New SK Interview

[JasonX 0]

Interview found at http://www.nzpwi.co.nz/interviews/2003/scott.keith/

 

SK leaked the interivew out on CRZ's board a week ago but hasn't mentioned it in his recent Rants like he does his other interviews.

 

Posted in two parts

------------------------

Scott Keith

 

Internet writer and notorious "smark" Scott Keith (a.k.a "Netcop") possesses a reputation that is nearly unmatched amongst the Internet Wrestling Community.

 

Love him or hate him, there are very few Internet writers with the skill - or balls - that Keith possesses. A veteran of the trade, Keith provides 411wrestling.com with weekly recaps for RAW, SmackDown! and, recently, NWA/TNA. These reports, known almost universally as his "Rants" have made him arguably the most influential, prolific and recognised Internet wrestling columnist ever, producing thousands of words of copy weekly that are viewed by tens of thousands of readers. However, his style (viewed by many as being unfairly harsh or overly critical) has earned him enemies as well as fans.

 

In addition to his online work, he has produced two books to date that cover the often-strange world of "sports entertainment" - 'The Buzz on Professional Wrestling' and his latest book 'Tonight in This Very Ring: A Fan's History of Professional Wrestling' (available from Amazon here). Another book is planned for release.

 

In this first part of a lengthy interview with the native of Canada, James Cardno covers Keith's personal history, how he broke into the Internet Wrestling Community, and how he polished his near-patented style of recapping. Part two will be released next week, and will focus on his thoughts regarding the current situation of the WWE, his books, and some hard questions from his detractors about his work.

 

 

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James Cardno: Scott, tell me a bit about yourself and your background.

 

 

 

Keith's home town of Edmonton

Scott Keith: Well, I'm your basic 28-year old wrestling writer who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada - home of the Oilers and winters that are colder than sleeping in a freezer. I studied at the University of Alberta for a little over two years, technically majoring in math but more interested in Computing Science and eventually just screwing around with whatever caught my fancy before dropping out in 1994. I lived in various small towns around Vancouver, British Columbia for most of my life before moving to Edmonton in 1989 and enjoying it so much that I've stayed here ever since. I have a huge (some would say obsessive) DVD collection and my goal in life is to make enough money to fund a true home theatre for myself, and have a soda fountain of my own.

 

 

 

JC: When did your interest in wrestling really start, and how did it develop?

SK: It started more by osmosis than anything - my dad was a big fan when I was little, and he watched a lot of NWA and Stampede Wrestling, although I couldn't stand the stuff. But since he controlled the TV, that's what I watched. Finally it had subconsciously soaked in so much that when my mom rented Wrestlemania 2 for my 12th birthday party, something clicked and I just became a fan. Specifically, the angle where Paul Orndorff turned on Hulk Hogan hooked me for good. I started reading Pro Wrestling Illustrated in 1987 and realized that people could make a career out of writing about wrestling, and things followed from there.

 

 

 

JC: At what age did you first get into writing in a formalized sense? Writing, say, for an audience, with the purpose of imparting thoughts, emotions and opinions?

SK: Well, I won several young authors' contests in the early stages of my life (Grades 1-3) and I've always been primarily focused on writing in terms of my means of expressing myself. There was a long time - until I was in high school - when the idea of being a writer strictly meant, to me, (doing) fiction and short stories. Unfortunately, I have the attention span of Vince Russo when it comes to sitting down and writing stuff out of thin air, so fiction was never my forte. However, once I got into high school, I discovered that I had a real gift for essays, specifically bullshitting my way through what were supposed to be researched essays. I would simply spend so much time giving my opinion on the work that the teachers would overlook my total lack of commitment to the goals of the assignment. Some might say that particular foible has carried over even today. This talent served me well in English 101 in University, where I essentially audited the course, attended maybe 1/3 of the classes, and turned in fluff pieces that were so eloquently written that I ended up with the highest score in the class regardless. I think that's where I truly realized that I could use my powers for good rather than evil. My style has always been pretty self-contained - although my natural cynicism and dry wit forms the basis for my most of my humour, the rest is kind of cribbed from a variety of sources ranging from Douglas Adams to John Petrie. Other than that, I just started writing and let the work shape itself from there.

