Commonly used words and phrases that annoy you

[jdw]

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.)

 

I think that captures as clearly, and without the heat, what a lot of us are saying.

 

Also agree on the other forms of entertainment/hobbies.

 

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.

 

 

 

And that. I just this morning ran across a 7 year old post quoting a piece that walked through how full of shit Jericho was about his SMW days in his book. So off base on so much that the person doing the walk through (a SMW employee) wonder how screwed up Jericho was on the rest of the book covering areas that didn't have first hand knowledge off.

 

Terry Funks book, as entertaining as it is, has a similar issue with Japan: there's a variety of things that are wrong that you wonder about the non-Japan stuff.

[jdw]

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

 

That's me paraphrasing his much earlier post on how the internet had a massive shift in how he sees pro wrestling. He knew it was a magic trick before, and after the internet he understands how the magic trick is done, which is the true greatness of pro wrestling. How he sees the greatness of wrestling now, how he waxes poetically about it here and on the podcasts, is a byproduct of the Interwebs and guys like Scott Keith. Unless Jerry thinks that 1995 Jerry could wax on like he does now.

 

On the flip side, I pretty much got the magic trick and how it was done by watching Flair and the MX with Jim Cornette back in 1986.

[JerryvonKramer]

Now now Williams, no need to get personal. I'm just going on the evidence I've seen at my disposal, namely accounts from people from the time period from the business (which you don't count), newsletters and articles I've read from before the time of Meltzer (which no one seems to want to address) and, more to the point, the thing that has been talked about in wrestling circles among wrestlers, promoters, writers, historians, fans and former fans for over a decade, namely, the "death of kayfabe", which apparently according to you and other geniuses around here, never actually took place.

 

I'd love to discuss this further because I think it's a really interesting topic and I don't think we've come to satisfactory answers yet. The picture of fandom pre-internet, and pre-Dave, that you are painting is basically alien to all other accounts I've read. You haven't attached any numbers to it.

 

However, I have to dive out of this now, because, y'know, it's you.

[jdw]

 

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.

 

 

Good post.

[jdw]

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.

 

That's a difference with me.

 

In the 70s when I came across wrestling, it was all Shitty because it was Fake Sports. I didn't want to watch it.

 

When I got into it in 1986, it was specifically because I could see the "good" in matches, mic spots and angles. If JCP had been all Boogie Woogie vs Paul Jones' Army, I would have bailed out instantly, even while admitting that the *angles* were pretty good in that feud. It was the good of Flair and MX+Corny that sucked me in. After that, picking up on other heels being good (like Arn and Tully), because they were the ones doing the heavy lifting of making things good. It took until Windham came that I really saw a Face akin to how I saw the heels, which then led me to rethink folks like the R'nR and be prepped for guys like the Fantastics coming in.

 

It really was always about Quality for me rather than it just being Wrestling. A big reason I wasn't a huge fan of the WWF: it's quality was quite a but below JCP. :/ Also why I instantly love All Japan and New Japan when I lucked into it at the end of the decade.

[jdw]

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.

 

The Front Row Section D boys were *smarter* than ECW Fans.

[Bix]

The death of kayfabe isn't something that can be looked at in a strictly binary fashion: Wrestling is a real sport or it isn't. The vast majority of people knowing it was worked was not a big deal. Pulling back the curtain and showing how the magician does his tricks did remove some mystique, though.

[jdw]

Now now Williams, no need to get personal. I'm just going on the evidence I've seen at my disposal, namely accounts from people from the time period from the business (which you don't count), newsletters and articles I've read from before the time of Meltzer (which no one seems to want to address) and, more to the point, the thing that has been talked about in wrestling circles among wrestlers, promoters, writers, historians, fans and former fans for over a decade, namely, the "death of kayfabe", which apparently according to you and other geniuses around here, never actually took place.

 

 

I believe it was pointed out to you that the Death of Kayfabe has been a talking point for two decades, before the IWC Evolution that you want to point to. I've literally stood next to Dave when people in the business express their anger to him for Dave killing Kayfabe. Considering I haven't stood next to Dave since about 1998, and the "IWC Webpages" were barely coming into being at the time... that might give you an idea of how far back that concept went.

 

"I respect you booker man." -Brian Pillman, 1996

 

Wrestling was already killing it's own kayfabe before your IWC Revolution. That's before pointing to Vince himself exposing that the business was worked a full decade before that. Or the 20/20 piece that I linked to.

