Specter Chronicle 006: Sports Entertainment

You may look at the title and think that the topic isn’t worth reading about. Then again, you may be completely into the topic and want to read something worth your time. There will be something worth reading and something that I’ve been working on in the background, so read on and learn about what has been going on.

A Brief History: Pro Wrestling and Me

I started watching professional wrestling just before Wrestlemania (yes, the original) and was a fervent fan through the mid-90s when things kind of trailed off. Well, I really just lost the ability to watch for a few years until the Monday Night Wars were coming to their climax, then I watched until WWE became boring with their repetitive brand extension BS.

When Total Nonstop Action (TNA) came in, I watched with enthusiasm… then it was ruined by Hulk Hogan and Dixie Carter. When All Elite Wrestling (AEW) popped up, I watched with enthusiasm… then it went onto channels that weren’t accessible to people without cable. I’m a cord cutter. Why would you cut off your programming to cord cutters?

Anyway, from 1998 to roughly 2003 I ran some eFeds (electronic federations, slang for fantasy wrestling played online). I opened with the Dark Wrestling Organization (DWO), the Virtual Wrestling Matrix (VWM), the Sports Entertainment Organization (SEO), and the Professional Haven for Athletes of Sports Entertainment (PHASE). The DWO was the most popular one of the group, but PHASE had the biggest potential.

I ran some offline federations during (and around) that time, too. Naming them won’t matter, so I won’t. That should catch everything up.

My Involvement in Pro Wrestling Currently

Recently, there was a deal for Peacock subscriptions (99 cents per month for 12 months) and I decided to go for it. Peacock has WWE programming on it and that got me back into watching some of their programming… except for a PPV and a couple of recent (at the time) episodes of Raw, I mainly watched classic episodes of “old school wrestling” and Saturday Night’s Main Event. I’ve since watched a few of the documentaries available and they were pretty good, too, but WWE just wasn’t that interesting… the formula was obvious.

Then Vince McMahon left due to allegations of sexual misconduct. But I’m jumping ahead.

I searched hard for a way to watch AEW online and finally found a site that has a lot of wrestling programs available on it. They aren’t live (I can’t get the live to work, anyway, not that I watch appointment TV in the first place) but I’m plenty happy watching Dynamite, Rampage, and Dark in a binge once a week. It’s been super great.

Back to Vince, though.

He left WWE under sexual misconduct allegations and was gone something like four to six months. All of a sudden, the locker room was happier, people were feeling better about working for WWE and wrestlers were feeling optimistic about their future. Vince then suddenly comes back and the WWE is all of a sudden up for sale.

The best hope is AEW buys them. Worst case scenario is that the Saudi government buys them.

That really doesn’t have much to do with what I wanted to get to, though… I wanted to turn this back to the fantasy wrestling aspect.

A Brief History of Fantasy Wrestling and Me

When I was watching pro wrestling as a youth, the obvious thing to want to do is have your own organization and run your own created wrestlers against others’ created wrestlers in that organization. Well, that’s what happened. Sometime in the mid-80s, a group of us had a thriving fantasy wrestling federation (called World Wrestling Organization, or WWO).

Along side this WWO, I ran my own personal federation in my free time to test out some booking theories I had. I can elaborate on this after the announcement down below, as it’s part of the “historical background.”

After the WWO, I was part of a mail in federation (which was painfully slow but was interesting) for a few years before getting access to the Internet to start the DWO for a group of coworkers (and eventually the Internet).

Even though there were offline feds and online feds that all ran basically in the same basic (and short-lived) period of time, I look back on that period with fondness and periodically get the twitch to go back and run something like that again.

I’m more inclined to run the “my own personal fed” rather than an eFed, though.

The Real Purpose of This Column

I mentioned that there was an announcement, and we have finally arrived at that point. Let me announce that I have recently acquired Fire Pro Wrestling World and have been figuring things out to where I can begin running my own sports entertainment promotion. There is a history to the characters in this promotion (there are a lot of “children of the other feds I mentioned above” participating) and that history will also get written about in due time on this website. But let me announce officially:

Championship Unlimited Revolution Sports Entertainment (CURSE) Wrestling. I am diligently working on the details behind the scenes and will be getting actual content out on this website for CURSE as soon as I can.

These will be in the form of wrestling shows, so hopefully everything turns out great and I look forward to hearing from everyone!