Dr. Darin Davis

On Saturday Jan 8th 2011, I helped out as a referee at the MIW show in Chanhassen, MN. Luckily, I got to work the main event of the night (actually, it was a request, not luck, but I felt privileged that they wanted me for their match).

The main event that night was Brody Hoofer vs. “Playboy” Pete Huge, with the stipulation that the loser had to leave MIW (and presumably wrestling).The event ended up selling out at the American Legion, with more than a dozen fans being turned away due to the inability to squeeze anyone else into the room (a.k.a. fire code).

Back in 1998, when I was still in the Eddie Sharkey/Terry Fox wrestling training camp near Minneapolis, MN (see Part 1, Part2, and Part 3), two of our new trainees were Pete and Hoofer (I think Pete started first, but I don’t know what the gap was between them). They ended up being ready for a card in the bright lights, small city of Spooner, WI around the same time, so they had their first match against each other there in Feb 1999. At the time, I think Pete was going by the ring name Damien Navarro, and Hoofer was Big Daddy Hoofer. I was on the card also, probably against the Mighty Angus, and I’m almost certain I witnessed their first match. After a twelve year feud, I may have also seen their last match.

At the end of a great contest that included some of the moves and counter-moves used in their very first match, with the crowd exhausted and getting more than their money’s worth, with a long string of false finishes behind them, Pete was victorious and Hoofer was forced to leave the world of professional wrestling.

Although he didn’t get the win, he got the girl (Pete’s valet Allison Wonderland), and he got even more respect than he already had. Besides the great reputation he has built over the years with his fellow trainees and his many opponents, tag team partners, and friends, and he has also earned the respect of many of this industry’s greatest veterans like Honky Tonk Man, “Wild” Bill Irwin, and Road Warrior Animal, just to name a few.

It’s the end of one road, and the start of another. Good luck to Hoofer in whatever dangerous hobby he decides to pursue next. I’m just happy I got to participate in both the beginning, and in the end, of Hoofer’s career in professional wrestling.

At the start of each year, I put together a post of what I felt my best articles were for the previous year. The year 2009 was a pretty good, with quite a few items to select from for the “best of the year” list. The year 2010? Not so much.

Between work and other things (mostly work), I haven’t done a lot of writing on here, and what I have done was not exactly the type I set out to do. Yes, this is a wrestling site and I wrote about wrestling, but the best thing I could do is share personal stories about my time as a pro wrestler that you won’t hear from any of the traditional wrestling sources.

I will try to do a better job sharing more of these stories in the coming year.

—–

Below are the my best articles for the year 2010, listed in chronological order. If you didn’t get a chance to see them when they were first posted, you may want to check these out.

Previous articles are always available through the Archives box on the right, the Category selection, or the Search box.

• WWE: Don’t Call Us Wrestling (Jan): The WWE has spent at least the last several years, maybe the last decade, telling anyone who would listen that they are an entertainment company and not a wrasslin‘ company. Wrestling is apparently a dirty word.
• TNA Monday Night War (Jan): TNA Wrestling had a live 3 hour broadcast on Monday Jan 4th, in direct competition with the WWE‘s live Monday Night Raw program. I describe the Good, the Bad, and a few that are On the Fence.
• Invisible Wrestler (Feb): I usually don’t go for the stuff that requires a huge “suspension of disbelief“, but once in a while something comes along that I just have to share.
• TNA Towel: 2, Believability: 0 (Apr): On a Monday night on TNA Impact, we got to see the TNA BloodyTowel ™ used again on a broadcast. Now I have to add another clause to the footnote of my answer of one of the most often asked question by casual or non-wrestling fans: Is the blood real?
• TNA Waves the White Flag (May): After a few months of trying to compete head-to-head with Monday Night Raw, TNA retreats back to Thursdays.
• TNA Should Add Bloody Towel to Roster (Jun): Since the towel has now gotten more air time than TNA president Dixie Carter, I figure TNA should just add the thing to their official roster.
• The Highs and Lows of Monday Night Raw (Jun): The birth of NXT (high) and one of the most embarrassingly awful series of skits  with the actors from the new A-Team movie (low) all in the same episode of Raw.
• Bigger Stronger Faster* (Jul): I rarely review movies here, but this was an exceptional documentary about the use, abuse, and propaganda of steroids. You may remember the filmmaker’s brother, Mike Bell, as an occasional jobber for the WWE, and for his death a few years after this documentary was filmed.
• Final Match Rating Results (Jul): In July of 2009, I started collecting some data about the wrestling programming I was watching. What I was measuring this time was the number of matches per hour, and the quality of those matches as judged by a simple rating system. These are the final results after one year.
• Final Wrestler Stats (Aug): I also have some Final Wrestler Stats. I used the same data to see who my top wrestlers were based on a simple match rating system.
• Wait ‘Til Jumbo Gets Here (Sep): Quite often something seemingly unrelated triggers a memory that I decide to share on this site. Here’s a story from about 15 years ago…
• My Wrestler Rankings vs. PWI 500 (Oct): I compared the list of wrestler rankings based on my data (see August above) to the PWI 500 for the year ending June 2010 to see if there was any correlation.
• Line, Please (Nov): Comments on the Piper’s Pit segment and a supposedly leaked script from Monday Night Raw a year before, which implied that all of the wrestler promos were scripted by the “creative” dept.

