Commonly used words and phrases that annoy you

[jdw]

"X-Pac Heat"

 

I am sure some dudes get boos because the crowd really wants them to go away, but way too often I think it reads as "I hate this guy/gimmick for some reason, but the crowds seem to react, so I can't be wrong, and they must all be boo'ing because they think it sucks too". I've seen it used with fuckin' Rusev already, and I think that's absurd.

 

X-Pac Heat was great in the day because it did work up a really good image in people's minds. But it's also 15 years old, and that's another lifetime in wrestling.

 

Though... Hulking Up does still work all these years later. But Hogan is a Wrestling God, and Pac was about a dozen levels below Hogan.

[jdw]

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

 

It's kind of like Second Baseman, Third Baseman, Quarterback, Striker, Center, Goalie. Good Guy and Bad Guy are pretty much the Positions of Pro Wrestling.

 

Technico and Rudo are what they are called on the air in Lucha, so it's hard to argue that's not correct for a fan to use.

 

Babyface and Heel are/were more inside the business terms. But they slipped out to hardcore fans 30+ years ago, and are pretty much how smart/hardcore fans having been talking for 30+ years... along with bumping, selling, high spots, etc.

 

Has and does the lingo grow over the years? Sure. Properly? Usually, though not always. We've talked about hardcores being confused over Strong Style back in the 80s and thinking it was UWF-style rather than New Japan-style. On the other hand, sometimes some are ahead of the curve in picking up stuff like "puroresu" and "puro", and online fans did in the 90s from Hisa Tanabe.

 

Even in the circles that we've run in over the past two decades, we've seen stuff come and go, some stick and be regularly used, and other fall out of favor.

[Coffey]

You think the term IWC is bad? There's a YWC now! Youtube Wrestling Community. I'm not joking. A bunch of dudes, with followers, constantly uploading videos doing "reviews" or shows & "predictions" before PPVs & whatnot. Then them all using the YouTube comments to troll one another & call each other names.

 

There's not an eye roll big enough for that but I've heard people say it with total sincerity.

[jdw]

Yep... it's just a continuation of tech evolving and making it easier for people to "talk about wrestling".

[JerryvonKramer]

The problem with jdw weighing in on the IWC stuff is thst he's not an average fan, he's a guy who wrote in newsletters and knew Dave Meltzer, so his experiences are atypical. As such he's one of the people here worst placed to comment.

 

The idea that there were no broad trends is complete nonsense. I remember being a fan who literally didn't give a shit who Chris Benoit was until I started reading online only to discover that he's the best thing since sliced bread. That Dean Malenko was in fact severely underrated. That phrases like "workrate" and so on exist. Look at the amount of people who have said that they were influenced by Scott Keith when they first found their way online.

 

To say that "oh it's just fans being fans" completely misses the mark, completely. There was a big difference to being a fan online and a fan who'd never been online. I think basically anyone who joined the internet in the late 90s will attest to that. jdw's perspective is non-representative, and it's because he has been a guy in the 1% from back in the 1980s.

[funkdoc]

honestly though, what parv just said fits my fighting game analogy too!

 

although i said that the fighting game scene is a bunch of different communities more isolated than united, there are also common things people learn if they go online and learn about tournaments. mortal kombat is the most famous fighting game franchise in general, yet it never gets anywhere near the tournament numbers that street fighter or marvel vs. capcom do. hardly anyone outside of anime nerds has heard of guilty gear, and that's basically the "chris benoit" in this example. i guess blazblue would be the "dean malenko".

 

there are common ideas you'll encounter in an internet fandom that you would never have seen otherwise, but that doesn't change the fact that the fandom is still a hodgepodge of different scenes. it's just that the largest such community online tends to dominate the discussions so you get exposed to their groupthink first and foremost.

 

tl;dr both parv and jdw are right to some extent

[Matt D]

tl;dr both parv and jdw are right to some extent

 

This is pretty much the only sentence anyone has ever had to write on this board. Well done. I'm staggered.

[Dylan Waco]

One thing I will say is that when I first came online (almost twenty years ago, christ), there was FAR more consensus than there is now. Does this mean everyone agreed on everything and that there weren't different cliques with shared interests? God no. But in general there were many more sacred cows. Or at least that's how it seemed to me as a teenager at the time

[jdw]

I guess the WWF Fans and the WCW Fans and the ECW Cuckoo Birds fighting with each other was just much more noticeable to me. I mean... people were literally rooting for the other promotion to die.

