Commonly used words and phrases that annoy you

[dawho5]

I have been trying to think of a response to this line of argument for a while that encapsulates how I look at this. Hoping this works.

 

On the one hand, I think that yes, the internet has changed the way some fans look at pro wrestling. For my it goes back to the "why" part of jdw's argument. That is the part that the internet really opens up to younger fans now with much less personal experience necessary to see it.

 

On the other hand, I've been to live MMA events that my friends were taking part in. The majority of the people who went to them seemed to want to drink, be really loud and get excited when somebody started getting the shit beaten out of them. Who it was didn't matter very often. I've got to guess that a certain cross section of those people would gladly go to a WWE or indy show and watch people "fake" beat each other up and yell and scream while drinking to blow off steam. And you know, that plays into the way the faces are always rejecting authority (the boss?) and sticking it to the man. It gets to the more casual audience in a big way because of what those people would like to do given the chance.

 

My feeling about this whole argument is that we're really talking about a matter of the ratio of "smart" fans who read the internet and talk about booking to people who just show up to yell and scream and chant, just for the entertainment of it. I would guess that has changed, but to what degree I really have no idea.

[ohtani's jacket]

Split crowds don't really mean much though as regards this particular topic. It says basically nothing about the fans' status as being "marks", "smart" or whatever. The split reaction could result from bad booking. It could be a sign that it's time to turn a guy. It could be evidence that a particular babyface isn't over. "Boring" chants could be a sign that ... the match is boring. None of this really demonstrates much.

 

 

 

 

None of this stuff matters to the argument. What matters is how fans engaged with and talked about wrestling. Were they talking about booking decisions? Were they recognising who was a good wrestler and who was a shitty one based on non-kayfabe criteria such as selling? Did the mythical 1968 smart fan know that Chief Jay Strongbow pretty much sucked?

 

The pre- and post- Meltzer newsletters seem worlds apart to me, worlds apart.

You lost me at the mythical 1968 smart fan part. How do you know there weren't smart fans in 1968? Just because you imagine there weren't doesn't mean it's true. I could just as easily convince myself that there were smart fans in 1968 simply by stating so.

 

Find me the evidence. There is quite a lot of evidence of fans not being smart -- riots, death threats, and so on. 20,000 people at MSG who'd throw a fit if Pedro lost, etc. etc. You find me the evidence to suggest that a significent proportion of them were "smart". The onus is not on me. I'm peddling the line of what is known. The onus is on those people claiming that there were smart fans discussing wrestling like the IWC in 1998 back in the 60s or even the fucking 1930s. They are the one making the claim, it is up to them to prove it.

 

If you think that they're a myth then the onus goes right back on you. You've had the argument put to you that the media has always tried to expose pro-wrestling as fake (as far back as the 1870s or before) and that there was very little difference between how people viewed pro-wrestling then and now, i.e. the media thought it was fake, the public thought it was fake, and the fans didn't care. Of those fans, you don't think there were people capable of viewing it as a performance? In the 1960s? Does it really matter if they didn't use the same terminology or that there was no internet? I get your general point that people were unlikely to have been talking about wrestling the same way that we do in the 1930s, but what does it matter if they appreciated it the same way?

 

There is huge world of difference between stories exposing the business and reporting it like it's some major scoop and "smart fans". As I said, everyone knows it's a trick, but how is the trick done? The burden of proof does not lie with me.

 

The terminology matters less than the entire way they think about and engage with the product. And to be clear, I'm talking about fans in the 1960s or the 30s or whenever talking about booking decisions as fans now talk about booking decisions. "I think Wrestler X should have won and it was a mistake for that promoter to make Wrestler Y win". That sort of thing, doesn't matter what words they were using.

 

How many shoot interviews have we all seen and heard from guys who got into the business in the 50s, 60s and 70s? How many times do you hear guys talk about being "smartened up"? And this is people into wrestling enough to, y'know, actually become a wrestler. How many times do you hear those same types of guys talk about being part of "smart communities" of fans? The answer is zero is so far. Zero.

