Random thoughts thread v2 *NO NEWS ITEMS*

[IANdrewDiceClay]

Surely if they have scarecrows for his entrance, Sting will walk out to the ramp and go "I dont fancy this, like" and walk back to the dressing room.

[drkopen]

There was also a casting call out for people to play Russian soldiers for Rusev's entrance, that's going to look awesome

Something like this would be cool

 

Edited March 23, 2015 by drkopen

[Arch Stanton]

Surely if they have scarecrows for his entrance, Sting will walk out to the ramp and go "I dont fancy this, like" and walk back to the dressing room.

 

POTY

[thegamehhh]

Just as a one off Seek & Destroy would be fucking awesome

[herbie747]

If Triple H & Stephanie are "The Authority", why do they hire people they don't like? They hire wrestlers, then try to put them in matches so they'll lose their jobs. 

[WWFChilli]

If Triple H & Stephanie are "The Authority", why do they hire people they don't like? They hire wrestlers, then try to put them in matches so they'll lose their jobs. 

 

These are questions you don't need to ask, because wrestling isn't real.

[air_raid]

If Triple H & Stephanie are "The Authority", why do they hire people they don't like? They hire wrestlers, then try to put them in matches so they'll lose their jobs. 

 

You know why. Why can a bloke like Sting just turn up at Survivor Series without the Authority knowing he's coming? If somebody else hired him, why did they not tell Steph & Hunter? Why, if he's not supposed to be there, does security not grab him well before he gets as far as the ring?

 

Because...

 

 

Trying to think about what happens "behind the scenes" in kayfabe is a waste of time and will just leave you scratching your head at the inplausibilities and incosistencies, so don't. Trips and Stephanie run the show while it's on air, if it's not happening on air, don't think about it.

[herbie747]

Yeah, no shit lads. But can they not help me suspend my disbelief? That's what makes it good. The authority heel figure makes no sense in principle. It worked with McMahon & Austin because Austin presumably had a contract that McMahon couldn't get out of, and McMahon evolved into that heel role from the Montreal deal.

But brand new hires that they don't want there? It's retarded - at least try to make sense logically.

[Shane O' Mac Version 2]

Best for business.

[tiger_rick]

Yeah, no shit lads. But can they not help me suspend my disbelief? That's what makes it good. The authority heel figure makes no sense in principle. It worked with McMahon & Austin because Austin presumably had a contract that McMahon couldn't get out of, and McMahon evolved into that heel role from the Montreal deal.

But brand new hires that they don't want there? It's retarded - at least try to make sense logically.

There is a "board of directors". They've called Vinny mac to account many times. Assume they are still around. Plus, most of the wrestlers Triple H has a problem with pre-date "The Authority". So presumably he would just get rid of them but for their iron-clad contracts.

 

Plus, they do what's best for business. which presumably is humiliating wrestlers people like.

[WWFChilli]

I reckon it's a lot more odd that Kane and Triple H hang about given the history, but I understand.

[air_raid]

And Rocky was perfectly fine to banter with Hogan at Mania XXX despite the fact that The Hulkster tried to kill him with a truck once. But it's fine. It's not real.

 

There is a "board of directors". They've called Vinny mac to account many times.

 

They've removed Vince from active duty and effectively put him out to pasture on TV. And yet within 6 months he was back on TV apparently with the power to influence things and sack people. That was nearly 3 years ago.

 

herbie, if you expect consistency or logic in the behaviour of those cast in the position of running the place, you're looking in the wrong place. Especially when expecting any level of complexity in regards to "inner workings" style decision-making in a show which, let's remember, is currently aimed at kids.

Edited March 24, 2015 by air_raid

[Pinc]

Christ, I hope that Max Landis gif doesn't become the stock response whenever anyone points out a booking inconsistency. I loved the film too but that's just obnoxious. Citizen Kane isn't real either but it's still bullshit that no one was around to hear him say Rosebud.

 

On the point of Sting in particular, has it ever been mentioned that he has a contract with WWE now? I'm satisfied that as a three decade veteran he's made his money and his recent appearances have been because he decided to intervene in The Authority's abuses of power, not because he now works for the company. It's not as though he wrestles for them every week. And he only appeared at Fast Lane by invitation of the COO.