 

That was a bit more obvious in rsp-w and places like AOL Grandstand. It was perhaps a bit less obvious on Message Boards because those tended to open up around a group of fans. tOA were a bunch of people who left AOL Grandstand, with a few rsp-w folks migrating as rsp-w went to hell. DVDVR were folks in Dean's circle initially. For the life of me I can't remember where A1 came from, as I don't remember Gerry and his bother posting to tOA or DVDVR a ton *before* they opened up A1. There were other boards popping up... but they usually came from a group of fans moving to it, rather than a big massive pool like rsp-w or AOL GS that people jump into.

 

When you get a bunch of people opening up and moving over to a place like SmarksChoice or TheSmartMarks, you're going to get a lot more commonality of thought than wider, broader places.

 

In turn, I don't think a heck of a lot of us spent years in say a WWF Official Message Board. We generally stayed in our various (i.e. several) circles, or moved onto a new one / new ones that caught out eye. What we might think of as "The IWC" is really just a fraction of a giant swamp out there.

 

It's another reason why I think "The IWC" is generally a silly term. Wrestling Classics has had over the decade pretty decent traffic, a regular flow of people joining it as others get bored and move on. But how many here really feel much of a sense of "community" with it relative to what you have on your chosen Home Boards? Aren't they a bit like Chicago to say the New York or Los Angeles that we're in here?

 

We have commonality with elements of the WO-4 boards, but when you look at it, WC and us here... is that really one big happy melting pot community that agrees on a hell of a lot?

 

Not really.

 

And my point would be that it's always been like that.

 

Take Dylan and me, for example. Despite all the things that we tend to share on how we look at wrestling, you and I & Jewett banged heads over the years. In turn, the three of us would go over to and REALLY BANG HEADS with some of the folks there. The three of us, and people that we tended to feel more of a sense of community with, couldn't have rational fact-based discussions with a lot of folks over there, or even share much in common on the opinion level.

 

That's pretty much why I've always thought "The IWC" was pretty silly. I've seen far too much over the years where there is less community and instead just a bunch of wrestling fans like there are a bunch of baseball fans online and a bunch of soccer fans online, etc. Having spent stretches over the past two decades where I've spent more time on sports forums/boards/blogs than wrestling ones, wrestling fans really aren't any different from fans of other things, be it online or offline.

[JerryvonKramer]

I'd love to believe that individuals are all supremely free-thinking agents all coming to their own conclusions all the time, but we can't pretend that there weren't some massively influential people who created certain consensuses that were ready-made when a lot of us came online.

 

You only need to read old Observers to see the huge influence Meltzer exerted on his own reader-base. The voting is virtually almost in-line with his own tastes.

 

How many fans were sticking their heads above the parapet in 1999 to say that "actually no, I think Dean Malenko is fucking boring and doesn't know how to work a crowd"? How many fans chimed in when commenting on Scott Keith reviews with "Oh actually John Tenta is a really underrated worker"? How many people really challenged the orthodoxies? People wanted to create a "smart" image and maintain a rep; certain opinions were vogue.

 

In jdw's world, apparently the orthodoxies didn't exist. Obvious nonsense. I've done cross comparisons of reviewers from down the years on matches like Flair vs. Garvin to see that there was a type of hive mind that developed, whether consciously or not, with star ratings.

 

I remember when Hogan would just get bashed and bashed and bashed and bashed. Don't pretend these were just small sections of the internet, it was everywhere. RSPW, Online Onslaught, CRZ, The W, you name it, that same shit was happening with the same tired old opinions being regurgitated over and over again.

 

Lex Luger was always a shitty worker.

Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart are the greatest of all time.

 

And so on and so forth. It seems ridiculous to deny it. What planet were you on? It's like I said, Williams moved in elite circles so his perspective on this isn't representative.

