Back to the beginning, twelve years ago:
Time to open up that ol’ Smarks.com mailbag…
First piece of mail this week comes from Dave Simons, who goes that extra distance and not only criticises me, but actually wishes me dead and tortured. Now THAT’S passionate letter-writing.
(2013 Scott sez: Remember a couple of weeks ago when I was talking about how grumpy I was watching RAW because of a guy prank-calling me? Basically it was some dude in Florida who sounded rather drunk and got a hold of my cell phone number, then spent two hours texting me messages about how I “touch little boys” and making dated jokes about my haircut from a decade ago. Then he moved to voice mails advising me to kill myself by jumping off a cliff. My wife trolled him for a while by constantly answering my phone and acting like she didn’t know who I was, but finally we got bored of him and blocked the number. The funny thing is that he gave his name as though it was someone I should know and quake in fear at hearing from, but I’d never even heard of the guy. So the point is, 12 years later my popularity remains unabated. On with this moron…)
I just wanted to say that just when I thought you could not be more pathetic than you already are, you go and prove me wrong.
I guess you forgot that you're the guy who all this time has been using every chance he ever could to bash WCW. You're the one for years who said they'd go out of business. (funny though how you never said a thing about the XFL, you goddamn shill) Now they finally have gone out of business and you were ecstatic about it, you faggot. You were the one who said how "surreal" it was to see you're god, Vince McMahon, on wcw tv and how there's no way they can fuck this up. Lo and behold, you got you're wish, and now the WWF has gotten stale. Since you are so stupid, I will draw the conclusion for you--the WWF can't even keep themselves interesting, there's no way they could handle two promotions.
It's not your endless shilling that bothers me though. It's how goddamn hypocritical you are. You say Buff Bagwell has no business in wrestling, but then say that the WWF "has to get Goldberg" they guy who wasn't even considerate enough to show up to the last episode of Nitro (yeah I bet a guy like that really respects the business) You never complained once during the WWF comeback, which Vince Russo had an integral part in. But the second he comes to WCW, you don't even give him a chance. Hell, you were the loser who made a chart of every mistake he ever made in the WWF, yet never pointed out these mistakes when he was working for the WWF. And now look at you. You've finally started writing about the WWF objectively. THe only reason you do this--it's cause you've finally realized how little you count. The WWF doesn't give a shit about you or your opinion--that's why they had one of their columnist's nail you (he did a damn good job too). And then all of a sudden the guy who spent his entire life kissing the WWF's ass, and said Vince McMahon can't fuck anything up, suddenly turns into a broken-hearted pussy when he realizes that the WWF doesn't care about him.
I'm real sorry about your apartment burning down--sorry that you didn't burn down with it. Don't worry though, I'm sure one day there'll be a book burning party at your place, where we'll torch "The Buzz on Professional Wrestling" Looking at the reviews on Amazon.com, it seems like more than enough people would participate. This time, though, we'll make sure you're inside the fire.
I can honestly think of no one who deserves to be tortured and murdered more than you. And if there's any justice in the world, one day that'll happen.
Oh,one more thing. Don't ever act like you care about Owen Hart. You don't give one shit about him. Ever since his death, you never once criticized the man who killed him and then crapped all over his death by continuing the show. These are words not just from me, but from his own older brother. And who do you think mattered more to Owen, his brother, or a dumb fuck like you.
So, Dave, what do you REALLY think?
(I don’t know why I didn’t respond here, but the e-mail is so hilariously inaccurate that it kind of stands on its own. I didn’t say anything about the XFL? REALLY? Doesn’t making fun of the very idea for months leading up to it and then practically dancing on its grave count? And I never criticized Vince McMahon for leading to the death of Owen Hart? And this guy was still defending Russo even after he brought down the entire promotion?
On the bright side, this e-mail was written well before 9/11, so at least he would likely have someone more worthy of being tortured and murdered now.)