 

That doesn't explain why security don't remove him from the building, but security always seems to be lax at WWE shows. I'm happy enough for that to be a trait of wrestling's internal logic. Like Samoans having hard heads because of the midichlorians or whatever.

Edited March 24, 2015 by Pinc

[JNLister]

Found a saved web page on my hard drive from an article with Roy Shire, the California promoter who decided to spill the beans after he got out the business. Bit long, but some great insight into his booking mind and philosophies of stuff making sense and being logical. (Complete coincidence that I came here to post it as the above discussion was happening!)

 

 

 

OY SHIRE TELLS ALL TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

 

Saturday, October 8, 1983 Los Angeles Times story about Roy Shire, ex-wrestler and legendary San Francisco promoter.

 

By RICHARD HOFFER, Times Staff Writer

 

Sometime in the late 1970s, Roy Shire burned out. Suddenly one of the best bookers on the West Coast couldn't think of a single finish for his wrestlers, even bad finishes for bad wrestlers. In 20 years of promoting, he'd worked all his angles, exhausted every gimmick, overused every gotta-be-a- rematch flourish. Even if the public was stupid, of which he was sure after his years in the business, he had finally grown tired trying to fool it. So when Bob Roop, one of his stars that year, came to him with an angle, Shire was ready. "Roop, he wrestled on the Olympic team once, not only a 'shooter' but a good worker," Shire says. "So he has this idea. Bring this guy from Florida that he knows out to San Francisco's Cow Palace. Build him up. The gimmick is this: Let Roop take the title, get a feud going, make people think they couldn't stand each other. Story'd be Roop hurt this guy in Florida and he's chased him here."

 

Well, in pro wrestling, this is not considered a real fresh angle. A feud? Couldn't stand each other? It had come to this? But as we said, he was tired choreographing all this nonsense. "I just ran out," he says. So Shire let it ride and allowed the boys to work their own angle. "Roop finally announces he'll wrestle the babyface, whose name is Kevin Sullivan," Shire says, "but only on the condition it's not for the title. If he beats him, then he'll put the title up. Been done a thousand times. OK. Now here's the part I wasn't so sure about. Kevin's been talking about his poor old dad on TV during his buildup, how he's doing it all for dad, that kind of thing. Flies him all the way in from Boston for his match with Roop. And there he is, this old gray-headed guy, I'd say about 57, sitting at ringside, cheering his son, proud and everything.

 

"Kevin beats Roop, big upset. Then the father gets into the ring to raise Kevin's hand. Well, Roop comes up behind Kevin and hits him a good one and knocks him out of the ring and then, this was hard for me to believe , he does a knee break on the old guy." Shire pauses here, still awed by the memory. "Then it really got wild. I had to send all the guys in to chase Roop, and he runs. Meanwhile they're carrying the old guy out, and the word spread through the Cow Palace-you never have to announce anything, the word just spreads-that he's been taken to the hospital."

 

All in all, one of the most satisfyingly spectacular evenings in pro wrestling, ever. "We put a cast on the old guy's shoulder the next day and got some pictures taken," Shire says. "Billed the rematch for a month, packed the Cow Palace to the gills. We brought it back five times. "Course, Roop and Kevin were the best of friends." What follows is the colorful confession of a con man, a guy who made a pretty good living fooling people although the work, as we've just seen, wasn't alway that hard. Roy Shire, known to you as Professor Shire in the 50s when he strutted into rings wearing a gown and mortarboard, wrestling those poor little babyfaces in all the big territories, has also been both a booker and promoter on the West Coast. What he hasn't seen in pro wrestling hasn't happened.

 

Until Shire, a stocky man of 59 whose trademark bleached-blond hair has turned a natural white, came along with a chip on his shoulder, mad at the game, there haven't been a lot of promoters willing to describe their tricks. Oh, we knew the game wasn't exactly on the up and up ("Up and up' Are you kidding? Even when it was supposed to be real 40 years ago it wasn't on the up and up!";) . We knew the wrestlers weren't real, mortal enemies, that they weren't in as much pain a they appeared to be, that some of the holds were more theatrical than athletic that the blood wasn't real, that ..."Hold on," says Shire, off and running, "the blood, a least, is real." Real? "We'd all have little razor blades wrapped in adhesive tape, except for a little corner. We'd get thrown into a ring post, say, we'd fumble around and blade ourselves. Just a nick really, but if you stuck it in your forehead right, you could get a lot of blood. Didn't hurt at all. Really."

