WON HoF Candidate Poll Thread

[ohtani's jacket]

Are we supposed to infer that drawing 10,000 in Mexico or Puerto Rico is the same as drawing 10,000 in Japan or the States?

[Victator]

Why would it be different?

[Dylan Waco]

I don't know that you are "supposed" to infer anything from it. You'd have to ask Matt. I've been really critical of the metric precisely because it doesn't address the reality of different eras, promotions, regions, et.

[Al]

I FOLLOWED WRESTLING IN AUSTRALIA/PACIFIC/PUERTO RICO CANDIDATES

Spyros Arion {22}

Carlos Colon {89}

King Curtis Iaukea {7}

Mark Lewin {13}

Wasn't Iaukea inducted last year?

[Dylan Waco]

Yes. So was Doc. This is a year or two old.

[kjh]

I would not be shocked to find other top ten finishes from the 90's.

I wouldn't be too confident of that given that business in Puerto Rico really dropped off in the early 90s, whereas Mexico and Japan were hotbeds at the same time.

[Dylan Waco]

I would not be shocked to find other top ten finishes from the 90's.

I wouldn't be too confident of that given that business in Puerto Rico really dropped off in the early 90s, whereas Mexico and Japan were hotbeds at the same time.

 

Yeah I know the business there started to drop dramatically in 89, but IIRC they popped some good houses in the 90's at various points.

[cm funk]

Really British wrestling was going to be done when the WWF/WCW offered their tapes with better production values to the local stations at cheaper rates than any British promotion could make them for, especially when American culture transplants so easily to the UK. Meltzer talks a lot about Jarrett holding out till the mid 90s in Memphis, but it's not like the British scene completely died as soon as the WWF first stepped foot on our shores. All Star Wrestling did OK until Kendo Nagasaki retired in 1993.

When did WWF get on UK tv? I thought it wasn't until the late 80's or so, but Dave was talking about it on Observer Radio like it coincided with Daddy no longer being a draw and the local promotions falling off, which I thought happened much earlier than that.

[Loss]

Also, when did WCW come to the UK? This intrigues me.

 

Was JCP on TV there at all pre-Turner?

[ohtani's jacket]

Why would it be different?

I'm thinking about it from the point of view of ticket prices.

[ohtani's jacket]

Really British wrestling was going to be done when the WWF/WCW offered their tapes with better production values to the local stations at cheaper rates than any British promotion could make them for, especially when American culture transplants so easily to the UK. Meltzer talks a lot about Jarrett holding out till the mid 90s in Memphis, but it's not like the British scene completely died as soon as the WWF first stepped foot on our shores. All Star Wrestling did OK until Kendo Nagasaki retired in 1993.

When did WWF get on UK tv? I thought it wasn't until the late 80's or so, but Dave was talking about it on Observer Radio like it coincided with Daddy no longer being a draw and the local promotions falling off, which I thought happened much earlier than that.

 

They started showing WWF in 1987 during the shared wrestling timeslot. WCW first began being shown in 1990 regionally and 1991 nationally.

[Dylan Waco]

Does anyone know where I can find Jose's Gordy List on Atlantis?

[NintendoLogic]

http://www.luchawiki.org/index.php?title=Atlantis

[Dylan Waco]

Kind of a random question, but how good a candidate would Sangre Chicana be?

[Dylan Waco]

So I decided to subscribe to the WON today and reading Dave's HoF piece on people who have gotten 50% or more and there eventual fate on the ballot it really strikes me how much I disagree with Dave. The stuff on Hamada is really puzzling to interpret, his claim that Michaels drawing power was a positive when he went in is very hard to defend (which he well knows), his statement that Puerto Rico doesn't really fit with U.S. wrestling in the Colon section seems really odd, the argument about Sak being a good pick when he was voted in, but not so much now....it's just....odd stuff. I don't even mean this to come across as an attack but I was wondering if anyone else read it and thought it came across as as strangely as I did.

[JerryvonKramer]

I've just read Meltzer's long rant about Big Daddy. The idea that wrestling could have sold out "soccer stadiums" in that time period is insane. The very fact that he's comparing the UK to Mexico is insane. The thing it's easy to forget is that pro wrestling just isn't a big part of British culture. It just isn't, at least not to anywhere NEAR the extent it is in Mexico where it is really ingrained as part of the popular culture. I'd argue that France and Germany have much deeper wrestling traditions than this country too.