Former Rant Crew contributor Andy Goss chimes in with a King of the Ring scenario (which I’m deleting because it’s long and kind of not good. I’m sure beating me another 200 times at You Don’t Know Jack will make up for it, though.) …
That's, uh...very well thought out. I don’t think the WCW crossover is gonna happen anytime this summer, but it’s certainly no worse than anything else the WWF has been booking lately.
John David, an embittered UK reader, writes in to bitch about the WWF’s UK PPVs, a popular topic it seems…
After watching InsurreXion on Sky Box Office the other weekend, I was quite surprised to see the announcement of the Manchester PPV Rebellion. Manchester is not that far from my home town of Liverpool, so myself and the four friends that I was watching Insurrexion with decided that we'd do our damnest to try and get tickets, since for the last few PPV's we'd been unable to get tickets or we'd been unavailable when the tickets went on sale. We decided that each of the five of us would try to get five tickets (just in case some of us failed), we figured that if we had too many tickets we could always sell them on (Insurrexion tickets were selling for £150-£300 on eBay the week before the event). My friends Chris & John(II) would phone ticket master, Suze would go to HMV and Clare and myself (John(I)) would sit on Ticket Master's website.
What I was surprised at was what happened on the following Friday. Tickets went on sale from Ticketmaster and HMV Box Office at 9am on that day, and so we were at our appointed posts. Clare and I had started checking the website at 8am, and at about 8:30am it experienced a notable slowdown, at 8:45 it was painfully slow on average getting a time out error every 10 reloads. At 9:00am it was dead stop almost. But we continued, knowing that surely one of us would get through on their website.
No
Ticketmaster's website displayed that there were no more tickets for sale (or rather a "We cannot complete your transaction" message indicating sold out). Ticketmaster's phone lines were about as much help, as they were constantly engaged for two hours. HMV - well they were a non factor, Sold Out it seemed were an order of the day.
So the five of us decided that it looked like we wouldn't be going to Rebellion (and I really wanted to dress up as Steven Richards to the disgust of my four other friends). Once more the fickle hand of fate had dealt us a killing blow.
But no, like any good fairy tale this does have a (vaguely) happy ending - it transpires that quite a few coach companies had bought massive blocks of tickets and were selling them on in a package deal and we managed to scrounge some tickets out of them. So we will be going (and I really hope RTC doesn't split up so I can go looking like a moron dressed as a member of RTC).
My point(s) on this matter -
1. The UK gets two PPV events a year and it looks like the WWF could easily expand that to more, such as they did when they were doing a "UK Tour" rather than just one event at a time, and certainly they would get the patronage, and transporting their wrestlers over for one show then transporting them back to the US is surely less cost effective than getting a few shows out of them while they're over here.
2. Due to the limit on PPV's - the UK fans become rather rabid at the thought of tickets, I believe that it was around 1hr that it took for all the outlets to sell out of tickets for the event, and it left many fans out in the cold - the US are very lucky in that they have house shows / PPV's / TV Tapings to see their "superstars" in action. The UK gets one 2.5 hour segment every (if we're lucky) 6 months, so it comes as no surprise to find the mass appeal for tickets.
3. And due to this ticket grabbing madness some people are making a LOT of money off this. I know someone who ordered tickets (and received them) due to the priority service that Ticketmaster runs - purely for the intention of selling them on eBay - he got 10 tickets at a cost of £35 each - £350. If tickets go for the same price on eBay that the Insurrexion tickets go for he can expect to get between £1500 and £3000 for them. Sickening really. Isn't it?
Hey man, just be glad you don’t live in Canada – you’d only get the WWF once a YEAR unless you lived in Toronto. And if there’s one universal constant about ticket-buying systems worldwide, it’s that chances of people actually buying tickets through them are slim and none.
(Now up here you get WWE once every two to three years, if that. And the UK doesn’t get PPVs anymore. So everyone wins, I guess.)
That’s all I got from the mailbag this week, until next time, keep smilin’…
(That was kind of a lame first edition, aside from the spectacular first letter. I just don’t get that kind of passionate hate mail anymore. Mostly it’s confined to people on the F4W board now.)