WrestleZone is crediting PWInsider with reporting that the WWE Monday Night Raw guest host concept may be finished after about a year and a half of pulling in celebrities to boost exposure to the programming. I couldn’t find the original story, but I found a similar one on the Bleacher Report.

I don’t know if either story is based on some “insider” comments, or just their observation that the guest host section has been pulled from the WWE web site.

When Raw first started using this format, I wasn’t sure what to make of it (Raw Guest Hosts Not About Ratings?). After a little more investigation, it seemed like an ingenious idea (WWE + Talk Show = Raw), but not without its flaws. A shorter-term strategy that didn’t have a clear longer-term payoff as far as an increase in ratings.

Since then I have been more critical (Monday Night Boos, The Highs and Lows of Monday Night Raw, WWE: Don’t Call Us Wrestling).

I guess this has run its course, which seems like a good thing. Although I don’t see the product improving anytime soon as a result of this, and I’m a little nervous about what “great” idea they’ll come up with next.

I don’t spend too much time reading the wrestling sheets or sites. Partly because I actually want to be surprised when something happens on-air, and partly because there is just so much activity out there between “news” sites and blogs that it’s hard to separate the signal from the noise.

So it’s probably mostly luck that I stumbled across an opinion piece by Mark Madden on the WrestleZone site that touched on something I had meant to ask a year ago.

Mark says this,

Everyone is RAVING about the Piper’s Pit segment on Raw, citing [it] as evidence that old-school characters like Roddy Piper have it all over today’s crap performers.

That’s incorrect.

Oh, Piper was BRILLIANT. He added more value to the WWE title by talking about it than any champion of the past 10 years has done by wearing it. He led John Cena and Wade Barrett around like dogs on leashes, and to great effect.

and this,

But the reason that segment sparkled was because Roddy’s lines weren’t scripted. He [knew] what to advance, and he advanced it within the context of the Roddy Piper character, which he knows much better than anybody else who could ever write words for that character.

I beat this drum A LOT, but it’s a drum that needs beaten. WWE (and TNA) do things that are NOT a matter of opinion, NOT thinking outside the box, NOT a reasonable alternative. They’re just WRONG.

Scripting promos word-for-word is WRONG. It sounds like everyone’s speaking in the same voice.

I haven’t read any detailed reports about the level that the interviews and segments are scripted in WWE. I remember reading what was supposedly a “leaked” Monday Night Raw script, but I wasn’t convinced it was actually real. It looked realistic format-wise, but I have a hard time believing that anybody would be able to memorize a 10 minute promo the day of the event and not screw it up.

I am also guilty of fast-forwarding through just about all the interviews on every wrestling program, so I would only be giving an opinion on the small number that I have heard (Piper’s segment was one of them). But for the sake of discussion, lets assume that the “creative” team actually writes out the dialog for every interview.

Why would they do this? I can see where they have some bullet points or guidance to provide because they have the angles and feuds mapped out probably 6 to 9 months in advance. They know when all the Pay-Per-Views are scheduled and they are trying to set the road map for the company. But why would they actually write out the complete dialog for someone to memorize word-for-word?

If you’ve ever read anything about the Larry David show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or any similar improv-style program, you know that they just have an outline and a general direction and the rest is improvised. That sounds like the perfect model for wrestling. It works as long as you’ve got guys that can talk, and wrestling has that.

