Dave Meltzer stuff

[JerryvonKramer]

I'm not sure Matt, because whenever I've listened to podcasts or read books and things produced by fans outside of the PWO bubble, not a lot seems to have changed really. And these are people hardcore enough to produce podcasts and / or write books. I won't name names.

[Loss]

Whether you read Scott Keith or Dave Meltzer in the mid-90s, you were influenced by Dave Meltzer, because without Dave Meltzer, there would be no Scott Keith. His impact doesn't have to be direct to still be there.

[JerryvonKramer]

I totally agree with that Loss.

[JerryvonKramer]

And while we're on the topic, a real bugbear of mine recently is reviewers letting backstage stuff affect their ratings of matches. Meltzer does it sometimes, Keith does it always. I hate it, because the reviewer then uses it as a crutch to downgrade the match and the review becomes more about the backstage stuff, which really doesn't dictate how the thing is executed bell-to-bell.

[Loss]

Can you provide an example of what you mean? I'm not saying I disagree, I just want to make sure I understand.

[Matt D]

I don't disagree about Meltzer influencing Keith. I actually that's HOW Meltzer is most important, actually, by influencing the next generation of voices who became big with the birth of the internet, since it was those voices who really popularized things you credit Meltzer for.

[JerryvonKramer]

Very simple example being something like Meltzer using the fact that Dusty was the booking to influence his rating of a Dustin Rhodes match. His reviews from 1991 have been down on Dustin almost exclusively it seems because he's the booker's son.

[goc]

Keith definitely had his biases that affected his reviews. Most notably HHH, Shawn & Taker.

[JerryvonKramer]

This has only just struck me but could we say that Keith calling Taker "Lazy Taker" is his version of Junkfood Dog?

[Eduardo]

Listening to last nights, WOR, Meltzer had a funny line when the word IWC was brought up:

"When people use the words IWC or smark, immediately [my reaction is] like, 'Okay, you're a dumb shit, I'm not reading anything you write.'"

[Childs]

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.

 

I had a similar thought reading through the thread, though I do believe Meltzer had a significant influence on the evolving internet discourse.

 

But yeah, even as a 10-year-old kid, I saw Savage-Steamboat as exciting in a very different way than Andre-Hogan. I saw the NWA as a "good wrestling" alternative to WWF and Flair as a guy who had great matches rather than just getting by on star power. And I wouldn't have any awareness of Meltzer for another decade.

[KrisZ]

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.

 

I've seen a lot of old 70's newsletters and there were people that did that but Dave was the one that made it big.

[Loss]

This is going to sound silly and it very well may be, but I'll still put it out there. I sometimes wonder if not for Dave, would the Internet not expose the business so much? It's possible it still would have, but I wonder if we would be more PWI than PWO otherwise - talking about win-loss records, winning strategies and that sort of thing.

 

As far as knowing the difference between good and bad, I knew the difference between Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan as a child. But again, that wasn't something I came up with on my own, that was Apter mag influence. Even then, they talked about Flair going 60 minutes and Hogan not having the stamina to do that. They talked about scientific wrestlers and I liked scientific wrestlers, but I just saw it as one of many styles a wrestler could take on instead of the preferred method of working. There were also the muscle/power guys, the brawlers and so on.

 

PWI had such an influence on me that I didn't think it was any of my business if the Horsemen attacked Dusty in a parking lot. I didn't know everyone personally, so who was I to judge them? I tried to watch more like a sporting event, but one where it was common for tempers to flare and things to get carried away.

[sek69]

Somewhat off topic but still Meltzer related, I wonder if Dave will still keep up his feud with Deadspin now that all their articles calling out his boo Chael's bullshit have pretty much been vindicated.

[Matt D]

This is going to sound silly and it very well may be, but I'll still put it out there. I sometimes wonder if not for Dave, would the Internet not expose the business so much? It's possible it still would have, but I wonder if we would be more PWI than PWO otherwise - talking about win-loss records, winning strategies and that sort of thing.

 

As far as knowing the difference between good and bad, I knew the difference between Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan as a child. But again, that wasn't something I came up with on my own, that was Apter mag influence. Even then, they talked about Flair going 60 minutes and Hogan not having the stamina to do that. They talked about scientific wrestlers and I liked scientific wrestlers, but I just saw it as one of many styles a wrestler could take on instead of the preferred method of working. There were also the muscle/power guys, the brawlers and so on.

 

PWI had such an influence on me that I didn't think it was any of my business if the Horsemen attacked Dusty in a parking lot. I didn't know everyone personally, so who was I to judge them? I tried to watch more like a sporting event, but one where it was common for tempers to flare and things to get carried away.

 

Before I had any influence from the magazines, I liked the Rockers and Brian Pillman more and hated Hulk Hogan (because he always only ever did the same three moves) and Jim Duggan and the Bushwhackers, but I also liked Ultimate Warrior and the Young Pistols and Shane Douglas and Tom Zenk and any high-flying type babyface or someone who seemed really energetic. I liked Arn Anderson a lot too but that was sort of beside the point. I just liked the Spinebuster. I absolutely hated Hogan because he only did three moves though. it had nothing to do with him winning or losing.

