Indikator

1) Is it possible that Rio de Janeiro was used for the WWWF pseudo-tournament because of the song "I go to Rio" by Peter Allen? I never made that connection in my head. The song was released in 1976 and i would be one of the better inside jokes of the wrestling business. It's about a closeted gay guy who goes to Rio to live it up without having to surpress his urges. I have watched an Australian tv movie biography about Allen, was really good. 2) By accident I stumbled over a May 1982 newspaper article which stated that Don Diamond was busted for cocaine. Is that common knowledge? I need to listen to Exile on Badstreet more... Maybe Bix can tell us what is available if you want to do these kind of searches

I believe this should have gone twice as long, but Brookside changed it on the fly

I might have been at the show of Günther Wagner's last match. He very well might be the worst of the Hulk Hogan impersonators. And he debuted around 1979. He made a niche in Bavaria (later on he called himself the "Bayern Hulk") for himself where apparently one third of the audience were local people of ill repute, another third undercover police and the rest wrestling fans or whatever you might want to call those who would watch that voluntarily. That was btw a description I read in a newspaper article about him. This was NWA Germany and it should be run by Franz Schuhmann. I don't know why anything of this show was taped, it is probably proof that there is no god. What else from that show is available? Alex Styles vs. Wild Child Tom Crippler has matches 3 and 5 in their careers, they each added a single match in their careers... that is if they didn't change their names and we don't know about it. As you can see, you have stumbled upon a goldmine for the bad wrestling connoisseur

I believe it is Cowboy Bob Brothers. I love these local nobodies

I have begun to really dislike 1980's interviews which could only work the way they did because of cocaine consumption.

If it's the Tatu lineage I would believe that the US wrestling troupe that came in 1941 (Kwariani, Shikat etc) might have been highly influential. Of course that would have to be researched, you guys could probably make up a better story in the armchair section

You can crosscheck then Highspots with the release schedule http://wxwnow.de/page/release%20schedule Ask CMJ is basically Ask The Promoter in German. The Roundtables can be in English or German. Unwind is by a Dutch guy so it's in English

wXwNOW is kinda unique, as it is not exactly tailored towards an English audience. Because of that I can see that a Highspots subscription might be preferable for certain people. Now please do not expect that you will have all full length shows online. It's actually a good question how many % of potential footage even gets online in the end. Not that I am complaining, Nero/Dreissker vs Ringkampf from Shotgun #334 was rather awesome for instance. It is actually very interesting to notice how Alan/Walter/Ilja have an anti-BSS approach in that they dislike the somewhat hedonistic throwaway approach to wrestling. There is even a German word to describe that, "kurzweilig" (=> entertaining but with a duration date). One of the highlights this year for me was listening to the roundtables on wXwNOW and external Rico Bushido podcasts, as you could hear the Dutch wrestlers voice their displeasure at the disorganized state of the Dutch wrestling scene and how important for them the aspect of sustainability and organisation and the resulting growth at wXw is. I believe that these are the reasons why the Dutch and Alan have put their energy and trust into wXw. The backlog is a mixed bag. If you can understand German, do absolutely watch the Carat timecapsules with new retro commentary about the old days. Only the newer shows have English commentary, I don't expect older shows to receive that treatment anytime soon. Looking at the old Thumbtack Jack matches it seems that the lovely Video Vegas commentary was hardcoded into the audio, so with that and the crappy lights in Essen it seems possible that only very little of the pre-Oberhausen era will be available for a long time. Will there be still be doubts that the concept won't work with the national, far more casual crowd? Absolutely. In the 16 years that our WD website had a German board the interest in European promotions generally had a crappy 5% in polls. That is quite a handicap to overcome. So if you decide to dump your hard-earned $$$ into wXwNOW, you will help them keep up their dojo (where apparently students from 20 different nations trained this year). You will help people like Timothy Thatcher stabilize their careers, you will make the Chris Brookes and Jurn Simmons of the world improve by leaps and bounds. And with every AMBITION tournament the chances will improve that such a concept of wrestling will be accepted. Doesn't sound too shabby, does it?

Why Arena Mexico when you have El Toreo de Cuatro Caminos? For the whole duration of UWA I am unsure if Arena Mexico and Arena Coliseo ever outperformed it. Even in the rigor mortis phase you had some interesting Double Power cards.