 

When Shire was wrestling in the Texas territories there was a big call for blood. "They love blood in Texas," he says, "One week, I had to blade myself ever night, just worked across my forehead, left to right.I used to tell people I had 487 stitches. I didn't. I had 70, but most of those were from when a fan hit me with chair."

 

Shire says there's hardly a wrestler alive who doesn carry his own blade, hidden in his trunks, in a wrapped finger, anywhere. "I used to hide mine in my mouth," he says, "but one night I almost swallowed it.You can get hurt in wrestling, you know. But only by accident." Besides blood, there is not much that is real in pro wrestling, you will not be shocked to hear.

 

The holds are real, true. But their effects are so exaggerated that, nobody really bothers to insist that anything like wrestling is going on in there.

 

Some pro wrestlers, like Shire, really were wrestlers, "shooters" in the trade. Shire was a big school and AAU champion in the 1940s. It's nice to be able to wrestle, but it's hardly a qualification. "Nowadays you just have to be good with the stick (microphone) -and be able to take the bumps," he say with some disdain for the new breed.

 

Shire's introduction to the game was probably the traditional one in his day, He walked into Al Haft's office back in Columbus and applied. Haft told him to strip down. Shire, who lifted weights, revealed an impressive physique. Haft wondered whether he could wrestle , so sent him upstairs to the gym for some live tussling punches.He was a real wrestler, all right. But not yet a big-time wrestler. So he spent 2 1/2 hours every day learning to perform fly off drop kicks and assorted other basics, the kind of self-defense stuff that doesn't work as well in a dark alleys as it does before the camera. These are important skills in pro wrestling, but not moneymaking skills.

Haft had Shire wrestling in the prelims, making about $175 a week in 1950, a nice living but a long way from top billing or financial security. After about nine months, Haft sensed potential.

 

Noticing that Shire always seemed to be reading this same textbook on "psycho-semanties," Haft hit on an angle.

"How'd you like to make some real money, Roy?" Haft asked, somewhat unnecessarily. "What I'll do is make you a professor, get you a gown and a mortarboard. What's more, you're not a 'babyface' (good guy) anymore, you're a heel (you guessed it, bad guy). And I'll make you the junior-heavyweight champion."

 

So Shire learned to strut-"You ever strut? It's not easy"-got his mortarboard and gown and made his debut in Dayton. "I didn't think I was ready," he says. "And I was begging guys to take my place. They were laughing at me. So there I am, my first main event, and on TV, and I'm strutting into the ring. I'm trying to make people hate me and they're laughing like hell. I was so embarrassed I could hardly wrestle."

 

Not too embarrassed to collect his $1,000 a week paycheck, though. And this was in 1951. He became a popular attraction during wrestling's heyday, when TV was so starved for programming it put the game on in prime time. His cockiness was infuriating. He always made his opponent look better than him, but he always got his hand raised. However, it was about this time that

Shire discovered that only person to really hold the upper hand was the promoter. Shortly after Shire "won" his championship, Haft approached him with the news that, from now on, they would be splitting Shire's pay after the first $500. If Shire didn't like it, his belt was gone.

 

It was extortion of the highest, yet most routine, order. "Well," sighs Shire, with no apparent malice, "he did give me the break."

Shire had about 10 more productive years on the circuit, moving from territory to territory as he exhausted both the promoter's and public's tolerance of his villainy. This was amazing, as he could be very difficult to get along with. He says be once tried to defect from Haft's stable but found himself blackballed across the U.S. They managed a compromise. And he nearly got himself kicked out of the Texas territory where he tried-this is about the worst thing a pro wrestler can do-to actually wrestle.

 

What happened there was that Baron Leone (Shire snorts, "He was no baron";) , the world junior heavyweight champion came to the state to "go over" the state champion, Shire. The Baron would have to win, of course. But Shire should look decent in the loss, for the pride of the territory. "I have to put him over, which I don't mind," be says, "But the Baron says, 'I beat him in two falls.' He don't even want to Iet me have one fall. I say this isn't very good. I'm the Texas champion and I don't even get one fall? That hurts the whole territory."

