Bruce Prichard's credibility

[The Thread Killer]

I think that what Meltzer thinks is a separate issue. I tend to think that it's easier for Dave to say that Bruce, Bischoff or whoever are running a gimmick rather than admit he's wrong a fairly decent percentage of the time.

 

You make a good point. After listening to the debut episode of Bischoff's show this past week, I had the same thought. I know Bischoff can and will be just as guilty as Prichard of being full of shit. He will also have an agenda he is trying to promote. But so does Meltzer. Don't get me wrong...I genuinely respect Dave Meltzer's work and abilities. However, the massive explosion in wrestling related Shoot Interviews and Podcasts over the past few years by people who are either insiders or in some cases were actual decision makers themselves, has damaged Meltzer's credibility somewhat. I never did take everything Metlzer reported as fact, but I think there are more and more examples of times he was just flat out wrong coming to light. (The whole "who is the third man going to be" story is a good example. I am of the opinion that some of Dave's theories about that story were just not right.) I also don't discount the fact that Dave has clearly gotten worked by some of his sources who obviously had agendas of their own.

 

One thing Prichard is clearly doing is using his show to bury people he has a bad history with. To hear him tell it, Jerry Jarrett is an idiot, Terry Taylor is overrated and Paul Heyman was never as successful as his brainwashed fans think. Maybe all those things are true...but you can tell that (at least in the case of Jarrett and Heyman) there is clearly some jealousy happening.

[shodate]

 

what is not Polical Fox news in News Source id say the same about MSBNC or akin saying a news source in not accurate is Political

 

https://youtu.be/A-mm4M-GR54?t=50s

 

I don't understand a word of what you wrote, but good job in continuing the gimmick by linking to something on YouTube that mentions Trump in the title of the video.

 

fox news is the least trustworthy news source as that video shows how is that political even fox irs self showed the graphic only 30% of people trust fox based on poll by Monmouth college

 

its not overtly political at all

[The Chief]

 

 

what is not Polical Fox news in News Source id say the same about MSBNC or akin saying a news source in not accurate is Political

 

https://youtu.be/A-mm4M-GR54?t=50s

 

I don't understand a word of what you wrote, but good job in continuing the gimmick by linking to something on YouTube that mentions Trump in the title of the video.

 

fox news is the least trustworthy news source as that video shows how is that political even fox irs self showed the graphic only 30% of people trust fox based on poll by Monmouth college

 

its not overtly political at all

 

 

 

Mods, please. This is getting ridiculous....

[El-P]

However, the massive explosion in wrestling related Shoot Interviews and Podcasts over the past few years by people who are either insiders or in some cases were actual decision makers themselves, has damaged Meltzer's credibility somewhat.

 

Gotta factor the fact most of the shoot interviews and podcasts are also full of bullshit. I mean, Bischoff is notoriously full of shit too. So, I don't see how source sources do much damage to Meltz honestly. Was he wrong in the past (and probably today too) at times ? Sure. But I wouldn't take most of these insiders declaration as facts either, especially when they are know bullshitters to begin with.

As far as Prichard goes, I pretty much agree with the whole "let's have a sneak peak into Vince's brain" being fascinating. To his credit, Bruce also takes no glove at time when he thinks some of the stuff was awful or didn't make any sense. But you have to know he's mostly throwing the WWE company line and won't ever critizice TriPaul on serious offense (his take on the Booker promo and program was ridiculous to the point he wasn't even trying not looking like he was full of shit). And he's an excellent storyteller. So there.

[Matt D]

I'm going to bring a little bit of politics into things (sorry), but it all feels a lot like the current administration and the amount of leaking going on, people serving their own interests, and how the NYT/Post are handling it. Meltzer's problem, I think, was in the way he presented information. It always felt like a universal truth in the Observer as opposed to "my sources tell me," which would have gotten tedious line after line, but even anonymous sources are treated a certain way in the media. I feel like Bix has written about this re: Meltzer before. I believe that most of the time he wasn't just making things up and he was getting things from his sources, but he rarely attributed the information he received in meaningful, contextual ways and that makes all of it age worse than it probably should.

 

There are times, too, where you can definitely tell that Meltzer was putting together dots in a logical way (in the Bischoff podcast, there was a bit about Hogan's turn re: merch which would have mattered in most other points of history but merch wasn't a big line-item in early 1996 WCW apparently), when he really didn't have sources. It was much more "expert analysis" than news, but even then it was presented as objective and concrete, not just analysis. He was probably right more often than not when he did this, just like we often are when we do it, because if you follow the wrestling industry in any meaningful way, you note causal relationships and patterns, but it was still presented too definitively as "this is why this is happening."