 

We're not talking about the distant past here, this isn't the stone age before men and women could write things down, it's not the even the medieval age, it's the 20th century. Evidence shouldn't be hard to come by. Fuck, let's go to Kayfabe Memories and get some of those 70-year olds to explain what their fandom was like in the 1950s.

of I literally have no idea why so many people here are not willing to admit something as painfully obvious as the seismic shift in fandom that happened post-internet.

 

 

In my experience, the first thing people discover about pro-wrestling is that the outcomes are predetermined. From there, they come to the realisation that the wrestlers are co-operating with one another and that the moves are assisted. Most of us here came to that realisation on our own before newsletters and before the internet. I remember reading in the tabloids that the guy I thought was the announcer was in fact the owner of the company and that the whole thing was rigged. I didn't know how they rigged it and frankly I didn't care. Did I learn a lot when I logged onto the internet? Sure. Did it change the way I thought about wrestling? Not really. I was already thinking about booking and pushes as a teenager. Was I the first person to do so? Unlikely. The internet collected a lot of information in the same place and allowed for communication across the country (and indeed the world) where previously the only form of communication had been through fan clubs or at live shows, but honestly if we were talking about movies or comic books or music or any of our other hobbies we wouldn't be talking about seismic shifts (and there is insider knowledge in all those fields.)

 

Why should I trust what workers are saying in shoots? Are you really going to have a shoot where a wrestler says they guessed it was fake before they began training? It's not going to happen. Believing what wrestlers say in shoots leads to a pretty romanticised view of pro-wrestling.

 

Steve Yohe watched wrestling in the 60s. He seems pretty smart.

[khawk20]

 

I literally have no idea why so many people here are not willing to admit something as painfully obvious as the seismic shift in fandom that happened post-internet.

 

 

Knowing and talking to several AWA people that watched the AWA both live and on TV faithfully through the 70's, 80's (and in some cases the 60's), it isn't a stretch to say that fans that were into it way-back-when talked about wrestling in a Meltzer-ian way, discussing "insider" rumours, tidbits about interactions with wrestlers in the community, and talking with people that were actually on the inside. Those guys talked if you got to know them.

 

Same with some of the Montreal-area old-time fans I've talked with over the years, and even discussions with my father and grandfather when I was a kid about when wrestling used to come here and appear on their tv.

 

What it demonstrates to me is that the community of "smart" fans existed, and the insider information was an enjoyable part of being a fan. It trickled out in smaller doses, but it was discussed amongst the fans of the product at the time, even sought out by them.

 

The era of the internet and the WON becoming popular brought those smaller communities together in a way that could not happen before, and in time I believe did indeed expand the community of "smart" fans. I also believe those fans existed in greater numbers pre-internet and pre-WON than Jerry will acknowledge, but the broadness of the discussions were limited before either entity became as big as they did.

 

***

Also, to Jerry's point about the stories of people having to be smartened up, I think there is some merit to that being necessary back then in some cases, but I often question the things like "Verne didn't smarten me up until I was in the dressing room before my debut". I just can't accept that someone could train for any length of time before realizing how much co-operation was involved to make almost any hold work. We figured that out as grade school kids the first time we mimicked our tv heroes in the schoolyard.

No way new wrestlers and new backstage people could go so long without figuring out the performance aspect of it. I can accept the illusion of a face and a heel hating each other being maintained backstage to outsiders and potentially new insiders, but I imagine the questions would center more around "This is pretend and they still seem to not like each other and are kept apart and I have no idea why".

 

The fans rioting and attacking wrestlers I consider a separate entity from the above. People went to the matches to lose themselves in the spectacle, and spending two hours geting their blood up watching the matches makes it easy for me to believe the basis for those kinds of stories. I've seen also seen it regularly in minor-pro hockey around here, where fans get so into hating the opposing team that their bus gets egged, players get attacked and there are fights with them off the ice and in the stands, things like that. Hockey isn't "worked" like wrestling is, but the ability of the fan to immerse himself in the game to the point of losing his concept of the game vs. real life is very similar to the way wrestling fans behave.