The Baron took the first fall as planned, then went for the second, as planned. Shire was mad, though. "I've decided you're going through," he told the Baron. Shire wasn't going for it. "Now the Baron gets mad, but he don't know a hammerlock from a padlock. 

He tried to kick me but I bar -armed him and almost broke his arm." Texas' pride was saved. but Shire was nearly kicked out of the territory for one of the few recorded instances of real wrestling.

 

But Shire's time was coming to a close. He was tired, lonely and hurting. A missed drop-kick resulted in torn knee ligaments. As Texas champion, he couldn't very well take time off for surgery-what would that mean to the territory?-so he shot himself up with novocaine to continue competing. "If it started to wear off during a match," he remembers, "I'd let the other guy beat on it so a limp would look realistic." Later, the whole knee had to be reconstructed. A knife, stuck so firmly in his backside by an irate fan, that doctors had to cut it out, also persuaded him that this was not a gentleman's game. The future, as Haft had seen a long time ago, was in the promoting, not the wrestling,

 

You may have seen pro wrestling and acquired an appreciation for the participants' theatrics. The bombast is not easily learned. Nor is the dramatic ability. Let Sir John Gielgud play The Assassin for awhile. It may be his audience is not, uh, real tough, but then his shooting script may have some holes in it, too. Yet these guys perform. As somebody said, as a wrestler was being hauled out of a ring on a stretcher, the winner savaging the helpless corpse all the way, "Tell me that's not for real."

It's a kind of genius, Buster Keaton style. The winner's long shinny up the pole where the bag of money is hanging, the loser slowly coming to, recognizing the desperate situation. And rising, amazingly, to pull his opponent back down.

 

And what of the cage matches, in which four tag-team wrestlers are put in a pen and the last to crawl out must leave town. Must leave town! Imagine the last guy's sad plight as his teammate-his teammate!-is crawling out, leaving this crippled hulk behind. "I'm hurt! This isn't a matter of leaving town! I need help.' Who wouldn't go back. Whereupon he who was formerly the last guy, beats the new last guy into a bloody submission. It's exactly like real life!

 

Still, the real genius belongs to the booker, the man who decides not just who wins, but how. This is the man who plots the feuds, who develops the story lines, who builds the house. Who keeps pro wrestling going, in other words. The personnas are fairly easy to develop. And the ring action isn't that hard to choreograph. A good worker knows how to control the crowd, when to take his high spot, to cut meat (punch), and when to relax a little, to lean some. The wrestlers call it heat and they know when to turn it up and down.

 

"The really hard part, the toughest part is figuring the finish," Shire says. "The problem is figuring what can I do that the fans will buy that will get another rematch. Say your heel is the champion, wrestling a babyface. Last fall. Your champion goes into his finishing hold and slams the baby face into the ring post. He blades himself, gets some heat up. Takes the 20-count then comes back to beat the heel, your champion. Thing is, in my territory, the ref is allowed to stop a fight on cuts. He had stopped the fight. Everybody thinks the baby face has won but here comes the ref to announce he stopped the bout because the baby face was cut too badly to continue. Almost have a riot."

 

Shire goes on: "The thing to do in this case is to bring them back for the rematch, bill it: 'No stopping for blood."'

 

Other finishes: Fight on the floor to a draw, run out the time limit, then come back without a time limit. "The public buys it," Shire says. "I could never understand how the public could be so damned stupid."

 

Then there are the injury finishes, as many of them as there are pages in "Gray's Anatomy." As a wrestler, Shire used to leave the ring in a coma pretty regularly. He read a medical text and got all the symptoms down.

"It was easy. You lie still, then act like you're coming out of it, then go a little nuts, but not quite," he says. "Depends how bad a concussion you want to have, but you might want to swallow your tongue. In fact, I was doing that once when I noticed somebody reaching down my throat with a safety pin; he was trying to get my tongue." Whoever that man is, he should get the Nobel Prize for curing concussions. Incredibly, Shire came to.

 

As a booker, Shire sent lots of guys to the hospital with head injuries, but "Not all the time, you don't want a pattern developing in your territory." As part of the scam, which of course would lead to a rematch, the wrestler would have to stay in the hospital at least a little while, the longer the better, for publicity purposes. Shire remembers that one of his wrestlers decided, he didn't want to spend time in the hospital, didn't want a concussion after all, and tried to come to in the ring. Shire leaped in and, in as violent terms as he could articulate, made his wrestler understand the importance of a relapse. "There's money in our pockets," he tried to explain.

