Robert S

I remember Cornette making jokes about how uncomfortable Caudle was with being on screen with The Gangstas (and using the Jesse Helms connection as a point-of-reference), so there was definitely something there.

Some stats: the biggest winners (in percent points, not actual percentage) Zack Sabre Jr. +33.4% Gran Hamada +32.7% Spyros Arion +31.6% Dorrell Dixon +19.6% Cody Rhodes +16.3% Otto Wanz 15.4% CM Punk +13.4% Samoa Joe +13.3% Matt & Jeff Hardy +12.4% Jay & Mark Briscoe +11.4% Biggest losers: Royal Brothers -15.0% Ole Anderson -13.5% Angel Blanco & Dr. Wagner -12.5% El Hijo del Santo & Octagon -12.3% Split of people who got in (not sure how Dave calculates the numbers w.r.t. voting categories): Spyros Arion (3rd among reporters, 1st among historians, 2nd among active professionals, 24th among retired professionals) Gran Hamada (1st, 2nd, 27th, 30th) Dorrell Dixon (2nd, 2nd, 21st, 17th) CM Punk (6th, 12th, 4th, 12th) Cody Rhodes (7th, 10th, 10th, 1st) Sabu (9th, 6th, 3rd, 13th) Bobby Bruns (13th, 9th, 13th, 18th) And of people who were close: Hayabusa (4th, 23rd, 16th, 16th) JYD (14th, 15th, 9th, 21st) June Byers (12th, 7th, 19th, 26th) Jesse Ventura (11th, 22nd, 5th, not in top 30) Jose Tarres (10th, 4th, not in top 30, 15th) Ted Turner (8th, 14th, 30th, not in top 30) Von Erichs (5th, 21st, 8th, not in top 30) Gorilla Monsoon (22nd, not in top 30, 1st, 4th) Some outliers among people who did not pass the 50%: Billy Joyce 5th among historians, 39.9% total Manami Toyota & Toshiyo Yamada 2nd among former professionals, 33.8% total Larry Matysik 3rd among former professionals, 39.7% total Dominic DeNucci 5th among former professionals, 32.1% total Randy Orton 6th among former professionals, 31.6% total Edge 7th among former professionals, 27.6% total Matt & Jeff Hardy 8th among former professionals, 35.6% total Tony Schiavone 9th among former professionals, 23.4% total Mike Tenay 10th among former professionals, 48.6% total It's really funny, that former professionals voted for a lot of announcers, but did not vote at all for Jesse Ventura (who is on the ballot as an announcer).

if you ignore the elephant in the room called Jesse Helms

To be fair, there have been a lot of stretches over the last 25 years where an AI would have done a better job than Vince and the writers staff did. As was pointed out time and time again, booking wrestling in theory is anything but rocket science. You have your standard formula and tropes that you use again and again, just making sure to not repeat stuff too soon.

Public European TV stations usually were very good with archiving their stuff so if the SRF (RTS) produced it, they very likely have the tapes somewhere in a vault. If they only got the tapes from the French promoters and aired them unedited then I guess the stuff is gone. Re. Lasartesse: I remember that he went to some trainings and maybe shows promoted by the scene that Claudio Castagnoli came from. He talked there a bit about his attempts to run shows in the German-speaking (Germans would argue that this is not really German, as a guy living less than 2 km away from the Swiss border, I obviously have a different opinion ;-)) parts of Switzerland (covering about 2/3 of the Swiss population) and drawing poorly. His conclusion was that Switzerland was (at least at that time) just not the right place for wrestling. Cagematch has some results for shows in Switzerland pre 1990. The 80ies stuff looks to be CWA-affiliated, there is a 78 card that has an Inoki vs. Lasartesse main event where I think David Mantell posted some clips of, the 60ies cards look to be Lasartesse-run shows filled with French talent, the 40ies and 50ies cards might actually have been run by promoters in Switzerland (maybe promoted by Paul Berger as he pops on most cards and is the only Swiss regular from what I can tell). And on why only the French station in Switzerland had wrestling: that's probably just simple geographics. I guess back then it was already possible for most people in the French-speaking part of Switzerland to receive French TV and probably wrestling on those stations was popular enough that it got coverage in newspapers and someone got the idea to air wrestling themselves, buying tapes from French promoters. You did not have that for the German-speaking side. I don't think there was (apart from clips here and there) regular wrestling on German or Austrian TV (and considering geographics, it would have had been German TV) that could have swept over.

"If you called yourself the pedophile killer (...) you would have plenty of opponents [in this business]." - that's a great line

Colby Corino started at the age of 13 (he had matches earlier, but I would assume those were comedy matches or whatever as they were all on "Toys for Tots" fundraising shows)

As there was some talk about Jim Cornette and his podcasts on this board: Cornette has fired the guy who did the art for his podcasts (the youtube thumbnails) because he found out that that guy posted all kind of right-wing-nutjob conspiracy theories on social media. (okay, to be precise, it was more that that guy quit before he could get fired - Brian Last apparently told that guy to stop acting crazy on social media and he was, "nah, I'm good")

After spending two minutes on Wikipedia clicking on "Personal life" on the pages of the main eventers I remember one of the reasons why I stopped watching MMA.

In some parts of Europe (e.g. Austria or France), WWE PLEs are still part of the original WWE Network. The expectation was that content will be moved to Netflix in 2026 or so when local TV deals expire, though so far nothing official was announced. Not that I care too much, to be honest. I am neither interested in their product to begin with, them going full-MAGA (and stuff like bringing back Brock) does not help either.

Which is funny because aren't the "Polynesians" actually really tribal (pun intended)? I mean the story going around why it took forever for Samoa Joe to get a chance in WWE was because he was NOT an Anoa'i and the Anoa'i family was actively pushing against Samoans not related to them.

this I am able to do approx. conversions from pounds to kg (divide by 2 and round down a little), from feet to m (divide by 3 and round down a little) and from miles to km (times 5 divide by 8 - or if I need rough estimation is good enough, times 2 divide by 3) in my head, but I will never be able to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius without using digital assistance. There should be a section in the Geneva Conventions about the the use of non-SI units.

Even better was Virgil (an obvious shot against Dusty Rhodes, Vince at that point really had it out for Dusty considering Akeem "the African Dream") being called Vincent in WCW.

It feels like that they have these kind of plans every 10 years. There is this famous picture of Triple H in front of a world map with lot of small NXT markers on different parts of the world and I am pretty sure there were similar news sometimes in the early to mid aughts. Anyway, who could they grab in Europe? Both RevPro and wXw feel too small to make actual plays for real fulltime touring companies.

There are about four page on this at DVDVR (though far) in the general April discussion thread, so I wouldn't say there were no reactions over there.