Dave Meltzer stuff

[Matt D]

I'm not entirely comfortable with that. For one thing, Dave came out of a broader tradition of that sort of thing going back into the 70s, no? I mean, I know we have some older posters. I know there were fanzines and what not, things like Bockwinkel's Brigade. i'm okay with the idea that Dave helped defined certain views about, let's say, the importance of workrate, that we're only getting away from now. Maybe that he brought it to the masses on some level? But it's not the masses. It's more like the Russian Revolution and it's taken a while but it's finally come to a head with the fans taking over the booking from the WWE with Daniel Bryan 30 years later? I don't know who that makes Trotsky though.

[Loss]

I didn't say he invented it. I said he popularized it. Yes, Dave is a product of 70s fanzine and early VCR tape trading culture. That's what led to the WON. He was not the only guy doing what he did, but he was the most prominent and long-lasting guy doing what he did. I wouldn't even say he defined the importance of workrate. Well, he did, but I think it was more broad than that. He defined the idea of good-and-I-enjoyed-this versus bad-and-I-did-not-enjoy-this as it relates to pro wrestling. Before him, I would say the common wrestling fan frame of mind was something like, "What do you mean good? Dusty won, so yeah, I guess it was good."

[Loss]

I think Dave's greatest impact even more than that is that aside from a few people here and there, I don't know that most people with power in wrestling looked at it in a global way. Sure, they knew Japanese wrestling existed, but does a wrestling promotion ever come close to taking concepts that were successful in Japan and adapting them for an American audience if there is no WON? Does WCW co-host (or co-promote ... whatever you want to call it) an AAA pay-per-view without the WON? If the WON didn't exist, I suspect wrestling promoters would still be trying to recreate Hulkamania and the Four Horsemen and not understanding why it no longer works. Hell, many of them tried doing that over and over even with a WON around.

[JerryvonKramer]

Matt, discussion around here: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/21457-where-the-big-boys-play-55/&do=findComment&comment=5575080

[Matt D]

Thanks, I will read; now go and run with the Russian Revolution thing.

[Matt D]

Went back and read.

1. You always no-sell my best stuff. It was Foucault there.

2. It was pretty definitive the influence Keith had, but I didn't see the link to Meltzer necessarily. In fact, you suggest that Keith was actually more important than Meltzer.

 

I didn't say he invented it. I said he popularized it. Yes, Dave is a product of 70s fanzine and early VCR tape trading culture. That's what led to the WON. He was not the only guy doing what he did, but he was the most prominent and long-lasting guy doing what he did. I wouldn't even say he defined the importance of workrate. Well, he did, but I think it was more broad than that. He defined the idea of good-and-I-enjoyed-this versus bad-and-I-did-not-enjoy-this as it relates to pro wrestling. Before him, I would say the common wrestling fan frame of mind was something like, "What do you mean good? Dusty won, so yeah, I guess it was good."

 

I'm still shaky on this. Was it that he invented the "not-common wrestling fan" or that he made the common wrestling fan think differently?

[Loss]

He didn't invent anything. I've said that twice. But he is why we are all critics. Even casual fans are critics now, even if they don't post at message boards. "This is awesome!" isn't deep criticism, but it's criticism.

[Matt D]

He "defined."

 

So he codified what was already there? Something people were thinking but they didn't realize?

 

I'm sorry for the semantics but I'm not 100% understanding.

[Loss]

He popularized. He didn't even define. He was the first guy to prominently talk about wrestling matches as being "good" or "bad". He was the first guy to prominently talk about wrestlers in terms of their talent and ability to deliver good performances instead of their won-loss records. Others did it before him, but on a very small and limited scale. He reached a much bigger audience. Then people copied him. Eventually people copied the viewing dogma but started going in different directions with their opinions and weighed things differently than he did. But the whole idea of thinking of wrestlers as workers is not something that people really did all that much before the WON.

[Matt D]

I don't want to break down your paragraph since I think you were trying to get across a general thought and not a specific one.