 

Some men were gifted in this regard, others not. In Shire's circle, there was a Memphis booker who was regarded as incompetent. "He was a nice guy, but we thought of him as kind of an idiot.

 

He had this wrestler that was real, uh, effeminate. See if you think they'd buy this in California.

 

Effeminate wrestler puts his finishing hold on the guy, who blades himself. Effeminate wrestler sees the blood and faints. The Southern crowds always were the easiest." 

 

But there are heroes in this small and 

unusual circle. The booker in Montreal is Shire's hero. "See if you like this one. Babyface pins the heel, who happens to be the champ. Well, this is amazing. The referee counts one, two and then, this was even more amazing, fell over clutching his heart. Had to take him out to the hospital, of course. Sold it out the next time." ____________________________________________

 

Roy Shire

 

Roy Shire recalled wrestling in Yonkers back in the mid-1950s as part of a tag-team: "We were wrestling Perez and Rocca, and Jerry Graham starts the match. So he goes out there, and he tries to get Perez to 'sell' -- which means register to the people that you're hurt. But no matter what Graham does to Perez, he won't show them that he's hurt. 

 

"So he comes over and tags me and he says, 'Ah, shit, I'm gettin' the hell out of here, you go in and wrestle.' I say, 'What's the matter?' 

 

"He says, 'Ah, that son of a bitch, no matter what I do, the guy won't sell. I punch him, he won't register.' 

 

"I said, 'Oh, give me that son of a bitch.' 

 

"So I went in there, and he tried it on me. I leg-dived him, I bar-armed that bastard," said Shire, a one-time high school state champion, then later, while he served in the Coast Guard an all-Service champion. "And so I rode him all over a piece of paper, and then I said, 'All right, you little son of a bitch, you better sell, or I'm going to kick your brains out' -- he didn't know how to wrestle, they brought him in because he was a Puerto Rican. And they beat us, just like they did every night. 

 

"A couple of days later I walked into the office, and Kola Kwariani got a hold of me, he was a Russian guy." (Kwariani, described in one magazine article as a "Slavic Buddha," also owned a cat named Pushkin.) "'What you try do to Perez?,' he tells me. 

 

"And so I tried to explain to him, you know? I said, 'Hey, to make the show look a little better -- when he made that big comeback, and he sold for us, it would have been greater!' 

 

"Kwariani says, 'I don't care, you make him look like piece shit! From now on, if you ever do that again, you're done! In fact, you got one week off, with no goddamn money!' 

 

"I said, 'Aw come on, Kola,' and he said, 'Two weeks off for you! You bastard!' 

 

"I said, 'You mean you're gonna give me two weeks off 'cause I made that asshole look crazy?' He said, 'That's right! He brings the Puerto Ricans. You don't bring the Puerto Ricans!'

"Of course, all the other guys in the territory are sayin', 'Boy, we'd better make Perez look good, or we'll be in the same fucking' boat.'" 

 

Shire complains, "How can Hogan be in shape, when all he does is go around the goddamned ring, raisin' his fists up -- what we call 'beating the people.' You know, when I wrestled, and I worked for Al Haft, if you did that with Al Haft, boy, you wouldn't wrestle more than a week. He'd say, 'Wait a minute, the people are seeing you to wrestle, great moves, flying around the ring, taking bumps, et cetera, -- you don't have any time to be beating the goddam public out there.' That's a cheap way of getting heat, of getting response. 

 

"You know, Hogan -- he does something, he turns to the crowd, right? And he raises his hands up, and his fists, and he's shaking 'em, and the crowd goes nuts. Cheap way of getting a reaction. You couldn't do that years ago, most promoters wouldn't go for it. So consequently, he wrestles about two minutes, then he spends about three minutes doin' that while he's relaxing. So he's not in shape." (Sam Muchnick said of wrestlers today, "A lot of the guys -- they can't wrestle, but they start pestering the audience in order to get a reaction.";) 

 

The first angle that Roy Shire broadcast on television to build up fan interest in the Bay Area two and a half decades ago does not differ in kind from modern "campaigns" and "marketing concepts." 