The workers are going to have better ideas about the words they should choose and the personality of their character than some ex-sitcom hacks that the WWE hired. Maybe “creative” should worry less about the intricate details of the promos, and spend more time preventing  stupid decisions like making Vladymir Kozlov and Ezekiel Jackson babyfaces, keeping Kane employed, and having Microsoft Outlook be the WWE general manager.

Back in the beginning of August, I posted rankings of the top 15 wrestlers in the WWE and in TNA based on my own data on the quality of the matches over a one year period (Final Wrestler Stats)

Around the same time, Pro Wrestling Illustrated released their yearly PWI Top 500 wrestlers list. Regardless of what you think of their ranking system (I don’t remember how much effect reader ballots have on the rankings vs. PWI staff voting), I thought it would be interesting to match up my list with theirs to see how they compared.

Below are the same rankings I originally published, with the addition of the PWI top 500 ranking. Coincidently, the PWI rankings span the same months as my data collection (July through June).

WWE Top 15

Here are the Top 15 wrestlers under the WWE brands and their PWI 500 rankings for July 2009 through June 2010:

TNA Top 15

For TNA, there is only one program available that I was tracking (TNA Impact).

Here are the Top 15 wrestlers under the TNA brand and their PWI 500 rankings for July 2009 through June 2010:

Conclusion

Just what I expected… absolutely no correlation between my rankings and the PWI 500 (except for A.J. Styles in TNA).

You can see all the details about the rankings on the Wrestler Match Ratings page.

You can also look at the spreadsheet here– Google Docs: Wrestler Match Ratings Spreadsheet

Quite often something seemingly unrelated triggers a memory that I decide to share on this site. Here’s a story from about 15 years ago…

Back in 1995, before I started in professional wrestling, I was just a fan going to some of the local shows (big surprise). The independent scene had recently been heating up after several years of absolutely nothing, so I had been attending shows more frequently.

On one particular weekend, I went to three different shows in three days (Fri, Sat, Sun). I remember that it was also the first time I met Dale Spear, who attended many of the matches and later did color commentary, alongside play-by-play man  “Slick” Mick Karch, for St. Paul Championship Wrestling (SPCW) and Steel Domain Wrestling (SDW). Dale came up to me during the second show of the weekend and asked me if I was Pro Wrestling Illustrated writer Steve Anderson. He didn’t know why anybody besides him and a guy that worked as a wrestling journalist would be at multiple shows in the same weekend. I told him I wasn’t Steve, and I didn’t know why someone would do it either.

I don’t remember the name of the tiny bar in Minneapolis we were at, but I remember some of the locals weren’t exactly at the forefront of society. In fact, I would have thought I was down south if it weren’t for the noticeable Minnesota accents.

The promotion had the shorter ring set up (the mat was about two feet off the ground instead of about four), which was good because above the ring were a couple of ceiling fans. All of them still spinning. I remember thinking: I guess I’m not going to see anyone go off the top rope tonight.

The crowd was unusually vocal. Every time a wrestler walked to the ring, one of the regulars would say something like, “Wait ‘til Jumbo gets here. You won’t be such a big shot then!”. I kept looking around to see where this “Jumbo” guy was. Nobody in sight fit the bill.

There were about five matches on the card, so around ten to twelve wrestlers walking to the ring (12 if there was a tag match). Each time a new guy came out someone would say, “Wait ‘til Jumbo gets here…something, mumble, something…”. I felt like I was in some kind of David Lynch movie. Or maybe the Coen brothers.

Near the end of the night, in what was probably the main event, out walks a guy that had to be close to seven feet tall. Probably around 450 or 500 pounds. Of solid fat. As he climbed up on the ring apron, his head was just a few feet below the ceiling fan.

This must be Jumbo. Ok, I can see why everyone would be worked up about him. I’m guessing not a great wrestler, no five-star matches, but at least an oddity that the locals could get behind. At least they had their hero for the night.

The ring announcer introduced him as Sampson. A few seconds later, one of the locals said, “Yeah, you just wait til Jumbo gets here. Then you’ll be sorry!”

Oh…crap. He’s not Jumbo. Then who is Jumbo? I’m not sure I want to be present when Jumbo actually gets here. I don’t think he’s with the show. Maybe he’s a bouncer that works here, or some guy that wants to prove how tough he is (several years later, at the one show in Waverly that I missed, there was a big brawl between a few bar patrons and the wrestlers).