 

I do think what you're suggesting is that he turned a specific percentage of the audience from "common wrestling fan" to "uncommon wrestling fan," or maybe that he united an even smaller percentage that he DID create with another percentage of already existing "uncommon wrestling fans" under one flag by giving them a central resource to tap into and then feed back into.

 

The question I guess I'm curious about is when the common wrestling fan stopped thinking about wins and losses and about whether a match was good or not and how much of that had to do with Meltzer? I think most of the people who he initially had as subscribers already felt that way, but that's just a guess.

[Loss]

I don't want to say he did it because I think it was more about him helping change the way people look at wrestling, both inside and outside of the business. So there are people who have been influenced by Dave Meltzer that don't even know Dave Meltzer's name. It's a movement that is bigger than him as an individual, so that's why I hesitate to say that he did it. He didn't even start it. He gave it momentum though.

 

"This is awesome" is generally speaking a commentary on match quality. There are often "Match of the Year" chants at indy shows and even in NXT. Those chants started in US indy wrestling. Most indy wrestling fans are hardcore fans. Most hardcore fans are either WON subscribers or go online seeking news that is taken from the WON. That's the connection and influence.

 

We're just like the "This is awesome" chanters, it's just that we type our commentary instead of chanting it and we choose different words.

[Matt D]

I don't know a real answer to a lot of this. I'm 32. My experience was that I got into wrestling at 9. I got into it again at 16 or so and by that point the internet was out there and I was sort of reared and raised in pro wrestling culture by the disciples, by the people who had subscribed to the observer. And you get the ECW fans which is early internet stuff, and now everyone over the age of thirteen who gets into wrestling in any meaningful way is so socially active that they're tapped into this, and I'm glad that you're trying to draw a line through it in the book to come, because I'm not entirely sure how it works. I just think that the people who talked about quality and thought about it existed and he just unified them and it built momentum that way, especially in an age before the internet when the only real history and discussion between these forces spread around the country would be a newsletter. When you read old WONs, there's a very big collaborative element to it.

 

Edit: I think quality mattered to certain people within the business too. You hear stories like the JJ Dillon one about wanting to impress the boys in the back with a great match when he was supposed to wrestle chickenshit or the way Savage would plan out his matches.

[Loss]

I think I see where the confusion lies. Maybe this will help. I don't want to say he invented it only because I'm sure if we poured through old 1970s newsletters, we would find at least one writer who talked about seeing good matches and bad matches, or talked about wrestlers as workers. That has nothing to do with the quality of what is said. It's more about just viewing wrestling within that paradigm at all. So I'm guessing it happened before the WON. I think for all intents and purposes he did invent it, but I'm trying to avoid saying that in case Billy Bob Newsletterwriter called a match "good" in 1975.

[Matt D]

And I think that it had to be out there in the people who would eventually become his readership and he brought them together and then, as the internet came together, they spread it out to the next generation, that he's more the unifying force in movement. That's when it comes to match quality and thinking about it. When it comes to exactly what a good match looked like, the workrate ideal, I'm okay with the idea that he really defined that. But the idea of "A match can be good or bad?" I'm less comfortable with that, even if he could be the leader of the cultural movement that put that forward. But I think it was probably an underlying thought he tapped into and that his initial reader base had before they ever picked up a WON.

 

Frankly though I think we need some old people to chime in here.

[Loss]

It's also worth noting that the idea of matches being good or bad is something that originated within wrestling. The WON talked about wrestling the same way that people within wrestling talk about wrestling. So to be clear, what we're discussing is the idea of wrestling fans thinking that a match can be good or bad. People within wrestling obviously always looked at it that way. They may have had different standards for that, but they thought about wrestling in those terms.

[Loss]

Here's food for thought:

 

In 1998, when Foley took the bump from the top of the Hell in a Cell, fans in the building chanted Undertaker's name.

 

If that spot happened now, Foley's name would be the one chanted if a wrestler's name was chanted at all.