 

Shire detailed how he got started: "I went in, and with a friend of mine who was in promotion, flew out west here. We got a television out here -- Channel 2, which was the big independent -- and we got on at nine o'clock on Friday nights -- how much better can you get? Gateway Chevrolet sponsored us, and though they'd had tape on before then, we started doing the live show. 

 

"And I brought Bill Welch out, gave him a piece of the action -- I don't know if you ever heard of Bill Welch or not, he used to be the commentator for the Divorce Court on T.V. years ago, so he had the credibility. Fantastic announcer -- he was kind of a celebrity, and at that time, he did all the West Coast football games, like UCLA, you know, or USC, on games that were going around the country. See? So the guy was known. He said, 'I'll do it if you give me a piece of the action, plus a salary.' I says, 'Man, you got it.' So he started in with me. 

 

"And with all that going, coming into a town that had no television -- I wrote the script for my wrestlers, tellin'em what to say on television. 

 

"Nobody had ever come to San Francisco and said they didn't like San Francisco. Everyone just came out here and fell in love with the city. 

 

"Well, I got Ray Stevens -- him and I had wrestled together for a while, up until I started promoting -- I brought him out. And I wrote his script, and I had him call San Francisco "Fogsville." Said all the girls were ugly as hell, and just knocked and lambasted San Francisco like you couldn't believe -- in those days you could get by with a lot of stuff you couldn't get by with today. 

 

"So then I worked an angle on television, and I walked into the Cow Palace, and everybody says, 'Aw, shit, he ain't gonna draw.' Even the management says, 'What you gonna draw here, Roy?' 

 

"I said, 'What's the place seat?' He says, '16,000.' I says, 'We'll fill it.' He laughed at me, says: 'Not wrestling.' 

 

"We came in, we didn't draw sixteen -- we drew something like 17,000. We turned six, seven thousand away from the doors. They were scalping tickets for 50 dollars outside -- this is back in '60, friend. 

 

"I ran television for six weeks before I opened in town. See, I was working an angle on them. What I did was, I took a guy out of retirement: Bill Melby, who had won third in Mr. America, and 'Best Legs.' A bodybuilder and a wrestler -- good-looking S.O.B., from Salt Lake, a friend of mine from wrestling, but he'd quit and was building apartment buildings. And he was close -- I said, 'Melby, you know you've gotta come back.' I said, 'I'll feature you, and you'll make some money. You know, I'm only gonna be running the T.V. on Friday nights, and the Cow Palace every couple of weeks, 'till I open the whole territory, so why don't you come out and give it a try?' 

 

"So I convinced him to do it. Meantime, I'm bringing a guy in from the Indianapolis territory, which was Jim Barnett's at the time, and he was a Japanese guy named Mitsu Arikawa. He beat everybody with a stomach claw. 

 

"Well every week we would would carry the guy out -- Arikawa would give him the stomach claw, and he'd give up. And Arikawa'd run back, and give the guy the stomach claw two, three times after the guy'd give up, and they'd carry him out on the stretcher. 

 

"Now Melby, with this beautiful body, abdominal section -- anybody'd get him in the stomach, he'd never sell it. I'd make guys keep hittin' him in the stomach, and he'd flex his muscles, and he wouldn't sell it to him. So everybody knows now that he's got a tough abdominal section, right? So I get Melby on television, two weeks before the fourth week. 

 

"The fourth week he comes on the television, after Arikawa wrestles, and Melby says, 'You know, I have been watching this now for one month.' And he says, 'This guy is making me sick.' (I've got Arikawa with Cowboy Ellis, and I've got Melby with someone else, I don't remember who it was. This is two main events.) And he said, 'One of these days, he's goin' to keep doin' this, and I'm gonna run into this ring and just kick the living heck out of him.' 

 

"And Bill Welch says, 'Now you can't do that, you just can't do that.' 

