ohtani's jacket

I assume Dave is basing that on something like television ratings, which again isn't a straight apples and oranges comparison with the US.

I doubt very much that Chigusa was as popular as Hogan.

More like a few thousand every year. So what do you think a better analogy would be? I don't think there's any easy analogy. Chigusa was primarily seen as an athlete. In the mid-80s, the only Japanese female athletes with any sort of profile were (I'm guessing) the women's volleyball team, gymnasts and figure skaters, but none of them had their own weekly TV show where they were part actress, part idol, part athlete. I think if you're going to compare her success with someone from the US you might as well compare her to other wrestlers not a singer or an actress.

I find it more annoying when Gorilla criticises a guy like Tito for having the wrong temperament or when he brings up one of his talking points like having a second ref on the outside, but I kind of doubt that people paid much attention to Gorilla's commentary at the time.

One big rumour around the Internet back then was that it was supposed to be Jake Roberts. He was also supposed to show up in WCW as part as Raven vs DDP angle the year before. Yeah, we were all about Jake Roberts in the late 90's. Ted Dibiase was another of the rumours. I think Al Issacs had the scoop on it being Yokozuna as well.

He came in at 18 in a 2007 poll of the most influential people in history. http://www.japanprobe.com/2007/04/01/histo...-edition-video/ I'm sorry but that's just silly. 100 most influential heroes? So many is a few dozen at the most. Probably hundreds more if you count try outs, but unless there were a bunch of short haired teenage girls wandering around wearing suits with giant shoulder pads I don't think she influenced fashion to any great degree. There were short haired sporty types before Chigusa.

I can't really speak for Mexico, but Rikidozan is not one of the top 20 or so most iconic figures in Japanese history. Perhaps of his era, but certainly not in history. How do we know that Chigusa had a big lifestyle and fashion influence on teenage girls? That's even flakier than Dave walking into some shop in Tokyo, only recognising Chigusa among the dozens of other stars and thinking she was the Madonna of Japan. It's easy to exaggerate things when there's a language barrier and a lack of information. Chigusa Nagayo's English wikipedia page, for example, says the Crush Girls had several top 10 hits, but I checked the Japanese charts and no single by either the Crush Girls or Nagayo was in the top 50 selling singles from 1986-89.

If there was a female entertainer who was bigger than Chigusa then I don't see how the Madonna analogy works. Think about it the other way round, if someone said Hogan was the most popular athlete in America during the 1980s or that he was as big as Michael Jackson would you agree with that? First he says Chigusa was on the same level as a Pro Bowl quarterback, then he says Madonna, now he's saying Miley Cyrus. The strange thing is he's ignoring that the Crush Girls were an idol pair, even if Chigusa was the more popular of the two. The 80s was the so-called golden age of Japanese idols. They used to produce 40 to 50 a year, most of them disappearing in short order. Chigusa had amazing success, but she wasn't the biggest idol in the business.

Japan had its own Madonna at the time, Akina Nakamori. I think it's a case of Dave not knowing that much about Japan culturally.

Uh, no. Don't agree with the Madonna analogy either.

Who booked the TV from the Tyson angle to SummerSlam '98? I guess we'll see how it holds up on the yearbook, but it was enjoyable at the time.

When did WWF get on UK tv? I thought it wasn't until the late 80's or so, but Dave was talking about it on Observer Radio like it coincided with Daddy no longer being a draw and the local promotions falling off, which I thought happened much earlier than that. They started showing WWF in 1987 during the shared wrestling timeslot. WCW first began being shown in 1990 regionally and 1991 nationally.

I'm thinking about it from the point of view of ticket prices.

Are we supposed to infer that drawing 10,000 in Mexico or Puerto Rico is the same as drawing 10,000 in Japan or the States?

Daddy's role in killing wrestling in Britain is overstated. Joint Promotions were struggling before the short term boost they got from Daddy. It wasn't as though Daddy killed the golden goose. As much as I love 70s WoS a lot of it is guys in their 50s who were 1960s television stars. They weren't doing great business pre-Daddy. Besides which, every territory died a similar death, what makes Britain so special?

There are a lot of older fans floating about on the various British wrestling sites as well as quite a few of the workers. Being universally despised is probably why he'll never be voted in, dunno if it's a criteria for not voting him in. I just want Dave to take Europe more seriously.