 

 

 

JC: What's your particular interest in the Internet as a medium?

SK: I enjoy the instant gratification of the feedback, both giving and receiving, positive and negative. I can watch a show, have my thoughts immediately imparted to other fans and the promotion, receive in turn love/hate mail from those same fans and/or promotion, and use it to further shape my writing. I used to enjoy the community aspect, but corporate meddling and too many idiots have sucked that dry and I pretty much keep to myself now outside of a few close friends on my instant messaging list. It's also a great way to garner free publicity for my books.

 

 

 

JC: Your first steps as an Internet critic per se were with RSPW. Could you tell us a bit about what it was, for those who are unaware, and what part you played in that?

SK: I started with RSPW - the Usenet newsgroup rec.sport.pro-wrestling - back in 1992 while attending university and getting increasingly bored during programming sessions that stretched too long into the night. This was back before the Internet was a household word, and back before the World Wide Web even existed. I discovered RN (the primitive Unix newsreader) and on a whim, did a search for "wrestling", which provided me with my first glimpse at RSPW. Back then, it used to be quite civilized and filled with intelligent discussion from people who actually had something to say. People like Dave Scherer of 1wrestling.com were a part of it back then.

 

 

Fellow RSPW user Dave Scherer

I lurked for quite a while before making a few posts (as was the tradition back then) and didn't really become a 'character' until 1996. By that time, I had become interested in the process of creating subgroups, and spearheaded the creation of two such groups - rec.sport.pro-wrestling.fantasy (for discussion of so-called 'e-feds' and fantasy wrestling) and rec.sport.pro-wrestling.info (for news-only postings). In fact, I'm not sure that the people who now post to the fantasy group even know that I'm the one who wrote the charter and gained much of my early 'fame' on RSPW by getting that group going.

 

By 1998, however, my love/hate relationship with RSPW was skewing far more towards 'hate' and I was far less active in posting outside of my reviews. You see, in 1994, the 'AOL Invasion' hit the Internet in general, as that was the first time that AOL allowed its members general access to the net. Before then, RSPW would experience some general stupidity during the summer when teenagers were home from school, but go back to normal in the fall. With the advent of AOL and similar services, the idiot patrol was there 24/7 and the group started to become a cool hangout for trolls instead of a place to talk about wrestling.

 

Once I joined up with the Wrestlemaniacs.com crew as a sort of project of Mike Samuda, I suddenly had a larger audience who were far more intelligent readers, and my antagonistic relationship with RSPW led to a famous farewell posting on my part in 1998 (I think) where I essentially told the entire newsgroup to fuck off and die. They didn't take that too well and many from that era still hold a grudge against me for that to this day.

 

They are, of course, the only ones on the planet who care.

 

I was a little too late to be considered part of the 'golden age' of RSPW (although I'm often counted as a part of it by those who came later), and my run there lasted from 1992-1998, and was so completely eclipsed by the stuff I did on the web later that I'm rarely even associated with the group anymore. Although they're still obsessed with me.

 

As a sidenote, in late 1998 I was so desperately sick of the situation on the newsgroup and willing to do anything to try to contribute something positive back that I rewrote the years-out-of-date FAQ for the group, increasing it in size from 10 pages to nearly 200. It became a pretty defining achievement for me and a work I was very proud of, which is partly why I use "RSPWFAQ" as a username much of the time.

 

 

 

JC: You earned the moniker Netcop quite early in your career. What's the story behind that?

SK: That was during a rather small phase of my career on RSPW that ended up being the most famous. It was 1996, and general stupidity on the group was running rampant, to the point where I decided to seek inspiration from better-behaved groups (i.e., the comic-book groups) and start pro-actively defining rules of conduct for the newsgroup for those who were ignorant of how normal human beings should treat each other on a Usenet group. I wrote the "Guide to Posting to RSPW" as a gentle reminder of netiquette and the like (although phrased in very smart-ass manner, which was becoming my trademark), and then to partly vent my frustration and partly make examples out of people, I would reply to a post that was breaking netiquette and declare "Freeze, dirt bag! This is a Netcop bust!" Netcop was a common term on Usenet for people who would "police" newsgroups, and wasn't a very nice term either. People took my usage of the word to mean that *I* was called 'Netcop', and it gained a double-use with me - some called me that as an insult, some called me that because they thought it was a nickname. I chose to keep the name in order to take away the power of the insult, although after a few months it was little more than a silly gimmick to draw attention to my reviews and was dropped completely, except in tribute when I would title things "The Netcop Rant".

