Commonly used words and phrases that annoy you

[jdw]

Parv is absolutely right that there is a much greater quantity of people reading smarky stuff online now. People who will read stuff and comment on places that aren't WWE.com but have no desire to pay for the Network or anything like that.

 

There are more people online all the time. There are always going to be more people wrestling that stuff.

 

More people read about sabermetrics now than in 1999 or 1989. Hell, more read online now then read Moneyball. It doesn't mean that the revolution started today, or with Moneyball, or with Rob Neyer getting hired by ESPN (which some people point to).

 

That's the general point.

[jdw]

I read a lot of Hyatte when I was 17. It took me forever to remember that guy's name.

 

I forgot about Hyatte, and had been trying to remember his name as well.

[Eduardo]

I read a lot of Hyatte when I was 17. It took me forever to remember that guy's name.

 

That's the dude that got catfished for months by someone pretending to be Tammy Sytch, right?

 

I still remember the revelation on 411mania (I think) like it was yesterday. Must have been ten years ago.

[jdw]

People who cared about workers and matches more than the WCW vs. WWF war were often labeled as purists or elitists, particularly if they believed that Japanese wrestling was better than American wrestling,

 

This is true. We ate a lot of shit for it. On the other hand, in some circles it remains the same: Puro Snobs is a term people on this board have addressed in this decade.

 

One of the reasons why Keith had a presence back then was that he reviewed (seemingly) everything in an era where it wasn't easy to get stuff and where the 'canon', for want of a better word, was WON star ratings and maybe the old rspw awards.

 

 

SKeith really didn't review everything. He didn't do weekly Japan TV, or even the big shows. His stuff on Japan was limited to the WCW-NJPW shows that were PPVs over here.

 

I don't even think he did weekly ECW. He certainly never touched regular Lucha reviewing.

 

SKeith was your standard Big Two-centric writer, who at least initially was a big WWF guy.

[jdw]

 

I read a lot of Hyatte when I was 17. It took me forever to remember that guy's name.

 

That's the dude that got catfished for months by someone pretending to be Tammy Sytch, right?

 

I still remember the revelation on 411mania (I think) like it was yesterday. Must have been ten years ago.

 

 

411mania... that was the thing. I'm trying to recall if the morphed out of another site as well.

 

There really were a ton of them...

[Matt D]

Let's get back to my Russian Revolution analogy from page 2.

[Dooley]

Regarding the casual smart fan, the first thing that most people discovered through dial up was the news sites. Suddenly, they had access to all sorts of gossip, rumours and backstage news, but the extent to which it effected them was that they probably thought Yokozuna was going to show up on RAW on Monday.

 

Whatever happened to Al Isaacs anyway? Dude was CERTAIN Yoko was joining the Hart Foundation any day now.....

[JerryvonKramer]

 

Parv is absolutely right that there is a much greater quantity of people reading smarky stuff online now. People who will read stuff and comment on places that aren't WWE.com but have no desire to pay for the Network or anything like that.

 

There are more people online all the time. There are always going to be more people wrestling that stuff.

 

More people read about sabermetrics now than in 1999 or 1989. Hell, more read online now then read Moneyball. It doesn't mean that the revolution started today, or with Moneyball, or with Rob Neyer getting hired by ESPN (which some people point to).

 

That's the general point.

 

 

The general point is that being online to some extent "smartened up" the wrestling audience (although how much is very debatable I think). And even casual mainstream fans think they are "smart" fans. You were acting as if there was no basic change and that fandom was the same as it's always been just now it was online. But it wasn't the same and isn't. Ask any wrestling promoter.

 

The reason I was pointing to the late 90s is because then the numbers were small enough for "IWC" to actually refer to a group of people (i.e. those fans who had stumbled online and underwent the process I described here: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/27795-commonly-used-words-and-phrases-that-annoy-you/?p=5612170). Now and since about 2006, EVERYONE is online so the term has no meaningful application at all.

[Eduardo]

 

 

I read a lot of Hyatte when I was 17. It took me forever to remember that guy's name.