[BigBadMick]

 

This is going to sound silly and it very well may be, but I'll still put it out there. I sometimes wonder if not for Dave, would the Internet not expose the business so much? It's possible it still would have, but I wonder if we would be more PWI than PWO otherwise - talking about win-loss records, winning strategies and that sort of thing.

 

As far as knowing the difference between good and bad, I knew the difference between Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan as a child. But again, that wasn't something I came up with on my own, that was Apter mag influence. Even then, they talked about Flair going 60 minutes and Hogan not having the stamina to do that. They talked about scientific wrestlers and I liked scientific wrestlers, but I just saw it as one of many styles a wrestler could take on instead of the preferred method of working. There were also the muscle/power guys, the brawlers and so on.

 

PWI had such an influence on me that I didn't think it was any of my business if the Horsemen attacked Dusty in a parking lot. I didn't know everyone personally, so who was I to judge them? I tried to watch more like a sporting event, but one where it was common for tempers to flare and things to get carried away.

 

Before I had any influence from the magazines, I liked the Rockers and Brian Pillman more and hated Hulk Hogan (because he always only ever did the same three moves) and Jim Duggan and the Bushwhackers, but I also liked Ultimate Warrior and the Young Pistols and Shane Douglas and Tom Zenk and any high-flying type babyface or someone who seemed really energetic. I liked Arn Anderson a lot too but that was sort of beside the point. I just liked the Spinebuster. I absolutely hated Hogan because he only did three moves though. it had nothing to do with him winning or losing.

 

I think I had similar early experiences in liking wrestlers that I'm still happy to stand by. My early days were 1991, and the Horsemen, Pillman, Bret and Hennig were a-ok in my book.

 

Maybe the pwo crowd had and have a sixth sense with this....

[Matt D]

Oh, my opinions now are pretty different from back then. Hogan vs Michaels is an interesting discussion for instance. I'm not sure where I'd fall on that. Wrestling has nothing to do with how many moves you do. I'm not 10 anymore.

[kjh]

This is going to sound silly and it very well may be, but I'll still put it out there. I sometimes wonder if not for Dave, would the Internet not expose the business so much? It's possible it still would have, but I wonder if we would be more PWI than PWO otherwise - talking about win-loss records, winning strategies and that sort of thing.

 

Someone else would have filled that niche, probably Wade Keller who was cut from the same cloth, but started out later.

[Loss]

True, but Wade started the Torch because he was a WON reader.

[jdw]

Question:

 

Do we consider Meltzer an influence on Scott Keith?

 

See, my problem with the Ebert comparison is that I think he shaped the entire IWC and what was considered accepted taste for years and years. Even Ebert had Siskel (not to mention others and also that there isn't a direct comparison to film geeks, I think).

 

Ebert had a massive influence on film reviewers. More so than Dave had on people talking about wrestling, which isn't to say that Dave didn't have an influence.

 

Roger had Siskel as a foil, and it "worked" with them together. But Roger was the star. Would it have gotten over as much without Gene there to push him (in the papers) and act as a foil on TV? Probably not. But Siskel was more akin to Piper or Savage to Roger's Hogan, with Roger being the man. The only difference is that while Piper and Savage might have had their heel fan kids who wanted to grow up to be them, no one really wanted to grow up to be Gene.

[Dylan Waco]

Oh, my opinions now are pretty different from back then. Hogan vs Michaels is an interesting discussion for instance. I'm not sure where I'd fall on that. Wrestling has nothing to do with how many moves you do. I'm not 10 anymore.

 

This is an aside, but I'm not sure Michaels had a bigger moveset than Hogan

[jdw]

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.

 

Dave's greatest impact was covering wrestling as "news", rather than as "storyline". The "news" in stuff like the London mags was just storyline.

 

30 years later, Dave's global impact doesn't matter a lot to the vast majority of fans. What's going on in NJPW isn't relevant.

 

On the flip side, 30 years later kayfabe may not be dead, but has been on life support for more than a decade.

 

More than that, when we need to remember that when something is treated like news, it gets "analyzed". He pushed that, and 30 years later it's important.

[jdw]

Question:

 

Do we consider Meltzer an influence on Scott Keith?

 

Indirect, not direct. I don't think SKeith was a regular sub of Meltzer at the time Scott was posting on RSPW. The Meltzer influence in RSPW would have been more on Kunze, and Keith wasn't exactly a Kunze follower.

 

The indirect influence was more than Keith was a member of a group of smart fans who talked about pro wrestling. They came at it from a lot of different directions. Some were WON subs, and while not Meltzerites certainly had been impacted by Dave's "methods" for a lack of a better word. Before the internet blew up with AOL, most people in that pool had some of Dave rubbed off on them whether they knew it or not.

 

On some level similar to the impact that Dean Rasmussen has had, even among people that never read him or even know who he is.

[jdw]

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.

 

 

Keith was in the first wave of internet smart marks, and hardly any of them were influenced by him. Keith had influence on the wave(s) after that when it started moving to Webpages, but the influence of Dave had already taken root by then. In fact, it had taken root in Keith's own writing simply because that whole first wave for the most part were influenced by Dave.

[Matt D]

Somehow, I fear for the next generation.