With the Trump administration gutting disability regulations I have to wonder if that means that you won't have to subtitle everything anymore. It might even lead to a scenario when the democrats will resume power that companies like the WWE will just dump whatever they have onto their networks so that they won't have to subtitle it immediately when released.

I'm only at the Amazon games currently, but I thought to myself this would be a great episode to convince people to give your extra-long episodes (aka the BTS format ) a try as you guys had some nice epiphanies and were able to get into them nicely. Years ago I got bunch of German newsletters and one of them was coauthored by Stefan Pickshäuser of Picksi's Puroresu Page fame. I have barely gone through them, but there might be a chance that I can fill some 1998ish gaps. I believe that one (Wrestling World Weekly) started in like late 97 or something, so 1996 will still be somewhat problematic for the moment. Kriss Knights has recently run amok and entered a shitload of showa era shows, so it could be that in the next twelve months we will be running out of potential Japanese shows to enter. This means for one that we could help the Japanese people with career records of the old heroes like Rikidozan, Baba and Inoki. It also means that we can ask them if they could fill the holes that are left. A pipe dream is that we could enter all the Japanese TV shows. Also in one of those newsletters - a crew of mostly catch guys going to Lebanon in 1998. Featuring Smash.... from Ecuador!

It's still in the SSDI range, so that might solve it. Which details about him are known anyways?

Will we ever find out who Tudor the Turtle was? Stupid turtle....*mumbles*

I read somewhere once how Bobo Brazil was the hero of...errr.. "his" people in Washington DC and that in 1970 the WWWF wasn't too happy with that anymore, which led to the cancellation of the Washington TV tapings. Sadly I don't remember the source, that's an aspect worth exploring. It's also worth mentioning that in 1963 they put over Dory Dixon for that weird WWWA world title they tried to establish. That could have been something like the Chicago/Ohio/Pennsylvania/Ontario (!!!) world title of the McMahon/Mondt group. And back in the 50s they used the ladies crew that was available (Babs Wingo/Betty White/Ethel Johnson/Kathleen Wimbley/Louise Green) 4000 is not very good an attendance for Vancouver, you could fit 3000 people in the PNE Gardens and so you can guess how many additional tickets you had to sell to make the same profit in the bigger venues. I have been adding Canadian attendance numbers and still have maybe a couple hundred left. Lot's of Vancouver attendances, and I have to mention that they underwhelmed me. But, they are a very good example how they handled occasional big shows in bigger venues back then. Of course that meant if you moved from PNE Gardens you should get more than 4000 in attendance for the show in question

Quick correction: This was 90s Mach Hayato, Nanjo. IIRC 80s Mach Hayato ended up as a landscaper in.... I wanna say California or Florida

The point being that his racial claim might be overblown. Although who better than to ask you what Lance had to say on the matter

I'm tentatively with Robert on Sputnik. Whenever I came across him I am underwhelmed by his role in any promotion. You don't linger around the Tex Hager circuit for 5 years as a rookie and fall out of favor at the end of your career if you really are that successful. I looked at him just now again and noticed that a decent chunk of his career happened in Florida, so I fear that Crimson Mask could have a good input into his matter. It is possible that more Gulas research might help him a lot, but otherwise I don't think he has too much of a case. The argument for him sounds good, but it might not hold up. So please take away from this that we still have our doubts which need to be dispersed. Never blindly trust old wrestling claims. Take a look at this show, which ran in opposition to the Montreal territory Montreal, QC: Aug 15, 1953 (Sylvio Samson; Delorimier Stadium; Attendance 12,000) … Jacques Larose, Sam Chuck & Joe White defeated Henri Dufresne, Jean Paul Dufresne & Ronald Dufresne … Man vs. Animal: Gorgeous Gus (bear) defeated Giant Goliath by count out … Dr. Jerry Graham defeated Gerard Dugas … George Desparois defeated Emile Gordon … Raymond Couture vs. Joffre L’Heureux If you say that something like Wicks vs Sputnik is enough for a Hall of Fame consideration, how many of those main event guys should be considered? The current old-school darlings who might be overrated are Sputnik Monroe, for reasons I couldn't express better than Robert has done so, and Bull Curry. It's anecdotal, it does sound good and you have magazines covers and articles which will romanticize them to a degree. But with all the things I come across, there is so little I see that works in their favor and too much that speaks against them. My biggest beef with Curry is by the way that he probably shouldn't be considered before Danny McShain and Frank Scarpa. Curry is more a Bulldog Brower type than a Bruno Sammartino type. Come to think of it, something similar could also be said for Leo Savage. Everything you normally see attributed to him should rather be said about other heels like Cowboy Luttrall. So if you ask me who is currently severely underrated I can name the later Florida promoter. And I have wondered if the careers of Sammartino and Brower would have switched if the demographic in the Northeast would have been switched as well. Now that is some food for thought