 

"He says, 'If he does that next week, I'm gonna do it to him!' See, well, this is the buildup. Next week, sure enough, Arikawa puts the stomach claw on the guy, and the guy's in pain, screamin' and hollerin', and after takin' him off, Arikawa jumps out of the ring, puts the stomach claw on him -- on the floor, the cameras are on him, boy. And out of the dressing room, here comes Melby! Comes running in and -- pow, pow! he beats the shit out of him, and Arikawa runs in the ring. We want to capture it on the T.V. and make it look better. Melby jumps on the ring, and hits him, pow, pow!, -- down Arikawa goes. Then, Arikawa chops him in the stomach, puts the stomach claw on him -- and everybody says, 'Oh boy, he's got Melby!' Everybody's groaning now, you know? Melby's straining, you can see his abdominal section coming out -- we zoom in on it, 'cause I'm standing there telling the camera guys exactly what to do. And Melby's just standing there, nothin's happenin' -- Arikawa gets up, looks, you know that surprised look that Japanese have, you see 'em in the comic deals -- and he puts a stomach claw on him, and again, Melby stiffens up his muscles again, and nothin' happens. 

 

"Arikawa looks at him, that funny expression again, puts it on him again, nothing happens. And then Melby comes back, starts kickin' the shit out of him, and Arikawa runs right out of the ring, with Melby right after him. 

 

"So I come running behind the camera, I jump on the television, I say, 'You know, in all my days of wrestling' -- I was still wrestling -- 'I have never seen Arikawa run from nobody, I mean from nobody. I mean nobody can do this to this guy.' And I said, 'You know what? I'm gonna go back into the dressing room, and I'm gonna try to change this match, for March 4, and see if Melby and Arikawa will wrestle one another in a main event.' 

 

"So I run off, now we have a match, I come back at the intermission, and we come back out, and I say, 'Ladies and gentlemen -- I did it, I did it! I got the match changed!' 

 

"Arikawa says, 'Nobody can do this to me! I lose face! I lose face! I can't afford to lose face, my ancestors' and all this bullshit. He says, 'Give me contract, I sign!' He signs the contract. And then rushes off, and Melby comes on, and he signs the contract. 

 

"Now, I got -- cause tickets aren't moving too good -- I got about ten days to sell the tickets. You know, I went in to the match that afternoon at twelve o'clock -- we had served $32,000 in the kill. And those tickets were two, three, and four dollar tickets. We sold out -- we had $53,500. That was a sellout, and I mean, we had, something like 2000 standin' in the aisles. That gimmick did it. 

 

"Well, you see, the reason that Vince McMahon is doing so great is not because of his manipulation or his expertise of promoting, or anything else, of knowing the business, it's strictly that he has got the T.V. that goes national. Over everyplace, and he has the next prestigious thing coming, that it's coming from the Garden, you know, or affiliated with the Garden, which is probably the most prestigious arena in the United States. 

 

"Not because he is a great promoter. He's not that great a promoter. But if you've got T.V., and you go national, you know, and people are seeing those wrestlers, week in and week out, then you come along -- that's the scenario of our business -- you put a guy on T.V. and you get people to like him or hate him, then you put him in a town, and the people that have seen him on T.V. for seven, eight, ten weeks or months or ten weeks -- or whatever, long enough to either you really like him, or really hate him, you bring him in the people'll pay their money at the box office to see him. That is the essence of our business. Has been. Like I'd go when I was promoting -- take Las Vegas, say. 

 

"I went in, I would make the tape here in San Francisco. I put it on, I run it for about ten weeks. And I got the people liking and disliking guys. And then I took a good match, and I put it on the Convention Center down there, you know? I made nothing but money. 

 

"And I used to always run anywhere from every two to four weeks, in all my big towns. I didn't want to overdo it -- it's like cake, if you eat too much of it, you lose the taste of it. So I'd work a angle, bring the thing back, and draw money again. I'd do this all over -- I did it in Anchorage, Alaska, did it in Honolulu, you know, and I did it in Phoenix, Las Vegas, you know to name a few towns that I did this. 

 

"I'd just take that tape and run it, and I'd cut from the tape for that market -- it's very simple. You take a master tape: if I'm making a tape for the Cow Palace, which is my master tape, I'd have the wrestlers come in, and interview the ones that are in the main event at the Cow Palace. And then, when I go and make the tape for say Las Vegas, I had the spot in there, say three minutes, that was blank. Where the interview had been done for the Cow Palace by, say, Pat Patterson. Well then -- but Pat is not in the main event in Las Vegas -- say, Joe Blow's in it. Well, I put Joe Blow in his place, talking about the match in Las Vegas . . . . 

 

"So you make custom tapes for everything, you know? And the guy's there sayin' 'I'll kill that sonofabitch!,' and the other guy sayin' 'He ain't gonna kill me!' 