[khawk20]

 

 

In my experience, the first thing people discover about pro-wrestling is that the outcomes are predetermined. From there, they come to the realisation that the wrestlers are co-operating with one another and that the moves are assisted.

 

 

From my experience, it was the co-operation aspect that led to the knowledge that the matches were pre-determined somehow.

 

But yeah, those two ideas were arrived at fairly early on in my or anyone else I knew that watched it's viewing experience.

[khawk20]

I was already thinking about booking and pushes as a teenager.

 

The people I discussed it with as a kid/teen did basically the same thing. We would discuss what made the most sense if it happened, what was likely to happen, and what we hoped would happen.

 

I remember seeing Greg Gagne beat Nick Bockwinkel on TV in 1979 in a non-title match as a soon-to-be-ten year old. When they began promoting the July Minneapolis card with a Greg-Bock main event, I was already surmising that it would be cool if Greg won the title, but he wouldn't win it in that first match, guessing whether it would be a two or three match series, and knowing if it got to a cage match that Greg wouldn't win the title but he would win the match.

 

I was doing that without knowing anything about the concept of booking as it related to wrestling, in terms of the terminology.

[Loss]

It never occurred to me before going online that matches could be either good or bad, but I would appear to be in the minority on that one. It wasn't that thinking about wrestling in that framework didn't appeal to me, it was that it didn't occur to me. I mean, I realized that Renegade and Erik Watts couldn't throw dropkicks and saw them as poorly trained wrestlers, but more in a kayfabe sense of that giving their opponents a huge advantage in matches.

[Loss]

I will agree that the Internet changed wrestling in the sense that kayfabe is broken and insider terms are used on WWE.com and official WWE DVD releases, and I'm not sure that would have happened without the Internet. Yes, Vince admitted wrestling was fake in 1989 and it's not like he went out of his way to present the WWF as something real, but you will notice he stopped short of using the word "fake". Whether the majority of fans were going online to find out more about Montreal in late 1997 or not, the framework in which it was discussed on WWE television would have been very different had it happened ten years earlier. We saw fake shoots in 1988 with Paul E. and the Original Midnights showing up in the NWA, and again in 1990 with the Jerry Lawler-Snowman feud. But those looked very different than Vince Russo booking Hulk Hogan to literally lay down and do a job because of BACKSTAGE POLITICZ in 1999 and 2000, or from Kevin Nash being booked to "save" a match after Goldberg acted unprofessionally. There is a reason magazines like Pro Wrestling Illustrated didn't thrive in the late 90s/early 2000s wrestling boom and it was not just that technology was changing, although admittedly that was part of it.

 

I agree that what we are arguing here is ratios of fans. I think most people have always known it was fake. I think because wrestling is more open now, people understand (or think they understand) more about its inner workings now - meaning that I think the number of fans who know what a babyface and heel are, and what doing a job means, is higher now than it was thirty years ago, even if it's still not the majority of fans.

 

Still, WWE will never quite go all the way. Yes, they admitted wrestling was fake in 1989 (something which the vast majority of wrestling fans never knew he did, by the way - I'm convinced that was a bigger deal to hardcore fans than mainstream fans), but they also rejected merchandising proposals for Dolph Ziggler a couple of years ago that would include insider terms.

[Lee Casebolt]

It never occurred to me before going online that matches could be either good or bad, but I would appear to be in the minority on that one. It wasn't that thinking about wrestling in that framework didn't appeal to me, it was that it didn't occur to me. I mean, I realized that Renegade and Erik Watts couldn't throw dropkicks and saw them as poorly trained wrestlers, but more in a kayfabe sense of that giving their opponents a huge advantage in matches.

 

This is interesting to me. By that I mean I can't quite wrap my head around it. Were there matches you enjoyed more than others? And (assuming so) how did you classify "matches I like" vs "matches I don't like"? Did all the matches look the same? This confuses me greatly. Please elaborate.

