The Whole DDP-Wade Keller Story!

He claimed that he used to go to the Power Plant and train with Terry Taylor, and DDP was there and he’d be so upset because “the dirt sheets” were ripping him apart at the time.

First, anyone who uses that as a collective term to start out with is going to end up saying something silly. I read stuff all the time that I think shows the people writing have no clue. Other times read stuff that shows great insight, whether it’s wrestling or MMA. A collectively blanketed statement is inherently going to be misguided almost all the time, whether it’s called the “MMA Media” (a term used frequently in some hilariously bad analysis pieces this year) does so-and-so or wrestling media does so-and-so. In both, you have guys who want to go along and get along, people who get the business, don’t get the business, people who are always saying things are bad when business shows they are good, or saying everything is good when the needles are pointing in the other direction. 

He claimed Wade Keller was brutal on Page, saying “Page is a waste of skin. I don’t even know why he has a job there.” He said it bothered Page and he said to him that Bischoff puts a lot of stock into this. So one day he came with a story where Keller ripped him, called up Keller and left a scathing message. He said Keller called back, they hit it off and from that point on Keller flipped his opinion on Page.

“Completely,” HHH said when asked if he flipped. “I was like, `You just worked the dirt sheet guy.’ It blew my mind that these guys don’t even really have an honest opinion. There’s a lot of guys over the years I’ve seen put over and I just didn’t get it. But then I realized, those guys give them insider dirt. In the Attitude Era, we’d be on a plane and there’d be four of us traveling in first class or something, and a week later, I’d read the conversation verbatim in the dirt sheets. I’d be like, `F***, how does this happen?’ Because it had to be one of the four of us. I always thought, just do your job. If the crowd reacts to you, positively, negatively if you’re getting a reaction, they’re going to push you. That’s what nobody gets. We don’t tell the fans who’s going to be over. We put somebody on the table, fans react, and then we decide where to go with them. What people forget is we have a focus group every single night, 10,000 people somewhere. We didn’t get Austin over. Austin got over with the fans.” 

While fans do have a say-so in the sense if you die with the audience today, it’s going to be tough, the idea that if fans react, the company follows that lead is such complete shit and everyone in the business knows it. There are guys who sell merchandise and get over who are buried for both good and bad reasons. There are guys the fans love that the office thinks are Internet darlings and get buried because fans love them and the company doesn’t think they should be over. Sometimes guys with limited talent get big reactions and the job of the people in charge is to determine if they’re really worth pushing or not. Sometimes they have issues and it’s not worth the headache when maybe a less-over guy is lower maintenance or lower risk. I’ve seen 15 years of promoters burying guys specifically because they got over with the crowd. I’ve talked to people in the creative room who said those exact words are the ones being used when the decisions are made to do so. And at times, the decision may be the right one. When it comes to who to push, at the end of the day, it’s all about the instinct of the guy in charge. He’s already going to be right sometimes and miss the boat other times. But the idea that a promoter doesn’t dictate who is pushed is almost laughable. Ultimately, you should listen, but if you book based on decibel levels with no instinct for what it means and where you’re going, you’re not going to be the slightest bit successful. 

There’s a huge problem with the Keller story. It’s that it’s completely false, past the point that Page did call Wade Keller probably that day from the Power Plant, and I’d guess, plenty of other days from other locations as well. Page has called everyone of any note probably at some time in his life. That’s hardly a story or a revelation. He’s a self-marketer, and that’s what self-marketers do.

First, I’ve been reading the Torch likely from its inception and during the 90s read every single word because there was very little quality stuff out there on wrestling in those days and that was my profession. Even now I read a lot of it. If Keller would have flipped in 1995 on Page, it would have been painfully obvious to me. Painful would have been the word. But it never happened. The guy who was the most negative on Page push was Bruce Mitchell, and he called him “DDMe,” as a nickname until the closing of WCW. If anything, Page took more criticism afterwards in that publication if that phone call took place when Levesque was still in WCW. 

There are probably viable things HHH could say, but he either couldn’t come up with one, or felt he could make one up out of thin air, or his memory is really bad. Granted, nobody remembers all the details of 18 years ago, but the idea that a guy who never said anything close to what he claimed he said, and claimed he flipped instantly over being worked in a phone call would be a story if there was even a smidgen of truth to it. Every detail of this story was wrong.

Grantland.com then wrote, “Wade Keller contacted Grantland after the publication of this interview and insisted, plausibly, that the writer HHH was referring to is not Keller, but rather Bruce Mitchell, then a writer for Keller’s newsletter,” and noted Keller wrote a response. 

That’s even worse than HHH. First, that would indicate that Page called Mitchell, which he never did, and then Mitchell flipped, which never happened, and that Mitchell is a former writer for the newsletter when he’s a current writer. Aside from that, I guess it was accurate.

Again, I’m not defending any group of people in general here. If he had made a valid criticism of Wade Keller, I’d have probably ignored it, unless it turned into a story and then I’d give my perspective of it based on whose story was accurate, or if both stories are accurate. Politically, kissing up to HHH is probably better, which is why you didn’t exactly see writers jumping to Keller’s defense, even though most probably knew full well by the second day after publication that the story couldn’t have been true. Anyone who read that publication in the 90s would know how ridiculous that claim was.