I'm a bit late Re: Jack Tunney but I have to note that Canada is getting more and more interesting with all it's weird promotional "wars". I have been going through every show on the newest Vance Nevada list in order to have everything represented on WrestlingData and especially the ca. 1972 Ontario shows with Bobby Heenan are a weird promotional setup where I might have to move some shows to a different promotion (like I have just moved a good amount of Ray LaMontagne shows but that's a whole different era and in Quebec). As I'm also still doing Farhat and the other (rival) promotions in Ohio it will end up quite interesting to look at that bigger picture in the end. Stupid Whipper Watson Jr.........

I have no problem with that, you won't be able to improve otherwise. So you have to be grateful in a way. What I never really can understand is how lazy people are. Nobody ever thought to listen to (shoot) interviews and inform us or Cagematch (or OWW in the old days) about things like debut matches. I believe I was looking up Loranger for some reason and came up with this hypothesis "10/8/84 Lake Charles, LA @ Civic Center The Midnight Express beat The Fantastics This is probably the card where Shawn Michaels debuted and lost to Art Crews" Now this entry was from David Baker's list for Watts and I certainly don't ever want to complain about him. But nobody else could be arsed to connect the dots on that one? That is so lazy it is almost pathetic. Please everybody, continue to complain about our mistakes so that they can be corrected.

I believe I screwed up the Bud Licious picture. As you can barely find anything for those guys you have to take whatever you find, an on KFM one person noted that "he wrestled Phil Collins" , as you can see in the Wrestlecrap entry. So I thought he was a generic Warrior clone who couldn't wrestle a lick. But he was the stunt double. A rather avoidable error :-/ These are the mistakes that happen when you don't really watch wrestling and just read/listen it +95% of the time. But you find things like the obituary for Drifter Ripper which identifies Drifter Nomad in the process.

I have to assume that you addressed it in an earlier episode - or did you not talk about the fact that Vernon White could be introduced as "former WWF Superstar Vernon White"

As a WD guy I can only shake my head at the criticism both our sites get. Just this week we had a... let's use the word Armleuchter in case he will google me , who bemoaned the lack of Showa Zenjo and Great Gama results. Don't think that we have a million ways to get all the relevant information. If you have something, send it to us or tell us how to access it. Don't just be a whiny bitch, who often enough is even too lazy to see that we have certain things. People are engaged enough to complain and not much else. Also, fuck social media. Made it sooooo much harder to research.

It's a really weird feeling driving during your daily commute and hearing your name At least all these wrestling podcast are a neat sideeffect of being on the road for so many hours each week. While I did not learn English because of Ringmasters I was surprised by how much I had forgotten about that run. Basically I only remember that Otto Wanz (or was it his son Michael?) called every move he didn't know the name of a "Big Otto". Needless to say, there were many Big Otto's and if I ever have the opportunity to call a rather minor wrestling product I will call many moves a Big Otto. And I always assumed that Owen's name was a play on his full name Lovely tribute btw

What is even the best available footage of worked punches, screen quality wise? People can swoon over Florida or Mid-South Coliseum related things as much as they want, but if you can't replicate it because of modern HDTV standards and giant TV screens it's pretty pointless.

Once the first European tournament wrestler who couldn't really cut it figured out he would be booked because of his comedic antics (escape spots!!!) or because of he was lovable hometown hero the business was doomed in that regard. That probably happened in one of the first ten tournaments which were ever held. I love how some (IIRC 1901'ish) Vienna tournament coverage explicitly stated that because the normal, charismatic ring announcer/mc was missing one day a full fledged riot couldn't be prevented, unlike the other days when they could be calmed down by said MC. Wrestling has always been wrestling and will always be wrestling