Lee Casebolt

That NWA title looks nice. The Triple Crown is also top-notch.

Andre's body of work easily trumps Show's body of work. I'm not trying to diss on Show, and his longevity has been impressive. But, I'd put Andre's peaks above Show's peaks, and I'd still put late Andre over prime Show because they both basically served the same function, Andre just served it better and worked a better style for getting people over. I think it's possible to make both of these arguments - Show has more talent, Andre a better body of work. If you put each man in the other's career in terms of booking, Show could do what Andre did. I don't think Andre could do what Show did, and I love Andre. Show never got to do epic matches with his era's equivalent of Antonio Inoki and Stan Hansen. He didn't get built up as an unstoppable force for years to be matched up against his contemporary version of Hulk Hogan. (You can fill in your own Inoki, Hansen, and Hogan.) He was never protected to the degree Andre was, and so couldn't develop the aura Andre used so successfully. But if you put Andre on tv every week, have him job to the equivalent of DDP, Matt Hardy, and MVP, I don't believe he'd be looked at in the same light, either.

Bobby Lashley has a Bellator fight scheduled for Sep 5, so you can look forward to a) the abrupt ending of Bobby Lashley, dominant champion, the dominant champ being taken off tv for a month or so, or c) the dominant champ getting wrecked on national television. TNA, everybody!

I think it's indisputable that conversations became much deeper, more detailed, and more knowledgeable. Going back to my own experience, the difference between the conversations I had with my friends as teenagers watching tv, renting WWF and NWA tapes, and buying magazines off the rack at Wal-Greens and the ones I could have in a post-internet situation with the DVDVR guys, tOA, Bix, Snowden, etc. is not one of kind but of degree. We're still talking about who's good and who sucks and why, what this company should do and why it won't because they are a bunch of morons. But instead of dealing with the experiences and opinions of a small number of people in my immediate circle, it's a larger number of people with vastly different experiences and opinions. It's much easier to access information and to include more people. Rather than relying on my shitty memory, I can look up dates and results, or throw a youtube video into the middle of a conversation so everyone knows exactly what we're talking about. That ease of access means you have to wade through a lot of crap, too, be it misinformation published and disseminated or people who can't (or won't) differentiate fact and opinion, but I find that largely manageable and the highs are high enough to justify the effort.

I would absolutely have bought those if they were available on the open market. As a kid, I was always thinking of shooting on the champ and stealing the belt.

You realize Meltzer alone predates the internet by something like a decade, right?

This is interesting to me. By that I mean I can't quite wrap my head around it. Were there matches you enjoyed more than others? And (assuming so) how did you classify "matches I like" vs "matches I don't like"? Did all the matches look the same? This confuses me greatly. Please elaborate.

Or split crowds. I forget which, but at least one of the Flair/Steamboat '89 series had dueling "STEAMBOAT!" "FLAIR!" chants going on.

Hansen really is the wrestler that the Apter mags, at least (I'm not overly familiar with Meltzer) tried to sell Brody as.

I'll dig through my archives. Meantime, read The Fall Guys (1937) and Barthes' "The World of Wrestling" (1957).

If you find it more plausible that no one thought of wrestling in analytic terms before they had contact with Dave Meltzer than that people had these conversations but elected not to publish them (except when they did, in the form of various books and newspaper articles), I don't know what to tell you.

I had those conversations as a teenager - the Blue Blazer, Curt Hennig, Ricky Steamboat, and the Rockers were awesome, the Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan and Hacksaw Jim Duggan were terrible. I'd never heard the word "workrate" but it's easy to recognize, as is who makes an opponent look good and who makes them look bad. That was late 80s/early 90s; post-Meltzer, but I never heard the man's name, nor knew there was anything even vaguely like the Observer til I got online in 1996. We talked about the WM 6 main event in terms of Hogan never loses, but he's getting old, so is Warrior supposed to replace him? We were informed solely by what we saw on TV and read in the WWF and Apter magazines. That's just the experience of one kid in a small town in Iowa, but I think this is a pretty standard sort of conversation to have whenever you have fans above a certain minimum level of interest and intelligence.

The Fall Guys was published in 1937.

Tournaments were very good for that. Similarly - how long did it take you to realize that, in every two out of three falls match, whoever won the first fall was going to lose the second? Not long, probably. And that's hardly a new phenomenon. I can get you a newspaper article from the 1880s talking about it. (At length, and with as much smug superiority as you'll find anywhere on the internet. That part's not new, either.)

It's a great look, but you'd be better off watching literally any of the Brody clones - John Nord, The Predator, whoever.

Prowrestlinghistory.com lists Bart Vale defeating Fujiwara for the championship 3-20-92, but no defenses.

Taking a quick look at wikipedia, and trying to trim out the redundancies, it looks like Flair gets... 10 NWA World titles 8 WCW World titles 2 WWF World titles 3 Mid Atlantic Heavyweight titles 2 NWA Television titles 6 Mid Atlantic/NWA/WCW US titles 2 WCW International World Heavyweight titles 1 NWA Missouri Heavyweight title 1 WWE Intercontinental title 3 Mid Atlantic Tag Team titles 3 NWA World Tag Team titles 3 WWE World Tag Team titles Which comes to 44 titles.

There is no point in their respective careers I wouldn't rather watch Akiyama than Kobashi or Misawa.

Far too harsh. Dustin was one of the better guys in WCW at that point. I'd go so far as to say his last name gave them an excuse to give him a push he deserved but might have looked like too much too soon if he was Dustin Smith. I haven't seen the Ironman match in probably 15 years, so I don't have an opinion on it, but Dustin was cranking out great matches and his career seemed to be progressing at a logical rate. He had a great tag run with Windham (and Steamboat); the most natural (hah!) thing in the world is transitioning from that to a second-tier title run.

Mostly the WWE-created lingo - fans are not a "Universe", "divas" sounds like you think all your female competitors are uppity bitches (apologies to whoever from twitter I stole that from; it's true), Hillbilly Jim is not a "legend" (ditto), and not every wrestler is a "superstar". "Sports entertainment" I've learned to live with; "sports entertainer" is a fucking abomination.

I just rewatched the Enforcers/Dustin & Steamboat Clash match yesterday as part of introducing a new fan to classic tag team wrestling. I always remember it primarily for the initial angle and forget how amazing it is as a pure wrestling match.

Far from being crazy, I think that would make him a much better heel than he's been thus far.

Voted for Andre largely for his versatility. I think you can argue Vader was a better monster/heel than Andre over the course of his career. I don't think you can argue Vader was ever good in a babyface role, which Andre was. Both of them worked against a wide variety of opponents, but I saw more versatility in Andre, from his surprisingly athletic younger days to the minimalist attention to detail work he did when his body broke down. Vader can match the former, but I've never seen him do anything like the latter.

A booming economy would help.

Second both of these. '89 is, all told, my favorite year in wrestling.