 

That's the dude that got catfished for months by someone pretending to be Tammy Sytch, right?

 

I still remember the revelation on 411mania (I think) like it was yesterday. Must have been ten years ago.

 

 

411mania... that was the thing. I'm trying to recall if the morphed out of another site as well.

 

There really were a ton of them...

 

 

Rantsylvania? I know Keith (and possibly Hyatte) were there, before he (they) went to 411mania. I think Rantsylvania, or the predecessor to that site (can't remember what it was called) was where I first saw Michinoku Pro. Someone uploaded a low quality video file of the famous 10 man tag from October 10th, 1996. Was blown away (while watching it on a tiny video player at my local public library).

 

[jdw]

I don't think jdw has really grasped what I'm saying because he's still focusong on hardcore fans. I'm not talking about hardcore fans. I'm talking about Joe Bloggs who stumbled onto the internet because he wanted to read about his favourite wrestler.

 

We're talking about a genuine phenomena that took place in wrestling fandom, namely the birth of the CASUAL "smart" fan.

 

There were Casual Smart Fans before the internet go big. We'd run into them all the time when going to WWF and WCW shows. We (as in Yohe, Hoback and I) would be talking our hardcore talk, and part way through the show some of the fans around us got the idea that we Knew A Lot. So they would start peppering us with questions. They weren't Mark Questions. They were Casual Smart Fan questions. They knew it was a work. A decent number of them could read-between-the-lines on the booking. They had an understanding of "pushes" without knowing the word. Some we "work" fans, without knowing the term: "I like Wrestler X because he does a lot of shit in the ring..."

 

One of my favorite wrestling memories was a teen explaining to us who the next WWF Champ would be, and why. It was 1994, and he said Diesel... and then went through very non-mark reasons of why Nash would be champ relating to his push, what the WWF liked out of champs, etc. Kid was spot on, and the funny thing is that Yohe, Hoback and I hadn't thought of Diesel as the next champ at that point, but really should have. Kid ended up bring right, on pretty much everything he said.

 

And he was like 12 years old.

 

The same type of 12 year old was the guys we were posting with in 1999, and eventually mophed from Casual Smart to Hardcore Smart... probably really fast given how sharp that kid was.

 

Who is the casual smart fan?

- A guy who grew up watching WWF or NWA or even the territories

- A guy who maybe read the Apter mags as a kid

- A guy who has fond or nostalgic memories of watching that wrestling

- A guy who found his way online, probably during the Monday Night Wars.

 

How did being on the internet transform his fandom?

- He learned about insider terminology for the first time, and started seeing fan favourites as "babyfaces" and wrestlers as "workers"

- He learned about star ratings and "work rate"

- He learned that certain guys were great workers but that maybe some of his favourites as a kid like Hogan or the Road Warriors were lazy or unprofessional or dickheads behind the scenes or whatever

- He learned about the Montreal Screwjob

- He learned about what a booker is and, perhaps more importantly, how to complain endlessly about booking decisions

 

What did this fan care about?

- WWF or WCW or ECW TV

- His old favourites for whom he had nostalgic memories

 

What did this fan not care about?

- Anything foreign

- Indy promotions

- Anything outside of the major leagues including old territories

 

 

This really isn't Casual Smart. Guys like CRZ fit into this, and he was a Hardcore Smart Fan. As were countless guys we talked to in RSP-W, AOL GSW, and on message boards after that.

 

 

This fan was created as a type by the internet. I don't see how this variety of fan could have existed in the pre-internet era.

 

 

The fan base was "smart" long before the internet. I never was at a show where I didn't seem people who knew it was a work, or who didn't toss "smart" stuff at the wrestlers. They weren't all WON readers, or even very many of them. I can't remember any fan in the 80s asking me if I read the WON.

 

The net simply made it easy for those fans to find others like themself, in places like RSPW and AOL, etc.

 

The kid sitting at home with his PWI and his Ultimate Warrior toy had no idea, and let's say he grows up to be a 17-year old watching Raw and Nitro, without the internet where's he going to "smarten up"? Even his old man telling him "y'know kid that wrestling's all fake", is still not going to make him into the sort of fan I've described above.

