Loss

As we get later in the decade, I'm going to need more help figuring out what's worth keeping and what isn't. Here is what I have for 1998 New Japan. Anything I should add or remove? 01/04/98 - Ultimo Dragon vs Shinjiro Otani 01/04/98 - Naoya Ogawa vs Don Frye 01/04/98 - Riki Choshu Retirement 02/04/98 - Jushin Liger, Kendo Ka Shin & El Samurai vs Shinjiro Otani, Koji Kanemoto & Tatsuhito Takaiwa 02/07/98 - Jushin Liger vs Shinjiro Otani 02/08/98 - Jushin Liger vs Koji Kanemoto 02/15/98 - Naoya Ogawa vs Don Frye 03/06/98 - Jushin Liger & Dr Wagner Jr vs Shinjiro Otani & Koji Kanemoto 04/04/98 - Naoya Ogawa vs Don Frye 04/04/98 - Kensuke Sasaki vs Tatsumi Fujinami (Finish only) 04/14/98 - Jushin Liger & Kendo Ka Shin vs Shinjiro Otani & Tatsuhito Takaiwa 04/14/98 - Genichiro Tenryu & Shiro Koshinaka vs Tatsumi Fujinami & Satoshi Kojima 04/21/98 - Jushin Liger, El Samurai & Kendo Ka Shin vs Shinjiro Otani, Koji Kanemoto & Tatsuhito Takaiwa 05/17/98 - Koji Kanemoto vs Yuji Yasuraoka 05/18/98 - Jushin Liger vs Masakazu Fukuda 05/23/98 - Koji Kanemoto vs Kendo Ka Shin 05/28/98 - Jushin Liger vs Shinjiro Otani 05/31/98 - Shinjiro Otani vs Tatsuhito Takaiwa 06/03/98 - Koji Kanemoto vs Dr. Wagner Jr. 06/05/98 - Jushin Liger, El Samurai, Kendo Ka Shin, Dr. Wagner Jr. & Hayato Nanjyo vs Shinjiro Otani, Koji Kanemoto, Tatsuhito Takaiwa, Kaz Hayashi & Masakazu Fukuda 06/05/98 - Genichiro Tenryu & Shiro Koshinaka vs Masa Chono & Hiroyoshi Tenzan 07/02/98 - El Samurai & Kendo Ka Shin vs Koji Kanemoto & Shinjiro Otani 07/15/98 - Jushin Liger vs Koji Kanemoto 07/31/98 - Genichiro Tenryu vs Keiji Muto 08/01/98 - Satoshi Kojima vs Tadao Yasuda 08/01/98 - Shiro Koshinaka vs Masa Chono 08/01/98 - Genichiro Tenryu vs Shinya Hashimoto 08/02/98 - Shinya Hashimoto vs Satoshi Kojima 08/02/98 - Shinya Hashimoto vs Kazuo Yamazaki 08/08/98 - Shinjiro Otani & Tatsuhito Takaiwa vs Koji Kanemoto & Dr. Wagner 09/10/98 - Jushin Liger vs Great Sasuke 10/18/98 - El Samurai vs Dr. Wagner Jr. 10/18/98 - Genichiro Tenryu & Shiro Koshinaka vs Keiji Muto & Hiroyoshi Tenzan 10/24/98 - Shinjiro Otani & Tatsuhito Takaiwa vs Koji Kanemoto & Kendo Ka Shin 10/24/98 - Jushin Liger vs El Samurai 10/26/98 - Jushin Liger, El Samurai & Dr Wagner Jr vs Shinjiro Otani, Koji Kanemoto & Tatsuhito Takaiwa 10/30/98 - Jushin Liger vs Shinjiro Otani 12/04/98 - Jushin Liger vs Tatsuhito Takaiwa

There are A LOT of juniors matches in '98 New Japan that are pretty highly-rated. How come no one ever really talks about this stuff? Has it been overlooked? Was it overrated? Just curious.

Put in the Company rather than Apter. Bill is just symbolic of them, rather than the guy who did Everything That Was In PWI. We don't know how many of the pics were his. We don't know how much he actually wrote. We don't know how much he worked the phones with the non-New York territories to make sure to get their storylines and pics. We don't know how much he worked on layout. Etc. We're giving Bill credit for things that we have no idea about, simply to have a Face of Wrestling Magazines. Put it this way. If we didn't know who really ran Memphis, would we would be advocating Eddie Marlin in the WON HOF as the promoter/matchmaker of all that great Memphis stuff that everyone creams over. That would be fucked up. But we would do it because if didn't know better. With the London Publications, we simply don't know better. We also aren't likely to know better because (i) it's a dead industry, (ii) the other big guys in the office have long since moved on, and (iii) Bill is a nice guy and no one is going to burst the illusion. John We also don't know what many promoters and bookers in the HOF did in terms of day-to-day operations. For wrestlers who are in on work, we don't know if they called all of the matches that people remember fondly. For wrestlers who are in on drawing power, we haven't interviewed each person in attendance to confirm that the main event is what motivated them to buy a ticket. I don't think a lack of knowledge surrounding his day-to-day job duties are enough reason to say he shouldn't go in. There are probably many people that have played a huge role in the success of companies like WWE and New Japan whose names we will never even know, and that's because the person at the top typically gets the credit. Can anyone confirm Bill Apter's actual job title? It was not on his Wikipedia page. If he was the top-ranking editor at London Publishing, he should get credit for their accomplishments during that time, even if the term "Apter mags" is a colloquialism.

