Dave Meltzer stuff

[jdw]

Oopps... responding to something old.

[rzombie1988]

And if you thought TNA was confusing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFL_on_television

[Ditch]

The "one doubleheader per area" rule sucks. Only reason I can think of is it promotes expensive TV packages where people get access to all games.

 

Don't get me started on when the NFL decided that the Buffalo blackout zone extended to Syracuse.

[KrisZ]

The only game that can't get changed is Monday Night Football and believe me ESPN would be ecstatic if they were able to flex that game as well because of games like last night.

[Cox]

The "one doubleheader per area" rule sucks. Only reason I can think of is it promotes expensive TV packages where people get access to all games.

I think part of that is so markets with two NFL teams (New York, Bay Area, and Los Angeles until the mid-90's) won't have any other NFL games going head to head with the "local" team. Same reason why the Jets and Giants never play at the same time. Of course, it sucks for every other market in the US, but what can you do?

[jdw]

The only game that can't get changed is Monday Night Football and believe me ESPN would be ecstatic if they were able to flex that game as well because of games like last night.

Thursday night games can't get changed either.

 

John

[KrisZ]

Yeah I forgot about that and NFL Network has ended up with some stinkers as well over the years.

[KrisZ]

I hope to God we get a critique of LeBron's return to Cleveland somewhere in the WON empire.

[tomk]

I really like Josh personally, a lot, and he's actually one of the best reporters on MMA, but articles like this tell me he doesn't understand business.

And for a baseball writers analogy. Tell me when one of the top baseball writers complained about the World Series not being a legitimate championship because the Japanese Central League powerhouse team was not invited to play, they won't let them play, and they don't allow the best international teams to play ever against the major league teams. And when ranking who the best baseball team is in 2010, you rank teams in the Japanese league, sometimes No. 1, or teams in the CFL where they play under different rules against NFL teams. Was it better for the sport of football for the NFL to open up its playoffs to XFL teams?

 

Nobody does that. I don't know of one of those top baseball writers you talk about who say things like that on national shows. Maybe some do, since I don't follow baseball anymore, but I sure don't see it. They accept that teams in the major leagues play in the World Series and the NFL teams play in the Super Bowl even though the sport is played elsewhere, don't complain about the big bad commissioner that doesn't let it happen and is ruining the credibility of the sport by doing so.

 

I really want out of this argument right now, but Gross, being one of the best people covering this industry, shouldn't get a pass by saying it's how other sportswriters cover their sports. It's not and they don't. .

They don't? Is that accurate?

 

The last sportswriter bio I read was on Lester Rodney, and well regularly lobbying for integration of baseball in thirties is definition of not understanding the “business”. But while there weren’t a lot of sportswriters pushing that line, my general sense is that mainstream sportswriting is built on the ideology that advocating for fairer conditions for competition is what is in the best interest of the “health of companies, the sport and the marketplace”. That "ideology" may be wrong, but that's the basic assumption behind most of it. My sense is that in early days of most sports leagues, sportswriters did make arguments that leagues needed best players even if they weren’t in the league.

 

Fuck. Not just in early days. When I followed hockey regularly,I remember reading sportswriters pimping that the NHL needed this or that foreign player. And the NHL has been around for almost a century. People writing about college sports regularly complain about who is and isn’t in the BCS.

 

Boxing is filled with this type of writing. There were boxing writers who were pushing for a Dempsey v Willis fight in the 20s, which is absolutely not ”understanding the business” as boxing was just starting to recover financially from having an African American regularly in title fights. My memory is Winky Wright was a guy who was pushed by boxing writers despite him not being attached to any of the big time boxing promoters. The whole point of boxing writers ranking fighters or keeping track of lineal champions is that it is in the best interest of the sport, the fans, the gamblers, etc if the best fighters fight (instead of just having the matchups that the promoters want).

[sek69]

Dave really goes off the rails when he tries to talk about practically anything in sports other than wrestling or MMA (usually). His comparing the NFL to the CFL or XFL is ridiculous to the point of either trolling or sheer cluelessness, just like comparing MLB to Japanese baseball. One league is far more established than the other and has a significant financial edge on the other. It's like trying to say the winner of the Premier League soccer championship is somehow lesser if they don't play the winner of the MLS cup in America. It's not to say lesser leagues don't have talent or have entertaining contests, but trying to build your case by stating sportswriters don't get upset if teams of lesser leagues aren't included just makes you look like you have no clue of anything that goes on outside your own self created bubble.