 

 

Star ratings? The word "work rate"? I doubt the majority of fans online right now give a shit about using those things. It remains a small number, just like it was in the 80s and 90s.

 

The WON made it easier to find other people who viewed wrestling like you did. In turn, the Usenet did as well. In turn, AOL and Prodigy did as well. In turn the websites did. Now the podcasts and youtube and everything else do as well. It's just another cycle on a wheel going around and around on down the road.

 

 

If you listen to jdw, that sort of fan has always existed. When? How? How many?

 

 

When?

 

As long as I've been a fan, which is back to 1986. I was that type of a fan before I started reading the WON, and before I started watching Japanese wrestling.

 

How?

 

Because Pro Wrestling is fucking Worked. And it was fucking obvious to me, and I found it entertaining as all fuck. When I went to shows, it wasn't hard at all to look around and see that there were people just like me having the same type of fun.

 

How Many?

 

Who the fuck knows. We don't even know how many wrestling fans there are right now in the world, and how we'd throw them into buckets. About the only thing we know is that there still are very few wrestling fans Like Us. Not even 1%.

 

The death of kayfabe was a real event in wrestling history. I know jdw HATES to acknowledge real change.

 

 

When did Kayfabe die?

 

Vince admitted on National Television in the 80s that it was fake. There were other national pieces on it being worked.

 

There was no Internet in the 80s.

 

Beyond that... I know wrestling was worked in the 70s, even when I didn't watch it. I've also dropped a quote on these boards from the 30s by a Hall of Fame promoter in a major newspaper admitting that it was fake, and that his job was to give a fan something that entertained him no matter how he saw it: fake or real.

 

Kayfabe has been dead forever. Much of the business was too silly to admit that the majority of fans knew it was a work.

 

 

This is the same guy who told us Vince didn't really change how wrestling was presented on TV and pointed to the fucking 1950s as evidence.

 

 

I'd be happy to use Mr. Searchy to find the thread and point people to it so they can determine whether your specific claims turned out to be correct, or staggeringly wrong over and over again.

 

 

Yes, there was Montreal and Russo bullshit that exacerbated the death of kayfabe, but the business was exposed on the internet.

 

 

Jerry: the business was always exposed because people could see that all the punched were FAKE. I knew that when I was 6 years old. I don't claim to be the smartest kid in the world, so if I could see it... a hell of a lot of kids (and adults) could see it. Do I have any additional evidence from the 70s? Not a single kid in my rather large circle of sports friends thought it was real. They all knew it was fake. Their older brothers did as well... as did their fathers. If wrestling ever came up, which was extremely rare, it was met with a "Fuck that fake shit".

 

The business was exposed back in the 1800's. We've found it in newspapers. It was exposed throughout the early period of the last century when cities and states forced the matches to be called "exhibitions". Etc, etc, etc.

 

If you're an average fan, with access to only PWI and your mates, do you REALLY know about the Montreal screwjob? Really really?

 

 

Well... since Vince talked about the screwjob on TV ("Bret screwed Bret"), you probably did unless you were stone cold stupid.

 

 

This is why I'm saying that jdw is not well placed, because he's lost sight of that average "mark" fan who had no real idea about how the business worked and of just how many of them hit the internet around the same time.

 

 

The average fan knew how wrestling worked:

 

It was fake. Wrestler A was picked to win the match. Wrestler B lost it on purpose. Wrestler A and Wrestler B weren't really trying to hurt each other, and just trying to have a match together. Wash, rinse, repeat.

 

 

I'd hazard the entire userbase of PTBN is madeup by such people. I don't believe -- as an actual class of fan -- that they would have existed prior to the internet. There was no such thing as your casual smart fan.

 

 

There always has been Smart Fans: those who knew it was a work, generally how it was worked, and still loved the shit. They generally got concepts like guys jumping to the WWF because it was bigger then the promotion they had been in. You couldn't be in AWA Land and not get the clear notion that Vince had gone to war with the AWA, was stealing their talent, and out to destroy the AWA. You didn't need the WON to explain that to you: Hogan and Mean Gene and Heenan and others were over in the WWF now, and the WWF was moving into AWA Cities.

