Shouldn't mastery of a crowd be considered separately for territory bookers and national bookers? A territory booker had a much narrower range of crowds to book to. Vince Sr. mastered Boston to DC, Bill Watts mastered Louisiana and Texas... both of which are relatively homogenous when compared with booking for national crowds. Vince Jr, Crockett/Dusty, and Bischoff had a much higher degree of difficulty. As has been noted in this thread, Crockett/Dusty really struggled when expanding out of their base, while Vince Jr. did much better.

Shouldn't mastery of a crowd be considered separately for territory bookers and national bookers? A territory booker had a much narrower range of crowds to book to. Vince Sr. mastered Boston to DC, Bill Watts mastered Louisiana and Texas... both of which are relatively homogenous when compared with booking for national crowds. Vince Jr, Crockett/Dusty, and Bischoff had a much higher degree of difficulty. As has been noted in this thread, Crockett/Dusty really struggled when expanding out of their base, while Vince Jr. did much better.

 

I'd tend to want to say that on a national or even international level, the bigger the audience the more it becomes a matter of demographics.

 

Vince was exceptional when booking for kids (80s), got better with time when booking for teenagers (90s), but generally hasn't been as good booking for "everyone" (past decade or so) and not at all good booking for hardcores (again past decade or so).

 

JCP generally swung for an older crowd with more hardcores in it, but with that came more dickery.

 

Probably the best attempt to book for the hardcores came during the Kip Frey / Dusty era in early 92 WCW, where the quality of matches was sky high. Fantastic crowds on 92 cards. Trouble is that it wasn't getting over with a wider audience than the hardcores. If you look at the gates, even though business was declining WWF still drew 62,000 for Wrestlemania and 17,000 for the Rumble, and then drew 80,000 in London. He did it through appealing to kids. WCW was drawing 5,000-6,000 on amazing cards like Superbrawl 2, Wrestlewar and Beach Blast because they were only appealing to hardcores.

 

For whatever reason though, the crowds in WCW 92 seem much better behaved than the crowds in Crockett 86-9. It might be because Dusty wasn't booking himself. Or it might be because he was on a tighter leash under Turner. Or that there were just more dicks in the crowds (see also Sorrow, Johnny).

The '80s were a time when people in the states really became conscious of crowd control. Sports teams were conscious of drunken louts spoiling things for families, they started controlling alcohol consumption, early intervention, etc. I'm sure that filtered down to smaller arenas by the early '90s.