[Loss]

I liked the matches where my favorites won and didn't like the ones where they didn't. Beyond that, I really didn't have matches I liked versus matches I didn't. It didn't enter my thought process. Wrestlers who won were my favorites because winning meant they were good. My thought process was more "Ok, this strategy worked in the last match, so here's what the guy who lost needs to do differently this time and here's what the guy who won may need to consider doing differently." I was very into the mental aspect of it all.

 

It sounds ridiculous now, but until 1997 or so, I really watched it like a sporting event, to the point that I thought stuff like heel turns were a distraction from the sport. We don't know these people personally, and it really doesn't matter when it comes to how good they are at winning matches anyway, so who are we to judge them?

[Lee Casebolt]

 

I literally have no idea why so many people here are not willing to admit something as painfully obvious as the seismic shift in fandom that happened post-internet.

 

 

You realize Meltzer alone predates the internet by something like a decade, right?

[Loss]

I had thoughts as a ten-year-old of creating an independent company as an adult that did scouting reports for wrestlers, where payment would be dependent upon beating their opponent.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

I literally have no idea why so many people here are not willing to admit something as painfully obvious as the seismic shift in fandom that happened post-internet.

You realize Meltzer alone predates the internet by something like a decade, right?

 

Me? No I haven't got a clue about anything, clearly.

[Lee Casebolt]

I had thoughts as a ten-year-old of creating an independent company as an adult that did scouting reports for wrestlers, where payment would be dependent upon beating their opponent.

 

I would absolutely have bought those if they were available on the open market.

 

As a kid, I was always thinking of shooting on the champ and stealing the belt.

[jdw]

Still not really any evidence that there were fans discussing wrestling in the way that we think of hardcore fans (or "the IWC") discussing wrestling. Show me that evidence, and I'll happily concede. I've seen none at all. And I have been looking.

 

I would be interested to know how exactly Meltzer started and who the real pre-cursors to Meltzer were.

 

Well, since the original concept was that the Internet Changed Everything, it seems like I can now point you to a 1983 edition of the WON as evidence of people discussing wrestling in a way that the IWC does and be done with it.

 

But to be consistent:

 

There has been a long, on-going evolution of how fans view pro wrestling. It's not a binary evolution that was 0 before the Internet and a 1 after some point in 1998/99 websites started popping up or when you came along. Nor do those of us who were hip to hardcore wrestling fandom prior to the internet claim it was a 0 prior to the WON and a 1 after that. The evolution is probably far closer to 0 to 10 or even 0 to 100. The 0 is probably the very first pro wrestling match, and the 1 is probably within a few days when some people knew it was worked. I exaggerate only a bit, as those of us who have gone back and researched pro wrestling into the 1800s have found discussion of Wrestling Is Fake in major papers all the way back to that point... and frankly keep finding it the further back one wants to look. There is no definitive 1.

 

I'm sure Snowden would agree to that notion when he was looking at it. People are always finding new stuff, though for the most part aren't even bothering to look for it since we proved long ago that it was worked *and* exposed as a work far longer than people thought or wanted to admit.

 

The WON isn't 2 or 3 or 4 or even 10. RSP-W, Prodigy and AOL Grandstand Wrestling weren't 80, with Website 90 and PWO the magic 100. It's all a continual evolution.

[jdw]

None of this stuff matters to the argument. What matters is how fans engaged with and talked about wrestling.

 

Watch Clash 1. Those fans dressed in suits rooting for the heels? They were the legendary Front Row, Section D and they existed in the Carolinas before there was an rsp-w and "IWC" nonsense.

 

Were they talking about booking decisions?

 

 

Yes. And I was with my brother in the 80s.

 

 

Were they recognising who was a good wrestler and who was a shitty one based on non-kayfabe criteria such as selling?

 

 

Yes. As did I with my brother when explaining why Flair and Cornette were great. Did I use the term "selling"? No. I'd use terms like "making the good guy look good." Or point out what we now call selling and say Flair was great at taking a beating.