Luger was a businessman, but he got heat for it sometimes too. My favorite story regarding that: In 1991, he was supposed to work the Starrcade in Tokyo show against Riki Choshu. However, he cited a clause he had put in his contract that no one else thought to do, which was that the company could not require him to work outside the U.S. However, if he agreed to work outside the U.S., they would have to reimburse all of his travel expenses, give him a substantial markup on his usual rate, and he would be free to separately negotiate a price with the home promotion, in that case New Japan. That would be IN ADDITION TO what WCW had to pay him. Needless to say, WCW ended up not sending him on the tour. That is so genius that I'm surprised no one else ever thought of it before him.

And back on the subject of the WON HOF, Bill Apter would get my vote for sure. Apter is at least as deserving as Dave Meltzer, and I think Dave is a slam dunk pick for his own HOF.

It may be a money loser, so I'm not so much recommending this as a business proposition as I am something that I personally think would be awesome. But PWI has the most extensive wrestling photo library in the world, and it would be cool if they did a coffee table book of the prime PWI years. I know the magazine is still out there, but something to capture the glory years of the 70s and 80s would be great. I think PWI started in 1979, so 1979-1989 would be great. For The Wrestler, which I think started much earlier, they could go farther back. So yeah, I don't expect it to happen, but it would be great if it did.

I think he was out of touch not necessarily in his ideas, but in who he selected to be the principles of the Invasion angle.

Bret wasn't really put in a position to draw until the company tanked, sadly. For what it's worth, his singles push happened because he was getting more fan mail than anyone in the WWF.

There's a Baba/Pedro match from the 70s that I remember getting some praise at one point.

It's worth also mentioning that this was really the "last hurrah" of the era. Their business plummeted in a big way in the last quarter of the year (after having what I believe was their best quarter ever at the beginning of the year) and didn't really recover until the rise of Steve Austin.

I agree that Davey Boy probably wasn't the key to the show filling Wembley. I think it was a show that drew because it was done in a market where that had never really happened. There was no Hogan-Andre match on this card. People were there for the WWF experience. I intended just to point out that Davey Boy was promoted in a bigger way there than in the U.S.

So before you make your next move ... ... ... ... THINK IT OVER, CREEP.

Davey Boy was definitely a draw in England, and they were building him up in that market long before Summerslam, even giving him a clean pinfall over Flair on a tour earlier in the year.

I hope to eventually do a PDF that's a definitive guide to 1990s pro wrestling (or something else ridiculously grandiose) and will keep that in mind. It would ostensibly also be a guide to watching all of the yearbooks. Anyway, I think that is likely a better platform for multi-media ideas than a DVD, but either way, it will make a nice companion.

My thoughts on the Cornette Guest Booker are here.

Ok, I can accept that. Carry on.

I glance at Raw. Kane and Zach Ryder are teaming. Miz and Daniel Bryan are teaming. I remember why I lost interest. Every angle is forgotten.

I think the 80s Memphis set is the way to go, with the soon-to-be-released 1990 Yearbook as a great companion too.

I don't know enough about the Andersons to say if they are HOF-worthy or not, but what's this I've always read about Mid Atlantic being almost entirely a tag team territory until the mid 70s? What prompted that change, and were the Andersons not drawing on top part of what led to the change? Even through the 80s, tag teams were headliners for Crockett, so what exactly was it like before that change was made? This particular topic has always interested me.

I think we're almost enough removed from the indy boom of the 00s that we can really look at how much of it had to do with Punk, Bryan, Joe and Homicide. Now that those guys aren't around, indy wrestling has really fallen apart. They created enough demand for themselves and worked a full schedule in the immediate aftermath of a WWE monopoly. Whether that's a HOF case or not, I don't know. But it's a positive, and I think we're at the point where we can reflect on it and discuss its impact and significance a little more.

Stephanie McMahon is now eligible.

Yes. Excellent stuff. I've grown to enjoy the breaks between yearbooks just as much as the yearbooks themselves, but maybe one day, I'll get motivated to do this again.

While 7 points is a substantial lead, the gap isn't as wide as I would have expected.

This stuff is hard to talk about sometimes, because the tendency to want to establish absolutes is there. I just caught myself going down that path. How moves look isn't important to me. Except when it is. I don't care about execution. Except when I do. "The opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth" -- Niels Bohr