[Matt D]

The sort of thing that brought him to the game:

 

Dave in the May 84 Observer after going over each territory and Vince's invasion:

 

"... The inevitable end, as I've stated before is that in a few years, maybe two years, maybe five, there will be just a few promotions left. They will all run basically major cities. Eventually small minor league groups will pop up from time-to-time, some will make some money in small wrestling-starved towns, most won't. The question to be answered here is where wrestling's new blood comes from. Who was the last person WWF actually developed into a star? If promotions like Oregon and Memphis fail, the business will be much worse off in the long run..."

 

Also in the same WON

 

"... The Memphis fans are used to a completely different brand of wrestling than the rest of us. It's not really wrestling, it's more wrestling with a comedy flair. For the most part I've felt the same way about Memphis wrestling as I feel about Indoor Soccer. I love soccer, and indoor soccer is not soccer, but I actually like it better than soccer."

[Loss]

Wow, that first quote was definitely prophetic, and pretty much explains how we got where we are in terms of roster depth in WWE and seemingly no major stars working minor leagues who we can expect to make a big impact in a few years.

 

The second quote is funny. Is Memphis wrestling really THAT different from most wrestling? Yes, there's comedy, and yes there was a distinct style, but every territory had that. I always thought it was cool that while the brains behind most territories tended to be old wrestlers and ex-jocks, in Memphis, Jerry Lawler and Jimmy Hart were DJs, artists and music fanatics. So it was definitely a more colorful, exciting style.

[jdw]

Wow, that first quote was definitely prophetic, and pretty much explains how we got where we are in terms of roster depth in WWE and seemingly no major stars working minor leagues who we can expect to make a big impact in a few years.

That's extremely early in the expansion: May 1984 issue probably was put together and mailed in late March / early April. It a theme that Dave and others would come back to time and again.

 

What's a little interesting, and I'm not sure how much Dave or others have talked about it, is that the Monday Night War era probably created a bump in new talent even after WCW died. It's likely that the popularity of WWF/WCW/ECW in the mid-to-late 90s, and then the WWF into the early 00's, is what got a lot of the younger guy into wrestling. Popular things tend to get people to want to follow that path. There also was a pretty wide variety of wrestlers in that era, so all sorts of kids could dream of being a wrestler, rather than just juiced up guys say following it in the 80s.

 

Problem now is that wave of popularity has passed. The number of kids following it in 2010 is smaller than in 1996, and what they follow is largely one promotion, and its product is a bit more of the "same" rather than as eclectic as say 1996 was.

 

How many 8-15 year olds in the past 3-5 years have watched the WWE and said, "That's the shit I want to do"? It's not just that you have 10 kids who want to do that. It's that the base of fans you're drawing from is big enough that your net draws in guys who have the talent _and_ drive to turn out to be something.

 

There are places they can work to get experiance: there remains a pretty wide indy circuit, and even the WWE isn't immune to picking up guys who've made their way through it. The bigger question is what type of talent is coming up behind the batch that was spawned by the peak of wrestling that has since passed?

 

 

The second quote is funny. Is Memphis wrestling really THAT different from most wrestling? Yes, there's comedy, and yes there was a distinct style, but every territory had that. I always thought it was cool that while the brains behind most territories tended to be old wrestlers and ex-jocks, in Memphis, Jerry Lawler and Jimmy Hart were DJs, artists and music fanatics. So it was definitely a more colorful, exciting style.

There always was a bit of snobbery among hardcore fans that Memphis was garbage wrestling, while the "Good Stuff" was in FL, the Carolinas, St Louis, and San Fran before it declined.

 

John

[Johnny Guitar]

Wow, that first quote was definitely prophetic, and pretty much explains how we got where we are in terms of roster depth in WWE and seemingly no major stars working minor leagues who we can expect to make a big impact in a few years.

 

The second quote is funny. Is Memphis wrestling really THAT different from most wrestling? Yes, there's comedy, and yes there was a distinct style, but every territory had that. I always thought it was cool that while the brains behind most territories tended to be old wrestlers and ex-jocks, in Memphis, Jerry Lawler and Jimmy Hart were DJs, artists and music fanatics. So it was definitely a more colorful, exciting style.

I've just watched a clip on Youtube with Bam Bam Bigelow, who puts over Jimmy Hart as the best head booker WCW never had ( he gives him his props for WCW Saturday Night. Which was great). How he new all the boys. Had their respect. Knew what they could and couldn't do. And basically just knew what worked in wrestling.

 

As far as I know. He seems to be like Bobby Eaton, in that he's one of the few people in wrestling that everyones seems to love and/or respect and doesn't have a bad word to say about them.

 

I don't think Jimmy could have saved WCW on TNT and TBS. I think AOL/Time Warner would have found some reason to pull the plug sooner or later. But he might have at least been able to keep them on a level where they still seen as a viable product for some else to buy and get another network deal. If not, at the very least his stuff would have been a million times better than what we got from Russo.