 

 

 

JC: Tell us a bit about your style of recapping - what inspired the "Rant" style?

 

 

 

One of Keith's online Rants

SK: In addition to RSPW, I also frequented the comic book newsgroups, and one big name in 1996 was Dave Van Domelyn, who would post capsule reviews of the latest comics, which he called Rants. It was basically short-form, stream of consciousness reviews, and I loved the idea so much I thought I'd apply it to wrestling. By my current standards, they were terrible (they were kind of like Dave Scherer's rhetorical questions in form and style) but it was enough to get the ball rolling on developing my own style, and soon I started reviewing the occasional TV show and PPV.

 

In 1997, I completely revamped my writing style, basing it on John Petrie's early RAW and Nitro reviews, until I had a basic syntax and form for my reviews. To test it out, I started reviewing slightly older shows (my first was either Slamboree 94 or Spring Stampede 94, I can never remember) and the idea caught fire.

 

 

 

JC: When you write, how much of what you do would you call a gimmick? Which is to say, how much of it is 100% you, and how much is a "character" per se, or at least a style that is expected of you?

SK: As people who have sat in a car with me and listened to me go off for 10 minutes at a time about road construction on the first day of summer can attest to, 99% of what's in the rants is just good old me. I don't tend to be as openly conceited and brash in real life, if only because you get punched in the mouth in the real world whereas the internet only gets you a nasty e-mail, but my friends tend to hear much of the same material (and bad jokes) while watching shows with me as readers do later on while reading me. I define the style, not vice-versa.

[Guest Choken One]

this is old...

[Nevermortal 0]

Man, those aren't very flattering pictures of our favorite net critics.

 

Except Jay Bower....he's soooo dreaaaaammmmyyyy. Even though he's making Scotsmanality.com boring.

[JasonX 0]

As the capacity of the Internet increased, so did Keith's online presence. He went on to found Rantsylvania with one of the most controversial figure in the IWC, Sean Shannon, former leader of the nWWWo. Shannon gained a reputation as being dodgy, especially during a high-profile "flame" war with fellow 411 writer Chris Hyatte. Hyatte took great pleasure in exposing Shannon as a faker - Shannon claimed on many occasions to be an "insider", and claimed to possess a neurological disease in order to avoid a tricky situation that most writers accept was fabricated.

 

 

 

JC: How did you guys decide to launch Rantsylvania, and what were your ambitions?

SK: The deal with RS.com is this - I've had a web page almost as long as the web has been around, because I started Scott-Land! using space on the U of Alberta servers way back in the infancy of the WWW. Back then it was a text page, browsed with Lynx, featuring me bitching about work or whatever. Then I moved to Geocities when I got kicked off the University servers because of not being a student there and all, and decided to use the page to begin archiving my TV and PPV rants, which admittedly were in their infancy at that point. I think I had like 10 Thunder rants and 5 PPV rants to start with. For some reason, Scott-Land! became something of an underground sensation amongst the online wrestling fans, and I remember getting all excited because the page was finally about to record the 100,000th hit, which is funny now because I usually do that off one or two rants.

 

Now, this was back before the entire advertising structure crashed and burned, so naturally Sean Shannon (a fan of the website) saw an opportunity to go dot.com (his original goal was just to redesign my god-awful HTML) and make a few bucks. Rantsylvania.com officially launched in September 1999, and the goal was to do a site like Wrestlemaniacs, but without the newly corporate sponsorship.

 

Sean loaded it up with his friends and started paying them to do news updates and the like. My goals were actually quite different than his - I was never interested in the money aspect of it. Near the end of the transition period between Scott-Land! and RS.com, I started this thing where readers could submit their own reviews of stuff, mainly because I'm so damn lazy about updating my own page and wanted easy content, but also because I wanted to get some of my very talented readers out there as writers. I ended up launching the Internet careers of some of the people currently inhabiting the web world, like Bob Morris and Eric Szulczewski. Anyway, THAT was my main goal with the site - to provide the forum for new writers to have their voice. I personally hated the news updates and always have, but really my thing has always been delivering content and leaving the experts to run the sites. The only real stated goal Sean had was to make a profit. I just enjoy writing and liked the egofuck of seeing my audience grow rapidly.

