Indikator

IBV by then was Selenkowitsch. Hannover until 1980 was Schober (Peter William as the matchmaker). Berlin/VDB was Berger. Hannover then got Kaiser, who was more like a money mark. In the end William/Wanz as more or less heads of VDB edged out Selenkowitsch, consolidated power and by that you could say they drove it into the dead end that was Catch. It will take quite a while until all the intricate details of the promotional structure will be shown at WD. Like Berger&Lasartesse copromoting and then being in opposition to each other in Berlin. Then again I am also trying to flesh out the UK and things like figuring out Jack Atherton shows is quite some task. I could live to the age of 200 and never run out of things to do.

Mile Zrno was trained by Michael Ujevic

Read a great line by Andrew Betts on the Stick To Wrestling FB Group: The reality is nobody who wasn't already a fan has ever taken wrestling seriously it's been that way forever

Small correction, he was in Hannover for Edmund Schober, that had nothing to do with Wanz/CWA/VDB. I assume Katsuji Adachi was the middleman, Schober had in the previous year tried to book him as the successor of Kiyomigawa, but I think he didn't get as over as they hoped. Not sure how he got booked in Grand Prix just prior.

Shoots happened behind closed doors. I see coverage of the first euro tournaments and the papers shit on them. "We only had coverage becaue the venue needed the money, otherwise they would have gone bankrupt"-stuff from Vienna 1900. Friendly reminder, that it was the town where the NYC Masked Marvel angle originated from.

As always your posts are very fascinating, we cannot thank you enough. What I would like to know is if there has been information about the shows in Riki Sports Palace. Was it difficult not to run a deficit with those shows? I always thought it might be comparable to a venue like Arena Coliseo, meaning that it was a good way to have placefiller shows and an easy way to get TV footage on a quick notice. So I can totally see the value that Riki Sports Palace could have offered, but at the end of the day the question remains if it just wasn't feasible to have such a venue. Maybe for good reason that approach wasn't used afterwards.

That Urata connection sounds interesting. What else did he do in the business?

I have read such an article from 1912 (should have been an Austrian sports magazine IIRC), it read a lot like those night club "wrestling" deals you had with the women for the longest time. So why you surely can debate if it was professional wrestling, you have to at least admire the ladies because they surely didn`t have it easy.

"Mulligan and referee Rick Hazzard got into it in the dressing room.... Hazzard called him a lousy wrestler and blamed him for the fact his match with Brody drew 200 fans.... Mulligan punched Hazzard out and rammed him into a wall." - July 7, 86 Observer This was likely Fort Worth on 6/23, Mulligan probably left the promotion immediately

Just in case anyone still wants to know the Maritime 1987 guys: Butcher Vachon (Roger Theriault) , Bobby Hart (Shane Bower) , Nature Boy Sweetan (Verne Siebert)

Two commutes later I'm done with the episode. I can't recall where we got the identification of Mighty Sputnik from, but if it was Mike Allen he merely upheld the family tradition of having a Russian gimmick (Russian Wolfman - John Smith) . Doesn't beat "Rapapotsky" though. I really hope that Mike will emerge one day and tell us something about his family history

Nature Boy Sweetan couldn't have been Fred, he died in a fire 13 years prior. It is comparable to a Pretty Boy Hanson in 1975 who was misidentified as Stan Hanson. The only "other" Sweetan we don't know nothing about is a Hoss Sweetan who worked in Detroit in 1974

If Meltzer reads that spoiler sentence he will likely give the first 8 star rating... as he should

To put it negatively - "Drawing Heat" was an attempt of doing a book in the "Gonzo" style and the more I have to do with the Ontario shows outside of Toronto from like 1965-1990 the less does the book make much sense. You would really need a Whipper Watson Jr. book as well to be able to understand what the hell was going on. Canada around 1975 is pure chaos

I started in mid 94 (KOTR airing) so I am a bit unsure when the hype started in Germany. AFAIK RTL only had WCW on "Catch Up", Eurosport and Tele 5 had WWF. I have yet to hear anyone say that any European hype had started due to the Eurosport timeslot. The Sunday afternoon fiasco was IIRC around August 1995, maybe it was two Challenge episodes that they aired. Currently I would assume that the Bravo involvement (#1 teen magazine, nothing like the US Bravo network) was a big part of the hype and probably when they went from Tele 5 to RTL 2 in early 1993. The last WWF show in late 1997 was the Survivor Series of that year and. I think it resumed (on RTL 2 again?) with either Survivor Series 1998 or Wrestlemania 1999. I think I remember that they showed an older, yet to be broadcasted PPV before the new PPV. Alas, it did not get anywhere near as over as the previous RTL 2 run. I have accumulated a good number of newsletters and because all the random tiny Euro shows of that era I want to go through them anyways. Robert, do you have some of them still in your possession? In a way it is really weird that almost nothing from back then is in a private collection, I wouldn't know anyone who could still have DF1 airings. I want my drunk New Years Eve WCW marathons. And I think that "the" dj_ddt recorded the Pittsburgh PWX, so if we are ever so lucky and he emerges from the shadows who knows what he could give into circulation. Hopefully I didn't traumatize you writing his name

When and for which promotion was that Victoria allegation supposed to have happened? I'm not aware of it

WWS was done by two Americans who turned out to be conmen to some degree iirc. Have you even heard of them? Mike Lane was apparently Equalizer Zip, if New Wave Wrestling is to believed. What happened with Sherdog?

The original article stated thtat, if I remember correctly, it was an estimate based on the number of shows they had each year and the number of years he main evented. It was clearly just an estimate. But everybody is always only quoting the number, ignoring that it is merely an estimate. It's funny, even his post-Ivan exit details are always hilariously wrong. He had his own Pennsylvania sub-territory (basically you had a PA based roster and a NJ based roster until the national expansion). He didn't exactly slow down. He ran his own "territory" in the most godforsaken towns that were no step above Witschi`s Arena. I kinda have an interest in that as one of these towns is Washington, Pa and if my parents had divorced I might have even ended up there. And that town was always dead as a wrestling town, only Bruno made a serious attempt to make such towns into a real territory. Retirement my ass. In a way, "The case against Bruno" would be a fascinating topic and it would have some legs. The cancelled and dark MSG, that Pittsburgh territory... not exactly what you would expect from a Hall of Famer. It is important though to be clear that while these issues can be interpreted as negatives, it doesn't negate the positives. Was he a flop because of 1968 MSG? No. But 1968 MSG wasn`t a run of 12 sell outs either.

Was there really a wrestler who only couldn't make it in football because of bad cardio? You mostly hear about bad knees, but other reasons aren't really mentioned. I still don't really know why Ron Simmons didn't make it for instance.

Just to make the point clear - the wXw fans were the heels in this dynamic. What happened was that Danielson returned on 2008-01-20 and because of that some additional fans attended that one show who preferred ROH normally. The core fans were a tad annoyed and weren't that entertained by the workrate/grapplefuck stuff. So, out of curiosity and boredom we decided to troll Danielson. As 16 Carat Gold crowds are "wXw fans on steroids" that led to this fascinating scenario. The fans were the instigators and Danielson was happy to indulge in this ridiculousness. You have to love wrestling because of these things. "Eye of the Tiger" was picked as a theme by the matchmaker Felix Kohlenberg, never did that sound better for Zack than at the post match celebrations.