Biggest 80s draw not called Hulk Hogan

[JerryvonKramer]

Is it Backlund? Is it Slaughter? Is it Flair or Race? Is it Savage?

 

Do we have any sort of measure of how big a draw Flair was AS COMPARED with, for example, Harley Race?

 

In theory, this data should exist:

 

Race as champ vs. local hero

Flair as champ vs. same local hero a few months down the line

 

I would imagine that scenario happened numerous times. I'd be interested to see if there was a correlation of differences there. Did Race and Flair draw the same or did one do better than the other? How did each of them draw vs. Backlund? How did they draw vs. Lawler?

 

Of course, these aren't perfect comparisons -- there are factors other than who is wrestling that dictate if people go to see wrestling (e.g. economic climate, whether wrestling is in a boom period or not) -- but over enough time and with enough data it should be possible to show who the bigger draw was between the two of them.

 

Who else is even in the conversation? There are I guess two different ways of doing "biggest draw":

 

1. Total combined gate - in which case it's got to be either Backlund, Race, Flair or possibly Bockwinkel or Savage or Lawler

 

2. Ten largest gates - in which case I'd imagine the field is busted wide open. What was Tommy Rich drawing like in 81? How do his top 10 gates compare with, for example, the top 10 gates of Junkyard Dog? And how did either of them compare with Ultimate Warrior in 89?

 

These two different ways of measuring drawing power will give us two very different lists, roughly speaking "long-term" and "short-term" draws. The picture is complicated further by geography, and we might say:

 

3. How well did Jerry Lawler draw outside of Memphis compared with how well did Flair draw outside of the Carolinas? How well did Backlund draw outside of the North East? And so on.

 

Now Hogan is demonstrably the "biggest draw" by each of these three criteria. His total combined gate is probably the biggest, his top 10 gates are bigger than anyone else's top ten gates and he drew well all around the country from coast to coast and in between.

 

So the number 2 has to be someone who measures well by all 3 criteria. Who is it?

[Ricky Jackson]

Meltzer did a top draws of all time issue a few years back. The criteria was most shows headlined which drew 10,000 or more. Flair was number 2 for the 80s. Not sure about the rest of the top ten, but I could check it out later.

[Loss]

Yeah, even with Flair's drawing power being hurt as the decade progressed by how he was portrayed, Flair was still the No. 2 draw in wrestling for the decade for sure. Dave has said Flair was the biggest drawing NWA champion in history from 1981-1984, and the worst drawing NWA champion ever from 1985-1989. I'm not sure if that's true or not.

[JerryvonKramer]

I'm interested by that Loss. I'm interested to see if he drew any better than Race, for example. In other words, was Flair drawing well simply because business was up or because he was Ric Flair?

 

I might do some digging around to compare Race and Flair from 80 to 85. Might throw in Backlund and a few other names too to put this idea to the test.

 

Would be good to have Meltzer's list though.

[Dylan Waco]

10k metric is heavily flawed.

 

There is no hard and fast answer because someone like Backlund had much bigger buildings around his loop than the MACW guys (to take just one example).

[JerryvonKramer]

Dylan, if you look at the 3 criteria in my OP, I thought a combination of those three things might be a very robust metric.

[Dylan Waco]

Dylan, if you look at the 3 criteria in my OP, I thought a combination of those three things might be a very robust metric.

Not so sure about that.

 

For example Flair drew much better out of The Carolinas than Lawler did out of Memphis. Of course Flair was the NWA World Champion and was promoted as a huge deal in many of these places. Lawler's job was to draw good/great numbers in the same building every week - which was not Backlund's job because they didn't run their "primary" buildings weekly. JYD turned around a totally dead city and probably drew more fans in a single place in a single year than any wrestler in history has done in any single town. But he wasn't as consistently hot around the rest of the circuit. Bock was on top of a lot of cards that did well, but because of the way the AWA was booked you could argue that on a lot of that shows his match really wasn't the most heavily pushed match on the show. Et. Et. Et.

 

I'm not saying it is not worth trying to put together some way to look at all the data, but there is no way to adjust for all the factors. I do think there are good ways of determining value/stardom relative to others, but drawing power is much harder.

[NintendoLogic]

It's Flair and it's not even close.

