Falls Count Anywhere

04-30-08

Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?

I’ve been watching Dusty Rhodes matches for the last few days. He was a big deal, and the WWE DVD release didn’t really hit me as being enough, so I went into my collection and watched a lot of his stuff from the 1980s and early 1990s. Seeing his matches with Harley Race and against Ric Flair were great, but there’s something about Dusty in the studio in Atlanta or the Florida stuff. Sadly, there wasn’t much of his classic feud with Kevin Sullivan to make me happy. Go figure.

Of late, I’ve been studying up on history a little. The biggest thing I’ve been looking into is the history of the Mid-South Coliseum with the great work that the folks at Pro Wrestling History have put together. They put up an almost completely comprehensive look at all the cards that took place in the Coliseum between 1971 and the present.

It’s amazing that it exists, and as much as I’d love it if it contained full prose descriptions of every show, it’s more than enough for it to just have the results and match listings. It did raise some questions: how much information from today will survive to the future?

We have the Wayback Machine (www.waybackmachine.org) that is run by our good friends at the Internet Archive. They store images of the web dating way back. You can search for a particular page and voila, you get a listing of what was on the page on that particular day. It’s very useful, as you can go back and see the information on a particular day. Sites like WrestlingObserver.com, RFVideo.com, WWE.com and tnawrestling.com, as well as the various incarnations of ecwwrestling.com can all be accessed.

Do you have this one, Chris?

Now, let’s just assume that the web isn’t just a fad and the funding for the Archive is enough to keep the thing going; there’ll always be a source for all the information there. That means we’ll have access to things like Christopher Robin Zimmerman’s legendary RAW reviews of the 1990s and 2000s, which you can still find at http://slashwrestling.com/, and the Death Valley Driver Video Reviews (http://www.deathvalleydriver.com/) are going to be available for reading into the foreseeable future. That means that we’ll have more than just results.

There was a time when the only places you could get opinions on wrestling were from two sources: the newsstand magazines and the sheets. The magazines were a good place to get info and get reaction to the major events in wrestling. You’d get photos and you’d get usually slanted material about the shows that happened.

A complete run of Pro Wrestling Illustrated would be incredible as it was the most significant magazine for years, published arena reports, had lists of contenders for various titles that would allow you to know who was where, and had photos of people. They also had terrible articles, made-up interviews, and didn’t acknowledge a lot of stuff that happened. Still, I don’t know of a single library in the world that has a complete collection nor of any plan to get them all scanned to PDF and put up on-line. It would be incredible to have all of that available, and there’s someone to do it somewhere.

The Sheets are different. They’re mostly information and usually have a business slant to everything. The Wrestling Observer is the best view of the 1980s through today. Dave Meltzer does incredible work, writes well and has the broadest coverage of anyone. Having a set of every Observer scanned, even if it’s only available by subscription, would be so useful. Hell, there’s gotta be some library that would scan and store a set and do full annotation of the material. There are probably a dozen complete sets in the hands of private folks (I have major gaps even in the 12 years that I’ve been reading) and I’m betting that we’ll see someone do something with them. They’re still a money-maker for Dave, but with his Yahoo! gig, who knows?

Of course, jerks like me will have our words up for as long as we can. I’ve got my columns here (and FanboyPlanet will never die!) and I put them up without the photos (or editing) on Scribd.com after they’re up here. I like having back-ups, what can I say?

If I were a researcher into the history of the 21st Century wrestling business, I’d start with things like Falls and the CRZ reviews and then dig deeper. If there are no libraries or archives that collect Observers or PWIs, then how will they get deeper. It may well be easier to find info on the 1950s wrestling, where a lot of material has gone up in various forms, than on wrestling in the Internet Age.

And how much would that suck?

Chris Garcia