Against my better judgment I stayed for the whole show. But Jumbo never did get there. Whether he was a real person or not, I’m not sure. To me he was kind of like the boogieman. Or Freddy Kruger. Something you could threaten your kids with when you want them to behave.

What if somewhere there’s a tribe of people whose whole culture and religion revolves around waiting for “Jumbo” to return. Maybe, just maybe, over several thousands of years they walked across a land bridge to North America, and their descendents settled in Minneapolis.

Yeah, seems a little far-fetched to me too.

Probably just an overweight bouncer with an attitude.

From July 2009 through June of 2010, I collected some stats on the WWE Monday Night Raw, WWE Smackdown, and TNA wrestling products (and ECW until their shutdown on 2/19/2010). I was measuring the quality of the matches on each program by giving each one a “Thumb” rating. A great match gets one Thumb Up, an outstanding “match-of-the-year” candidate gets two Thumbs Up, and everything else gets zero (I was also giving Thumbs Down- more on that later).

When I recorded the Thumb Rating, I also happened to write down the names of the wrestlers that were involved in the matches. Since I had the data, I decided to total these up for each wrestler involved. All participants in the match got the same number of points.

You can read all the details and a bit of analysis on the Wrestler Match Ratings page, including a link to the spreadsheet so you can see the numbers for yourself.

I’m providing a quick summary below.

Top 15 in WWE and TNA

For the WWE, I used the combined data from the Raw, Smackdown, and ECW programming to calculate the rankings. I assigned one point per Thumb, so the scoring should be obvious.

WWE Top 15

Here are the Top 15 wrestlers under the WWE brands:

TNA Top 15

For TNA, there is only one program available that I was tracking (TNA Impact).

Here are the Top 15 wrestlers under the TNA brand:

Take a look at all the details on the Wrestler Match Ratings page.

You can also look at the spreadsheet here: Google Docs: Wrestler Match Ratings Spreadsheet

I rarely talk about movies here (in fact the only other time I can think of was when I recommended Lipstick & Dynamite), but I watched a film last weekend that I thought would be of interest of the readers of this site.

The movie is a documentary called Bigger Stronger Faster* (2008). It deals with the use, abuse, and propaganda of steroids, while examining the root problem of why someone would want to take them. You can read the review from Roger Ebert (3.5 out of 4 stars) or IMDB (7.7 / 10) for a synopsis– I’ll just touch on a few more points below.

The film’s main characters are three brothers: Chris, Mark, and Mike Bell. Chris is the director, interviewer, and narrator. All three brothers had tried anabolic steroids, and two  (Mark & Mike) were still on them at the time of the documentary. One of the motivations for them to give steroids a try were there heroes, including Hulk Hogan, Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stalone. All of whom would either admit to using steroids (Hogan and Schwarzenegger), or be caught with them in later life (Stallone with growth hormone).

All of the bodybuilders and professional athletes shown in interviews (like Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds,  Olympian Ben Johnson) said they took performance enhancing substances because they had to– everyone else was doing them. That was one of the central themes of the movie. They didn’t do it to get ahead… they did it to keep up. To keep up with the idea that America has to be the biggest, strongest, and fastest country in the world.

On one hand we spend an extraordinary about of political and media attention on: steroids in the WWE, steroids in baseball, “roid rage” in the media (Chris Benoit), but at the same time we reward and admire those that are faster or larger than life and we look the other way. The U.S. Olympic Committee spends most of its time looking for loopholes for U.S. athletes to exploit (or they work with the officials to change the rules), according to one of the interviewees.

While everyone is focused on steroids, the supplement industry is pulling in over $27 billion dollars a year (PDF), and is virtually unregulated thanks to tons of legislation from Utah senator Orrin Hatch. Not coincidentally, about 10% of the supplement business resides in Utah.Which leads to shenanigans like the photographer who admitted that many of the “before and after” shots he has done for supplement companies were taken the same day, thanks to the use of lighting, makeup, and a bit of Photoshop. No rules against it, and everyone else is doing it so why can’t I?

The picture below was a set of shots the photographer took the same day to show how it is done. The six pack was airbrushed on. Not airbrushed on the image, but on the guy (Chris Bell).

For those of you that recognize the name Mike Bell, you may remember his work as a jobber for WWE and ECW. During the time of the documentary, he was still working the independents and sending tapes into the WWE. They kept telling him that he was “too old”.

