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A very interesting reminder of the pro-wrestling connection in the MMA media
By Zach Arnold | July 14, 2010
I recently saw the archive for the May 3, 1993 Observer and as if I needed a reminder of just how many people from the pro-wrestling world came over into MMA over the last two decades, I got it in the form of two reader letters Dave Meltzer received and published.
We should have known. Continuing the tradition of the infamous Nassau Coliseum shows, Dusty and company managed to completely discredit themselves in front of a large crowd of wrestling-hungry fans. Nobody believed or accepted the reason for Flair’s absence. The major crowd chants were “We Want Flair” and “Refund.” Needless to say, no signs were posted and no refunds were offered. Flair should have been here in town the last few days doing promotional work. Instead, the WCW marketing geniuses omitted any mention of the card on the previous Saturday’s World Wide show, and instead played scatter-shot ads on TV and radio tennis shows. What they did overall was a disaster. The match with the most heat, Chris Benoit vs. Ron Simmons, was cut short by a stupid ruling. This gave us plenty of time for Vinnie Vegas and Van Hammer. Do the bookers really hate the fans that much or are they just completely insane? The fans popped for Too Cold Scorpio but he did almost no flying, including not doing his finishing move which was voted the best move in wrestling in 1992. There were the usual assortment of Dusty DQ finishes along with a couple of clean pins and one submission. Most matches sucked, with only four of the nine matches two stars or better and nothing better than three stars.
Eddie Goldman
New York, New YorkI went from Boston to New York to see WCW’s debacle at the Paramount. Needless to say, I’m fairly disappointed. Is any thought at all being put into the booking? Whose brainstorm was it to use Chris Benoit in a 45 second match and follow it up with Vinnie Vegas vs. Van Hammer for what seemed like an eternity? The sad thing is WCW will look at the decent gate and call the night a success, probably not realizing that they’ve killed themselves in yet another market. Ted Turner, if you’re listening, please let WCW die.
David Doyle
Braintree, Massachusetts
Yes, that is our Eddie Goldman, the one that we all know. Eddie was a fan for many years of wrestling but was turned off by it in the mid-90s and he was really one of the true pioneers of MMA writing. In a sense, he was ahead of his time. A lot of people crack on him for saying “the fake professional wrestling” but in hindsight, the conclusion he came to back then is one that we’re seeing a lot of people come to now.
As for Dave Doyle, that Dave Doyle turned out to be a sports editor for Fox Sports (the dot com) and then became the boxing/MMA editor for Yahoo Sports… where Dave (Meltzer) works now. It’s a small world.
Ariel Helwani also was a lifelong fan of wrestling, but he admitted that he soured on the business when he was backstage at a TNA show a couple of years ago (due to being with Spike) and watched grown men in costumes live out their gimmicks and watched someone like Kurt Angle struggle with all the injuries he’s been through.
Oliver Copp, who has done work for the UFC in Germany, is of course a huge wrestling supporter.
The truth is that for a lot of people covering MMA, they admit that they are/were wrestling fans or are closet fans. What does ‘a lot’ constitute? I’d have to say at least half. At least.
The big question I wonder is if the supporters that pro-wrestling has lost over the years will ever support the industry again.
As for my experience and background, most people know my story. I had the unique opportunity to watch the rise of the UWF and then Pancrase as a teenager while at the same time watching what was happening with UFC and then the Monday Night Wars, but my wrestling knowledge was never limited to just those time frames. I grew up as a kid watching a lot of the territories and still have a lot of that footage. It’s amazing to look at the climate 30 years ago in both Japan & America and see what the transformation has looked like.
Topics: Media, MMA, Pro-Wrestling, Zach Arnold | 28 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
I’ll never forget the time-limit draw between Eddie Goldman and Fritz von Erich in Dallas at the Sportatorium in ’72. For 60 minutes they battled. Eddie was the perfect heel.
Millions and millions of people from all walks of life were pro wrestling fans in the 1990s and are no longer so.
I notice a lot of the writers tend to have been super hardcore Pro Wrestling fans, and they use a lot of the terminology from that. Like Mike Fagan whining that Carwin is a “80’s Babyface”
I don’t see it nearly as much with the fans
I fear that within a month we will see a headline on this site pondering the efficacy of the Pedigree and Tombstone in mma.