[El-P]

I was hanging out with Mike Lorefice and the Quebrada crew back in 99. We didn't think Shawn Michaels was the greatest of all-time. Both of us thought he was overrated as all hell. We thought Bret wasn't the greatest of all time. He was down on Ric Flair for being dated and formulaic. I thought Takada was awesome, Mike thought he was a bit overrated and not a great shoot-style worker. We loved NJ juniors, which had supporters and critics at TOA (Jewett was very critical of them, including bashing Tiger Mask way before it was fashionable). We both loved LCO, which Schneider down at DVDVR didn't care for at all. I enjoyed garbage wrestling and Onita much more than Mike, although he pimped some stuff that was highly regarded by the DVDVR guys too (Honma, Yamakawa in BJ) in 99/00. Their crew loved GAEA, we weren't much enthousiastic about it. There were a lot of different opinions and taste even back then. Looking at just a few cases about US wrestling is really understating how diverse the opinions were. I was über critical of HHH when he was having a honeymoon with quite of bit of "smart" fans in 00. Etc etc…

[jdw]

The problem with jdw weighing in on the IWC stuff is thst he's not an average fan, he's a guy who wrote in newsletters and knew Dave Meltzer, so his experiences are atypical. As such he's one of the people here worst placed to comment.

 

Quite the opposite. I'm probably one of the best placed because I've seen the Internet (Hardcore) Wrestling Community, the Non-Interent (Hardcore) Wrestling Community, have witnesses the massive growth of both, and have been around various key people who have (allegedly and non-allegedly) driven both. Rather than just seeing the Forrest or the Trees, I can see both.

 

And...

 

They really aren't wildly different. And most of the differences are things that are just part of the continuum of the growth of hardcore wrestling fandom over the past 30 years. Rapid and instant communication? That was already starting without the net, and at times was faster than the net. Mass availability and sharing of matches from around the world? Happened in the 80s, and was continuing to grow all through the 90s even as the net grew. Things like Youtube and file sharing make it easier, but guys like Lynch made it easier in 1992 compared to trying to have a source in every territory that you wanted something out of.

 

In 20 years someone will think they are wildly different from us because they have some Smart Glasses that's feeding their wrestling content to them with great ease, thinking they've reinvented Wrestling Fandom... while those of us who are around for 50 years buy that point will pat them on the head while knowing it's just another in a long line of steps in hardcore wrestling fandom.

 

The idea that there were no broad trends is complete nonsense.

 

 

Alright... let's take a look at some examples you give...

 

I remember being a fan who literally didn't give a shit who Chris Benoit was until I started reading online only to discover that he's the best thing since sliced bread.

 

 

When Chris was in ECW, the WWF and WCW diehards online didn't give a shit about him. ECW Fans loved him, and Puro Fans who had been following him for years loved him, along with fans of WWF and WCW who also crossed over into other promotions.

 

When he went to WCW, eventually WCW diehards online loved him... but your WWF diehards didn't give a shit about him because he wasn't on Raw, and Bret and/or Shawn were The Shit! Again, you'd have people who crossed over and liked him.

 

When he went to the WWF, not the WWF diehards loved him, and laughed in the general direction of WCW fans for stealing him.

 

But here's the thing:

 

Chris was over in Japan even to the fans who weren't on the Internet.

 

When he went to ECW, Chris was over with the ECW Fans who weren't on the Internet.

 

When he went to WCW, Chris was over with the WCW Fans who weren't on the Internet. Listen to his Starcade match with Jarrett, or the war all over the building with Sullivan. He was over.

 

Then listen to WWF fans when he showed up in the WWF. He got over.

 

Now... did they think he was a Great Worker?

 

Mainstream Fans in the era didn't use that term, or know what it was. Of course they weren't Hardcores.

 

So did the non-Internet Hardcore Fans think Benoit was a great worker?

 

Fuck yeah. All the way back to 1990 at the latest. Readers of the WON who weren't online thought he was great. A lot of readers of the Torch thought he was great. Friends of mine who weren't online thought he was great.

 

So...

 

It's a Hardcore Fan thing, not an Internet Fan thing.

 

That's why I've been trying to get across.

 

 

That Dean Malenko was in fact severely underrated.

 

 

See above. That's a Hardcore Fan thing, not an "IWC" thing.

 

That phrases like "workrate" and so on exist.

 

 

Workrate existed in the WON long before rsp-w was created and online wrestling started. It's a Hardcore Fan thing, not an IWC thing.

 

 

Look at the amount of people who have said that they were influenced by Scott Keith when they first found their way online.

 

 

No different from the people who said they were influenced by Meltzer... except that Meltzer's influence was first, and pretty much all of the basic concepts that flow through SKeith flow out of Dave, even if indirectly.

 

To say that "oh it's just fans being fans" completely misses the mark, completely. There was a big difference to being a fan online and a fan who'd never been online.