 

There's a shift there.

[Matt D]

That shift happened after 1998 though. Does Meltzer have more direct influence before or after 1998?

 

I'd also counter it with the NXT crowd's reaction after the first time Aiden English sang. I swear there was a This is Awesome chant there too. That wouldn't have happened if the gimmick happened in ECW in 1998. Would it have happened in 2008? That's the sort of thing I don't think Meltzer goes for at all, which is extraneous but I find it interesting.

[Loss]

Does Meltzer have more direct influence before or after 1998?

 

That's an interesting question because I don't think Foley takes the bump in the first place if not for Meltzer influence. That's not to say Dave was advocating wrestlers taking dangerous bumps every week in the WON, but Mick has claimed many times that his motivation for doing the bump was fear of having a bad match. Most guys working madman gimmicks 20 years earlier wouldn't have cared so much about that, or if that was their concern, they may have just juiced a little more than usual or something.

 

It's hard to answer for sure, but I think hardcore fan influence is what made Foley feel like he had to take the bump. The bump was canonized by WWE for years and helped him become a star, which was the promotion being influenced by Dave ("Hey, we respect this guy for sacrificing his body to entertain you. Not to win a match, but to entertain you.") Foley talked openly on WWF television shows about being apprehensive about another Undertaker/Mankind match and worrying about having a bad match as a result. This type of marketing of the bump made fans respect the bump and respect Foley's willingness to sacrifice. This makes wrestling fans start slowly thinking differently about who they like and who they don't. We could probably go year-by-year and really track the progression, but ultimately, it slowly rolls forward to what we saw with Daniel Bryan in 2014.

 

I don't even think that's just limited to Mick Foley and his bump. Similar things were happening at the same time in all sorts of situations. Commentary became focused in TLC matches on how all the guys are putting their bodies on the line, but it was framed more as because they have passion for what they do than because they are desperate to win.

 

My point is that encouraging fans to think about wrestling in those terms is something that originated within the WON. The WON played a part in the erosion of kayfabe. People within wrestling stopped protecting trade secrets as much as they had before, so because they stopped thinking about wrestling like it was real, things like that would eventually slip through the cracks, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally.

 

It's a messy lineage.

[Matt D]

I need to crash and I do think your response is interesting and probably true in other cases absolutely but my first thought was.

 

"Wait, what about the story of Foley going to see Snuka jump off the cage?"

 

Caveat number two is how it's interesting that they used to talk about how dangerous battle royals or cage matches were for the people's bodies all the time, but then it was about either money or hate, not about the fans.

 

In the end, until we hear from some people who were watching at a fairly advanced age in the 70s, I'm a lot more comfortable with "played a part" than I am with even "popularized." I think it's the second generation of people after Meltzer that are more important in it spreading. And Meltzer's most important contribution in this specific thought (that matches can be good or bad due to quality) was in creating and maintaining a centralized place for it to exist during the years in the wilderness before the internet, if that makes sense, like monasteries in the dark ages or an incubator.

[Loss]

The Snuka story I think explains Summerslam '97 more than it does King of the Ring '98. It obviously influenced Foley as a performer throughout his career, but that doesn't mean it was to the exclusion of all other possible influences, one of which was hardcore fandom and an emphasis on match quality.

 

I'm with you on getting some older perspectives.

[cm funk]

Went back and read.

1. You always no-sell my best stuff. It was Foucault there.

2. It was pretty definitive the influence Keith had, but I didn't see the link to Meltzer necessarily. In fact, you suggest that Keith was actually more important than Meltzer.

 

I didn't say he invented it. I said he popularized it. Yes, Dave is a product of 70s fanzine and early VCR tape trading culture. That's what led to the WON. He was not the only guy doing what he did, but he was the most prominent and long-lasting guy doing what he did. I wouldn't even say he defined the importance of workrate. Well, he did, but I think it was more broad than that. He defined the idea of good-and-I-enjoyed-this versus bad-and-I-did-not-enjoy-this as it relates to pro wrestling. Before him, I would say the common wrestling fan frame of mind was something like, "What do you mean good? Dusty won, so yeah, I guess it was good."

