As the co-owner of Notinhalloffame.com, I can legitimately say that Halls of Fame have crossed my mind on a daily basis for the past two years. It is not just the running debate as to who should be in each one, as our site’s name would suggest, but its complete story. This goes much further than just a list of who is inducted and who is left out; rather it is a composite look at the institution’s history, facility, interactive nature and commitment to the future.

Assumptions would be that Halls of Fame would naturally seek to strive in all of those categories, but alas this is not always the case, and certainly not the standard of all of the institutions we discuss on a regular basis. For example, the Hockey Hall of Fame, while striving to be as interactive with visitors as possible, struggles with the limitations of their physical Hall.   The Baseball Hall of Fame, while considered to be the most respected Hall of all the sports, has an impressive view of its past, yet lacks focus on its future. The Football Hall of Fame has no interactive component and the WWE Hall of Fame does not even have a physical structure to call its own.

In the fall of 1983 there were no monthly Pay Per Views in Professional Wrestling. The matches that were shown on regular television were predominantly top stars against enhancement talent. This was by design, as promoters believed that if fans wanted to see top wrestlers compete against each other it would have to be at the arena. This was actually a logical business model for 1983, as it was the live ticket gate that dictated the bulk of the revenue at the time.

Like many wrestling fans, the first time I saw Marty Jannetty was in the American Wrestling Association, where he was one half of the Midnight Rockers with Shawn Michaels.  At this stage of his career, Jannetty had already been wrestling for a few years in smaller regional promotions and had a successful amateur wrestling background in High School, but I was oblivious to those facts.  What I saw was a tag team that I viewed as a rip off of an existing duo called the Rock and Roll Express, who was a very successful tandem in the National Wrestling Alliance.
Visually, it was easy to make that initial comparison.  Both teams came out to Rock and Roll Music (not common in the late 80’s), both were relatively undersized, both had similar ring attire and both featured one wrestler who had blond hair and a teammate with brown.  As a fourteen year old teenage boy who was in a stage in life where success with the opposite sex was sadly a mystery, identifying with a pair of good looking twenty-somethings who drew the screams of every girl in the audience (seemingly regardless of age) was difficult.

Interviewing professional wrestlers is an enjoyable benefit of running this website.  Normally, the excitement would center on questions on their in ring careers and backstage stories.  This was not the case when we spoke with former ECW and WWE Diva, Dawn Marie; for although she worked with some of the iconic stars of Extreme Championship Wrestling and performed for two and a half years for Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment it was her post wrestling career that we were anxious to discuss with her.