 

I mean... I get that you might have missed it. You might not have been a fan in 1986 when he copped to it being worked, or too young to understand, or perhaps sheltered in another country where the news never hit. Here... it was out there and known. Hell, it was known before that.

 

It's kind of hard to get more Death of Kayfabe that then most powerful promoter in the world admitting it was fake.

 

 

I'd love to discuss this further because I think it's a really interesting topic and I don't think we've come to satisfactory answers yet. The picture of fandom pre-internet, and pre-Dave, that you are painting is basically alien to all other accounts I've read. You haven't attached any numbers to it.

 

 

 

It's a picture that a number of posters on this board are painting for you how *they* were fans pre-internet and before reading Dave.

 

I get that you dislike me and won't take my word for anything. But you have respected posters (at not just this board but across the net) such as Kriz, Lee and Khawk pointing it out to you in just the past few pages. You've got guys like Daniel pointing it out to you, and that's clearly not a run in to give me support given the two of us punting each other around for 15 years. Sift through the thread and note just how many poster are saying you're wrong, and specifically which ones and where they rate on the "This guy is pretty respected" scale. These are guys who've been on the net and in the Hardcore scene for years, and have seen the growth of the net and Hardcore fandom. They're not pulling this shit out of their asses just to be disagreeable with You.

 

However, I have to dive out of this now, because, y'know, it's you.

 

 

I'd get that if it was just me.

 

But it's not. And you're just as much flipping the bird at them as me.

[Matt D]

Which brings us back to the issue of ratio, which is where this argument really needs to be. When the "secret society" stopped being secret and opens up, for free, to any kid on the net.

[jdw]

The death of kayfabe isn't something that can be looked at in a strictly binary fashion: Wrestling is a real sport or it isn't. The vast majority of people knowing it was worked was not a big deal. Pulling back the curtain and showing how the magician does his tricks did remove some mystique, though.

 

Bix: 20/20 special. Curtain pulled back.

 

It's hardly the only one. Vince going in and out of letting people blade back in the late 80s and early 90s, because "blading" was out there enough for the "barbaric" practice being a PR concern for Vince.

 

Exactly how much of the magic trick does one have to understand before Kayfabe is Dead?

 

That Hogan is going to keep the belt in every match isn't enough? So does it have to be that Trip and Steph are fucking? Because the fact that Savage and Liz were married was pretty common knowledge long before they got "married" in the storyline. I mean... I get the some folks might have been too clueless to have known. But it was out there for years.

 

Where is the magic bullet where kayfabe is dead, or died?

[jdw]

Which brings us back to the issue of ratio, which is where this argument really needs to be. When the "secret society" stopped being secret and opens up, for free, to any kid on the net.

 

You do know that a higher % of people had televisions in this country in 1985 than had internet access in 1999. So if the Secret was exposed on TV back then... it stops being a secret.

 

Then again, I was 18 when that thing aired. So perhaps I have a memory of it while others here don't, and it allowed them to think there was a Secret when there really wasn't one.

[Bix]

 

The death of kayfabe isn't something that can be looked at in a strictly binary fashion: Wrestling is a real sport or it isn't. The vast majority of people knowing it was worked was not a big deal. Pulling back the curtain and showing how the magician does his tricks did remove some mystique, though.

 

Bix: 20/20 special. Curtain pulled back.

 

It's hardly the only one. Vince going in and out of letting people blade back in the late 80s and early 90s, because "blading" was out there enough for the "barbaric" practice being a PR concern for Vince.

 

Exactly how much of the magic trick does one have to understand before Kayfabe is Dead?

 

That Hogan is going to keep the belt in every match isn't enough? So does it have to be that Trip and Steph are fucking? Because the fact that Savage and Liz were married was pretty common knowledge long before they got "married" in the storyline. I mean... I get the some folks might have been too clueless to have known. But it was out there for years.

 

Where is the magic bullet where kayfabe is dead, or died?

A one-off media expose or the occasional bad shoot angle (and there was no context given to your Pillman-Sullivan example by the announcers) is not the same thing as the promotion itself producing and marketing extensive documentaries about the very specific inner-workings of the business.

[Matt D]

I was going off of the WIFA conventions or whatever when I used the term.

 

Do you really feel like the ease of access to information previously harder to get changed nothing at all?