I know you get your jollies acting snobbish to people who dare enjoy(ed) pro wrestling and MMA at the same time. But realize that if it weren’t for those mouthbreathing manchildren who had a forum with fake pro wrasslin’ to talk about MMA when nobody else wanted to in the “dark ages” like Dave Meltzer, Dave Doyle, Wade Keller, Eddie Goldman, and Zach Arnold among others, you may not have a sport to be uppity about. Because every single one of those guys had more site visitors, subscribers and/or listeners than any MMA writers at the time. So show some respect.
Oh, make no mistake about it, I was a huge pro wrestling fan, and I was a mma fan and a pro wrestling fan at the same time back when UFC was only obtainable at Blockbuster and WWF was very popular in pop culture. I used to go to Zach’s puroresupower website to see updates about Japanese mma back in the day. I just think it is funny that this website was created to give mma it’s own website apart from the pro wrestling talk, and recently this board has become entirely inundated with stories about Batista and Stone Cold and Paul Heyman and how intertwined the two entities (mma and rasslin) are. It is like Zach is going out of his way to prove that pro wrestling wasn’t a waste of time via showing how it relates to mma.
Blame all of that on the fact that Zach closed down Puroresu Power.
Meh, I like the pro wrestling talk in relation to the MMA business. It’s interesting.
If you think Batista is somehow interesting for me to talk about, think again. I really don’t have much interest in seeing him at all in MMA, period.
Same with Paul Heyman. He’s an interesting promo and everyone gives him media time, so yeah I’ll summarize what he has to say. Austin the same way. These are people that fans pay attention to.
But if you think I cover Batista, Heyman, and Austin because of some need to justify pro-wrestling support, you’re off-base there. I’d be happy to cover anything non-wrestling related in MMA if there is volume of it.
*shrugs*
All the above named guys interpret MMA (and sports in general, when they expound upon such things) through the prism of pro wrestling because it is what they know, and their followers are willing to go along with them on that ride and follow the same conclusions drawn. You see that strongly in the promotion first thinking – the fighters are secondary to internet MMA fans, who couldn’t care less as to who is competing so long as they put on the shoot equivalent of 5 snowflake matches. That leads to everything else that you see repeated ad nauseum – the need for territorylike feeder leagues, demanding crap promotions have valuable and important belts, “building talent”, “creating narratives”, and all the other recurrent themes of MMA bloggin’.
For a large number of people, these arguments are self truths and do not require argument. Ask someone to explain what part of the “Strikeforce narrative” (back when Strikeforce supposedly did such things) was served by Von Flue/Cung Le headlining an arena show, and you’ll probably get blank stares unable to compute an answer. And yet generation of a consistent promotion wide storyline under the guise of an independent MMA universe is a regular and consistent argument pressed everywhere from Herb to Arnold.
I’ve read several of Goldman’s letters in Observer back issues. It is hilarious that the same exact stuff he says about Dana White being the AntiChrist today he was saying about Vince McMahon in 1992. So I take it the man has some kind of weird complex about powerful people in their industry. Having that psychoanalyzed might be interesting because the man clearly has some issues to be 60 years old and still acting worse than a trolling teenager on Sherdog.
Psychoanalyzed? Bring out the pop psychology why don’t you.
Goldman is an old 60’s era leftist, a Socialist and, his views on powerful people are tied to his beliefs. Nothing weird about it. Vince MacMahon is one weird guy, based on his interviews. More than driven, ruthless even.
Dana White just cusses a lot. He does work most of his fighter, it seems and, Goldman is opposed to such things.
Or it could just be that both Dana White and Vince McMahon are total cocks.
Not really. They are just really driven people.
George Steinbrenner died yesterday. He was hated by many. But the years leading up to his death, he was loved by fans. Why? Because at the end of the day he did everything he could to field the best team possible. And fans love that.
The same drive that George had…. You see it in guys like McMahon and White. It’s a specific kind of personality they all have. The only flaw in that personality is that you can’t cross them.
I was watching the YES Network they had a few specials they ran on him. A lot of the stuff people were saying about George is exactly what people are saying about White. But one thing people constantly talked about with George is that he was extremely loyal to the people who were loyal to him.
White is the same way. White has been extremely loyal to the fighters who got him to the big stage. Liddell, Hughes, Griffin, & Bonnar are perfect examples. So I would hardly call him names…..
Is White difficult to deal with? He seems so once in a while. But would you really want anybody else running the sport of MMA? Not really!!!! For all of White’s faults, he isn’t corrupt and he keeps the fighters in their place. What he has done is extremely underappreciated by his own fanbase. Someday people will realize that if White wasn’t in charge, the entire sport of MMA would look like Strikeforce…. Which is the nuts running the entire joint…. And I am positive that would be much worse.