 

 

There's a big different between Hardcore Fans and non-Hardcore Fans. That's always been the case.

 

When I say that I'm a Wrestling Fan rather than some such IWC Members, it's always with the implied or explicit idea that I'm a Hardcore Wrestling Fan. It really isn't any different than fans of other forms of entertainment or of sports. You have your fans, and you have your hardcore fans. You get that online and offline.

 

I think basically anyone who joined the internet in the late 90s will attest to that. jdw's perspective is non-representative, and it's because he has been a guy in the 1% from back in the 1980s.

 

 

I think pretty much anyone who can see outside of the bubble can see that the hardcores on the internet are simply an extension of hardcore wrestling fans that have been around for 30+ years. In turn, there are non-hardcore fans on the internet who just want to get some basic info, similar to non-hardcore fans of sports/entertainment who use the internet to get basic info (like movie times for Planet of the Apes when it opens on Friday).

 

The internet isn't really different from what came before it, just gives one easier access to information, especially a wide amount of info. But the info was there long before something like Wikipedia came along.

 

Anyway... we've had discussions like this before. Folks think there's a revolution with a definitive starting date, after which everything changed. My thought is that's usually based on when one came along in the revolution, and whether they have the ability to look backwards and break through their own bubbled. The Hardcore Wrestling Revolution didn't start with the Internet, and really didn't change in insanely revolutionary ways with the internet other than the ability to Get More Faster. Even that harkens back to pre-internet days, and is constantly evolving as Get More Faster in 2014 is nothing like it was in 1999 and is nothing like it will be in 2029.

 

The revolution that we're a part of started no later than 1983, and had elements we can dig up prior to that. In turn, it's constantly moving along and forward. Less revolutionary now than we tend to think, but still moving forward, evolving, expanding, etc.

[Loss]

I agree that you are both right. Parv is right that there was a 1%, in that there were a huge number of people who were interested in seeing international and territory footage and kept up with the opinions but simply didn't have the money to purchase footage. Even those that did purchase footage often had to be selective because it was so expensive. What has happened since 2006 or so has been YouTube democratizing a lot of wrestling footage and making it more accessible for everyone, along with DVDs becoming a popular medium, which are cheaper, quicker to copy and more conducive to practical storage than bulky videotapes. So lower cost and improved technology has let more people into the conversation that could only observe before.

 

All of that said, I don't think John is arguing anything contradictory to that.

 

John is right that there were multiple corners of the Internet with pretty divergent viewpoints on things almost as long as it's been around. People who use the term "IWC" are typically people that only follow(ed) the major promotions in America. I find that there tends to be - and always has been - more challenging of conventional wisdom among people who watch wrestling from all eras and all countries. People who stick to the mainstream American promotions sometimes think that their bubble is the only one that exists when it's actually just the only one that interests them. And there's nothing wrong with that except that a lot of this revisionism isn't so much new as it is new to us.

 

You're probably not going to find someone who was a big fan of BattlARTS or Michinoku Pro in the late 90s using the term "IWC", I think because they are more likely to realize that they had their own niche-based space. Current and American are what got the most attention, but that still rings true today.

[JerryvonKramer]

I don't disagree for a second that jdw and Dylan or El-P and his mate were having really interesting disagreements back in 1999. Not for a second.

 

But what I do question is how many of the people I'm talking about even knew who Takada was, let alone had an opinion on him.

 

I think there's a distinction to be drawn between hardcores, who were part of tape trading circles and who knew about Japanese wrestling and lucha, and ... basically Joe Bloggs who grew up on WWF and stumbled online to find Scott Keith's reviews, The Rick and others and then discovered the whole world of smart terminology, "behind the scenes" news, and so on and so forth. There was a type of fan who emerged from out of that. I don't think they are the same types of fans that jdw and El-P were hanging out with. Hope that makes sense.

 

Also, "community" does not and has never entailed everyone being of the same opinion, even if there are opinions that fall in and out of fashion or consensuses that grow up, any community is going to have disagreements. They talk about an "academic community", most academics could start an argument alone in an elevator.

 

This all gets us back to whether "IWC" has any purpose or application as an historical term along the lines Matt D has suggested. As a CURRENT term, of course, it is meaningless because everyone and their grandfather are online. I still think the numbers of people were small enough in the late 1990s for it actually to refer to something, whatever that might be.

 

I am much less invested in this argument, however, than I was in the "shine" one.