 

No one is saying that everyone was stupid until suddenly they weren't. No one is saying that no one talked about this stuff with their brother. Dave came from a pre-existing tradition.

 

Still things changed because of a new generation of people who were able to access this information not by sending away for it or even trying but because it was really easy to find for free.

 

If you can just admit that point we can talk about the how and the why.

[dawho5]

I would agree with Matt that at a certain point it became very easy to read about the booking/backstage aspects of pro wrestling. It had a lot to do with message boards moreso than newsletters I'd guess. Places like DVDVR and their competitors. I don't think fans were "dumb" before this happened, just not as many had the easy access to the kind of information that would make someone what we would now call a "smart" fan.

 

I guess my questions would be a bit more pointed towards the different audiences and what percentage of fans within them were the type who read the stuff on the internet and discussed booking, match layout, etc.

 

What percentage for WWE?

 

How about for RoH?

 

What about New Japan?

 

Would those numbers have changed from the mid-90s until now? Would it always be in the direction towards more "smart" fans?

 

How many of those fans who use the internet really get involved in the types of discussions that go on here daily?

 

What reasons did you have specifically for the direction you took once you started getting into wrestling? Did that keep going in the same direction once you joined any one of the internet wrestling discussion boards? If it changed, why? Can the answers to these questions apply to a lot of other fans or are you very likely in the minority?

 

edit:

 

I think there's a few questions I missed.

 

What communities did you join as far as discussing wrestling? Did you enjoy them or take anything from them? What did you not like about them? How did that affect what discussion boards you joined after that?

 

These probably have quite a lot of bearing on how you look at the subject at hand as much as they helped form who we all are as wrestling fans.

[Lee Casebolt]

I was going off of the WIFA conventions or whatever when I used the term.

 

Do you really feel like the ease of access to information previously harder to get changed nothing at all?

 

No one is saying that everyone was stupid until suddenly they weren't. No one is saying that no one talked about this stuff with their brother. Dave came from a pre-existing tradition.

 

Still things changed because of a new generation of people who were able to access this information not by sending away for it or even trying but because it was really easy to find for free.

 

If you can just admit that point we can talk about the how and the why.

 

I think it's indisputable that conversations became much deeper, more detailed, and more knowledgeable. Going back to my own experience, the difference between the conversations I had with my friends as teenagers watching tv, renting WWF and NWA tapes, and buying magazines off the rack at Wal-Greens and the ones I could have in a post-internet situation with the DVDVR guys, tOA, Bix, Snowden, etc. is not one of kind but of degree. We're still talking about who's good and who sucks and why, what this company should do and why it won't because they are a bunch of morons. But instead of dealing with the experiences and opinions of a small number of people in my immediate circle, it's a larger number of people with vastly different experiences and opinions. It's much easier to access information and to include more people. Rather than relying on my shitty memory, I can look up dates and results, or throw a youtube video into the middle of a conversation so everyone knows exactly what we're talking about. That ease of access means you have to wade through a lot of crap, too, be it misinformation published and disseminated or people who can't (or won't) differentiate fact and opinion, but I find that largely manageable and the highs are high enough to justify the effort.

[jdw]

Do you really feel like the ease of access to information previously harder to get changed nothing at all?

 

Not a single person has said that it Changed Nothing.

 

But as Lee says, it's a matter of degree.

 

For someone like Yohe in the 60s and 70s, it's entirely possible that he could end up in a Hardcore Smart Fandom of his own if all his friends grow out of wrestling, and he's not able to hook up with others who look at wrestling like him.

 

Then along comes the WON. Here is a writer who views wrestling like he does, and a slew of readers who do as well. He's able to send in letters to what was at the time a vibrant Letter Page where fans exchanged thoughts, ideas, incite and at times pure bullshit. Dave interacted with them, on the Letters Page in response, or in meeting with some in trips.

 

While reading through the Letters Page, you see people in the same neck of the woods as you.

 

"Who is this Steve Yohe over in Alhambra a couple of miles away?" -jdw 1991

 

"Who is this John Williams a couple of miles away looking for old Observers? Let me send him a letter saying I've got some." -Yohe in 1991

 

Your world of fandom expands. I met Yohe and Barnett through the WON, started going to shows with Yohe, buying tapes from Barnett, talking with both on the phone. I met Hoback through Barnett. I met Dave at a show here in LA, and a couple of weeks later he called about something or other.