 

 

Did the mythical 1968 smart fan know that Chief Jay Strongbow pretty much sucked?

 

 

Yohe has talked to me about who he liked in the 60s and didn't like in the 60s, and a lot of it comes down to work. He's a Destroyer Fan, after all. When ever Dick Hutton's name comes up, Steve will talk about how he didn't think much of him in the ring. For years Steve would talk about Baba being good, and we'd just shine him on that Baba was a crappy worker. When we started finally watching older Baba matches and saying Baba was a good worker, Steve would get "That's what I was fucking talking about and you guys never believed me."

 

The pre- and post- Meltzer newsletters seem worlds apart to me, worlds apart.

 

 

Not to me. When Dave started writing in the National Sports Daily, I thought:

 

"Fuck... finally someone who thinks about this shit like I do."

 

When I subbed to the WON after that, it was more of the same.

 

That's why I keep trying to get across that the "IWC" wasn't some on/off switch. The WON itself wasn't fully an on/off switch for anything other than Coverage of wrestling: it hadn't really been done that way to that scale. But Dave himself didn't suddenly start thinking that way when he began the WON. He'd been thinking that way for years, and had a circle of friends who thought that way. Enough that Dave eventually got the idea of doing the WON and selling it to them.

 

In turn, a good number of WON subs in the 80s and early 90s came to the WON already knowing the general concepts that Dave was talking about. I know that was the case for me, Yohe... it was the case for Bruce Mitchell and his crew in the Carolinas... for a fair number of other people.

[jdw]

I had those conversations as a teenager - the Blue Blazer, Curt Hennig, Ricky Steamboat, and the Rockers were awesome, the Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan and Hacksaw Jim Duggan were terrible. I'd never heard the word "workrate" but it's easy to recognize, as is who makes an opponent look good and who makes them look bad. That was late 80s/early 90s; post-Meltzer, but I never heard the man's name, nor knew there was anything even vaguely like the Observer til I got online in 1996. We talked about the WM 6 main event in terms of Hogan never loses, but he's getting old, so is Warrior supposed to replace him? We were informed solely by what we saw on TV and read in the WWF and Apter magazines. That's just the experience of one kid in a small town in Iowa, but I think this is a pretty standard sort of conversation to have whenever you have fans above a certain minimum level of interest and intelligence.

 

This.

[Dylan Waco]

I have no clue how to approach this thread at this point, but one thing that is completely unarguable is that the pre and post Observer newsletters were massively different.

[jdw]

The case remains, Lee, if it's as easy as all that, where are the pre-Meltzer newsletters of the 1960s and 70s discussing matches in those terms? Show me and I will believe.

 

So you think that Dave just woke up one day in late 1982 and suddenly understood pro wrestling?

 

He had been thinking that way for a decade, and talking with fans/friends that was for years. That no one had an idea to make a hardcore magazine/newsletter doesn't mean that there weren't hardcore fans. It takes a lot of effort to make and sustain a publication. In turn, hardcore fans have always been a small niche, and one that's not been easy to communicate with in large numbers until recently.

 

That's the change of the Interwebs: mass, quick, wide scale, wide spread communication. Via the web in 1996, I could communicate instantly with someone in Japan, someone in Georgia, someone in Virginia, someone down the highway in California. I could toss some up, and get instant feed back on it.

 

But going back...

 

I could pick up the phone, ring Yohe and spend 3 hours talking about pro wrestling with him. Same with Hoback. And I'd been calling them for years before I went online.

 

Hell, I went to Japan with Dave before I got online, and talked to "smart" hardcore wrestling fans over there.

[jdw]

I have no clue how to approach this thread at this point, but one thing that is completely unarguable is that the pre and post Observer newsletters were massively different.

 

The newsletters and WON specifically were a major change.

 

Though Mat Results, which pre-dates the WON by a year or so, didn't work Kayfabe. It just didn't bother about working/booking too much, and instead was focused on sharing news from around the world, largely results based. We're so far removed from it that I suspect it's not something Dave gives a lot of credit to. But the ability of that first year / 18 months of Mat Results to sustain being able to send our news on a monthly basis covering both the US and Japan likely played some role in Dave doing the WON and taking it to the next level.