 

http://wrestlingclassics.com/cgi-bin/.ubbc...10;t=002127;p=0

 

Of course, a big part of that is him being the touring world champ during a period when most of the territories were on fire business-wise.

[Cross Face Chicken Wing]

If only Nate Silver was into pro wrestling.....

[Dylan Waco]

That's a faulty metric for obvious reasons.

 

I still think Flair is the "safe" number two, but you've got a top fifteen with Big Bossman, Big John Studd and Orndorff but no JYD or Lawler.

[JerryvonKramer]

Was The Sheik really a bigger draw than Bruno?

[Dylan Waco]

Was The Sheik really a bigger draw than Bruno?

It's a faulty metric

 

I like Matt and think his research has value. But he has never come out and published all of his research. And the 10k plus metric has obvious flaws.

 

Having said that I don't think it's out of the question to put peak Sheik in the same league as peak Bruno. It was an act that was hot in some big markets. My immediate thought would be similar to yours - "this can't be right, Bruno has to be the bigger draw by a wide margin" - but that may have as much to do with personal bias/how the business has evolved as anything else.

[NintendoLogic]

Farmer's list doesn't tell the whole story, and it certainly has issues as you go further down. But it does do a good job of demonstrating who the absolute tippy-top guys are.

[Moonsault Marvin]

Farmer's numbers of 10000, 20000, etc. are arbitrary and lead to a mathematically meaningless system. I think it would be better to find the average attendance of a building and compare the main event runs of a wrestler to the average to get a better sense of which wrestlers were draws and to what degree. Gathering all the information together to do the calculations seems like it would be a huge and time consuming job.

[Al]

I feel like Andre the Giant is possibly in the discussion somewhere. Worked more sparingly so he doesn't qualify as a consistent draw. But his numbers working alongside Hogan are virtually untouchable.

[Loss]

Andre is definitely in the discussion. I look at him more as an attraction draw than a guy who could pop a house working on top in the same arena week after week, month after month, year after year. That's in no way a weakness. I just think it's an accurate description of his appeal.

 

But still, you bring up a flaw in just looking at the number of 10,000+ houses. Hogan and Flair are going to have higher numbers than Andre simply because they headlined more shows.

 

I do think at the end of the day that Flair meant more to his promotion than Andre did. But Andre should be on a list like this, as he was at worst one of the five biggest draws of the decade.

 

Even though numbers don't have opinions, numbers do indeed have opinions.

[Dylan Waco]

I can tell you from going over the AWA results, that Andre coming in was a guaranteed spike in attendance every time.

[Mad Dog]

Was The Sheik really a bigger draw than Bruno?

It's a faulty metric

 

I like Matt and think his research has value. But he has never come out and published all of his research. And the 10k plus metric has obvious flaws.

 

Having said that I don't think it's out of the question to put peak Sheik in the same league as peak Bruno. It was an act that was hot in some big markets. My immediate thought would be similar to yours - "this can't be right, Bruno has to be the bigger draw by a wide margin" - but that may have as much to do with personal bias/how the business has evolved as anything else.

 

I think the Sheik was easily in the same league as Bruno. He was huge in Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto for a really long time. I live in that general area and people speak of him as this monster that came off of the television screen. I mean they hated him with a burning passion and a lot of people judge every heel by the metric of the Sheik.

[khawk20]

I can tell you from going over the AWA results, that Andre coming in was a guaranteed spike in attendance every time.

Yeah, but I'd guess that most of those were tied to the annual fall battleroyal cards and probably some angle/match with Andre the card immediately after that, and Battleroyals were big business in the AWA. Those and cage matches.

 

Andre is of course part of the attraction of the Battleroyal, no doubt.

[Death From Above]

Who would be the top answer in Japan? Choshu? Maeda?

 

I doubt any of them worked enough big shows to come close to Flair. Just curious as a side question really.

[Loss]

I think Choshu has drawn more $1 million+ gates than anyone ever, or something like that. I remember hearing something to that effect once.

[Childs]

What about Inoki?

[FLIK]

Yeah, Inoki was my first throught for Japan as well.

[jdw]

Yeah, even with Flair's drawing power being hurt as the decade progressed by how he was portrayed, Flair was still the No. 2 draw in wrestling for the decade for sure. Dave has said Flair was the biggest drawing NWA champion in history from 1981-1984, and the worst drawing NWA champion ever from 1985-1989. I'm not sure if that's true or not.