 

Then long distance got free in packages, and one no longer had to watch the phone bill when talking with someone in NoCal, NC, Minnesota, Texas, Tennessee, Michigan... I've forgotten 80% of the people I talked with in the early to mid-90s, almost all of them nice, smart fans. Some of them that I recall were big players in hardcore fandom whose names you'd come across in the old WONs like Tim Whitehead (terrifically nice guy who we always called the Switzerland of fandom because he got along with everyone) or Chris Zavisa (one of the biggest collector fans of puroresu in the era and another really nice guy) or Gary Will and Royal Duncan when they were working on their Title Histories project.

 

Then I popped online in the mid-90s into RSP-W, and it was another circle. Some of them names you'd seen in WON like Scherer, but also a wide world of people like CRZ or SKeith or Dean Rasmussen or Mike Lorefice, etc.

 

Then taking a peak into AOL GSW, and another group of fans like Frank or Travis or all those ECW fans who were even more... uh... odd about the company that Scherer & Co. on rps-w.

 

Then the website boards...

 

And then the news & recaps websites...

 

What some of us are trying to get across is that for those of us who've been from that very first step 30 or more years ago, then moved through each of these other ones, that last step doesn't represent a Revolutionary Change. It's just another change in a long revolution. It's not an insignificant one, it is a pretty decent sized on, but it doesn't feel like the Wheel or Fire or Sliced Bread.

 

* * * * *

 

On some level, this is similar to the Music Business. It's Dead now... just flat out dead. Sales are in the shitter. So what killed it off?

 

Up and down people will say the ability to Share Music. They wouldn't be entirely wrong.

 

But folks who have been around a long time have heard cries of the Death of The Music Business going back for ages.

 

The Cassette Tape was going to kill it, because people would just record their music, and share it, and sales would tank. Didn't really happen.

 

CD burning would kill it, because one person would buy something, then burn it for a lot of people. Didn't really happen, and the music business actually sold a pretty decent records during that period.

 

Napster would kill it. Not really... Napster died before it could kill the music business.

 

What really seemed to be the breaking point?

 

High speed internet *everywhere* (as opposed to loads of people still on dial-up or slow shit), portable mass storage and even single tracks being marketed by the industry. You could share lots of stuff extremely easy (and often for free!), store a shit load of it on a device to take it with you, and the "single" reborn as a "download" was much more viable as a mobile song mixed in with all your other shit than as a 45 on the turn table.

 

Is any of that really revolutionary?

 

Not really. A CD was pretty damn mobile on a walk man. Selecting the tracks you want is something that went back to mix tapes. Copying stuff for free... well, fuck it... my first Beatles collection was initially all on cassette tape after borrowing all the albums from a friend of the family. It was several years before I got the whole album collection on vinyl as a great gift from my mom. Downloaded and internet file sharing? Napster had it... but not everyone was really connected well to the internet at that time... I certainly wasn't.

 

Technology kept evolving, and eventually what everyone feared back when the recordable cassette tape was introduced finally happened. But elements of it had been going on for decades prior to it, laying the foundation.

 

Hardcore wrestling fandom is the same.

 

John

[jdw]

 

 

The death of kayfabe isn't something that can be looked at in a strictly binary fashion: Wrestling is a real sport or it isn't. The vast majority of people knowing it was worked was not a big deal. Pulling back the curtain and showing how the magician does his tricks did remove some mystique, though.

 

Bix: 20/20 special. Curtain pulled back.

 

It's hardly the only one. Vince going in and out of letting people blade back in the late 80s and early 90s, because "blading" was out there enough for the "barbaric" practice being a PR concern for Vince.

 

Exactly how much of the magic trick does one have to understand before Kayfabe is Dead?

 

That Hogan is going to keep the belt in every match isn't enough? So does it have to be that Trip and Steph are fucking? Because the fact that Savage and Liz were married was pretty common knowledge long before they got "married" in the storyline. I mean... I get the some folks might have been too clueless to have known. But it was out there for years.

 

Where is the magic bullet where kayfabe is dead, or died?

A one-off media expose or the occasional bad shoot angle (and there was no context given to your Pillman-Sullivan example by the announcers) is not the same thing as the promotion itself producing and marketing extensive documentaries about the very specific inner-workings of the business.

 

 

Have A Nice Day was released in 1999. It was a best seller, and was released with the WWF's blessing. I don't see that book written due to the growth of the IWC, especially since Mick had been working on that well back into 1998.