 

I'm still shaky on this. Was it that he invented the "not-common wrestling fan" or that he made the common wrestling fan think differently?

 

I think it's pretty fair to say that for a generation of first wave internet/IWC "smart marks" Keith was more influential than Meltzer. Now, Meltzer obviously had a huge influence on Keith's tastes.....but Meltzer didn't have a strong internet presence til fairly late in the game. Keith was the most popular * rating guy during the boom period of the Monday Night Wars and ECW. It's arguable that guys like Al Issacs and Scherer and Rick Scacia were more influential opinion makers among the masses of internet fans at the time. I'm the same age as you, and Keith definitely had more of an influence on me than Meltzer at the time. My tastes have changed a lot since then, as most of ours have, but I was firmly in the "WCW is holding down Benoit/Jericho/Eddie etc./want to see cruisers/high spots/want to see car crash table/ladder matches/ECW style stuff crowd" at the time. Scott Keith was the champion of that stuff and had a huge following of fans. Meltzer had a bigger influence on pre-internet smart fans, and younger fans now with his greatly increased online presence and podcasting, but that mid-late 90's pocket I think he was outpaced by several people. Obviously not in terms of news reporting and most of the newz sites copied his reporting (as they still do) but in terms of recapping/rating/championing stuff

[goodhelmet]

I think there is wayyyyy too much credit to Meltzer on the idea of rating matches. I was rating matches from Best to Worst when I was a kid. When I was watching the Monday Night Wars, I was giving match recommendations to friends who missed the latest PPV, RAW or SD. PWI had Match of the Year awards years before any of us had an Observer. I want to reread this thread closely a 2nd time before I start making statements directly to posters but I don't think Meltzer has as wide of a scope as has been portrayed here.

[goc]

Personally I think Meltzers ratings are good to use as a reference point if nothing else.

This is really the only value of them. They aren't the gospel where you're just wrong if you don't like a match the almighty Dave Meltzer has given a 5 star rating to. It's just a guy who has watched and rated a lot of wrestling over the years, from a lot of different places and they are relatively easy to access. Even Scott Keith's stuff has SOME value for that. Ratings give a guide to someone who hasn't seen anything and is looking for a good place to start. It takes more than 1 guy's rating to create a consensus on whether a match is generally well liked, no matter how "influential" the person rating it.

[JerryvonKramer]

The analogy I'd make is that -- in the very specific terms of the early days of the IWC, among fans who read and wrote reviews online -- Meltzer was the Lou Reed, who was tremendously influential to anyone who actually listened to the Velvet Underground (the quote they always trot out is "not many people listened to the Velvets, but anyone who did started a band"), while Scott Keith was the David Bowie -- who reached a bigger and wider audience.

 

I feel sick to my stomach having just compared Keith to Bowie, but I think that's basically it. Meltzer clearly influenced Keith a lot, and then Keith influenced the legions of people of could easily access his free-to-read rants on various avenues.

 

Meltzer was only availble to a tiny fraction of the people who got online in the late 90s, Keith -- and people like "The Rick" and so on -- could reach anyone who had an internet connection and a Yahoo or AOL search engine. In fact, I think most of us will remember first finding those guys online. You found Keith before you found Meltzer. Most fans hitting the internet in the late 90s wouldn't have had a clue who Meltzer was, and probably found out about him from Keith's references.

 

The legacy of Keith, of course, was not just ratings, but the snarky and ranty tone of reviews. It would take a decade for the IWC to get that shit out of its system, much as it took wrestling that long to full get beyond the attitude era.

[Matt D]

I really feel like we're only starting to get past workrate dogmatism, maybe in the last few years, which I, again, think is a combination of Indy style burnout (we got too much of what we thought we wanted), Benoit/Misawa dying and how they died, and so much more older footage being so easily available.