[Loss]

I think there's a distinction to be drawn between hardcores, who were part of tape trading circles and who knew about Japanese wrestling and lucha, and ... basically Joe Bloggs who grew up on WWF and stumbled online to find Scott Keith's reviews, The Rick and others and then discovered the whole world of smart terminology, "behind the scenes" news, and so on and so forth. There was a type of fan who emerged from out of that. I don't think they are the same types of fans that jdw and El-P were hanging out with. Hope that makes sense.

 

It definitely makes sense. I think that type of fan still exists. It's just that some of us were there at one point and we're not anymore. It's possible that it's not so much that scene has changed as much as where we are in it has changed.

[El-P]

 

I think there's a distinction to be drawn between hardcores, who were part of tape trading circles and who knew about Japanese wrestling and lucha, and ... basically Joe Bloggs who grew up on WWF and stumbled online to find Scott Keith's reviews, The Rick and others and then discovered the whole world of smart terminology, "behind the scenes" news, and so on and so forth. There was a type of fan who emerged from out of that. I don't think they are the same types of fans that jdw and El-P were hanging out with. Hope that makes sense.

 

It definitely makes sense. I think that type of fan still exists. It's just that some of us were there at one point and we're not anymore. It's possible that it's not so much that scene has changed as much as where we are in it has changed.

 

 

Agreed.

[jdw]

I'd love to believe that individuals are all supremely free-thinking agents all coming to their own conclusions all the time, but we can't pretend that there weren't some massively influential people who created certain consensuses that were ready-made when a lot of us came online.

 

You're making more out of this then there is...

 

You only need to read old Observers to see the huge influence Meltzer exerted on his own reader-base. The voting is virtually almost in-line with his own tastes.

 

 

The odd thing is that people, including me, have pointed to the influence of Meltzer. Even in this very tangent about the IWC, we've talking about how SKeith was directly/indirectly influenced by Dave. So you're pretty much crafting a nice big strawman of something that people have not said.

 

 

In jdw's world, apparently the orthodoxies didn't exist.

 

 

You have spent roughly 3 years trying to claim you know what "jdw's world" is, and you've been wrong every time you've tried to do it. Just give up trying: you'll never be right because you're looking at things far too narrowly within your own box.

 

 

Obvious nonsense. I've done cross comparisons of reviewers from down the years on matches like Flair vs. Garvin to see that there was a type of hive mind that developed, whether consciously or not, with star ratings.

 

 

I always liked cross comparisons of Hart vs Hart as perfect examples of hive mentalities.

 

 

I remember when Hogan would just get bashed and bashed and bashed and bashed. Don't pretend these were just small sections of the internet, it was everywhere. RSPW, Online Onslaught, CRZ, The W, you name it, that same shit was happening with the same tired old opinions being regurgitated over and over again.

 

 

The majority Hardcore Fans hated Hogan long before there was an RSPW, Online Onslaught, CRZ's recaped, etc. This isn't something that was invented on the Internet.

 

On the flip side, people online eventually got around to reconsidering Hogan's work, and funny enough some of those folks at the forefront of it were people who long hated him.

 

*raises hand*

 

Lex Luger was always a shitty worker.

 

 

That would be odd since there always had been hardcore fans who thought Lex was pretty darn decent in 1989 into 1990. So I think you're being unfair to hardcore fans, both online and offline, by claiming that all of them always thought Lex had always been shitty.

 

Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart are the greatest of all time.

 

 

There never was a consensus about that, either online or offline. In fact... there never was anything close to a consensus about that.

 

On the other hand, there were Hardcore WWF Fans online and offline who thought Shawn and/or Bret were the best workers. But everyone thinking that? Never happened.

 

 

And so on and so forth. It seems ridiculous to deny it.

 

 

I'm trying to figure out which of these you happened to be right on that I'm suppose to deny. You're not going to find any of the folks here who've been online for 15+ years and around in a number of areas who would agree with stuff like "Everyone thought Bret and Shawn were the greatest of all-time.

 

What planet were you on?

 

 

Earth.

 

It's like I said, Williams moved in elite circles so his perspective on this isn't representative.

 

 

The irony is the PWO is an elite circle of the internet. This place isn't representative. You aren't representative, Jerry.

