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It was a wild, violent brawl replete with stiff fists and thudding steel-chair shots. On March 23, 1981, Cornette and Dooley sat ringside at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis for a no-disqualification match between Jerry Lawler and Terry Funk. Only two years later, the scale underwent its first expansion.
Three stars: “That was pretty f-in’ good.”.Two stars: “Well, that’s about what we expected.”.One star: “Wow, I couldn’t wait for that to be over.”.“What we based it on,” says Cornette now, “was how much we and the people in the building enjoyed it, what the crowd response was, and did anybody just f- up and fall on their ass?” The scores, as Cornette explains now in his inimitable fashion, were meant to indicate the following: Like Maltin, they would rate matches up to four stars. He was sending this out to 40 f-ing people.”
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“I told him, ‘Weasel, the way you’re going into this detail now, you ought to rate the matches with stars the way they do in the TV Guide,’” says Cornette, who would later gain renown as an on-screen WWE performer, booker of various promotions, and famously unfiltered spitfire.
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During one of the pair’s regular phone calls, Cornette thumbed through an issue of TV Guide, in which movie syponses were accompanied by film critic Leonard Maltin’s ratings on a four-star scale. Dooley had taken to editorializing during his match recaps, peppering reports with wisecracks that presaged the snarky tone of today’s online wrestling discussions. Everyone who did newsletters then did it.”ĭooley’s ratings began in 1979, with an offhand suggestion made during a phone conversation with fellow local superfan and Weasel’s World photographer Jim Cornette.
“I was essentially copying Norm Dooley,” says Meltzer, one of Dooley’s loyal readers, of his early newsletters. Among them was Norman “Weasel” Dooley, a devotee who chronicled the Louisville scene and compiled out-of-town results in a self-published bulletin dubbed Weasel’s World of Wrestling. To follow the happenings and stars in other areas, hardcore fans would exchange videotapes and newsletters through the mail.
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He had launched the Observer in 1982 in what would be the waning years of pro wrestling’s territorial era, a time predating national and international promotions (à la WWE) when each segment of the U.S. When Meltzer doled out his first star rating, he was merely following a trend. But to understand how we got here is to understand modern wrestling fandom itself.
It’s in that same obsessive environment that Meltzer’s assessments have gone from one informed viewer’s opinion to a monolith worthy of casting online stones. Wrestling’s fanbase, present company included, often lends itself to tedious pedantism there is, for one of many examples, a 4,594-word, 172-source Wikipedia entry on the “persona and reception” of current WWE star Roman Reigns. Yet unlike, say, music or movies, where a plethora of assessments from various critics comprise elements of a larger conversation, Meltzer’s grades have taken a singularly lofty and divisive status, with many followers as concerned with the merits of his scores as with the merits of the matches themselves. Like any entertainment genre, wrestling inspires a wide range of responses to a variety of styles, in accordance with a spectrum of individual tastes. The backlash is based on a premise that even Meltzer himself questions: that his ratings matter in the first place.