[Matt D]

So far, the other interesting things I've come across are how Southwest is really portrayed as ECW (or worse), as a place where they thrive on blood and on gimmick matches (a Texas Brawl: a battle royal/street fight with weapons), and how threatened Toronto and Tunney seemed by Vince, which... well, I am really curious how that turned out like it did.

[jdw]

So far, the other interesting things I've come across are how Southwest is really portrayed as ECW (or worse), as a place where they thrive on blood and on gimmick matches (a Texas Brawl: a battle royal/street fight with weapons), and how threatened Toronto and Tunney seemed by Vince, which... well, I am really curious how that turned out like it did.

Toronto happened very fast:

 

http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/mlg80s.htm

 

They had not had the WWF champ since late 1982. But they had regular WWF talent after that, along with the NWA/Carolina talent. Muraco was up as late as June 1983. After that, it's a little less clear.

 

Slaughter-Mosca was a big feud from Aug 1983 through Jan 1984. He was getting a big push in the WWF at the time after leaving the Carolinas. Andre made his last appearance in Aug 1983.

 

This seems like the split between these two cards:

 

Toronto, Ontario - Maple Leaf Gardens - January 22, 1984

Bob & Joe Marcus defeated Bobby Bass & Ben Alexander

Keith Larson defeated Kurt Von Hess

Len Denton defeated Nick DeCarlo

Rudy & Terry Kay defeated Johnny Weaver & Keith Larson

Tito Santana defeated Don Kernodle

Leo Burke defeated Roddy Piper via disqualification

Angelo Mosca Sr. defeated Canadian Heavyweight Champion Sgt. Slaughter to win the title at 8:09

 

Toronto, Ontario - Maple Leaf Gardens - February 12, 1984 (17,087)

Kurt Von Hess fought Joe Marcus to a draw

Swede Hanson defeated John Bonello

Terry & Rudy Kay defeated Johnny Weaver & Billy Red Lyons

Bret Hart defeated JJ Dillon

Leo Burke defeated Vinnie Valentino

Dusty Rhodes & Jimmy Valiant defeated the Assassins via count-out

NWA World Champion Ric Flair defeated Harley Race in a steel cage match

The first still has Slaughter and Tito. The next sends in NWA heavy hitters: Flair, Rave and Dusty.

 

Then end comes very fast:

 

Toronto, Ontario - Maple Leaf Gardens - May 27, 1984

Tony Parisi defeated Jeff Sword

Brian Adidas defeated Doug Vines

Terry Kay defeated Don Kolov

Buddy (Bret) Hart & Johnny Weaver defeated Leo Burke & Rudy Kay

The Grapplers defeated Pez Whatley & Vinnie Valentino

Angelo Mosca Jr. defeated the Great Kabuki (w/ Bobby Bass)

Angelo Mosca Sr. defeated Ivan Koloff (w/ Bobby Bass) in a Russian Chain Match

NWA World Champion Ric Flair defeated Dick Slater

 

Toronto, Ontario - Maple Leaf Gardens - June 24, 1984

Jesse Barr defeated John Bonello

Nick Decarlo defeated Bob Marcus

Tony Parisi defeated Gary Royal

Canadian TV Champion Brian Adidas defeated Bobby Bass

Pez Whatley & Vinnie Valentino defeated the Grapplers via count-out

Jimmy Valiant, Angelo Mosca Sr., & Buzz Sawyer defeated Kamala, Assassin #1, & Paul Jones

 

WWF @ Toronto, Ontario - Maple Leaf Gardens - July 22, 1984

The 1st exclusively-WWF card held at MLG

Tony Garea defeated Charlie Fulton at 8:26

Afa defeated John Bonello at 5:06

Rene Goulet defeated Nick DeCarlo at 8:32

Sika defeated Pat Patterson at 8:19

The Iron Sheik fought Ivan Putski to a double count-out at 8:40

Chief Jay Strongbow defeated Tiger Chung Lee at 8:47

Sgt. Slaughter defeated Greg Valentine via disqualification at 12:08

Jimmy Snuka defeated Bob Orton Jr. at 13:14

WWF IC Champion Tito Santana defeated Paul Orndorff at 27:18

 

WWF @ Toronto, Ontario - Maple Leaf Gardens - August 5, 1984

Iron Mike Sharpe defeated Joe Marcus

Moondog Spot defeated Bob Marcus

Kamala defeated B. Brian Blair at 4:18

George Steele defeated John Bonello at 5:20

Rocky Johnson fought Paul Orndorff to a 20-minute draw

Big John Studd defeated Chief Jay Strongbow at 7:14

Roddy Piper defeated Salvatore Bellomo at 3:09

Jimmy Snuka defeated Rene Goulet at 9:56

WWF World Champion Hulk Hogan pinned Greg Valentine at 12:18

Toronto gets dogshit from Crockett and the NWA for the June 24, 1984. Perhaps the WON would indicate whether it was known Tunney was joining he WWF, or if that was one of the things that drove him. July 22 is a WWF card, loaded up with people that Toronto fans had been fed over the years. The next card has Hogan.