 

 

 

JC: What's your take on Sean? It's stated that his departure was rather acrimonious. What's your take on that, and on Shannon's ostracism by and large from the IWC after (amongst other things) Hyatte flamed him to shreds for alleged untruthfulness? What do you believe happened there?

SK: We always suspected Sean was a bit of a fruitcake, but it's only recently that it's come out just how MUCH of a fruitcake he really is. Basically, in November of 2000, Sean submitted his resignation as webmaster due to the stress of the job and whatever personal paranoia was eating at him at the time. By that point, we were doing so much business, hitwise, that we had switched to an expensive dedicated server because we had been kicked off our previous one, and the money had dried up completely. I didn't realize how completely it had dried up until I received a bill for nearly $2000 US from Communitech, as he had neglected to pay them and transferred everything into my name without informing me.

 

Funny story - the same night Sean resigned and transferred everything to me, my apartment burned down. God said "Ha," and all that.

 

 

 

JC: How did the concept of Rantsylvania evolve into thesmarks?

SK: It didn't evolve so much as Sean hijacked the domain name in April of 2001. I had hired Jeremy Botter as the new webmaster, and that was also an interesting experience because Jeremy had lots of big plans and ambitions for the site, but none of them were ever implemented. In retrospect, I should have gotten Don Becker to run the site from day one, but hindsight is 20/20.

 

Anyway, since I neither knew nor cared about the technical aspects of actually running a website, I just let Sean handle everything, which included him registering the RS.com domain name in his name. By this time the three of us running the site (Don, Jeremy and myself) had essentially decided that Rantsylvania as a concept had run its course and it was time to overhaul the site to a self-posting set-up ala Slashdot. And at the same time, all the stuff about Sean's behaviour and descent into goofiness got out via RS.com, and his feeling was that he didn't need to be paying for the domain name of a site that was trashing him, so he took it back and pointed it to his own site. We were on the verge of changing anyway, but our goal was more July 2001, and this forced us to move up to April. So rather than a "me-oriented" site like RS.com was, the idea was to build around a stable of writers, also known as The Smarks.

 

The plan here would be more equality, more interactive features, etc. Unfortunately the bandwidth bug hit us again, as we were doing in the neighbourhood of millions of pageviews per month and couldn't find a server to carry us. We eventually struck a deal with a porn host to give us a dedicated server in exchange for advertising their other sites, but after a few months with them shoddy service and frequent crashes due to viruses derailed the site and we essentially lost control of our own server. At this point the dynamic of the site was changing behind the scenes - by the end of 2001, Jeremy was webmaster in name only, having committed most of his time to Burst or whatever else he was doing, and I was doing most of the day-to-day operations on the site, with the invaluable assistance of Don Becker. And I HATE webmastering with a passion, so this was unacceptable.

 

I have never had any interest in the technical aspects of running a web page, so what I needed was a way to maintain my content to a large audience while having zero responsibility.

 

 

 

JC: From TheSmarks to your current home of 411wrestling. Why did TheSmarks shut down, and what was the reasoning behind the move to 411, both from the point of view of 411 and thesmarks?

SK: My original move to 411 is actually unrelated to TheSmarks. We have to go onto another tangent to get there. Back in 1998, I of course joined the cast of Wrestlemaniacs, the super-site with Rick Scaia and Mike "Micasa" Samuda, initially doing columns and then taking over for John Petrie recapping the putrid WCW Thunder show.

