Want more wrestling news, rumors, and results? Be sure to visit PWInsider.com and PWInsiderXtra.com.
It was some time in 1997 when Bob Ryder called me to discuss a business that he wanted to start. At the time, he ran the Wrestling area of the now defunct Prodigy service and I was publishing The Wrestling Lariat print newsletter. We were already friends and colleagues, having spent a lot of time together covering ECW shows from the Arena in Philadelphia. We both knew that the web was going to be the next wave of news distribution. He knew that it would make things like his Prodigy wrestling area obsolete. I could see that it would do the same for the print media that I was part of. So that day when he proposed the idea of creating a members only website where he, myself and the late Georgiann Makropoulos of The Wrestling Chatterbox newsletter would combine to post our newsletter content and the audios we did on our 900 lines for a paying audience, I was intrigued and agreed to come on board. 1Wrestling.com was born.
For the next six and a half years, we worked together very closely as the internet bubble expanded and then burst. We went from a paying members only business, to an ad-supported site, to a hybrid mix of both over that time, breaking stories right and left and changing wrestling reporting from something that arrived in a mailbox one day a week to an instantaneous medium where news broke the second it was posted on the site.
I am proud of what we accomplished as a team at 1Wrestling. Things that are common place today in how the business is covered were innovated and implemented by us back then. In real time, it’s hard to realize what you are accomplishing. That usually only happens when you sit back and reflect on where you have been.
The one thing that I knew from the first time that I met Bob was that he loved the business of professional wrestling with all of his heart and every fiber of his being, just as I did. We both had what I call “the sickness”. I remember us sitting on the stage at ECW’s first PPV “Barely Legal” and the emotion of the journey of all of the hardworking people in that company finally getting their day in the spotlight overcoming us both. It was the kind of thing that only kindred spirits can experience.
After that came The Monday Night Wars, a truly crazy time (and the best time) in the history of the business, at least in my lifetime. That is when it also became clear that while we both loved the business, we wanted different things from it.
In 1999, the then-WWF brought me up to Stamford to offer me that job of Editor of Raw and WWF magazines. I didn’t work for Bob, I was a content provider who worked for myself, but I did have a contract with him. Bob told me to go and take the interview and if I wanted the job, he would let me out of the contract so that I could pursue what he thought had to be my dream, to work for the WWF. Now keep in mind, I was doing 90 plus percent of the work at both 1Wrestling and ECWWrestling.com (which Bob bought and ran to help the company when they didn’t have it in the budget to do it themselves). Me leaving would have been catastrophic to the sites but still, because he loved the business and thought it would be my dream to work for the WWF, he would have done harm to his own business to support me.
That is the kind of guy Bob Ryder was.
As it turned out, I was happy on my side of the ring but Bob always wanted to be on the other. He got the chance to do that with WCW and he loved every minute of it. When they were bought out by WWE, he was very concerned about a monopoly befalling the business. So, he came up with another idea, TNA. He pitched it to Jeff and Jerry Jarrett, and a new company was born and he was an integral part of it. As time went by, our differing roles in the business led to a predictable split as we both had very different responsibilities to it, and then PWInsider was born.
As it turns out, it was the best thing for both of us. Bob spent the rest of his life with TNA/Impact, helping people in every way possible and making sure that the show always went on. He launched careers. He helped the business. He made friends and lasting memories.
He lived his life on HIS terms, even after Multiple Myeloma tried to shut him down.
Bob fought and fought and fought and never, ever lost his love of the business. While he was taken way too soon, he made the most of his time here and lived his life the way that he wanted to, and enjoyed every minute of it.
Rest in peace my friend and know that you will be missed. #NotesFromBob
If you enjoy PWInsider.com you can check out the AD-FREE PWInsider Elite section, which features exclusive audio updates, news, our critically acclaimed podcasts, interviews and more by clicking here!
Bang On Casino