 

I'm trying to recall if the Tunney bio in the WON had anything interesting on this, and if Tunney played it well. Seems to have, or at the very least knew where it was headed, and rather than war with Vince, he joined Vince. I'm not sure what Vince paid him for the "territory". We know Tunney was on the payroll for years afterwards. Toronto ended up doing great business for Vince, though it's not like Vince to share a big cut of anything and instead to put someone on salary and/or contract.

 

This goes back to the discussion of Hogan vs Austin that we've had on several boards. Hogan wasn't the only tool Vince used to eat up territories/cities, but he was the key one. I think Tunney could look across the boarder and see what Vince was doing in AWA cities with Hogan, and knew that if Vince got on TV and got into an arena there with Hogan, that his goose was going to be cooked. With Hogan, Toronto got insanely hot. They took the rest of Canada as well.

 

If we were to run through Graham's site, and the WON as well for data, the number of cities and territories that the WWF added to it's promotion with Hogan as the spearhead is rather staggering. Looking back now after 20+ years of viewing the WWF as a national promotion from sea to sea, it might not have impact on us. In the context of the time, it really is staggering. Austin being able to go into the GA Dome and draw isn't remotely the same as Hogan taking the #2 CSA in the country (Los Angles) from a dead area to thriving, stealing the #3 CSA (Chicago) from the AWA and starting the AWA on the path to death, rebuilding the dead #6 CSA (CA Bay Area) from the dead, rebulding the dead Detroit, adding Seattle, invading the Twin Cities successfully, Cleveland, St Louis, Denver, Sacramento, Indy, Milwaukee... all of Canada... and on and on.

 

Tunney looks like one who saw the handwriting and reacted smartly.

 

John

[Johnny Guitar]

So far, the other interesting things I've come across are how Southwest is really portrayed as ECW (or worse), as a place where they thrive on blood and on gimmick matches (a Texas Brawl: a battle royal/street fight with weapons), and how threatened Toronto and Tunney seemed by Vince, which... well, I am really curious how that turned out like it did.

Were the Tunney's threatened by Vince? although they were working with the Crocketts. When that deal fell through they seemed happy to go with Vince based on the relationship they had with his dad.

 

The beginning of the WWF national expansion is an interesting time because alot of people seemed to know what Vince was planning. but choosed to handle it diffferntly. Sam Muchnick, stu hart and The Lebells all wanted to retire and seemed quire happy to let Vince take over. eddie Graham and Don Owen were left alone for the most part, as they were tight with Vince Sr. As were the tunneys, who basically merged with Vince. In fact apart from promoting in St louis. It wasn't the NWA that Vince went after first. It was the AWA.

[Matt D]

In the WON I read, there was a lot of talk about.. Actually, let me take a look at what Dave said.

 

Apparently, Vince tried to buy the Maple Leaf TV time (like he had elsewhere). He'd already run shows in Kingston. He cited Piper, Snuka, Slaughter and Santana as already having huge Toronto following, for Vince's invasion. He thought Tunney would go into Buffalo and Rochester if Vince invaded, as Frank Tunney had promoted there successfully before he died. Most interesting quote is what he ended the paragraph with:

 

"Actually, McMahon's raids of Mid Atlantic talent may be more beneficial to him in Toronto than Greensboro."

[KrisZ]

The story was that Crockett was scared that Tunney was going to go to Vince so he quit sending his top talent. Tunney's plan wasn't to go to Vince to start but with Crockett not sending the talent, it forced Tunney's hand to do what Crockett was afraid he was going to do.

[El-P]

I always thought it was cool that while the brains behind most territories tended to be old wrestlers and ex-jocks, in Memphis, Jerry Lawler and Jimmy Hart were DJs, artists and music fanatics. So it was definitely a more colorful, exciting style.

Interesting observation.

[Matt D]

One last thing: What was up with Andre having part ownership of the Montreal promotion for a while? I've never heard anything about that before.

[rovert]

I know some of you guys recently received some Mapel Leaf footage, any early thoughts?

[Dylan Waco]

I got my Maple Leaf in the mail today. Haven't had a chance to watch any of it yet and probably won't anytime in the near future. When I do I will have opinionssssssss

[rovert]

In terms of presentation what is closest too?

[KrisZ]

Maple Leaf was different because they had their own tapings but would show some matches from JCP TV and the best part was they would show top matches from Maple Leaf Gardens. I really don't know what it would compare to really probably Florida is the closest.