Lots of people were also perfectly OK with seeing Steinbrenner head off into the night. Honestly, the guy was once banned for life from baseball. If that’s what we’re using as a yard stick for what we want out of MMA promoters, that’s pretty sad.
LOL no shit. Both Vinnie Mac & BLAF are total bullies. Good for them for doing what they like and getting rich in the process but when it comes to people I respect, I definitely value different things. Dana’s persona over the last handful of years is laughable to those who followed the sport pre-TUF.
You must be living in a New York bubble if you think people all liked Steinbrenner even at the end of his life. If you were a fan of another baseball team, you hated how he was able to get away with the unfair money advantage over other teams to buy seemingly any player he wanted. Of course it’s all fair in love & capitalism, but people still despised him for it. And he didn’t help matters any by doing Dana’s favorite hobby of ranting and raving without a filter in the media against anybody who crossed him: be it rivals, employees, former employees, or assorted other enemies.
When you’re a fan of someone, be it Steinbrenner, White or McMahon, it’s great to live vicariously through their “drunk on their ego” demeanors and arrogant interviews. But the majority of the world’s population absolutely despise “sore winners” like those three. Be it actions like Steinbrenner humiliating Joe Torre while he publicly fired him, McMahon erasing beloved figures from history on a whim, or White jacking himself off in the press gloating about interfering in deals with people he doesn’t like.
“The match with the most heat, Chris Benoit vs. Ron Simmons, was cut short by a stupid ruling.”
I sure hope that someone helped Eddie sort out that the whole thing, ruling included, was fixed.
“The fans popped for Too Cold Scorpio but he did almost no flying…”
Boy, Goldman really got into it.
… on to searching what in the world 2 cold scorpio’s signature move was.
Best wrestler’ of all time(or my favorite):
10. Ray Mysterio JR.(SP?), Juventud Guerrero, Kidman, The great Muta(Sp?)
9. HHH
8. Jeff Hardy
7. Goldberg
6. Scott Hall
5. Scott Steiner(pre 90 inch arms)
4. Lex Luger
3. HBK
1a. The Rock
1b. STING
Who thought UWFI was a ‘shoot’ when they first saw it? I knew non pro-wrestling fans who would tell me they loved ‘Bushido’ as it was real. One guy I work with was shocked when I told him that UWFI he loved so much when he was younger was actually a work. Ruined it for him lol.
UWF-i did a fantastic job of convincing lots of people they were legit. If you had nothing to compare it to, it was very convincing since it certainly did not look like Puro or certainly American pro wrestling. And they had some of the most respected pro wrestling shooters ever in Lou Thesz, Karl Gotch and Billy Robinson working for them, so yes, lots of people got worked.
You’re absolutely right, especially with the referances to Thesz, Gotch & Robinson.
All three were some of the best *PRO* wrestlers,but that is because thier performances stood out because they had legit wrestling/shoot credentials,…no suprise that they could make the “fake” stuff look so good. They were the real deal, athletically & technically.
And having Jeff Blatnick as the color man on the UWFI’s “Shoot Wrestling” U.S. PPVs and him saying “you won’t see alot of the nonsense that goes on in other profesional wrestling…” also helped make it look credible.
But its legacy when it finally came out it was worked made lots of people distrust anything coming out of Japan, especially Pancrase. And lots of stuff in the early days of PRIDE (which some of it really was worked, like most famously Takada-Coleman) everything got debated if it was real online. Lots of people believed Sakuraba fights were too good to be true and furiously debated, given the fact that he was a UWF guy, if he was on the up and up or not.
Is there any proff out there that Coleman threw the fight with Takada?
He’s repeatedly stated that he “did what he had to do” in that fight.
Wow, never seen those interviews. You learn something new everyday.
Hey Z Man,
Is Eddie Goldman, Eddie Ellner of Pro Wrestling Illustrated fame?
I liked wrestling back in the Mean Gene days.
It used to come on after Saturday Night Live.
With the Iron Shiek, Sgt. Slaughter and Roddy Piper.
I even remember Cindy lauper and Captain Lou Albano.
I think it was right around the first wrestlemania that I started to like girls and I’ve never understood or been able to watch pro-wrestling again since then.
Of course we all thought it was all real back then. And the way I understand it the appeal is different now as more of a storyline driven “soap opera” or comic book I guess.
But comics, even as directionless and repetitive as they can be these days, still seem to me a more satisfying and even more genuinely dramatic medium if thats what I’m looking for.
I really just dont get it I guess.