 

In mid-1999, CBS Sportsline bought out that site and turned it into Wrestleline. After some initial controversy, I came with them doing the Thunder rants. Since I'm a media whore and suddenly was thrust into the spotlight of more hits than I'd ever received in my brief career, I decided to start doing the Retro Rants for WL in lieu of columns. They proved to be a smash hit, to say the least, and became my calling card. RS.com and TheSmarks were always considered my "solo projects", while Wrestleline was the full-time gig. After a couple of changes in the hierarchy controlling things, the WL contract was up in 2001 and renegotiated by Samuda & Scaia, and the result was that all the writers would now be paid for their work. A small sum, to be sure, but the ad market had collapsed anyway and we all knew it. CRZ left the site as a result of a dispute over this, and I took over RAW (I had been doing it for RS.com since the move to TNN in September 2000) and ran with the ball. Unfortunately, in November 2001, we were suddenly informed (without so much as a personal e-mail to us) that the site was closed and we were all out of a job. Well, as noted, while TheSmarks was doing big numbers, we couldn't expand the fan base any further without costing ourselves thousands in server costs. So really I needed a big website that would give me free reign, with plenty of bandwidth for my fan base to grow, and space to host my archives. And 411 was the perfect fit, as I began posting the RAW and PPV rants to there, and started doing Smackdown as well. After a year there, TheSmarks was getting to the point where upkeep on the site was no longer worth the effort - we were running off a private server maintained by a 14-year old tech genius and basically mirroring all my content from 411, in addition to a few key writers like the invaluable Jay Bower, the always entertaining Scotsman, and Justin Baisden's Japanese reviews. So rather than continue the redundant mirroring situation, I simply ditched TheSmarks as an autonomous website (since I have no ambitions towards being a webmaster anyway, and Widro enjoys it so much more) and became a full-time sub-section of 411. And finally this year, it was apparent that the site itself was just me, Justin and Jay, so I made the decision to kill the subsite entirely and merge with 411 full-time when the changeover to 411mania occurred. I'm much happier now with it all behind me, believe me.

 

JC: Why do you think your rants in particular excelled where the millions of other people recapping on sites around the world haven't? What do you feel you bring to the table that others lack?

SK: I think it mostly just has to do with the fact that I'm an enormously talented writer with a natural, conversational style. Many of the kids trying to do what I do fail because they simply don't know how to write and haven't written enough outside of wrestling to be able to apply any kind of real-world skill at it. I might not be on my A-game 100% of the time as far as the humor goes, but I can always put out a readable and flowing piece of writing to cover for those weeks. It's not an exact science - it took me almost 5 years to finally find a format I'm 100% comfortable with - and a lot of people don't have the kind of perseverance to hang in there and keep changing the writing style until it pays off without something that people want to read.

[Guest Retro Rob]

SK: I think it mostly just has to do with the fact that I'm an enormously talented writer with a natural, conversational style.

If he was naturally THAT good, why does it seem like he has been phoning it in for the past couple of years?

[Red Hot Thumbtack In The Eye 0]

He's too good for us net geeks now that he's a 'legitimate' author...

[notJames 0]

SK: I think it mostly just has to do with the fact that I'm an enormously talented writer with a natural, conversational style.

If he was naturally THAT good, why does it seem like he has been phoning it in for the past couple of years?

Probably because the wrestling hasn't been as good. It's kinda like the deal with CRZ recapping wCw. He got tired of putting out so much effort for their mediocre product, so he up and left. SKeith has a little more faith in NA wrestling, but I'm sure it feels like an exercise in futility most of the time. So he "phones it in" until he sees something worth writing about. Lots of people do that all over the 'Net. SKeith just gets the brunt of the backlash because of his "celebrity".

[Big McLargeHuge 0]

SK: I think it mostly just has to do with the fact that I'm an enormously talented writer with a natural, conversational style.

Seems so fake...

[River City Rocker 0]

As the capacity of the Internet increased, so did Keith's online presence. He went on to found Rantsylvania with one of the most controversial figure in the IWC, Sean Shannon, former leader of the nWWWo. Shannon gained a reputation as being dodgy, especially during a high-profile "flame" war with fellow 411 writer Chris Hyatte. Hyatte took great pleasure in exposing Shannon as a faker - Shannon claimed on many occasions to be an "insider", and claimed to possess a neurological disease in order to avoid a tricky situation that most writers accept was fabricated.

 

Yes, not every IWC personality has wrestlers challenging them to fights, do they? I always wondered why someone as prissy and effeminate as Sean Shannon is was such a big fan of ECW. Doesn't that seem like the LAST thing he would ever follow?

 

I've got to hand it to Chris Hyatte, though...when he wants to humiliate somebody, he will not hold back.

 

-Ben