 

"The essence of the whole deal: 'You kill me, and I kill you.'" 

 

Fans prefer promotions that put together "logical" cards, fashioned with a regard for common sense and a concern for continuity. Shire, who was titled "The Professor" during his wrestling career, has often said that "preached logic" as a promoter. Meltzer commented on Shire's ability: "It was a real well-run promotion. And it consistently drew well, the Cow Palace was a real great -- for the size of the city they drew real great crowds, always. I mean, a crowd of 5,000 at the Cow Palace, that never happened. Always consistent, 8-12 thousand.

 

"All of the matches on the card always made sense. If a guy won a match, he'd be moved up on the card; if a guy lost, he wouldn't. Every match was important, because the guy on the preliminary match, if he won two straight preliminary matches, he'd be moving up to a main event, and then if he won that, he might get a title shot. No one came in and was in the main event the first time. 

 

"Every match on the card was important, the title matches were always long, and they always had good endings. He was really sharp at endings, and the rematch always made sense. (Promoters now -- I'll give you an example -- cage matches: of all the gimmick matches, the number-one draw is the cage match. Sometimes they'll just throw in a cage match, to draw. If Shire had a cage match, it was because the two guys were fighting in the stands the week before, and that's why he had the cage match, to keep 'em in the ring. If he had a match where there was no stopping for blood, it was because the guys were bleeding all over the place the card before. His gimmicks always made sense.)" 

 

According to Shire and others, the heel "leads" the match -- that is, he tells the "babyface" what to do. Shire, discussing "high spots" and "ring psychology," elaborated on how this works: "Say the guy's got a headlock on the guy, and he's punishing the guy. And he's punishing him, and the fans now react -- how can the fans get out of a headlock? I mean, there's not much action to it. 

 

"So now the fans are quieted down -- that's when you do it, when the fans are nice and quiet, and their throats are rested, 'cause if they keep hollerin' all night they get hoarse, and they can't holler anymore. (This is what I call psychology; you bring 'em up, you set 'em down, bring 'em up, set 'em down.) So now, here comes the high spot. Everybody's settled, no screaming. 

 

"I'm the bad guy, you're the good guy. So I got the headlock on you. You throw me into the ropes. I come off, I give you one tackle. I give you two tackles. And then, I go to give you the third tackle, you drop down, I jump over you. I hit the rope, I come off, I'm gonna give you the next tackle, but you dropkick me. And when I go down, you snatch the headlock on me, take me over. That's what we call a high spot. The people just rise to it. You see, that's all action. . . ." 

 

"I'd go into a match and have a good matchup. And the crowd -- when I'd say, 'Okay, let's settle down, let's settle down now,' that meant I didn't want any noise, so I'd tell the wrestler, 'Get a hold on me. Get a leglock,' an armlock, a headlock, whatever. 'Let's settle the people down.' Now they would be settled down for two or three or four minutes. And you could drop a pin in the place and there's no noise going -- a little bit, not much. 

 

"And I'd say, 'Okay, let's bring 'em to their feet.' 

 

"And then I would make my move -- maybe chop meat. People'd start yelling, and then we'd go into high spots, and I'd go flying all over the ring, you know -- lyin' upside down on the top ropes, you name it. And boy, we'd have them screaming, the whole goddamned arena'd be screaming. 

 

"And then, when I figured they'd screamed long enough, I'd say, 'Okay, so I'm gonna get a hold on you now. We're gonna settle it down' -- so that next time we do this, they'll be rested, they'll be able to react. 

 

"See, if you keep doing this constantly, cutting meat, and the high spots, pretty soon the people have yelled so much that they can't yell anymore and they're going hoarse. No matter what you do, you can't get a reaction. So then when you get finally to the finish, which is the high spot of the whole match, and the people don't react to it because they're hoarse and tired or whatever, at the end of match, the people say, 'Oh that was a lousy match.' All because they didn't react to the finish."

[air_raid]

Christ, I hope that Max Landis gif doesn't become the stock response whenever anyone points out a booking inconsistency. I loved the film too but that's just obnoxious.

 

I also gave him actual words describing why it was a waste of time trying to find logic in the "bad guy in charge" scenario. You know, an actual measured response, not just a meme for the sake of a meme. You want obnoxious? Spin on it.