Figure 4 debate about coverage of puroresu

[WrestlingPower]

I'm listening to the latest Adam & Mike show from F4W and they are calling Bryan Alvarez to task over his recent show with Zach Arnold. Basically, the Bryan & Zach show talked the doom & gloom of the current Japanese wrestling scene and both basically acted as if the business was so depressed over there that it wasn't worth covering. Alvarez even admitted that he had no clue who won the Champion Carnival and when Zach told him they both kind of laughed it off as if it was indicative of low business instead of an attempt to build the future. Zach also made such brilliant statements about how Hustle was the #1 promotion in Japan and that's how everyone over there sees puroresu these days.

 

Adam & Mike retorted making some good points about why a company's bottom line should dictate the level of coverage they get. They seemed especially dumbfounded at the amount of coverage F4W gives to TNA given its financial state as compared to the entirety of puroresu. Mike Sempervive said a line something like "I'm not getting paid dividends, what the fuck do I care, the wrestling's good".

 

So I'm bringing this up to see what folks here think. It seems like most people have followed the Meltzer & Kellers of the world in covering what their audience is more likely to be familiar with and equating what's most profitable with what's most important (and popular I guess) rather than truly covering what's newsworthy from everywhere. This really bugged me in the late 90s because if it weren't for the internet and tape trading friends, if I strictly relied on the Observer, I would have never seen lots of Japanese indies and most joshi from the period that I was every bit if not more entertained by than what the "big" companies were putting out.

[Indikator]

In these times I always remember two things

 

Number 1, from the March 1984 WON:

...Tour did well but Hayes/Gordy vs. Baba/Tsuruta for the tag titles could not sell out Korakuen Hall (a relatively small venue). Freebirds controlled almost the whole match but a bloody Hayes was counted out at the 17:14 mark

 

Number 2 is how there was a new attendance record for the Sumo Hall IIRC around 1988 that was a whopping 12 000 fans.

 

Yeah, good old times... and they knew how to work, too!

[Death From Above]

Zach has predicted the death of Japanese wrestling at least once a year publicly since the death of Baba. I used to go to his forums long ago (I think his own site is actually dead now) but he's just the most negative person in the universe. He killed his own site through his constant negativity as eventually no one wants to listen to it anymore. Japanese wrestling has shrunk but it's hardly dead. If you listen to Zach Arnold, New Japan should have folded 4 times over already.

 

I think both Japan and Mexico should probably have a breif subsection, something like just a quick bullet point rundown of a few important happenings. If people want to get more on those things, the information is out there. And there's going to be a chunk of your audience that doesn't care about those things at all so you probably don't want to fill too much with it. But an acknowledgement of it isn't a bad idea.

[Loss]

The down times are just as important as the booms, because there are usually circumstances in the down times that lead to the next boom, if one in fact happens at all. Dave is really the only wrestling writer I expect anything from though, so everyone else can cover what they want.

[ohtani's jacket]

I have nothing but negative things to say about the future of Japanese wrestling, but honestly the coverage has never been that great to begin with.