JNLister

Hurst Park (which was a group of racecourse owners) only bought out Dale Martin. Hurst then sold to Jarvis Astair in the 70s, and he then bought out most of the other promotions.

Joint didn't own Dale Martin as such. Joint is a rough equivalent of the NWA - a public "governing body" and a private cartel. As an organization, it had the TV contract. Dale Martin was the biggest individual member, covering the south of England (including London), so had the most prestigious venue (Royal Albert Hall) and put on the biggest proportion of the shows taped for TV. Aside from the absolute biggest stars who'd be booked nationally like an NWA champion or Andre, the biggest proportion of full-timers worked for Dale Martin and it had both a place for them to stay and provided transport to and from shows in buses. It's territory covered roughly half the population of England (40% of the UK population as a whole.) The story goes that Jarvis Astaire (a multi sports/entertainment) promoter bought Dale Martin in the mid-70s. He then gradually took over the over promotions and sold it as a collective to bookmakers William Hill. They employed Max Crabtree (previously a local Northern promoter) to run the whole thing and start promoting under the Dale Martin banner nationwide. Crabtree later bought it out. So by the time the Daddy push began, Dale Martin and Joint were largely interchangeable terms. Wrestlers who were active from that era tend to use the term "Dale Martin" (or even "Dale and Martin") because if they were working full time, that's likely who directly employed them. Specifically on Davies-Veidor, it would be a Dale Martin show under the sanction/oversight of Joint Promotions, even though by that time Dale Martin was one of only a couple of Joint members and by far the most dominant. It's roughly equivalent to a Jim Crockett Promotions show under the NWA banner in 1988 when there were hardly any other members doing notable business.

Pretty much the attitude of me and most subscribers I know is that we've subscribed since day one, we'll probably always subscribe unless the price gets silly, and it would be nice if WWE wasn't so obvious about taking full advantage of that.

IIRC, the cutoff is the last year that could be classed as counting towards your Hall of Fame credentials/case. Obviously that rules out 85-7 for Patera, and I don't think removing any of his career after that would detract from his case.

It's from Joint. Once you got into 85/6ish, Joint had cut the schedule down so much that they couldn't really enforce people being exclusive to them, so you had more people working for multiple promotions rather than doing a formal jump. Looking at house show results, Breaks seems to have been split fairly evenly between Joint and All Star in 86.

The implication wasn't meant to be that it is illegal, rather it isn't a WWE approved method of distribution. I am not going to change the wording but the intention wasn't that people were picking up the network through nefarious means. OK, cool. There are genuinely a few folk over here who think that if they are "caught", they'll be sued by WWE, have their internet connection taken away, or even go to jail.

Minor gripe, but there's nothing illegal about subscribing from a country where the Network isn't officially available. VPN's and the like are perfectly legal in and of themselves -- I liken it to buying from an eBay seller who only ships to the US, getting them to ship to a friend, then having the friend ship it on to you. The absolute worst you can say a UK subscriber is doing is a breach of the terms and conditions by giving false address information during the signup, but it's not breaking criminal law and it's not something WWE could pursue civil penalties over.

Ah right. Whoever copied and pasted the schedule for the Observer site had it 3-6.

I noticed they had Hallowe'en Havoc 90 on the livestream in a 3 hour slot today. The on demand version is still the 2 hour THE release, so I don't know if this was a screwup and they just mis-scheduled it, or if they've found the original PPV tape.

I *think* that was just something he said on the lists for comic effect while making the point that it was cash, cheque and possible postal orders only.

Plus he never used paper for notes, it was always the inside of a piece of cereal packet.

FWIW, Cooper's probably the guy that retired wrestlers mention the most as underrated and valuable in his role of making new guys look like stars.

Just want to say thanks for this great feature.

Yes, up until 7 days, like any other channel. Although, admittedly, it hasn't been consistent. Recently, starting at 6 am on some Tuesday I think, all it had said was "WWE Network Programming". Some other changes to Rogers prompted a reboot and that got fixed. It also went through a stretch of unupdated programming. Again, a reboot fixed that, as some other changes were happening as well with Rogers (new channels, IIRC). I imagine DVRing (or, as we call it in Canada, PVRing ) wouldn't be an issue. (I say all this as a non-subscriber (at present), as IPGs can be seen whether you're subscribed to the channel or not. I have no idea what On Demand changes exist, OTOH.) Cool to hear, though of course it raises the question of why the over-the-top service regularly has no more than a few days' programming listed. Is DVR/PVR a US/Canada thing? I've heard both terms used in the UK (though the brand name 'Sky Plus' is more common) but with a distinction, namely that DVR is bare bones functionality where you can pick a show from the EPG to record and possibly get a series link/season pass, whereas PVR makes smarter use of a wider programming database so you can do searches, get personalised suggestions and other features you get with services like TiVo.

Does the Rogers version have listings more than a few days in advance on the EPG (unlike the over the top version.) If not, does that mean it's largely useless on DVRs?

I think the 10 votes limit is more important than ever now we're far enough down the pyramid of candidates that you've got a large number of people on a broadly similar level. There's a real danger now that the "if X is in, Y must be as well" argument would bring in a flood of entrants and water it down. I think it's also important to remember (and the non-wrestler edition of VOW covered this) that it's likely boards like this vastly overestimate how much attention/thought most voters give to the rules and process. For example, I doubt the majority of people give any thought to the idea that there's a difference in effect between "I've not considered this category" and "I've looked at this category but didn't select anyone".

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting Dave should use that bare bones voting idea, just thinking out loud about what effect such a change would have.

Not sure if it was the real reason, but holding off to see if Brooks would recover was definitely how it was explained on TV.

Looking back, 1999 is definitely the time where you've regularly got a titleholder who you couldn't really have headlining a B house show without it feeling flat.

Hypothetical talking point here, but what would be the effect if the process was completely simplified so: * there's no categories * every voter gets a list of all the candidates and you vote yes, no or abstain on each. * to get in you need 60 percent yes among people who voted on you either way (so abstentions don't count). Put simpler, you need 1.5x as many YESes as you get NOes. Who gets in? Who's left out? Who's the big winner and loser from changing to this system?

NFL got on Channel 4 (the then newest UK network station) when it launched in 1982 and became a big cult deal around 85-86, to the point that the 49ers are still disproportionately popular here based on their 1984-5 season. I vaguely recall Sanders had the helmet to use as a weapon at live events, but obviously couldn't get away with that on TV.

Drew money for Stu or made money for Stu? The latter depends on his payoff.

Not sure if it's just a UK thing, but there's usually a distinction between hooker and ripper here. It varies, but the most common explanation is that a hooker is a shooter who knows submissions, while a ripper is somebody for whom causing injury is the priority, ahead of winning a match.

Bear in mind I've not seen the show yet, but I was hoping for a lengthy look at the Hart Foundation vs US feud, covering the way you had the unified heel force against the disparate bunch of babyfaces who didn't get along, and the whole deal of having babyface/heel switch round from week to week depending on Raw's location.

They even had closed captioning on the live NXT last night. Either they are paying a professional to do it live, or they have an incredible automated system, and I don't think the latter is even possible.