SLAGLE:  Hey everybody, thanks for joining us here at www.superstarbillygraham.com, I'm Steve Slagle, and today our guest is the creator of the Wrestling Lariat newsletter, and I'm sure you're also familiar with him from his work on 1Wrestling.com and also his weekly column for the New York Daily News.  Of course, I'm talking about Dave Scherer, who is on the line right now.  Dave, how're you doing?

SCHERER:  Very good!  How are you doing, Steve?

SLAGLE: I'm doing great, thanks for asking.  Also, thanks for being here to day.  First, I guess I'd like to start off by just having you tell everyone who's listening just how you got involved in the world of wrestling journalism?

SCHERER:  Wow, that's a good question, one that sometimes I ask myself, to be completely honest with you!  Basically, back in the early nineties, I was writing for a few different newsletters, I was writing match reports and posting news on the rec.sport.pro wrestling newsgroup, back in the time when there wasn't even probably a thousand readers on it.  Now it's huge.  So, I started doing that and basically, by writing those columns and hanging around shows, I got to meet wrestlers, I got to meet people who ran independents, and you know, met guys when they were younger, before they went to the WWF or WCW or ECW.  As I started to meet more guys, you make more contacts, and it just kind of seemed like one thing led to another.  Then in 1995, for whatever reason, I decided to start my own print newsletter, and that was basically how I got started.      .

SLAGLE:  And how has the print newsletter gone for you?  I mean, are you still doing it on a full-time basis?.

SCHERER:  Actually, to tell you the truth, I started doing that, and then in August of 1997 I hooked up with Bob Ryder when he was about to start 1Wrestling.com.  He asked me to come on board, and at the time, all I was really going to do was post my newsletter, you know, it was going to be part of the premium area that people would pay for on the site.  That was at the time when people still thought you could charge for things on the web.  ESPN was trying it then, too.  As it turned out, you know, there was so much content available on the web that we quickly scrapped that idea.  At that time, advertising on the internet started to take off, so where one thing went down, the other thing came up.  So, we started posting my newsletter on the internet as well.  You know, when I started, I never planned on writing a daily news column on the internet, it was never the plan for Bob or myself.  But, as the net itself evolved, I think what happened was, it just seemed like the natural thing to do.  As the news broke, why wait until the end of the week to put it in the newsletter when you have the immediacy of the internet to put it on live right now?  So, like I said, one thing led to another, to the point where I started posting things, then I started doing the Lariat online everyday, and then I started, you know, calling it the Daily Lariat and I pretty much do it now every day of every year from now on!

SLAGLE:  Now, at what age did you become a wrestling fan?

SCHERER:  Well, to tell the truth, that's kind of funny.  I grew up in the Northeast, and lived just south of Atlantic City, New Jersey down at the Jersey Shore.  Which, you know, people say, "New Jersey?!?  Man, that's a horrible place to live!"  Well, it could be, if you live in North Jersey, but where I live, down here it's really nice.  Um, so growing up here, pretty much until I was about seventeen, all we had access to was the World Wide Wrestling Federation, which was Vince's father.  And other than guys like "Superstar" Billy Graham, whose site obviously you run, there were a lot of boring guys in there.  I mean, they were the big, heavy, plodding guys and I was more into either the guys like Superstar who were more flamboyant than your run-of-the-mill wrestlers, or the guys who just worked real hard and had real good matches.

So, living here, I didn't much care for wrestling until I was about seventeen and we got cable.  Then, I started getting to see wrestling from Florida and Texas, Mid-South, and I liked the way they did it.  You know, the way the promotions were done down there, and the kind of product they did.

So, I guess I was about seventeen or eighteen years old before I really started getting into the wrestling business and really started enjoying it, and seeing it for what it could be when the guys did it the way I liked it, for lack of a better term.

SLAGLE: Now, you already mentioned The Superstar...who were some of your other favorites growing up?  Maybe some of the guys in the WWF, and then some of the guys that turned your head once you got cable?

SCHERER:  Well, in the WWWF, my favorites were probably, I mean, I loved The Superstar, he was awesome.

I liked the Wild Samoans, they were great, too.  For what they did, their gimmick was really great.  I also liked Fuji & Tanaka, Fuji & Saito.  I loved Don Muraco, he was great.

SLAGLE:  Ken Patera?

SCHERER:  Ken was alright.  I mean, he had a good look to him, but once the match started, it was like, you know.  He wasn't bad, it's just, you know, he wasn't like some of the other guys I liked so much.

SLAGLE:  Right.  I was just trying to think of guys from that era...

SCHERER:  Those were the guys from the WWWF that when they were on, I would sit and watch instead of just turning it off.  And Bruno, I saw the charisma in Bruno, and thought it was pretty good, too.

SLAGLE:  Now, were you around when Bruno had his neck broken by Stan Hansen, who I know is one of your favorites, too?

SCHERER:  I love Stan Hansen, he was great.  Yeah, I do remember that real faintly.  I wasn't real into it then, but my best friend in high school was into everything, and he would tell me about things whether I wanted to hear or not.  So, I remember hearing about it.

SLAGLE: This is kind of off the subject, but what do you think about Stan retiring?  It just came out that Stan's, you know, hanging it up.  What are your thoughts on that?

SCHERER:  Well, I think he's 51, and you, at 51, I can definitely understand why he'd want to retire...

SLAGLE:  Yeah, well, I haven't seen any of his stuff in a really long time...

SCHERER: Well, he's worked All Japan for the better part of the last decade or two, I guess.  And, you know that they work a stiffer style over there, and Stan has always worked stiff.  You know, I guess you get to a point...I mean, I couldn't imagine myself taking the kind of bumps he takes.  And I'm a lot younger than 51!

SLAGLE:  Yeah, and it's like, he's been taking them for the past thirty years, too!  Now Dave, I wanted to get your thoughts on the explosion of wrestling websites, and what role do you think the internet plays, or played, in the incredible boom that we're experiencing in the popularity of wrestling?  Do you think the internet was kind of hand-in-hand, or it didn't have anything to do with it?

SCHERER:  To be honest with you, I don't think the internet has caused wrestling itself to boom.  I think wrestling boomed on its own because the WWF, and a couple of years ago, WCW, had a really good product that captured people's imaginations.  I think the internet, where it has affected the wrestling business, is in the immediacy in which the companies can get feedback.  They can go to certain websites who have writers that they trust, or at least care about, and see what they thought about angles the day they happened, or the day after they happened, as opposed to having to wait a week to see things in print or whatever.  I think that is about the main area that the internet has, uh, has affected this business.  I don't really think that the internet has made the business more popular, I think the business has made itself more popular.  The bottom line, if you look at it, I mean, I think that maybe half the people, they said in one study I read, that half the people in America surfed the web at least once last year.  When the WWF was hitting their numbers, the big numbers, which, you know, were bigger then than they are now, it wasn't quite that way.  I mean, there was probably maybe 35 to 40 percent that were on the internet.  So, when you look at it like that, I don't really think that the internet is what made wrestling big, I think, basically, the regular population is reflected, to a degree, on the internet the way they are in society and, you know, more people who like wrestling are going to come online for wrestling sites, because they like wrestling.  Not, like, vice versa.