 

On the other hand, I've never claimed I'm representative. My claim was that I've seen hardcores both offline and online, both "fans" and "writers/reporters". I've watched the growth of hardcore wrestling fandom on the internet from its infancy to today, and have pretty similarly understand the growth of hardcore wrestling fandom offline prior to that from having lived a chunk of it while talking about its history back then with people who had been at ground zero of it or come to it very shortly thereafter.

 

I don't claim "representation". I claim "perspective", both online and offline. That's a very different claim.

 

John

[Matt D]

I would argue that the hardcore mentality that existed before the internet could still be the mentality of the historical IWC. It's just the hardcores plus the kids who stumbled into their mentality once the means to stumble in on a broader level existed.

[jdw]

I was hanging out with Mike Lorefice and the Quebrada crew back in 99. We didn't think Shawn Michaels was the greatest of all-time. Both of us thought he was overrated as all hell. We thought Bret wasn't the greatest of all time. He was down on Ric Flair for being dated and formulaic. I thought Takada was awesome, Mike thought he was a bit overrated and not a great shoot-style worker. We loved NJ juniors, which had supporters and critics at TOA (Jewett was very critical of them, including bashing Tiger Mask way before it was fashionable). We both loved LCO, which Schneider down at DVDVR didn't care for at all. I enjoyed garbage wrestling and Onita much more than Mike, although he pimped some stuff that was highly regarded by the DVDVR guys too (Honma, Yamakawa in BJ) in 99/00. Their crew loved GAEA, we weren't much enthousiastic about it. There were a lot of different opinions and taste even back then. Looking at just a few cases about US wrestling is really understating how diverse the opinions were. I was über critical of HHH when he was having a honeymoon with quite of bit of "smart" fans in 00. Etc etc…

 

Yeah... there were some pretty strong dividing lines.

 

Were the DVDVR crew, the tOA crew and the Quebrada crew (I want to say headquartered over on the Highspots board or something related to it) all generally spawned out of rsp-w and AOL Grandstand? Sure. Did we all have a lot more in common in terms of what we generally liked as opposed to what the Bob.com Crew liked? Sure. As opposed to what the SKeith related websites liked? Sure.

 

But on the flip side, the DVDVR crew and Quebrada crew didn't agree with us hyper critical assholes on tOA about a lot of things. The DVDVR guys luv-luv-loved Jerry Lawler long before there was the Jerry Lawler movement that there is today. The Quebrada crew loved joshi love after a lot of people abandoned ship on it. The tOA crew loved Backlund ahead of the curve of other folks, generally have been blamed over pimping The Destroyer, and folks would be surprised to recall that we turned on work in All Japan before pretty much 100% of the rest of the puro loving internet.

 

One could claim, and I wouldn't argue too heavily, that DVDVR and Quebrada and tOA were in the same general section of the Internet Pool relative to areas that were more WWF-centric or WCW-centric or WWF/WCW-centric and didn't know who in the hell those puro guys that we talked about. I wouldn't argue it... but I also don't think I'd call us a single "community" within a much larger "community". There were people who bounced around places, and there were also people who never ventured into the other boards (let alone the SC/SM sites or A1, etc). To a degree it was more the feudal era, sites being little castles, and some people who were sought out adventure popped up in a lot of places. Others were just stuck to their own home sites, and that was it. Perhaps those three sites and a couple of others were California. But...

 

Could I tell you what was going on over on the Bob.com boards? Not really. What was going on over at the site SKeith anchored? Nope. LordsOfPaste? Nope. The rest of the USofA of wrestling sites and boards? Clueless.

 

After probably the early days of rsp-w, there never was one homogenous wrestling internet. As soon as AOL GS and the Prodigy wrestling sites popped up, things started to get spread out. But even within rsp-w back in 1990-92, there wasn't a consensus. There were the same type of arguments popping up there that we have here:

 

Flair rules/sucks

Shawn is awesome/what a dick

WCW is best / WWF is best

 

Etc.

[jdw]

I agree that you are both right. Parv is right that there was a 1%, in that there were a huge number of people who were interested in seeing international and territory footage and kept up with the opinions but simply didn't have the money to purchase footage. Even those that did purchase footage often had to be selective because it was so expensive. What has happened since 2006 or so has been YouTube democratizing a lot of wrestling footage and making it more accessible for everyone, along with DVDs becoming a popular medium, which are cheaper, quicker to copy and more conducive to practical storage than bulky videotapes. So lower cost and improved technology has let more people into the conversation that could only observe before.