[KrisZ]

What do you think the WFIA was back in the day....all smart fans that would go to conventions every year in different cities to shoot the shit. Dave went to all the early WFIA conventions and the smart fans of that era were like a secret society in a way as they had their own little newsletters competing against the Weston mags.

 

Another thing that hasn't been brought up here I think is when you had outlaw groups such as the Poffo's in 1979 totally exposing the business by giving out secrets about the Memphis/Knoxville guys they were competing against on TV.

 

Also Buddy Rose at the Cow Palace which has been brought up many times.

 

Now on the JCP heel crowds.....Techwood Studios created that kinda environment with the Horsemen fans in suits and the Corny fans in suits and tennis rackets. Those crowds at times were as smart as ECW fans 10 years later....just watch how they treated Dusty in 1988. I know because I was there.

[jdw]

 

None of this stuff matters to the argument. What matters is how fans engaged with and talked about wrestling. Were they talking about booking decisions? Were they recognising who was a good wrestler and who was a shitty one based on non-kayfabe criteria such as selling? Did the mythical 1968 smart fan know that Chief Jay Strongbow pretty much sucked?

 

The pre- and post- Meltzer newsletters seem worlds apart to me, worlds apart.

 

You lost me at the mythical 1968 smart fan part. How do you know there weren't smart fans in 1968? Just because you imagine there weren't doesn't mean it's true. I could just as easily convince myself that there were smart fans in 1968 simply by stating so.

 

 

This is true.

 

If you talked to Yohe, he'd tell you he was the same general type of fan back then when he was heading off to Nam as he is now. In fact, most of the backstage stuff doesn't mean a whole lot to him. But thinking about work and booking, even if you had different names for them (or even no real names for them)... that's what he was all about back then. For the most part it's still what he's about.

 

Edit: as a side note, it's also how he tends to look at wrestling when doing historical research. He's looking for patterns in the booking, what's is doing well, what isn't, who is drawing, who is bombing. If you ever get him talking about Ed Lewis, in very short order he'll start talking about how Lewis was a boring wrestler (i.e. mediocre / uninteresting / poor worker), and how it was pretty well spelled out in the newspapers by the writers covering his matches, and if you read closely in how they describe the fan reaction to him.

[jdw]

 

 

Find me the evidence. There is quite a lot of evidence of fans not being smart -- riots, death threats, and so on. 20,000 people at MSG who'd throw a fit if Pedro lost, etc. etc.

Jerry, you make it sound like that sort of stuff is a byprodcut of an era that has long since passed, and that's just not the case. It's not a regular occurance, but that kind of stuff still goes on nowadays. Shane Douglas grabbing Gary Wolfe by the Halo, any of the Dudley Boyz riots in ECW. Concrete and I have told the story on this board before, of Brodie Lee KOing some dipshit who took a swing at him in the parking lot.

 

 

Not to mention that there have been fights and riots at concerts over the years.

 

I toss that out so avoid the expected response if I were to mention Heysel:

 

"Well... that's soccer and it's Real. That proves my point: fans only get violent when it's Real, not something they know is Fake Entertainment!"

 

No... people get violent when they're fuckwads and pissed off at something.

[jdw]

Stepping outside of U.S. wrestling, there was even the late 1987 thing where Sumo Hall fans turned on the angle that led to Vader beating Inoki in three minutes or whatever it was -- not because there was a strong heel involved, but because they rejected the promotional direction.

 

This is important because the fans expected Inoki vs Choshu to be the big epic match on the card. Instead they got this at the last minute:

 

Antonio Inoki beat Riki Choshu (6:06) via DQ

Big Van Vader pinned Antonio Inoki (2:49)

 

In back-to-back matches, which pissed them off into a riot.

 

It wasn't that Vader beat Inoki quick that pissed them off. It was the whole clusterfuck of how they felt ripped off by what the promotion was doing. They got fucked out of the match they wanted, it was treated as a throw away, and then the main event was horrid. Time to ripped the joint apart.

