americans who didn't buy the biggest show of the year, but are prepared to pay $15 a month for WWE TV programming. Even including people who watched it a friend's house, I don't see where those numbers are coming from.

Bob Barnett used to do four-hour "Best of Japan [insert month]" tapes in the early 90s, which are still listed on his site. They were more "biggest matches that didn't suck", but might be useful as a guide.

There was a Warlord hotline. A premium rate number solely for people who wanted to hear the latest news and interviews from the Warlord.

Short answer: cable TV wasn't a big deal here, satellite TV became much more widespread from 1989 (the first time you could get it with a dish small enough to mount on a wall) and WWF was among the most popular programming on satellite. The specific boom of 91-2ish was very much a case of it being a fad among teenagers that passed quite quickly. Long answer may be following in a different form in a few weeks

The three singles/same guys in a six-man tag was heavily used/overused on arena shows for a while, likely because it saved on payoffs. Poor Tony Walsh had to work singles with Daddy every night, then come back and bump for him in the six-man after having already done all of Daddy's routine.

Spring 1992 was when WWF was so hot in Europe they had to send the jet back to the US mid-tour to pick up more merchandise.

I find emotional connections to wrestlers are strained when they kill their wife and son.

HHH and Rock had a good one at the UK only PPV Rebellion in 1999. I vaguely recall it as being the last one in the big bars cage. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6yb3c_tr...match-par_sport

A good match from this year is Mikey Whiplash vs Robbie Dynamite from ICW: To give it context, Whiplash and Dynamite are two of the main "trunks and boots" straight wrestlers on All Star who either have the clean technical bout or defend Britain against the evil Yank invaders depending on the venue and line-up. However, ICW is very different (think ECW in 1995 but in a nightclub) and here Whiplash is a heel doing a gimmick somewhere between Raven and Golddust. Dynamite is debuting here. The backstory is that Whiplash won the Square Go (ie Royal Rumble) and is now the number one contender to the title, currently held by another heel. The two goals here are thus to further his move to full-on babyface and to establish him as a serious challenger for the title, all gimmicks aside. As you'll see, it works.

How do people go about choosing which categories to vote in? I set myself a threshold this year that I'd only consider a category where I thought I had a good enough knowledge of at least 75% of candidates, which gave me modern US, Japan and Europe.

My threshold for whether you should be considering somebody who objectively meets the 15 years/35 or older criteria is whether there's a genuine prospect that they'll continue to improve their case as their career goes on. With Tanahashi I think there's debate about whether he belong in now, but it's certainly possible he can solidify his candidacy in the next few years. With Cena going in last year, for the few people who don't think he belongs in now, I can't see what else he's going to do that will change their minds.

WCW came to Manchester in March 2000. They sold out a 16,000 seat building. The publicity advertised four names: Goldberg, Bret Hart, Sting and Nash. The actual show was: Bret did talking. Nash appeared unannounced in the aisle but didn't wrestle. Sting and Goldberg was never mentioned, and they didn't refer to the tag match as the main event, leaving people to assume Goldberg was still to come. During the match the crowd was so quiet everyone on the floor listened to a guy on his mobile getting live play-by-play from his wife who was watching WWF Heat. After the match the ring announcer and referees went to the back without any further announcements and people eventually realised that was it. Complaints about the show made page 3 of the local newspaper and a national network TV consumer show. They came back in November and did 2,000.

I interviewed Jim Breaks today for FSM. I'm both a little sad and also happy to say he's an absolutely lovely guy who's so far from his in-ring persona, it's silly. He's like a jovial grandpa who's telling you about how much he loved pissing people off.

A wrestling match contract is only valid if, at the top of the first page, it contains the word "CONTRACT" in block capitals of at least 72 points.

WOS reruns on the Wrestling Channel and then on Men & Movies both did great ratings by the standards/status of the channel. On Men & Movies in particular, they found they could show several hours in an afternoon without the audience dropping. I don't know if they get demographic breakdowns in UK ratings (or how useful they'd be for such small-scales channels), but the theory was that it was retired people who are happy to sit in front of the TV all day and reminisce.

No, it was without an appendix, but with an unused Vader-Takada ticket.

Luckily I can work my own schedule and am a night owl, so I'm usually up a good three hours after my wife goes to sleep, which is usually divided up equally between wrestling, TV and video games. If I had to work 9-5 and/or had kids, I'd pretty much be watching no wrestling. I do kinda miss the days of coming home from school and watching a four-hour tape straight through.

A while back I watched the full 1989 run of Superstars of Wrestling. The Rougeaus had the best squash matches by far -- not in a destruction way, but in a "doing spot show bullshit in the middle of a squash" way.

The unedited-three-times-as-long-original-draft of Bret's book must be a truly amazing thing.

I think WWE may be majorly overestimating the whole "we're like a sport so DVR-proof" value (even ignoring that only one show is live). I get the feeling WWE programming fees are about 20% the actual value to networks of the ratings and 80% whether or not they have two or more stations seriously interested when a contract comes up.

With the injury finishes, one great thing is that technically the non-injured wrestler could decide whether to accept the win or call it a no contest. Everyone always refused to take the win because they were sporting. Except once when Jim Breaks accepted the win and began acting like an absolute dick, taking all the credit.

That's odd. The only Tibor-Borienko match I can find is a DQ shown on 1 April 1969, which doesn't seem to correspond to a tournament. I've got a few gaps in that era, either because I don't have a listing, or because wrestling was pre-empted for football in the Midlands (where I got the TV listings) but may have been shown elsewhere in the country. That's seriously rare stuff you have there as when you buy pre-70s footage from ITV you not only pay a fortune, but pretty much have to put up your first-born as collateral to say you won't make copies of it.

I have two Hurst vs Peter Szakacs TV matches on record: one taped at Croydonon 16 September 1969 and almost certainly broadcast on the 17th or 20t,and the other broadcast 5 September 1968 from an unknown venue. Nothing for the other one, though it may have replaced a scheduled match. Where did you get this stuff?