 

There really wasn't a huge number of people who were interested in seeing international and territory footage. The vast majority of people wanted to watch the WWF, or WCW, or ECW, or some combo of both. Relative to the mass of people on rsp-w, there were a staggering few who ventured into the old DVDVR discussions and asked how they could get the shit.

 

Did we get people interested to seek the stuff out, and did people seek it out because of us. Damn straight we did: we were having the best wrestling discussions on the net at the time. They were funny as shit because Dean flat out was funny as shit, and all of the rest of us loved bumping our asses off for his jokes. They were informative as hell because people were asking questions, and those of us that could were dumping as much info as possible back in response. It also was really good shit that we were talking about, so there was a ton of enthusiasm about what we were writing/talking about. But...

 

We were a freaking drop in the rsp-w bucket, especially as AOL blew up and more people kept dropping into the rsp-w cesspool.

 

The same thing went for AOL Grandstand. We had a corner, and we were writing some of the best shit on the net. But out corner of AOL GSW was chump change compared to the ECW folder, the WCW folder, the WWF folder.

 

We weren't a 1% because 99% wanted to get the shit and couldn't afford it. We were a 0.5% because 99% didn't give a flying fuck about it, and we were just thrilled as hell that another 0.5% kept popping up asking questions. If we could point them to Lynch, we did. If Jewett could make a comp tape to sent out to people for free to hip them to something (like the original Jumbo vs Tenryu comp), he'd do it. If Quebrada Mike could get people to buy some stuff, great for him.

 

But there *never* were 99% of the people... or 80%... or 50%... or 10%... or even 5% of the people who gave a shit about what we were up to. Unless it was to say that we were puro snobs.

 

Territories is a different beast as a pretty fair number of fans were old enough to remember wrestling in the 80s, have thoughts about it, and would kind of be interested in seeing old Flair if they could get their hands on it. But were there a lot of people interested in going back to watch 80s WWF in the late 90s / early 00s? Not really at all. It's more a post DVDVR 80s WWF set thing.

 

Has access to matches gotten easier, and does it make more people go check it out? Sure. I could swear I said that above. But it's also just the next generation of what started with guys like Lynch who made loads of Japanese wrestling available to people in a way that had been hard a decade before. But still...

 

4M+ people watched Raw on Monday. Almost all of those people are online. Lots of those people visit wrestling sites, even if it's just WWF.com. The number of them that want to watch Memphis wrestling is a fly on an elephant's rear.

 

We are the 1%. We've never changed in that regard. We were when it was Meltzer writing the WON in the 80s. We were it on rsp-w. We were it on tOA, DVDVR, A1, Highspots, etc. We're it on PWO. I mean... if you went to next week's Raw and tried to interesting *everyone* in attendance to buy the 80s AJPW set, do you really think you'd sell sets to more than 1% of the audience?

 

We're hardcore wrestling fans. Same as there were hardcore wrestling fans in the 80s.

[jdw]

I would argue that the hardcore mentality that existed before the internet could still be the mentality of the historical IWC. It's just the hardcores plus the kids who stumbled into their mentality once the means to stumble in on a broader level existed.

 

The sabermetric mentality that sprung up in the 80s when Bill James was writing the Abstracts is largely the same as today. It really doesn't matter whether the statheads of today having read Bill and are instead influenced by Tom Tango. In the end, Tom Tango would admit being influenced directly and indirectly by Bill, even if he disagrees with Bill on a number of things.

[dawho5]

Okay, that just freaked me out. My kung fu teacher uses that "putting things in a box" thing jdw used all the time in the same context. Took him about 9 months to get me to stop thinking that way.

[ohtani's jacket]

And here I was thinking it was the most unintentionally ironic statement ever written.

[jdw]

Not at all. I always thought "Baba's booking went to shit because of the cancer" was the most unintentionally ironic statements every written.

[Matt D]

 

I would argue that the hardcore mentality that existed before the internet could still be the mentality of the historical IWC. It's just the hardcores plus the kids who stumbled into their mentality once the means to stumble in on a broader level existed.

 

The sabermetric mentality that sprung up in the 80s when Bill James was writing the Abstracts is largely the same as today. It really doesn't matter whether the statheads of today having read Bill and are instead influenced by Tom Tango. In the end, Tom Tango would admit being influenced directly and indirectly by Bill, even if he disagrees with Bill on a number of things.

 

Would you say the fact the mentality is taken on by a much larger number of people than back then matters?