 

This isn't to do anything to bolster Big Daddy's case, it's just to say that I think it's wrong to even be thinking about the UK or Joint Promotions in those terms.

 

My view on Big Daddy -- just as I said before -- is that his case rests almost solely on the fact that he was name checked by the Prime Minister and the Queen in a country where pro wrestling basically isn't on anyone's radar. The UK isn't Puerto Rico or Portland, it's a country with 60+ million people in it, most of whom don't give a damn about wrestling. The fact that in 1980 most of them could probably name Big Daddy has to amount to something. If that argument doesn't convince anyone of a place in the Hall of Fame, then he's not going to go in. In a sense, he's almost a unique case. If you hold him to the same criteria as most other candidates (drawing power, workrate, and so on) he's not going to compare favourably. He is only even on the ballot because of unprecedented mainstream cultural penetration -- if that's not a criterion, maybe it should be? I dunno.

[ohtani's jacket]

Of course it's not part of British culture now, but in its hey day it was. It didn't spring up out of nowhere with Big Daddy. Pro-wrestling isn't really part of any country's culture (pop culture maybe, but that's transient), however I'd love to know why you think France and Germany have deeper wrestling traditions than the UK. Seems like exoticism.

[El-P]

France had wrestling on TV in the 50's and 60's I think, and that's pretty much it. I do think it was pretty big back then, but it didn't last into the 70's I believe, and it has been pretty much dead since then.

Germany sure had a much stronger wrestling "culture" with Otto Wanz promotion I'd guess.

But I don't see how either can measure up to British wrestling.

[JerryvonKramer]

The French claim I'm basing mainly on the fact that Roland Barthes included a chapter on it in his book Mythologies, written in the 1950s. In the rest of that book he tackles other topics that are 'indicative of French culture' such as steak dinners and red wine. Perhaps this has given me an over-inflated sense of how mainstream / ingrained pro-wrestling is or was in French culture. That Barthes chose to devote a whole chapter to it (pretty much vital reading for everyone here if you haven't read that essay), led me to think that it was a bigger deal there than in the UK. Certainly, you don't get guys like Bertrand Russell devoting chapters to pro wrestling! Who would the UK equivalent of someone like Henry DeGlane be?

 

The German claim comes from a few different things: firstly Wanz's promotion drew much bigger money than any promotion ever did in the UK. In the 80s, guys like Regal did tours of Germany. It was big enough for the likes of Dick Murdoch to travel there for a paycheck. In fact, if you look at all the guys who passed through the Catch territory vs. all the people who passed through Joint Promotions, the former list dwarfs the latter. That might be a sign that the UK was dead at that time, but it also seems to be the general state of play decades earlier. Guys tended to move from the UK to Germany then to Canada, Japan or the USA. Obviously some guys could skip certain steps but there seems to me to be a pecking order: UK

 

Mostly everyone who was in the UK was looking to get out of the UK. Even in the 70s (see Meltzer's note about Billy Robinson). Before that, see this excellent site: http://www.wrestlingheritage.co.uk/wrestlersr.htm it seems to me that it was common for guys to do stints in Germany or Canada. Perhaps El-P can translate for us what it says on the French heritage section of that site and if we have any German speakers they can have a look at the German section.

 

I guess the two big counter examples to my claim would be 1. World of Sport -- the fact that wrestling had TV in the UK and a big casual, mainstream audience and 2. the fact that the WWF sold out Wembley in 1992, but I maintain that that remains a MASTERPIECE of modern marketing strategy and was as much down to the popularity of Hasbro action figures as it was to do with the overall overness of wrestling in this country.

 

There are hours and hours worth of reading on that site I linked though. Are the dudes responsible for that website consulted by Meltzer and the WON guys at all? If these are the 'historians' Meltzer mentions, they would certainly be the best placed people to make the call on Big Daddy (and indeed who should be in the HOF in general). Does anyone know?

[ohtani's jacket]

Isn't that Barthes example a bit like saying the UK has no film culture because nobody's ever written about it like Andre Bazin? Barthes was captivated by wrestling as a modern mythology and I believe he made some interesting comparisons between American wrestling and French wrestling as well as a bunch of comparisons to French literary classics, but I think it's a bit of a stretch to say because a French literary theorist and philosopher wrote about French wrestling that somehow it was more ingrained in French society than in the UK.