 

There was often no differentiation between the two.

[Loss]

Yeah, shodate, you said you wouldn't post anything else political, but you still did. Don't. Final warning. Thanks in advance for cooperating, and there's no need for anyone else to address it in this thread.

[C.S.]

Because he was a petty madman who got absurd amusement in putting grown men in killer bee costumes? In Vince's mind, what's the point of making all this money if you can't lord over people and lean towards your joys?

What?! The Killer Bees were very popular and cool as hell. Who didn't love the switcheroo mask gimmick?

 

Those are great gimmicks. Undead monster and fire demon.

Brian Lee sure did an incredible job as The Undertaker.

 

Kane himself, Glenn Jacobs, lit the world on fire as Diesel.

 

Great gimmicks, so what was the problem?

[PeteF3]

I don't think "imitation [x]" qualifies as a great gimmick.

[C.S.]

I was poking fun at the other poster for calling "undead monster" and "fire demon" great gimmicks with a straight face.

 

Yes, they're considered great because Mark Callaway and Glenn Jacobs made them great. But let's not pretend they were good on paper.

 

Imagine literally anyone else in those gimmicks. It takes a very special performer to make them work. With Taker, we actually have an example of someone else doing it: same costume, same music, same presentation - and it stunk. Remember, for weeks, the Brian Lee Taker was presented as the real deal, with camera angles and other magic tricks obscuring his actual identity, but it somehow wasn't good all of a sudden. The missing, magic ingredient was Mark Callaway.

[El-P]

The Kane gimmick should have had a shelf-life of about 10 months. It's been 20 years and as such, Glen Jacobs can be considered the worst major performer of the last 20 years. Almost nothing but shit matches and shit angles (not his fault but ne never made anything better) over a 20 years period. Painfull on every level.

[C.S.]

The Kane gimmick should have had a shelf-life of about 10 months. It's been 20 years and as such, Glen Jacobs can be considered the worst major performer of the last 20 years. Almost nothing but shit matches and shit angles (not his fault but ne never made anything better) over a 20 years period. Painfull on every level.

I thought he was great in tag teams with Daniel Bryan and X-Pac, and that's not solely down to the other guy. Corporate Kane was also good fun. I can't agree that he never made anything better because he's been involved in so much ridiculous crap that shoudn't have worked at all, including the Kane gimmick itself, and he elevated it with his personality and presence.

[shodate]

a Gimmick should never be cover or interfere in the work of worker a band worker if good gimmick if still a bad worker a good worker with bad gimmick unless he oenly bad will get over it and his talent will shine like the sun and shine on

 

Taker i never seen a top-level woker Vader was the better big man and was level above taker an bur Jacobs was fine worker if Japan stuff just saying the kane gimmick capped him alot

[Dylan Waco]

I don't take much anything he says super seriously, but I also don't like his show at all. I don't particularly trust Dave for a variety of reasons either. To me if I cared enough it would probably worth combing through what Dave says vs what Bruce says on certain issues, seeing where the Venn Diagram is and then kind of thinking about new historical narratives based on that.

[sek69]

Apparently Bruce said something on the latest episode along the lines of Dave tried to get USA Today to do an expose on blading after a SNME show in 1989, leading to his fanbase going after a bewildered Dave on Twitter (again).

 

There comes a point where guys like this and Russo risk turning themselves into an Alex Jones type, who can be both dismissed as unreliable crazies and also feeding in to a fanbase seemingly not aware of the gimmick and believe everything they say as gospel.

[Dylan Waco]

Oh there is certainly a cultish/religious mindset to a lot of consumers of various wrestling talking heads. It's weird to me that Russo has credibility with anyone and I worry about him least in part because he discredits himself so easily and often.

[JerryvonKramer]

From what I remember listening to Bruce's show, he definitely has insights that only someone who worked closely in the office could have. Obviously, it comes with all of the usual carny BS, but I don't think he's any more nor less reliable than Kevin Sullivan, Cornette, Bill Watts, JR, Funk, Flair, or pretty much anyone who ever had anything to do with the business.

 

I think Dave has that very old school smart tendency -- jdw also has / had it -- of thinking that because someone is a BSer EVERYTHING they say has to be BS.

 

Fact of the matter is, when it comes to what happened in the office, Bruce was there and Dave wasn't.

 

All anyone can do is check competing accounts against each other.