[jdw]

How many shoot interviews have we all seen and heard from guys who got into the business in the 50s, 60s and 70s? How many times do you hear guys talk about being "smartened up"?

 

Those guys are generally full of shit. I think people for years have been telling you that all those shoot interviews that you use as a basis point for you understanding of pro wrestling and pro wrestling history are screwing with your mind.

 

Terry Funk talked about getting "smartened up" when he got into wrestling. I think we all can generally see that as bullshit: if I'm smart enough in the early 70s to see Pro Wrestling Is Fake in my first viewing of it, there no way that a Son Of A Promoter could be around if for years, week after week, and not see it's Fake. And know a majority of ways that it was being faked.

 

That's just old wrestling bullshit.

 

There *are* elements of "tricks of the trade" that a wrestler will learn when he gets into the business: how to properly throw that Fake Punch, how to Bump, the best methods for selling, how to run the ropes, how to apply holds, etc.

 

Those really aren't terribly relevant to a Smart Fan. I could give a shit about how to throw a fake punch. When guys are getting all worked up about the various awesome ways that Jerry Lawler throws a punch, do you really think they care to ask Jerry, "So... technically, how to you get your punches to look so awesome?" Some perhaps, but most Lawler fans don't give a shit: the fake punches look awesome is all they care about.

 

 

I literally have no idea why so many people here are not willing to admit something as painfully obvious as the seismic shift in fandom that happened post-internet.

 

 

I don't get why you're unwilling to admit that the changes in fandom have been happening for decades. You first started trying to point to Scott Keith and the late 90s. When people pointed out to you there was an Internet before that, and he was a part of it, you blew that off. When people pointed out to you that before the internet, there were the newsletters, you blew that off. When people try to tell you that *they* as fans thought that way before reading newsletters and/or the internet, you blow that off.

 

Basically what it comes down to is how *you* were, Jerry... and you believing that you are representative of All Smart Fans. You happen to look back and see that you we're terribly smart to pro wrestling before you came online and found people talking in Hardcore Smart Fan ways. Ergo, no one could possibly have been Hardcore Smart Fans except in the way Jerry became a Hardcore Smart Fan. Which is...

 

Bullshit.

 

Some people *did* follow the same path as you. A pretty fair number, though still a small number of overall wrestling fans because most wrestling fans truly don't give a shit about wrestling in a Hardcore Smart fashion.

 

But there are also fans who didn't. They became Hardcore Smart fans through the newsletters, or the old hotlines, or through friends at shows who read the newsletters.

 

There also were some, pretty clearly like Lee as he's walked through, but also like me and certainly like Yohe, who simply because Hardcore Smart fans because it was nakedly obvious to them what Pro Wrestling was all about. And they still loved it, in fact for some of those very reasons of what it was all about.

 

They'd think about the quality of matches, and which wrestlers were better at putting on good entertaining matches. They'd notice who made people look better. They'd fantasy match make / promote over a long period of time, not because they were thinking Lex might beat up Flair if they faced, but what cool matches they could put on for quality, drawing and storyline. They would get pissed off when the Varsity Club broke up and Rotundo became Captain Mike because the Varsity Club was a cool gimmick, and Captain Mike with that stupid had was a dumbass one. If they saw Nash as Oz prior to reading the WON, they thought it sucked because... it SUCKED, but because Nash could or couldn't beat someone. Gator Scott Hall? Fucking stupid gimmick.

 

And on and on.

 

I get that you needed the Internet to figure out the greatness of pro wrestling, Jerry. Just please don't be so ego-centric to think that everyone else needed it... or even needed Meltzer to figure out the rich, wonderful, stupid greatness that is pro wrestling.

 

Of course I was 20 when I got into pro wrestling, and looking back it would have had to be dumb as a fucking brick not to see what it was.

[Dylan Waco]

Where did Jerry say he needed the internet to show him the greatness of pro wrestling?