Dave has clearly read John Lister's stuff (along with other British historians, presumably.) He should know that Joint Promotions made their money running upwards of 40 shows a week and that the wrestlers never got a big cut of the gate or the TV money. The way the territory worked (or the "territories" to be more accurate) was that workly nightly at the local clubs paid more than a day job and working for Joint Promotions paid more than the clubs, but of course there was more money to made overseas. That's hardly surprising. Ignoring the rising inflation and unemployment at the end of the 70s that gave rise to Thatcherism, it's common sense to anyone with an inkling of knowledge about the UK that there's more money to be made in the States in just about any pursuit bar football and that continues until this very day. It's like arguing why British actors try to make it in Hollywood or why British singers try to crack the American market. Besides, before the lighter weight wrestlers started leaving for North America and Japan a lot of the heavyweights would do the South Africa/Japan/Germany/India tours and only appear on British television a couple of times a year. That strikes me as no different from guys who would move around the North American territories, no? There were some bigger venues in the UK than just 400 seat town halls. The Royal Albert Hall filled 5,500 and there were some other bigger venues such as the Tooting Granada cinema, the Nottingham and Paisley Ice Rinks, Kelvin Hall in Glasgow, Belle Vue in Manchester and St.James Hall in Newcastle. If you check these venues it wasn't just wrestling that played at these buildings but Sinatra and everybody else. England, like the rest of the world in the 50s, 60s and 70s, didn't have huge indoors arenas like the United States of America. Football grounds were occasionally used in British wrestling history, but weren't very weather friendly. Japanese promotions used similar sized venues throughout the country in the same time frame, but Dave seems to ignore that because the pay-offs were better and more stars travelled there. He seems confused by the notion that there wasn't one big arena in London where most of the shows took place as with the larger American territories. What's the difference between London and Tokyo? Nobody was basing themselves out of Sumo Hall or Budokan in the 50s-70s. And as for Mexico, how much was the peso worth to the sterling pound? Mexico works on the sheer basis of volume and has had its up and down drawing periods. EMLL was not a big drawing promotion in the 80s, was it not a major company? And it wasn't exactly a magnet for foreign stars, no moreso than anywhere else. The deal with Big Daddy is that business was bad for Joint Promotions for much of the 70s. Daddy gave them a short boost in popularity in the late 70s but it petered out by around '81. After that, things went into an irreversible decline as far as the TV era was concerned. The workers started leaving for Brian Dixon's promotion from around the period that Joint Promotions got a five year renewal on their ITV deal and continued their monopoly. That was actually more relevant than workers going overseas because guys leaving for abroad had always been the case even if it was for months at a time. If we consider Daddy a fad, you have to look at the short drawing period he had around '78-80 or however long it was, which is comparable to other fads like the Beauty Pair, Tiger Mask, Crush Girls, etc. I don't really care for Daddy as a candidate, but Dave is stupid to crap on England as a territory.

It's pretty clear that Dave doesn't know much about England or what it was like during the late 70s-early 80s both socially and economically. He doesn't seem to understand how the territory worked at all and his whole argument is based on the period after Big Daddy drew not the few years when things were going gangbusters (for the promoters, not the workers.) His business model argument is ridiculous considering the venue size for the high paying Baba jobs. Japanese business from the same era must have been shit by Dave's standards.

I thought Dave didn't have a whole lot of knowledge about the territory? I don't see Big Daddy as a Hall of Famer but he sure has a lot to say about a territory he doesn't know much about.

What the fuck would Bryan Alvarez know about Big Daddy? They should get John Lister or someone on the show.

As far as I'm aware, Dandy had strong drawing periods such as other Herrera favourites such as Atlantis and Satanico, but wasn't a week-to-week draw like Konnan. My argument against Dandy would be similar to Jim Breaks in that we know that they're both all-time great performers within their countries and perhaps more successful than not as draws, but there's so many other guys from both countries that should go in before them that it opens up a whole can of worms over how poorly Mexico and now Europe are handled. Historically, I think there are a bunch of earlier figures that need to go in before you get to Dandy. I don't know who the Joshi comp to Dandy is, but I don't know that I'd vote for him before Karloff Lagarde, Huracan Ramirez, Dr. Wagner Sr. and Villano III for workers who are already on the ballot. Sims seems to follow the current product judging by the podcasts I've listened to.

I don't think Dandy's case as a draw is particularly strong. He may have headlined a couple of well drawing shows, but you'd have to look at the period after Paco sided with Herrera to see whether Dandy really drew without Pena. The 1992 Anniversary Show, for example, where they ran a Satanico/Dandy hair match for the third year running was seen as a failure at the gate though it may not have been Dandy's fault.

They could have cut to commercial, but I don't think they should have stopped the match and had the wrestlers and crowd stand around watching Lawler. Better to divert or distract the audience's attention so the medical staff can do their job. Don't see how encouraging onlookers helps.

The game where Hughes died was played out in silence. There are countless examples of an event continuing after a death from the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix where Ayrton Senna died (which was raced after Roland Ratzenberger died in qualifying) to the 1984 variety show where Welsh comedian Tommy Cooper died on stage. Right or wrong it happens. "The show must go on" originally comes from the circus not the theatre and there is an example here of the show continuing after a circus death: http://articles.cnn.com/2004-05-23/us/circ...swoman?_s=PM:US I'm sure Vince had all sorts of bullshit reasons for continuing with the show, but how wrestling is being dressed up as being worse than the rest is beyond me.

So if Marv Albert dropped dead during the NBA playoffs the show would go on? You can't have it both ways. Seeing as the post you quoted just outlined how they aren't comparable situations I'm not sure why you're accusing me of trying to "have it both ways." It's not like I'm saying it would be cool if ROH did it because they're scrappy underdogs who have a duty to deliver pure wrestling every night just to get that dollar or whatever. I mean, you at least agree with me that actual sports would have a different set of considerations owing to being anchored to greater economic stakes and perpendicular real world schedules than a fake weekly wrestling show, right? I'm sure that actual sports would have a different set of considerations, but the basic dilemma is the same. It doesn't change just because WWE is a fake wrestling TV show.