 

Things pretty much everyone does, regardless of the field, when recalling things and in autobiography:

 

1. Exaggerate their own role. This is the availability heuristic.

2. Mis-remember certain details.

3. Embellish certain details.

 

So obviously basic common sense on this.

 

Also, given how many Observers I've read through, Dave is not exactly a shining beacon of impartial truth. He had his favourites that happened to be his sources, and had his least favourites who also happened to be the guys who'd crackdown on the newsletters.

 

There are only a few guys who are SO full of shit that they are literally not worth listening to.

 

I'd include ...

 

Hogan probably

Russo

Honky Tonk Man

Iron Sheik

Warrior when he did shoots

 

That sort of ballpark obviously where you have to take EACH AND EVERY THING with a pinch of salt.

 

But Bruce is not in that ballpark.

[Mad Dog]

I find Cornette to be interesting because of his almost obsessive need to write things down. So with Cornette, he has his obvious biases but you also tend to get the clearest picture when he's being honest because he has it written down somewhere.

[SomethingSavage]

I still to this day love listening to Cornette. I agree with most of his philosophies and ideals regarding wrestling and the "way things OUGHT to be."

 

But it's weird. Because there are a lot of cases where my idea of talent or skill and his (mostly regarding modern workers) couldn't be further apart.

 

But when it comes to sharing stories from the good old days or just general discussion about how wrestling should work, I could listen to Cornette all day over just about anyone.

 

But yeah. Everyone comes with their own prejudices, their own biases, their own slants, and on & on. Everyone is only ever going to give THEIR side of any given story. That's life. That's human nature. You're not going to find anyone that simply delivers 100% undeniable truth.

 

Might as well go with the guys that you enjoy listening to, in that case.

[Mad Dog]

I find with Cornette that he's just completely out of touch with modern wrestling. The guys he really likes and speaks highly of have bombed like Seth Rollins and the guys that he hates are the guys that are draws.

[Victator]

I was poking fun at the other poster for calling "undead monster" and "fire demon" great gimmicks with a straight face.

 

Yes, they're considered great because Mark Callaway and Glenn Jacobs made them great. But let's not pretend they were good on paper.

 

Imagine literally anyone else in those gimmicks. It takes a very special performer to make them work. With Taker, we actually have an example of someone else doing it: same costume, same music, same presentation - and it stunk. Remember, for weeks, the Brian Lee Taker was presented as the real deal, with camera angles and other magic tricks obscuring his actual identity, but it somehow wasn't good all of a sudden. The missing, magic ingredient was Mark Callaway.

Well yeah those are great pro wrestling gimmicks. They were great gimmicks. What Kane and Taker did was make them credible long term gimmicks.

 

Brian Lee as Undertaker was always intended to be a short term gimmick. Someone impersonating as the Undertaker. You initially think it is Taker then you see the holes appearing. Paul Bearer appears and promises the real thing will appear.

 

It worked fully as intended.

 

I don't even know what mentioning Faux Diesel was suppose to mean.

[fxnj]

Fuck the people spazzing out about shodate. The cable news example isn't political at all and actually quite apt for this topic.

 

Everyone knows that any news network out there has some bias or agenda that it wants to push, albeit some are more obvious about it than others. The good thing is that means if a big network gets things completely wrong, the other places will call them out on it. The result is that these networks have a dialogue between them and the consumers are free to choose who to side with. No place is going to be right 100% of the time, so it's great that we have options.

 

The situation with Meltzer in wrestling is that there's only one real source of consistent news, so the consumers have no choice but to accept whatever he says. If you want to learn about what went into some old angle, even now your best bet is to just look at old Observers or ask Meltzer. He tries his best, but he's still a human with his own biases and he's been wrong numerous times. We have a Meltzer thread here with 8000 posts that mostly consist of criticizing him.

 

It's a bit concerning, then, that when an actual insider like Pritchard, who tries to set up a legitimate alternative to Meltzer for historical information and begin the same sort of dialogue that actual news networks have with each other, he gets branded out of the gate as heading some "anti-truth movement." It understandable that Meltzer himself would call Pritchard a con-man as he essentially serves a competition in a space that Meltzer has dominated up to now, but it's not good for people here to just go along with that.

 

In wrestling the truth is always going to be a lot more blurry than it would be elsewhere, and that's part of the charm. It's nothing but a good thing to have options and for Meltzer to be treated a public figure open to criticism rather than a purveyor of truths.

[Johnny Sorrow]

Shit, Vic. I was so confused by it I honestly thought he was talking about Issac Yankem.

That's totally on me, to be fair. 😀

[C.S.]