 

Again, I knew that shit years before getting my first WON. It was nakedly obvious to me what Vince was doing. If you want to invent a new phrase Casual Smart Fan and think it's something new, you need to understand there were plenty of us back in the 80s and we really were just Smart Fans. Hell, Yohe would explain that he fits the bill on that, and would have back in the 60s.

 

Newsletters, and then the Net, made it easier to find others... and to go further off the deepend on insider info and shit to watch.

 

Hardcore Smart Fans popped up as they got exposed to the WON or other sheets, and later when they got deep into the pool online like most folks here.

 

 

You would have had hardcores, you would have had sceptical casual fans and maybe some who'd worked out some basic things, but the vast majority of the audience were not talking about "workers" and "heels" or throwing out star ratings.

 

 

The majority of the audience still doesn't talk about star ratings, workers... and probably doesn't talk about "heels" either. They just think the heels are Assholes or Pussies.

 

Sceptical is the wrong would. It would be like calling someone "sceptical" of Santa Claus. People knew the shit was fake. And they still liked it. Or... the never watched it because they didn't care to watch Fake Sports.

 

 

That sort of thing post 1996 was not ONLY the preserve of the hardcores, it was anyone who had a 56k dial-up and whacked "Wrestlemania review" into Yahoo.

 

 

Star ratings still are something that the Hardcores really only care about. Even most Smart Fans don't care about them.

 

John

[JerryvonKramer]

Well, you heard it here first folks, the internet did not affect the business and the death of kayfabe is something it imagined.

 

From the same guy who said Vince didn't change the way wrestling was presented on TV, ladies and gents, because Gorgeous George existed.

[ohtani's jacket]

SKeith really didn't review everything. He didn't do weekly Japan TV, or even the big shows. His stuff on Japan was limited to the WCW-NJPW shows that were PPVs over here.

 

I don't even think he did weekly ECW. He certainly never touched regular Lucha reviewing.

 

SKeith was your standard Big Two-centric writer, who at least initially was a big WWF guy.

 

 

Right, by "everything" I was really referring to everything from the big two. I don't know about other countries but in New Zealand you could only rent NWA tapes from the late 80s and nothing from WCW, not even a single commercial tape. It wasn't until they started showing delayed free-to-air coverage of the 1997 WCW PPVs that we saw WCW events. So, I definitely remember Keith being a source for past WCW PPV info, and of course his FAQ was influential.

[jdw]

 

 

 

I read a lot of Hyatte when I was 17. It took me forever to remember that guy's name.

 

That's the dude that got catfished for months by someone pretending to be Tammy Sytch, right?

 

I still remember the revelation on 411mania (I think) like it was yesterday. Must have been ten years ago.

 

 

411mania... that was the thing. I'm trying to recall if the morphed out of another site as well.

 

There really were a ton of them...

 

 

Rantsylvania? I know Keith (and possibly Hyatte) were there, before he (they) went to 411mania. I think Rantsylvania, or the predecessor to that site (can't remember what it was called) was where I first saw Michinoku Pro. Someone uploaded a low quality video file of the famous 10 man tag from October 10th, 1996. Was blown away (while watching it on a tiny video player at my local public library).

 

 

Yeah... Rantsylvania was one of them. I couldn't remember if Rantsylvania was before 411, or after it. And if there was something before Rantsylvania that SKeith wrote for in the even earlier days of websites.

 

There were tons of sites. The ones that were large size, which in turn spawned others as folks broke off from them. There were guys who moved all over the place, like Zach. There also were tons of Geocities and AngleFire sites. If was a sprawling thing.

[jdw]

 

SKeith really didn't review everything. He didn't do weekly Japan TV, or even the big shows. His stuff on Japan was limited to the WCW-NJPW shows that were PPVs over here.

 

I don't even think he did weekly ECW. He certainly never touched regular Lucha reviewing.

