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 Wrestling on the net – one fan’s guide I spend a lot of time online (obviously) and a fair amount of that time is spent on wrestling websites. It’s a paradox that as my interest in watching the product has decreased, I’m spending more than ever to find out about it. I invest my time and money in something that TiVo watches far more of than I do. Maybe it’s that reading “Stephanie McMahon” is less painful than actually seeing Stephanie McMahon and hearing Stephanie McMahon. Anyway, with my credentials stated, I give you my top five wrestling websites 5. Kayfabe Memories message board An ezBoard which covers wrestling from the early days up until 1989 (I’m not sure why that date was chosen as the cut off but discussion of present issues is liable to get you barred). There is one forum for each of the territories and it is a marvellous place to learn about the past by people who watched and lived through it. The famous places are here – World Class, Jim Crockett, the AWA and WWWF – as well as less documented promotions like Central States, WWC, Portland and Florida. If you want to know anything about territorial wrestling, you’ll find it here. Great angles, rubbish characters, guys who vanished, what was in X’s secret envelope – you’ll find it all at Kayfabe Memories. There is an accompanying website which has a vast number of articles about the chosen time frame. One for historians only. I am a long standing subscriber to Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter. I think my first issue covered Mike Tyson’s WWF debut. The website doesn’t contain much beyond shilling for the WO and Figure Four Weekly (which I tried and which didn’t seem like anything special) but they have good TV reviews and a daily digest of news. 3. Wrestlecrap Once a huge site with hundreds of entries, it’s now been reduced to two entries a week but it’s worth checking out each Friday to be reminded that inanity isn’t a new thing in the wrestling business. It’s spawned a book which Amazon UK steadfastly refuses to have in stock. Some of the items featured make you shake your head and say “I remember that – wasn’t it awful” and the other half make you wonder “what were they thinking?” One favourite of mine is the NWA tag team “The New Breed” which was made up of two young wrestlers, both of whom were ok in the ring, but who were saddled with the gimmick of having come from the future. Yes – time travelling wrestlers. The only two things I know about them are that one of them had his career ended in his early 20s after a car crash and that they once greeted Dusty Rhodes with the line “Hello, Mr President”. 2. PWTorch.com Subscribers to the Torch newsletter get a VIP version of the site complete with audio features, special emails, back issues and more. The regular site is packed with adverts and pushes the newsletter to an off putting degree but if you can tolerate the advertising it is a very good site. The articles have depth to them, the staff are knowledgeable and there is more to read than you’ll be able to read. The Ask The Torch section is a reasonably good Q&A, the TV reports are a good blend of opinion and fact and The Lounge delivers some thoughtful articles. A couple of times I have been to 1wrestling.com’s free site and man alive are there a lot of adverts? It makes me glad I pay the $39.95 a year for the premium site. If you visit every day it is a small price to pay for the easy and convenience of an ad-free site. It works out at about 7p per day. You also get two full length radio shows and around four 10-15 minute hotlines each week. The 1wrestling team know their stuff too. Their background is in print and online journalism and before 1wrestling they ran the official ECW website. They behave like proper journalists who happen to be writing about wrestling and on a website rather than guys who compromise professionalism for both of the above reasons. If you visit other websites for news then the chances are you’re reading second hand stuff stolen from one of the above sites or rumours (i.e. things the authors have made up or read online and added to). As for the company websites, WWE.com is a dreadful site. Overly complicated, packed with code which doesn’t work on non-IE browsers, very annoying to navigate, riddled with errors, packed with adverts and containing no worthwhile content. The NWA:TNA site on the other hand is very well produced. A simple, clean and stylish design, content which helps familiarise people with a product that 99% of them don’t know and hype which builds their PPVs well. Hopefully they will add some multimedia content soon. Streaming highlights or the ability to download their weekly TV show Xplosion would be a definite plus. The technology even exists to offer their PPVs worldwide over the internet. By cutting out the PPV middleman, they could afford to stream their shows for say $5 a week and if it was on a tape delay basis I would certainly be interested. The internet is often blamed by those in power (i.e. the McMahons) for the decline in wrestling’s fortunes but that is because intelligent and astute people like Dave Scherer and Wade Keller have the nerve to point out what WWE is doing wrong and how they could fix it if only they’d swallow their pride and admit they have a problem. Instead they say everything is great apart from the cyber-pests who are cynically destroying all they have built. [update 24/07/04 - over due I know but the 1. position should now read as follows - ] The team who made 1wrestling.com left that site to open their own - PWinsider.com - back in January. 1wrestling is now a shell of its former self and isn't worth your time or money. PWi by contrast is even better than 1W was in its heyday. Dave, Buck, Mike and Jess have rediscovered their enthusiasm after the political mess which made them want to leave 1W. Well worth $39.95 a year, especially when the exchange rate is as funky as it is right now.
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