I don't even know what mentioning Faux Diesel was suppose to mean.

Shit, Vic. I was so confused by it I honestly thought he was talking about Issac Yankem.

That's totally on me, to be fair.

Did either of you read the full thread?

 

My original point was that gimmicks often live or die based on what the wrestlers do with them.

 

- Red Rooster could have been good. It wasn't because of Terry Taylor.

 

- Undertaker could have been bad. It wasn't because of Mark Callaway.

 

- Polka Dot Dusty could have sucked, and it certainly wasn't at the level of NWA Dusty, but he still made it work.

 

- Fake Undertaker is an example of the gimmick being bad in the wrong hands. Yes, OBVIOUSLY, it was always intended for "holes" to eventually appear. Not sure why that was even mentioned. But at first, everyone* thought it was the real Undertaker - and yet it somehow sucked.

*Everyone meaning "mark" child/teen fans, not Observer readers.

 

- With Fake Diesel - not the best example, I concede - it demonstrates what Kevin Nash did with a pretty pedestrian bodyguard/muscle type vs. what Glenn Jacobs did.

 

- While an evil dentist gimmick has delicious horror movie potential, I'm not sure anyone could have made Isaac Yankem, D.D.S. work. Maybe Matt Borne? (The original Doink - another gimmick that was proven to be a slow death in the wrong hands but great when Bourne had it.)

[BrianB]

I don't think Bruce's credibility is the dirt worst, but it's not generally speaking above Meltzer's (not that Meltzer isn't without errors, but if somebody bothered to compile everything they've said and put it side by side, Bruce would be wrong more frequently.). He strikes me as about like anybody who was involved with events and sometimes a decisionmaker. That's what makes his Vince McMahon perspective so interesting, but it also makes a number of his biases more clear (e.g. he's likely to slam the creative when he was on the outs of that, e.g. Russo although a lot of that era was bad, but it's really night and day).

 

I'd agree with parv that Bruce isn't on the list of guys you immediately ignore. That list of guys where when they make a claim, you immediately default to wanting 2 independent sources to confirm or seriously entertain their claims. I would say, in general, I trust people like Cornette to be reliable fact-wise, since Cornette took meticulous notes.

 

I'm going to bring a little bit of politics into things (sorry), but it all feels a lot like the current administration and the amount of leaking going on, people serving their own interests, and how the NYT/Post are handling it. Meltzer's problem, I think, was in the way he presented information. It always felt like a universal truth in the Observer as opposed to "my sources tell me," which would have gotten tedious line after line, but even anonymous sources are treated a certain way in the media. I feel like Bix has written about this re: Meltzer before. I believe that most of the time he wasn't just making things up and he was getting things from his sources, but he rarely attributed the information he received in meaningful, contextual ways and that makes all of it age worse than it probably should.

 

There are times, too, where you can definitely tell that Meltzer was putting together dots in a logical way (in the Bischoff podcast, there was a bit about Hogan's turn re: merch which would have mattered in most other points of history but merch wasn't a big line-item in early 1996 WCW apparently), when he really didn't have sources. It was much more "expert analysis" than news, but even then it was presented as objective and concrete, not just analysis. He was probably right more often than not when he did this, just like we often are when we do it, because if you follow the wrestling industry in any meaningful way, you note causal relationships and patterns, but it was still presented too definitively as "this is why this is happening."

 

There was often no differentiation between the two.

 

That's fair. It's also a big difference between the Torch and the Observer where facts/reporting are clearly delineated from analysis/opinion.

 

I was pretty late to the game on reading actual wrestling observer newsletter (well into college), so I was definitely surprised and taken aback at the formatting and presentation from the most prestigious wrestling journalist, especially on how the sourcing can be hard to tell.

 

But the more I've learned about pro-wrestling and its history, the more I can see Dave's approach and why he took it. He's had longer longevity at the top of the pro-wrestling journalism field than anybody else. And not too many of the more traditional journalism type newsletters were/have been able to sustain long runs as newsbreakers.

[NintendoLogic]

Prichard has a point: Why would Vince hire a wrestler and invest money, promotion, and TV time just for the sake of a rib? Okay, there was the Dusty polka dot look that was supposedly a rib, but I could just as easily see Vince thinking something that gaudy was actually fashionable - after all, look at the outfits Vince himself wore back then. Either way, Dusty earned Vince's respect by getting that over.

 

The WWF had no fewer than three gimmicks dedicated to ridiculing Dusty in the late 80s. In addition to the polka dots, there was Virgil and Akeem the African Dream.