Dave Meltzer stuff

[tomk]

In the sense of "Bearcat Wright got over in more places than Jerry Lawler", not in the sense that Dave think's Bearcat's HOF argument is stronger than Jerry's.

 

John

 

Bearcat Wright is a guy like Koloff who came out well (for their respective decades) in Farmer's attendance formula thing. As result they are guys Meltz has started regularly using as "guys who should be in the HOF but for some reason don't get the votes"

[jdw]

Ivan and Bearcat aren't in because Dave doesn't push them hard enough.

 

John

[tomk]

Yes I know that. You know that. I'm not sure to what degree Meltz himself understands that. As we've seen him over the years wheel out various versions of "his guy gets all the votes from veterans but current wrestlers don't seem as convinced" or this "contemporary guy gets lots of votes from current wrestlers but retired wrestlers aren't sold" as though his pimping isn't the main source that contemporary wrestlers get their opinions on veterans from and vice versa. That said Koloff is a guy who he's pimping more and more as a no-brainer where " I don't understand".

[Johnny Sorrow]

"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."

Going back to this, how exactly was Memphis "not really wrestling"? It's clear that Dave's "point" is that he enjoyed Memphis Wrestling as it's own entity, but it's not "really" wrestling.

 

Let's see. It had good guys and bad guys pretending to fight in front of sold out crowds. How is it not "really" wrestling?

 

edit: I get the Ivan Koloff thing. He beat Bruno in 1971 (?), had a great career down South, and then in the mid Eighties had a resurgance as part of team that drew big against Dusty, Magnum, Flair, the Road Warriors, and the Rock N' Roll Express.

And a side note, I always thought Ivan looked small on TV but the first time I saw him live back then it blew me away how huge the guy was.

[Al]

I'd dare make the case that Jerry Lawler was the most over heel ECW ever had.

[Al]

Actually, what really strikes me is the idea that Lawler isn't firmly in the top 50, yet Dave can only name 18 wrestlers who are clearly better.

[jdw]

It sounds like the level below "Super Elite" is wide for him.

 

John

[kjh]

I think Dave was playing Larry Matysik's devil's advocate in that thread, as Larry placed great stock on being able to get over in multiple territories and being genuinely tough (Larry relaying a story about thinking that Shawn Michaels was a wuss after he saw him bitch to the road agents about being busted up hardway was a hoot).

[KrisZ]

No one man can come up with the greatest list. There needs to be a consensus among a panel. It's just that simple.

[jdw]

As was pointed out earlier in the thread, Dave already went the panel route.

 

John

[KrisZ]

This is fantastic

 

Marcus Dupree, 46, a former University of Oklahoma college football star who was featured on an ESPN 30 for 30 recently about the greatest football player there never was, who later became a pro wrestler working for Jerry Jarrett, will be wrestling and promoting a 2/19 show in his home town of Philadelphia, MS (Doug Gilbert & Davey Rich vs. Tommy Rich & Marcus Dupree, plus Kamala, Road Dogg and Koko B. Ware). It’s being promoted as “New Mid South Wrestling” and they are using the insignia of the Watts version from the 80s. Jim Ross noted having dinner with Dupree this past week. Dupree rushed for 2,955 yards and scored 36 touchdowns in his senior year of high school, and was one of the most recruited football players coming out of high school in history, almost destined for a Heisman Trophy and NFL stardom. But after a great freshman year at Oklahoma (Steve Williams was an all-league offensive guard blocking for him), including gaining 249 yards in the Fiesta Bowl, his career fell apart due to drugs and injuries and left Oklahoma early in his sophomore year and really never did anything of note again as a football player, although he did play years later for the Los Angeles Rams but was never a pro star. Ross said that as a freshman, Dupree was better at the same stage than Herschel Walker, Adrian Peterson or Bo Jackson. I was stunned when he showed up in the USWA in the early 90s with very little fanfare, since his name was so big in sports a decade earlier. While he was head-and-shoulders athletically above anyone else in the territory at the time, I can’t say he stood out as a wrestler, and his tenure was short in the promotion and he never worked anywhere else of note.

