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I have started to get into New Japan Pro Wrestling but don't know a lot of the history of what came before the last year. What is the best way to get that information?
While it's always possible that we will run some pieces on the history of the company, I would suggest the excellent book Lion's Pride - The Turbulent History of New Japan by Chris Charlton, who has done an incredible job with his writing on the subject. For more, visit www.lionspridebook.com.
I wanted to commend you on your Axl Rotten piece but also ask if you feel you were too brutally honest about him?
That is an interesting question and one I thought a lot about after I posted the piece on the site. I liked him a lot as a person and I have a lot of empathy for his family, but at the end of the day, if I don't write about what he did wrong and what he did to curtail not just his own career but his life, I would be doing him a disservice. He was better than he ever showed and a big part of why he never went farther were his own issues. That's not an opinion, it's fact. The reality is he could have had a decent career and been a good creative mind and after his run, he could have been training kids who loved wrestling as much as he did, but he chose a different, sadder path for himself. Yes, he just passed away but by glossing over that and writing just nice things about him, would be to lie about who he was and what led him to the way he died. Writing that piece saddened me more than I can ever convey but what really saddens me is that his mother has to bury her son. That is what I was thinking about as I wrote the piece.
I have to take you to talk on something you wrote - in a time period where ECW had Public Enemy, Sabu, Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, Eddie Guerrero, etc. you are saying the Rottens put it on the map? I call bullsh**. That makes you look like such a mark.
You can say whatever you want, but the reality is I lived through the era and as much as all of those names you mentioned were great in ECW in 1994, the barbed wire bat gimmick got ECW a lot of press in the magazines during a time when those magazines helped spur interest in the product. There was no internet, on a major scale, in 1994 and AOL was just taking off in 1995. Old school media was a big part of promotion for the companies then and if you go back through the PWI family of magazines, the Rottens got a lot of ink. That absolutely helped ECW and if anyone wants to ignore that, they aren't seeing things with a clear picture.
Who should be the WWE Celebrity Hall of Fame inductee this year?
In my mind, Regis Phibin or Cyndi Lauper.
Whatever happened to Rob Barlett, one of the original Raw announcers?
Bartlett lives in the NYC area and regularly performs on Broadway and Off-Broadway productions.
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