 

How much money did Wanz draw? What makes you think the German tournaments were successful? Regal claimed they weren't that successful on that recent podcast he did, at least not every night of the week. Perhaps the foreign talent that passed through Germany had more to do with Wanz' talent-sharing arrangements with AWA and NJPW than the paydays, I don't know. The paydays probably were better than in England for however many weeks the tournaments lasted otherwise they wouldn't have drawn so many Brit heavyweights, but it wasn't some big secret that the heavyweights were out of the country and not on TV much. Walton used to give a run down on what each wrestler had been doing since the last time they were on TV. I don't really see how working Germany, Wales, India, South Africa and Japan (for example) was any different from moving around the US territories; it's just more travel and a tad more international. For what it's worth, I don't think they went from the UK to Germany to Canada. The heavyweights worked the route I mentioned. The lighter weight guys went directly to North America.

 

Wanting to leave the UK for America is hardly remarkable. The same thing happens with UK actors and again I hardly think that means the UK has no film culture. I also think you're overstating the number of guys who left. Robinson, Dynamite Kid, Davey Boy Smith, Adrian Street, Ringo Rigby and Chris Adams are the only guys I can think of who made permanent moves while Joint Promotions still had TV. There's probably a few I'm forgetting. Regal, Finlay and Dave Taylor left much later.

 

In my home country (New Zealand) there was a wrestling television program on air from 1975 to 1984 and prior to that pro-wrestling was extremely popular particularly in the 1950s, but it died before the promoter could take any sort of advantage of the WWF boom in the late 80s. Once they took wrestling off the air in '91, there was no way you could say it was part of popular culture in New Zealand, but it had still been extremely successful in its day, much like Saturday Afternoon wrestling was an institution in England. In both countries it died, but that doesn't mean it never was.

[Victator]

I remember Dynamite Kid saying the UK guys were all anxious to get on the German tours because the pay was good.

[Al]

Something I noticed about Sting. His first NWA title run was generally considered a failure, as I understand it. Here is a record of Sting's opponents in 1990.

 

http://www.wrestling-titles.com/nwa/world/...atches1990.html

 

31 defenses against Ric Flair, one against Sid Vicious and one against Al Perez as the Black Scorpion. I don't know all the details, but how in the hell can someone draw when they're programmed for five months against an opponent whose money match was already blown off on PPV?

[jdw]

http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/wcw90.htm

 

Flair was the balance of July, through August and into mid-September. Two months and a couple of weeks.

 

A contrast?

 

03/27/88 Mania: Randy Savage pinned Ted Dibiase to win WWF Title

 

Here are the televised or taped matches:

 

04/25/88 MSG: Ted Dibiase defeated Randy Savage

05/27/88 MSG: Randy Savage defeated Ted Dibiase

06/25/88 MSG: Randy Savage defeated Ted Dibiase

07/09/88 Boston: Randy Savage defeated Ted Dibiase

07/23/88 Spectrum: Ted Dibiase defeated Randy Savage

07/31/88 WrestleFest: Randy Savage pinned Ted Dibiase

08/06/88 Boston: Randy Savage defeated Ted Dibiase

08/28/88 Spectrum: Randy Savage defeated Ted Dibiase

08/29/88 Summer Slam: Hogan & Savage defeated Andre & Ted Dibiase

09/24/88 Spectrum: Randy Savage defeated Ted Dibiase in a steel cage match

 

There were countless non-taped matches, along with quite a few matches at Superstars/Challenge tapings some of which probably were filmed as well (and I think have seen the light of day). There also was an MLG card where a few of the matches appeared on Prime Time, but it's not clear if the entire card was tapes.

 

This the last singles match I find:

 

10/17/88 Utica: Randy Savage defeated Ted Dibiase in a steel cage match

 

Basically seven months after Mania.

 

Hogan-Savage the following year was very similar. Hogan won the title back in the "first attempt" (for all the masses knew), and then defended it around the horn against Savage for quite a few months.

 

Those two drew well.

 

Sting-Flair didn't.

[Al]

Then obviously my previous source had incomplete information.

[JerryvonKramer]

Guessing all of those DiBiase vs. Savage matches ended in bullshit finishes? Only the Wrestlefest match is a pin.