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With Bob Ryder being inducted in the TNA Hall of Fame, I was wondering about it being reported he worked for ECW and was the ECW webmaster? Wasn't that Dave Scherer?
Dave was the webmaster of ECWWrestling.com.
Bob never worked for ECW. That would 100% incorrect and if someone stated he was an employee of ECW, that's a lie. He never collected a check from ECW as a regular employee the way a Tommy Dreamer, for example, would have.
Bob, like a lot of others, tried to help ECW when he could, because he liked and appreciated the company and what they were trying to do - and saw there were things he could do to help and offer that they, as a tiny mom and pop shop, didn't have the ability or time to handle themselves. He flew himself to Philly to do live coverage of the shows for the old Prodigy wrestling area. That was for Prodigy, not ECW. I am sure that through Bob's travel company, he helped ECW by booking travel and trying to get them good rates, but he was never an employee. He never tried to get a job with ECW. He was later hired by WCW, but that's a completely different situation. He worked for WCW. He liked and tried to help ECW. Big difference.
What Bob did do, since Paul Heyman was overwhelmed and didn't have time for this, was buy the domain name of ECWWrestling.com and put the website up for the company, on his own dime. He later sold half of the ECW site and 1Wrestling.com to Joey Styles and the two were partners in both sites. When Bob went to work for WCW, he sold his half of the ECW site to Paul Heyman.
Dave Scherer was the point person running the ECW site, and for most of that run, he and others were doing it as volunteer work, because, again, they believed in what ECW was doing. I was part of that crew and involved every day, so I think I'd know what the deal was.
The reason I ask is that Dave Meltzer wrote this about Bob - "Ryder, who was one of the first people to do an internet news web site, 1wrestling.com, parlayed that into a job with ECW, running that company’s website."
Meltzer would be wrong and should apologize. If Bob was running the website, what was Dave Scherer doing? At best, that line is mischaracterizing. At worse, it's lying. He should amend and apologize.
Do you think Ryder deserves the induction?
Oh God, yes. In fact, I would argue that he should have been one of the first inducted. Bob truly loved TNA and knew where all the bodies were "buried" so to speak. He did everything he could to help keep that company running, including once getting the entire talent roster to convert their contracts, personally doing it over the course of one afternoon at a TV taping in 2015, in order to keep the company financially viable. Over that afternoon, only one talent refused (Kenny King), and Kenny remained to finish out his storyline before departing. Forget that the entire trajectory of professional wrestling on the Internet would have been completely different without Bob Ryder, there would have been NO TNA without Bob. Think about what that meas to the careers of AJ Styles, Eric Young, Bobby Roode and an infinite number of others. How is that not criteria for being inducted alone?
I've seen some dismiss Bob as a reporter because he worked with WCW. Thoughts on that?
Well, Bob was the one who broke Bret Hart was leaving the WWF for WCW, to the point that WWF had to, at the time, publicly acknowledge the situation. That's all one needs to know about whether his reporting was any good at the time. People want to knock him for going to WCW to work, and that's certainly within reason of criticism, but to say that before he took a six figure job that most would have jumped on if offered, his reporting wasn't good, that would be, as Maury Povich would say, "a lie." I think if you want to criticize Bob for working for WCW and criticizing WWF, their competition, publicly on 1Wrestling at the time, yeah, I think that's fair game. To knock his reporting before that, not so much.
Amazon has a Bob Ryder book listed but I can't find it?
Ryder once planned to write a book about his time in the business titled "How I Killed KayFabe" but later pulled back on the idea and stopped writing, privately noting that he didn't want to anger and upset those he had worked with around wrestling by telling stories as he remembered them, stories that likely will never be revealed. I don't believe any manuscript exists.
Whatever happened to the boat that Bob Ryder pitched Jeff and Jerry Jarrett on creating TNA?
I believe, and this is not a joke, that the boat sank.
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