Dave Meltzer stuff

[KrisZ]

The Killer Karl Kox mega bio in this week's WON is one of those things that makes me glad I still subscribe.

 

Great stuff.

[shoe]

The Killer Karl Kox mega bio in this week's WON is one of those things that makes me glad I still subscribe.

 

Great stuff.

 

That bio was top choice stuff.

[Phil Schneider]

It was really interesting, although Meltzers habit of putting bios weirdly out of chronological order always bugs me. Made me really want to watch some Australian WCW though.

[WrestlingPower]

To revisit an earlier topic and put a different spin on it, I think it may be time for them to start "farming out" coverage of stuff they don't have time to cover themselves. It seems like Bryan is starting to make more use of Alan & Steve Sims for stuff in his newsletter, why can't Dave do the same other than he never has?

 

To follow up on the "group think" talking point from earlier, to me defending their coverage of the highest profile promotions at the expense of everything else just contributes to the problem. They have completely marginalized anything non WWE/UFC/TNA that they almost talk down to those who care about anything else as being followers of something that doesn't matter. Bryan's conversation with Steve Sims a month or so ago really hit this point home as Steve tried to talk about how promotions that are deemed unimportant are having more & more trouble making payroll, etc. to the point that one day the promoters may decide why bother. To me Dave/Bryan are part of the problem here. LOTS of us discovered wrestling we had never seen thru the Observer. Now anyone that doesn't care only about the most visible stuff gets pushed aside and their interests are deemed unimportant & not worthy of anyone's time. How many times have they covered indies but always have the paragraph about them not being able to get above the level they are at? It's no wonder why, they can't get the coverage.

 

I think the time would be right for them to give some balance to indy coverage even if they can't do it themselves to break the trend of the groupthink & keep people on their site instead of going to PWInsider & other sites. I think someone mentioned a long while back that a website of Meltzer & Mike Johnson may have been the best option of all.

[FLIK]

It seems like Bryan is starting to make more use of Alan & Steve Sims for stuff in his newsletter, why can't Dave do the same other than he never has?

Don't get what the point of that would be, are there really that many ppl reading the Observer newsletter that would actually care about what Alan says about Indy Wrestling or Sims says about Lucha but aren't allready listing to their weekly radio aperances or reading what they write elsewhear?

[rovert]

Both of them refusing to watch something a computer in 2011 is getting increasingly annoying. Bryan more or less refuses to watch anything semi-regular he cant get to play on his big TV downstairs in HD!

 

Just remember Bryan reviewing World of Hurt and HBK's hunting show is as important as Dave reviewing AJPW in the 90s. lol

[sek69]

I wonder if anyone ever asked Bryan if he seriously would have gave two shits about World of Hurt if Lance wasn't a regular guest on his show. I mean, this is the same guy who makes it sound like it's a huge fucking imposition on his time to watch Smackdown every week (despite the fact he usually ends up liking the show). The idea that he wants us to believe he would have willingly watch a show full of geeks learning how to wrestle is just hilarious.

[Matt D]

Meltzer's bios are so informative but at the same time they're structurally maddening. He goes in circles with them, usually getting to where the proper chronological beginning would be about half way through.

[rovert]

Has anyone ever talked Football with Dave?

 

Someone on F4W made a somewhat trollish thread of "What Would Dave be Doing if Wrestling & MMA didn't Exist?" his response:

 

I'd be an NFL writer.

Is he just being logical/realistic just going where the money is or is he a fan? As I cant think that there is any money stateside in Soccer which he covered early on.

[Sean Liska]

Didn't he used to cover Cowboys games?

[jdw]

Journalism degree (from the same school my dad got one way back in 1960). Planned on being a sports writer, and those were his jobs before the WON became successful enough to be a fulltime job.

 

I don't recall Dave being a massive football or NFL fan when we were close. But it's safe to say that whatever sport he covered would have been one he obsessed over like he did pro wrestling and later MMA.

 

NFL jobs in NFL cities (such as the bay area where he clearly wanted to live) are rather prized gigs at major papers in the 80s. You don't just walk into the major papers in the Bay out of school and get a job covering the 49ers (since the Raiders were in Los Angeles from 1982-94). There were a number of smaller papers in those days, as even now we still have the Pasadena Star News and San Gabriel Vally Tribune here locally. Their sports coverage of the major sports never struck me as much, and instead they focused a good deal on high schools and the JC (Pasadena City College). I tend to think sports writers for those smaller papers end up being jack of all trades rather than narrowly focused.

 

Dave's pretty focused and driven. One could see him putting in time being a sports grunt in a major paper in the hopes of eventually moving up. But the 80s were also an era where sports writers stuck around forever. Not a massive amount of upward mobility. And again, NFL was a prized job, especially in the Bay when the Walsh Era was taking off.

 

Far more likely that after putting in time doing grunt work supporting coverage of all sorts of sports that Dave would have found an opening for some lower level sport, grabbed it for (i) moving up and (ii) security, and then become obsessed with every aspect of it and become the Dave of that sport.

 

Think along the lines of covering Stanford or Cal Football/Hoops, or the Warriors. He actually was more conversational about 70s baseball than football when we talked, and baseball has a long season with lots of games to cover... so getting on the A's beat would have been a possibility (since the Giants beat was the more desired one on the Bay). But even that gig is something that local writers would want: you get several hundred bylines a year, regular assignments, travel, the perks of the park, etc. Pretty decent gig.