[jdw]

I'm not sure that Ross is entirely objective on that one. Freshman Walker > Freshman Dupree, who by that point was already showing signs of problems.

 

John

[Bix]

Sometimes I don't think Dave really gets wrestling fans, especially WWF/E fans:

 

On Mike Francesca's radio show in New York, they were talking some wrestling.  A guy called in and compared the Bill Bellicheck and Rex Ryan feud to that of Rick Martel and Jake Roberts.  What, a feud that everyone has forgotten?  Francesca said that he last he watched pro wrestling was when he was a teenagers and saw Argentina Apollo and Bruno Sammartino.  Francesca listed Buddy Rogers, Argentina Rocca Bobo Brazil and Sammartino as his favorites and there were several give-and-takes with callers regarding wrestling later in the show.  (thanks to Rob Striker and producer Neal Baker).

One of the biggest angles of a period where the company was huge, which led to an even more memorable moment (Jake's sunglasses coming off revealing the white eyes after he DDTed Brother Love), ran for many months when the company was still huge, was blown off at a Wrestlemania with a new to the WWF gimmick match that had a ton of heat and he thinks nobody remembers it? Really?

[flyonthewall2983]

Not just that, it was angle so nice they did it twice (with Martel and Tatanka two years later).

[goodhelmet]

When we did the show about Jake recently, both Naylor and I forgot about the Jake-Martel feud. Lars Frederiksen had to remind us.

[Bob Morris]

I suspect Dave's remarks have to do with the fact that the blindfold match that concluded the feud wasn't particularly good... that type of match really limits what you can do because you have to get the gimmick over.

 

Also, I wonder if Dave was never a fan of Rick Martel's Model gimmick.

 

But the blindfold match aside, it's definitely one of the better feuds of that era. The majority of the feuds Jake had during that period, in fact, were very good... Rude, Honky, DiBiase, Andre and Martel were all strong feuds that kept Jake going strong. The only feud that didn't really work in that run was the Bad News Brown feud.

[Loss]

Well, Martel was way better as a babyface whose only gimmick was that he was a wrestler, but this feud was still fairly memorable.

[El-P]

I loved the Model gimmick. Martel wasn't given very much opportunity to shine with it, but he also said in his shoot interview that although he loved the gimmick, his mind wasn't focused as much on wrestling at the time, as he was getting into real estate business.

 

Lance Storm on WOL (and the context was, Lance was bitching about poorly written movies) : "Porn is like lucha, it doesn't need too make sense".

[Loss]

The gimmick was fun, and Martel was a good wrestler in it, instead of a great Steamboat-like babyface like he had shown he could be in the past. But the French-Canadian accent really worked well with the gimmick.

 

Martel was very talented. Had he been pushed higher on the card as a singles babyface in the WWF, and had his awesome WCW comeback not been cut short, he'd be way more in the discussion than he currently is.

[tomk]

No one man can come up with the greatest list. There needs to be a consensus among a panel. It's just that simple.

Eh.

I think I'd rather read Maystik's list than a list made by Maystick recruiting 100 like minded wrestlers, historians, and reporters and having them vote.

I like lists, I like list projects.

There are advantages and disadvantages to any strategy of list making.

This is Roger Ebert on list making:

 

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/07/th...e.html#comments

Least interesting type of list is the one based on mass aggregated opinion and ends up just repeating consensus opinion back on itself.

Part of what I like about the current DVDVR 80s project v the 90s one, is that you have essentially a curated exhibit that then is judged (which I think has the power to create consensus opinions instead of merely reflecting back already held ones).

[Dylan Waco]

The gimmick was fun, and Martel was a good wrestler in it, instead of a great Steamboat-like babyface like he had shown he could be in the past. But the French-Canadian accent really worked well with the gimmick.