 

SKeith was your standard Big Two-centric writer, who at least initially was a big WWF guy.

 

 

Right, by "everything" I was really referring to everything from the big two. I don't know about other countries but in New Zealand you could only rent NWA tapes from the late 80s and nothing from WCW, not even a single commercial tape. It wasn't until they started showing delayed free-to-air coverage of the 1997 WCW PPVs that we saw WCW events. So, I definitely remember Keith being a source for past WCW PPV info, and of course his FAQ was influential.

 

 

SKeith had a project of going back to do "Rants" on old PPV that happened prior to his time of during current Rants. And yeah... it was a useful resource. A number of other people/sites did the same thing, trying to backfill their content. It was cool, and would get people to talk about old stuff. Though... SKeith's "history" relating to those older shows often was a laughable mess.

[jdw]

Well, you heard it here first folks, the internet did not affect the business

 

Who said the Internet didn't affect the business? That's quite a different claim you're raising not compared to what's been talked about in the past. Is this another Jerry Morph Job?

 

 

and the death of kayfabe is something it imagined.

 

 

It's been imagined for 90+ years. I mean... wrestlers complained about Meltzer killing Kayfabe back in the 80s and early 90s, before the internet mattered. We use to laugh at it back then, and point to Vince admitting it was fake.

 

Take youself, Jerry. How old were you when you knew pro wrestling was fake? How did you figure it out that it was fake? Did you need the internet and a site like PWO to tell it to you?

 

From the same guy who said Vince didn't change the way wrestling was presented on TV, ladies and gents, because Gorgeous George existed.

 

 

Again, I'd be happy to point to that old thread so that people can see that you were wrong from the start to the end of it. I was hardly the only one point it out in that thread, either.

[Matt D]

See, the idea is that a few elites took charge of the entire country and suddenly everyone knew Issac Yankem was Kane. Obviously Keith is Stalin.

[JerryvonKramer]

All I'll say is in this past couple of weeks I've watched the Freebirds-DiBiase piledriver angle from Georgia, the Flair-DiBiase-Murdoch brainbuster angle from Mid-South, and Sgt. Slaughter vs. Pedro Morales from MSG in 1981, and the Savage vs. DiBiase match from MSG in 1988 when the fan jumps the cage and attacked Virgil. I don't believe that those crowds all knew for sure that wrestling was fake. And if they did, they did a pretty great job of acting as if they thought it was real.

 

It's a question of degree. There'd have been sceptics back in the day, there'd have been people who didn't buy it, etc., but there's a marked contrast in crowd reactions from those angles and shows and what you see at your average show today. What the internet did was compound the exposure and make it much more definite, so that things like -- for example -- that piledriver angle where you have a guy kayfabing it in the hospital for the week couldn't get over anymore.

 

Don't pretend that fans who were hitting those news sites and Keith reviews were the same as those fans going crazy at MSG or smoky arenas in Mid-South or crying at someone being laid out on the concrete in the Atlanta studio. Don't pretend for the sake of trying to win an argument or whatever the fuck you're trying to do.

[ohtani's jacket]

Well, you heard it here first folks, the internet did not affect the business and the death of kayfabe is something it imagined.

 

From the same guy who said Vince didn't change the way wrestling was presented on TV, ladies and gents, because Gorgeous George existed.

 

Are you sure you're not influenced by being an "international fan," so to speak?

 

When I first came online, I lived at the bottom of the world. I had a buddy who watched wrestling with me and we followed it PPV to PPV (sometimes skipping the IYHs.) The only TV we had access to was Worldwide. Later we got WCW Pro and finally one hour versions of RAW and Nitro and slightly edited versions of the PPVs, but we were months behind and our only real connection to the States was through the magazines. The whole reason I came online in the first place was to check for PPV spoilers. That's massively different from people in the US who went to shows or who could watch things live. I don't think everyone who came online was starting from the same place.

[Matt D]

Were there any local promotions?

[artDDP]

 

Why do you have to use the terms babyface or techico?