The cutoffs are really odd: 1981-84 and 1985-89. I suspect Flair drew quite well in 1985-86, and really the decline was in 1987-89. Even then, 1987 probably has some good pockets here and there along with some really bad ones due to expansion into poor cities and subpar national opponents (like Brad Armstrong, regardless of what we think of him as a worker). Then JCP went off the cliff in 1988-89.

 

There also were comments in 1986 about the difference between JCP cards with Flair on them and without him on it that we similar to the WWF comments about Hogan vs Non-Hogan.

 

John

[Ricky Jackson]

I'm looking at the top draws issue of the WON right now (8/5 2009) and Meltzer acknowledges the less than perfect nature of the 10k criteria right away:

 

I should point out that 10,000 as the arbitrary cutoff point for much of history greatly favors wrestlers who worked on top in a few selected markets, most notably the Northeast.

Highlights from the issue regarding some points already discussed in this thread:

 

He points out how prior to the 70s there were very few 10k arenas in North America or internationally. Here is what he had to say about several territories outside of the huge metro areas and the venues they ran during the 70s and into the 80s:

 

Florida

 

...the major shows were in Miami Beach and Tampa, with 5,000 seat arenas they sold out regularly, they had some of the best and most successful wrestling but nobody from that territory could make the list.

Georgia

 

...[they did not run a 10k arena] until the opening of the Omni [my note: 1973 I believe, or maybe 72], and they only ran that semi-regularly until the City Auditorium closed down, because on a weekly basis, it was more profitable to run a 5,500 seat arena.

Memphis

 

The Nick Gulas territory was hugely successful and until they went into Memphis and the Mid-South Coliseum in the early 70s, they had no 10,000 seat arena in the circuit.

Carolinas

 

The Carolinas had the Greensboro and Richmond Coliseums, but with a small population base, the idea of drawing 10,000 there, as happened at times, was far more impressive than that sized crowd in a market like San Francisco or Philadelphia.

Meltzer then goes on to state:

 

Thus, the list is generally dominated by wrestlers who worked on top in New York, Toronto and St. Louis and other areas when they got hot like Los Angeles and San Francisco at different points in time.

and

I think the safe way to view this list is not necessarily that people not on it weren't successful draws on top, but that those who made the top ten in any year concretely were having very good years...

Meltzer, based on Farmer's research, ranks the top draws of all time based on a formula that gives points based on 1) top ten per year ranking (most 10k shows headlined in a year, 10 points for number 1, 9 points for number 2, etc, with a bonus point for drawing 20k, 30k, etc., 2) ten points for having a "dominant year" (defined by someone who drew double the number of big gates than the number 2 wrestler), and 3) a five point bonus for "breaking the record for most biggest gates drawn" (typical awkward Meltzer phrasing). Based on this, here is the top ten of all time:

 

1. Jim Londos 250

2. Bruno Sammartino 196

3. Lou Thesz 172

4. Bill Longson 159

5. Hulk Hogan 154

6. Strangler Lewis 149

7. Ric Flair 126

8. Buddy Rogers 122 (back-to-back Nature Boys)

9. Joe Stecher 99

10. Dick the Bruiser 81

 

Some notes regarding the ranking of wrestlers discussed in this thread/discussed often on this board:

 

11. The Sheik 80

13. Bob Backlund 73

14. Andre the Giant 73

15. HHH 72

26. Harley Race 43

29. Antonio Inoki 42

31. Randy Savage 40

47. Shawn Michaels 30

47. Dusty Rhodes 30

53. Bret Hart 28

55. Pedro Morales 27

56. Kane 26

56. Jerry Lawler 26

67. Kurt Angle 24

72. Ivan Koloff 23

77. Sgt. Slaughter 22

78. John Cena 21 (remember this list was done in 09, so Cena would be ranked higher today)

78. Ultimate Warrior 21

92. Nick Bockwinkel 17

100. Chris Jericho 14

100. Ken Patera 14

120. Randy Orton 11

124. Lex Luger 10

 

No Sting anywhere on the list is somewhat surprising. Anyway, I've been working on this for long enough. Maybe I'll add more later. Hopefully this has been food for thought.