 

Martel was very talented. Had he been pushed higher on the card as a singles babyface in the WWF, and had his awesome WCW comeback not been cut short, he'd be way more in the discussion than he currently is.

The AWA Set is going to help Martel's rep a lot.

[CodySave]

Interesting thing in today's update:

 

--Kevin Eck of the Baltimore Sun interviewed Jeff Jarrett at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/sports/wrestling/blog/ He talks about TNA house shows, claims TNA is profitable and gave the strangest reason why the Monday Night Wars turned out as they did: "We learned, just like the wrestling fans learned, that the world has changed. Back in the Monday Night Wars, that was before our good little friend called the DVR was around, and you had to flip back and forth. Nowadays the viewing habits are just entirely different and we found that out. The landscape has changed, so we've planted our feet in our ground and we're making it grow, and that's our strategy right now. Had we not tried it, though, we would have never found out."

 

Okay, the part about having to try it I totally get. They had to try. But what does a DVR have to do with anything? Did we not have VCRs in every home since the 80s? And one of the issues was that nobody on Mondays DVR'd Impact to begin with. The landscape changed, but what we found out is there are really not that many TNA fans. About half the TNA TV fans are just WWE fans who will watch another wrestling show on television on Thursday, but there's nothing TNA was able to do to get all but a tiny percentage of them on a Monday.

What does everyone else think? To an extent, I can see certainly see the point Jarrett is trying to make, though there's much more to it than just the use of DVR's

 

From personal experience, I DVR a ton of shows now I wouldn't have ever bothered taping using a VCR during the 90s, but I also don't watch everything I DVR. I think Dave is totally not factoring in how much more convenient a DVR is than a VCR - literally takes a minute to press a few buttons to set a recording compared to popping a tape in and setting the timer up on the VCR, hoping someone else doesn't change the channel while your out.

 

And, really, I think a DVR would have dramatically changed the Monday Night Wars because of how many fans could actually watch both shows in full and not necessarily have to watch either while they aired live instead of having to flip back-and-forth and choose what to watch at which time.

[shoe]

The gimmick was fun, and Martel was a good wrestler in it, instead of a great Steamboat-like babyface like he had shown he could be in the past. But the French-Canadian accent really worked well with the gimmick.

 

Martel was very talented. Had he been pushed higher on the card as a singles babyface in the WWF, and had his awesome WCW comeback not been cut short, he'd be way more in the discussion than he currently is.

The AWA Set is going to help Martel's rep a lot.

 

 

His stuff from Portland is chocked full of great stuff too.

[jdw]

Agree on the DVR comments. You don't even have to individually record things, or track when they air. You can set a series recording, and bam it's recorded even if it changes night.

 

There still would have been flipping if the DVR existed in the old days: people don't like sitting through commercials. But overall ratings (rather than fast overnights) would have been higher if there were DVR's in 1996-2001. The people who watched both shows by "flipping dvr'd the "other" show, and watched it. They've created a new ratings category specifically because people watch stuff later on DVR rather than just watching things live.

 

Dave was an old school vcr taper. It was a natural part of his every day life. A lot of his subs in the 80s were the same way. He projects that a bit onto the mass of Raw/Nitro viewers. The mass of TV viewers were a lot less vcr-ing as the 90s went on. "Taping" has gone way up since the days of Tievo and even moreso with the dvr. Truly a new world.

 

That doesn't mean that Jeffey isn't talking out of his ass. If every WWE viewer was dvr'ing TNA and then watching it in short order, it would be reflected in that new ratings category, and everyone down in TNA-land would be crowing about what a massive turnaround the company has had. Instead, there aren't that many people watching TNA.

 

John

[Log]

If I'd have had a dvr in the 90's, there's no doubt that I would've watched both promotions every week.

 

I do have a dvr now, and I don't watch TNA.

 

People's viewing habits have nothing to do with TNA's numbers. That is, unless you count not watching shitty shows as a viewing habit.