 

Once the WWF blessed that, it was obvious that it's "documentaries" and "histories" and of course future books on wrestlers would change. That had more to do with Mick and the success of his book than the IWC.

 

That's not even touching on Wrestling with Shadows (1998) and Beyond the Mat (1999), since they admittedly made very little money while exposing the business. Though one of them did get aired a lot on A&E back at the time.

[Matt D]

What I am arguing is that the Internet allowed for certain "elite" ideas to spread on an exponentially larger degree than would've been possible otherwise. It was still ultimately a minority Albeit a loud one, but it was a huge shift that thanks to the growth of social media creating sort of a second wave Led to The booking at the start of this year. It was a KeyPoint if not the key point of change.

 

Edit: I should try this again when I have a keyboard again.

[ButchReedMark]

The book You Grunt I'll Groan by Pallo was released years before the internet Parv. Just because folk didn't have the internet doesn't mean they were stupid. As you should know Tabloids would have "exposes" giving out terms like "Get Colour" on a regular basis. Just because you smartened late it doesn't mean everyone else did. When you're 7 you realise "he's mentioning Hulk so he's walking through people til he wrestles him". We still have old lasses twatting heels with handbags to this day on shows I work. Its not because they think its real. Its because its venting. Anyone who's seen pro wrestling pazt puberty and thought it was real I surely slow. Eople would riot and the like because its accessible theatre in the round at its lowest ebb. Its a fake version of people in the stocks vrossed wwith living vicariously.

 

But in all fairness its probably got to this point because you and JDW are again bickerinng.

 

You two need to fuck each other and get that tension out of the way.

[ohtani's jacket]

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.

I would say it mattered less to me before I came online. As a kid I would watch the entire card with some notion of who my favourite performers were, but I was mostly into the storylines. Match quality never really crossed my mind. When I got back into it as a teenager I started judging matches and workers and looking at it from a performance aspect, but when you come online and there are so many voices saying this guy is great and this guy sucks, it's bound to have an influence of some sort even if it's merely reaffirming or strengthening your existing position. I imagine a lot of people, myself included, felt they should be a much bigger Benoit fan after spending a couple of months online.

[Jesse Ewiak]

I think the big difference today, is there are a lot of casual fans who visit cut 'n' paste websites and have no idea who either Bruiser Brody or Misawa are, but have this vague idea of people being held down. So, maybe, if that same kid in his late teens or early twenties who 25 years ago, when they got tired of Hogan being on top, they either would've drifted away or cheered for just somebody 'new' like Sid or Bret Hart, ignoring workrate, now they think "Cena can't wrestle" and think Dolph Ziggler is being "held down." I bet if you actually asked them to break down why a match was "bad" or "good", they couldn't actually tell you, they just know the people they read on the Internet (who are mostly sub-Scott Keith level) tell them Ziggler, Punk, and Bryan are great and that Cena and Batista are horrible. They're still marks, but just being conned in a different way.

[ButchReedMark]

Dolph Ziggler is feuding with Kofi for sub THE SHITS in my eyes.

[Zoo Enthusiast]

The term "buried." The fucking worst.

[PeteF3]

I might be alone on this, but I die a little inside when reading the word "botch." It's a meaningful term by itself. But thanks to Botchamania the word is being thrown about like it's a fucking insider term, or an official statistic. Some places have actually seen arguments over whether a particular spot was or was not a "botch." I hate it, hate it, hate it.

[BigBadMick]

The book You Grunt I'll Groan by Pallo was released years before the internet Parv. Just because folk didn't have the internet doesn't mean they were stupid. As you should know Tabloids would have "exposes" giving out terms like "Get Colour" on a regular basis. Just because you smartened late it doesn't mean everyone else did. When you're 7 you realise "he's mentioning Hulk so he's walking through people til he wrestles him". We still have old lasses twatting heels with handbags to this day on shows I work. Its not because they think its real. Its because its venting. Anyone who's seen pro wrestling pazt puberty and thought it was real I surely slow. Eople would riot and the like because its accessible theatre in the round at its lowest ebb. Its a fake version of people in the stocks vrossed wwith living vicariously.

 

But in all fairness its probably got to this point because you and JDW are again bickerinng.

 

You two need to fuck each other and get that tension out of the way.

I was going to suggest go have a beer together, but.......