I still say good guys and bad guys, with no sense of irony. It's how I grew up. I even hated it when the Apter Mags used "Scientific Wrestler " and "Rulebreaker".

 

I also remember the Apter mags referring to faces as "fan favorites".

[ohtani's jacket]

Were there any local promotions?

 

There was an NWA affiliated promotion when I was a small and a start-up promotion when wrestling was big in '88-89, but I never went to any shows. My parents did. They saw pretty much all of the touring stars from the late 70s and early 80s. The WWF tours we got during the boom were WWF E shows. They were headlined by the Bushwhackers and just awful.

[KrisZ]

I have been a wrestling fan since 5 years old and far as a I remember I never believed it was real as my dad let me know from the top it was all just entertainment. The first time I started reading the WON was in 1989 at the Center Stage tapings where the Atlanta Boys (Scott Hudson, Steve Prazak, Jon Horton, Gary Yarman, et al) would pass it around the area where we were seated at so yeah there were a lot of smart fans hanging around the ATL scene at that time. Those guys also put out their own newsletter the Shennomake Press which was a parody version of the WON that was very popular locally. Now were there a lot of fans that believed it was real.....yes but it wasn't as big as you would think especially in the South.

 

I started going online in 1995 going back to Ryder & Scherer and the Prodigy chat rooms and I read RSPW and all of it's spawns but never really started to participate until the birth of the Wrestling Classics message board in 1999 then DVDVR right after that as Gancarski recruited me there although I was reading Dean and the others stuff from the beginning. I also posted on tOA some because it felt like the Wrestling Classics of Japanese wrestling in a lot of ways.

 

And don't think that places like Wrestlezone is anything groundbreaking as you had Lords of Pain, Wrestling Inc., and many other sites that jacked Dave's news way before he himself even got online.

 

The niches dominated that era as you had packs of people that specialized in one form or the other but everyone was still able to speak knowledgeably on the other stuff as well and then you also had the various wrestling reviewing groups like DVDVR, Workrate Cru, Shoot Angle, so on and so forth that would goad each other making some highly entertaining reads. Then you also had the chat rooms and the like which also helped make the scene feel different than now as you would have people hanging around chatting for hours on end every night.

 

This particular board right here features the most of us "old-timers" than any other board except Wrestling Classics there is today and the only reason Classics has more is because it focuses on Classics mostly.

[jdw]

See, the idea is that a few elites took charge of the entire country and suddenly everyone knew Issac Yankem was Kane. Obviously Keith is Stalin.

 

I suspect that the entire country didn't care that Yankem was Kane. Nor, ironically, has it really matter over the past 15 years that Kane was Yankem. The WWE has largely gone on the Kane character for him, and fans largely look at him as Kane.

 

Even more recent ones like Cesaro/Claudio: other than the elite 1% hardcores, who really cares at this point?

 

It's not terribly different from the Six Faces of Darsow. A number of fans in the 80s got that Krusher Khruschev went to the WWF and became Demolition Smash, even if the WWF didn't acknowledge it (and I don't recall JCP ever taking an explicit shot at it in the other direction). Did the Apter Mags say something about it? Maybe... I don't recall. But there were times when things were kind of obvious, and Khruschev-Smash would have jumped out at me regardless.

 

Kayfabe? Eh.

[Loss]

I think deep down I knew the truth, but I was able to convince myself as a kid that wrestling was every bit as real as my attraction to girls.

[JerryvonKramer]

I have been a wrestling fan since 5 years old and far as a I remember I never believed it was real as my dad let me know from the top it was all just entertainment. The first time I started reading the WON was in 1989 at the Center Stage tapings where the Atlanta Boys (Scott Hudson, Steve Prazak, Jon Horton, Gary Yarman, et al) would pass it around the area where we were seated at so yeah there were a lot of smart fans hanging around the ATL scene at that time. Those guys also put out their own newsletter the Shennomake Press which was a parody version of the WON that was very popular locally. Now were there a lot of fans that believed it was real.....yes but it wasn't as big as you would think especially in the South.

There might be a good thread in this topic in itself.