 

I think he tosses out the NFL because it's the King of Sports and he probably thinks he would have gravitated towards it. But given his desire to be long term in the Bay Area, it would have been a tough gig to get. And again, we all know that when Dave tosses himself at something, he tends to go pretty hog wild on it. He would have found his "thing" long before a decent NFL slot opened for him, and once he found that thing, he would have devoured it (and it would have devoured him).

 

John

[Phil Schneider]

He isn't a good writer, I can't imagine any real journalist covering a real sport getting away with the kind of mangled nonsense in the Observer weekly

[Ricky Jackson]

I think a lot of "good" writers would be pretty tough to read without a consistent editor, which Dave apparently lacks.

[jdw]

I suspect that he would have learned before moving up into covering a beat. It would have been hammered home into him. His rambling nature would have been beaten out of him as well. Also worth remembering: he did write for papers, and no doubt did sports for his college paper as well as part of getting his degree. He had experiance cutting stuff down to fit. On his own, writing his own newsletter, he can do whatever he wants. He's gotten looser over time as he's moved away from worrying about space limitations. I think if you go back to his territorial sections in the 80s you can see him craming a lit of little things into a short space. I suspect his PPV write ups in say 1991 were shorter than they've become. The long intros have always been there, and depending on how newsworthy the show was, or how annoyed/happy he was about them, he could go longer. But he probably got in and out quicker.

 

Another good area to look at would be his old pieces in The National. All of them were newspaper column length, short, in and out but reasonablly inforative for a newspaper column.

 

I wouldn't hold up his writing in the WON as the type of writer he would be doing sports, at least not for the early part of his career. Also... sports doesn't really lend itself to those long pieces you'd see in Vanity Fair or the New Yorker where you can really stretch out in writing something at length. There are only a handful of those around, usually the long non-news "feature" piece in Sports Illustrated. You don't into the rotation of that writing assignment for ages.

 

I don't have any doubt that he would have had a career in the newspaper business. Especially in the 80s when there were a heck of a lot more papers. NFL reporter... that's a tougher gigs, especially at one of the papers of note.

 

It also would have been interesting to see how he responded to the current death of the newspaper business. He's not been up on, let alone ahead of, the changes in technology over the years. As sports reporting moved to TV and guys like Mort, Clayton and Gammons headed early into establishing themselves on TV, does anyone thing that Dave would be at the front end of that? Then with the net coming along and putting the final set of nails into both the newspaper business by also the magazine business, ahead or behind there?

 

I suspect that there were a lot of people who had the same level of "sources" that Mort and Gammons had when they first crossed into TV. I know Gammons' legend long before ESPN, having read in him in SI and TSN. But a ton of his sources were stuff passed along by the Red Sox front office and the same type of sources that all sorts of guys had. Out here in LA, Ross Newhan had the same level of sources... half the stuff we'd read before it showed up the next week in a Gammons piece nationally. Where Gammons and Mort were smart was knowing when to get into TV and have their network push them as "experts" to an even bigger national audience. Every major city had a Mort and Gammons... but only a handful of them out of that generation made it big on TV.

 

Dave? That would likely have passed him by.

 

John

[Al]

He isn't a good writer, I can't imagine any real journalist covering a real sport getting away with the kind of mangled nonsense in the Observer weekly

Ever read Bill Plaschke?

[shawmic]

Follow-up on the 1/2/12 videos.

 

Mike Johnson said today he's 100% certain (confirmed by his WWE sources) it's for Chris Jericho and it'll be Jericho vs Punk at WrestleMania for the title. One thing he did mention that makes a lot of sense is they are blowing through all of Punk's challengers now (Del Rio, Miz, Ziggler) and are clearly not saving any of them for WM which has to mean someone new is coming in for the WM match.

 

But Dave said today on Observer radio "at last word" the videos are for Undertaker and Bryan agreed. They sure didn't seem confident though.

 

Only one of them will be right but I'm betting against Dave on this one and I'm pretty certain neither he nor Bryan will admit they were wrong. They changed their mind! It was a swerve!

[sek69]

The odd thing is that they were pretty intent on Rock-Cena being for the title (Cena mentioned it again on RAW last night), and apparently that's no longer the plan per this news?

[kjh]

Only one of them will be right but I'm betting against Dave on this one and I'm pretty certain neither he nor Bryan will admit they were wrong.

That's what happens when you're too close to a source. Remember the time when Dave insisted that Batista vs. Booker was a work at the time that it happened?

[jdw]

Someone should start a pool for when Dave says its Jericho. A bonus on whether he admits others had it right.

 

John

[Loss]

In the latest WON, the FIRST ONE after that long report:

 

The Jan. 2 Raw taping in Memphis, which is expected to be the return of Undertaker (or Jericho or whoever the secret person is), is promoting a Lawler vs. Cole street fight.

[jdw]

That would be the one from last week? Then today on WO-Radio he says it's Taker?

 

My head is hurting...

 

John

[KrisZ]

Like I said on DVDVR, Mike has surpassed Dave as the go to guy for inside WWE news.

[Ditch]

Like with Rock vs Hogan, why the heck would it be worth putting the title in there when it won't add to the match? Whereas, having a title match between two other guys gives you three solid main events. Four if there's a seperate Taker match.

[Al]

Normally you'd want it to be a title match, but with Rock being a special attraction you don't want to put yourself in the corner where he can't go over because he can't drop the belt later.

[shawmic]

Someone posted Mike Johnson's article saying it was Jericho on the WO board. Alvarez replied:

 

"For whatever it's worth, more and more people who I talk to are saying they believe it's Jericho.

 

My guess is that the way they are designed, if Jericho falls through they can use the same promos for Undertaker and just say that was the plan all along."