Toward the end of the film there were very candid discussions of Mike Bell’s problems with drugs, and his inability to cope with not being a “success” in pro wrestling and life. His father said he was worried Mike was going to end up dead. Up until that point in the movie I had a feeling that there was something about the name Mike Bell that I couldn’t quite remember. After that line, I thought of it– Didn’t this guy end up dying?

After I watched the end of the film and didn’t see any mention in the credits, a minute with Google confirmed it. Mike Bell died a few months after the film came out (but possibly years after those scenes were filmed). The coroner eventually concluded it was from the “accidental” inhalation of a chemical used in a “household maintenance product”.

This documentary is definitely worth a rental (it’s also available on Instant Watch from Netflix). You don’t have to be a wrestling fan or a sports fan to enjoy it. The director does a great job of presenting the facts without taking sides. I would be surprised if you can watch this and not have your perspective change, regardless of what side of the discussion you started out on. It is definitely not black and white.

Photos: imdb

Back in July of 2008, I decided to keep track of my viewing time of WWE Monday Night Raw, ECW, TNA, and WWE Smackdown to see if I would be able to tell anything about the direction of the quality of the programming. This is assuming that if the quality (in my opinion) is better, I will watch more, and if the quality drops (again based on my tastes), I will watch less.

I tracked all four shows for a year before deciding to change things up and measure them differently (you can find the results of the that year-long experiment, including the charts and data, on the TV Viewership Stats page).

In July of 2009, I started collecting some different data about the same wrestling programming. What I was measuring this time was the number of matches per hour, and the quality of those matches as judged by a simple rating system.

The rating system I used was not one to five stars. It was closer to how I rate programming using my TiVo (Thumbs Up/2 Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down).

Since the WWE decided to shut down the ECW promotion, I stopped reporting on ECW and just did the other three.

The Final Results

After 52 weeks of collecting data from July 7th 2009 to July 9th 2010, here is a summary of the rating results. If you want to see more details, take a look at the TV Match Ratings page.

Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down Rating Totals

For each of the three brands, the thumb ratings have been totaled since I started collecting data the week of July 7th, 2009. Just to be clear, each “One Thumb Up” rating counts as one point, each “Two Thumbs Up” rating counts as two, and each “Thumb Down” rating counts as negative one (which subtracts from the total).

Here are the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down ratings for the three programs:

Total Thumbs Up Ratings

Despite all of the negative press it gets, TNA pulled out ahead of Smackdown and way ahead of Raw in the quality of the matches (in my opinion). TNA would have been even farther ahead on positive ratings, except that they have had so many bad matches since Hogan and company showed up that it pulled their total down (remember a really bad match gets a Thumbs Down which reduces the total by one).

Avg Ratings Over Time

One other thing of note was the average ratings per match over time for each brand.

Avg Thumb Rating Per Match

The Raw guest host format has certainly affected the WWE programming. They are consistently at the bottom, even though it is supposedly the WWE’s “flagship” program. About 1 in 20 Raw matches is considered great.

If you take a look at the trend of TNA, you can see the damage Hulk Hogan and his cronies inflicted after the first of the year (about the midpoint of the charts). The average rating of each TNA match was climbing until Hogan took over. At its peak about 1 in 3 matches was great. It has been steadily falling since then, up until the last few weeks where it leveled out.

Smackdown has been fairly consistent over time, equaling TNA in the last couple of months. About 1 in 5 matches are considered great.

Take a look at all the stats and my “brilliant” conclusions over on the TV Match Ratings Page

Has TNA started their own “Attitude” era? Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a few changes to the programming that by themselves seem pretty insignificant, but combined seem to indicate an actual company direction. I know, I’m making the assumption that TNA Management actually has a plan. Or even that they have the idea that they need a plan.

With the turn of Abyss and a more serious Jay Lethal, there aren’t any “cartoonish” characters left. On top of that, they’ve gone from bleeping the word “ass” on the broadcast, to allowing the word a**hole to be said multiple times per episode. It’s even part of Mr. Anderson‘s gimmick. Add the bit with Angelina Love‘s backstage camera shot and you’ve got the start of a more “adult” TNA.

Back in 1998, the WWE started running more edgy angles, violence, and swearing to compete with WCW. TNA has dipped their toes in the deep end a little bit with some hardcore thumbtack matches and flaming tables (I’m not going to comment on the “glass” this time). Now it looks like they’ve got their whole foot in.

Will it be the start of something good, or just another attempt of TNA copying what was successful in the past and keeping their fingers crossed?