Dave Meltzer was gravely ill, but the phone would not stop ringing. It was December 1993, and someone had circulated the number of the hospital where Meltzer was being treated for a ruptured appendix, the delayed diagnosis of which had caused a life-threatening abdominal inflammation.
The professional wrestlers he often wrote about called to wish him well. Several would then launch into trade talk or gossip, which a fevered Meltzer would dutifully record.
“For 16 days,” he recalled, “I sat there with my notebook, waiting to go home and write.”
The wrestlers had no one else to call. Meltzer’s homemade publication
, The Wrestling Observer
, was their confessional, a place to anonymously vent about the politics and the vulgarities of their industry. For the past 26 years, he has printed a no-frills weekly journal that pulls back the curtain on a notoriously secretive business: which egos are running rampant, why revenue is up (or down), which injuries are legitimate and which are for show.
Meltzer said his workweek often exceeds 110 hours, but his home office in San Jose, Calif., allows him to spend pockets of time with his wife and two children. He has no employees, and he prints his newsletter — in single-spaced 7-point type — at a local copy shop. He declined to specify either the number of subscribers or how much he makes, but he agreed with an assessment of his income as being in six figures.
No concrete accounting of Meltzer’s prolific output can be made. Publishing about 25,000 words per issue — often many more — he has conceivably written more than 33 million words, nearly all of which have been in the service of analyzing an often-maligned athletic event.
Frank Deford, a 50-year veteran of Sports Illustrated, once labeled Meltzer the most accomplished reporter in sports journalism.
“You could cover the Vatican or State Department,” Deford said recently, “and not do as good a job as Dave Meltzer does on wrestling.”
Meltzer, 53, began watching the sport at 9. By 10, he was publishing a newsletter that received endorsements in the fan club sections of wrestling magazines. Readers would send in a quarter; Meltzer would send them a 24-page booklet covering the latest news.
“Kind of the same thing I do now, actually,” he said.
By the time a teenage Meltzer was attending live wrestling in Southern California, he realized not everything was for show. The Von Brauners, who flaunted Nazi beliefs to agitate the crowd, often had their fists cocked on their way to the locker room; knife fights broke out in the parking lot. If wrestling was phony, it provided plenty of opportunity for unscripted mayhem — a real world beyond the theatrics that seemed as compelling as the drama in the ring.
After earning a journalism degree from San Jose State, Meltzer pursued a career as a sportswriter. He held a few newspaper jobs while The Observer, then a monthly, remained a “very time-consuming hobby.” He crammed typewritten words on legal-size paper; some passages were smeared with Wite-Out and corrected by hand.
The crude presentation was irrelevant. Fans loved the locker room anecdotes. The wrestlers appreciated that Meltzer highlighted which regions drew the most fans, and he audited the attendance figures. They were paid a percentage of the live gate, a number promoters often fudged.
“News in wrestling didn’t travel well,” Meltzer said. “I’d get phone calls saying, ‘Mr. Wonderful is dead.’ I’d say, ‘I see him on TV every week.’ ”
By 1985, Vince McMahon had devoured the sport, hiring the regional stars to populate his World Wrestling Federation. He went national, creating mainstream celebrities like Hulk Hogan. (The enterprise became World Wrestling Entertainment in 2002.)
The magazines, including the W.W.F.’s in-house glossies, pushed ice cream bars and promoted contrived rivalries. Meltzer criticized wrestlers for having a limited repertory of moves, analyzed talent deals and fretted over the kind of ballooned physiques possible only with anabolic steroids.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/sports/wrestling-reporter-dave-meltzer-tries-to-keep-it-real.html?partner=rss&emc=rss