One Moment WWE Wants You To Forget From Every Year (1985 to 2026)

40. 1987 - The Consultant

Never not a figure of controversy deep in the online wrestling bubble in the contemporary age, Dave Meltzer effectively created an industry that made jobs, lives and livelihoods for folk that think his words shouldn't carry any weight. Thanks to the likes of Bruce Prichard on the once-excellent Something To Wrestle With podcast, he's considered an irritant - a poorly-informed bane of the community and conversation.

Was some of Prichard's biliousness rooted in jealousy? 

He's occupied a right-hand man spot on and off in WWE going back decades, but Meltzer himself briefly found himself quietly consulting for the market leader during arguably the peak of its powers. 1987, the year Andre The Giant turned heel, the year of WrestleMania III, the year the Mega Powers formed, and the year Dave did some off-kilter market research for Vince McMahon.

Per Meltzer himself during a 2016 Wrestling Observer Radio broadcast (and per some Reddit sleuthing); "I did consulting work...so this is the funny thing: [Prichard]'s acting like it was this "he was on the payroll to say bad things" and it's like nobody would ever suggest that I would say anything, and it had nothing to do with the Observer to begin with. It was all about the Japanese market and it was in 1987 and it was for a very brief period of time...I wrote about it in 1991 and people have asked me about many times and that's the deal. I wouldn't do it now, and I probably shouldn't have done it then."

Meltzer's quite charmingly part of All Elite Wrestling's lore thanks to a tweet exchange with Cody Rhodes that resulted in a bet on the success of the original ALL IN. But he was woven into WWE's history first.