Bryan Alvarez on Figure Four Weekly, Teaming With Dave Meltzer and Why You Keep Going

Fred: We have a very special guest on the line. He’s one of the most respected voices in pro wrestling and MMA broadcasting, the founder of the Figure Four Weekly newsletter, and he runs WrestlingObserver.com with his colleague Dave Meltzer. We’re talking to Youth Wrestling Federation Hall of Famer Bryan Alvarez. Bryan, how’s it going? How are things in beautiful Bothell, Washington?

Bryan Alvarez: Normally things are better. It’s been the worst year of all time in terms of weather. We’ve never had a winter as bad as this one. But other than that, things are great here in rainy Bothell, Washington.

Fred: What’s a day in the life like for Bryan Alvarez, not only running WrestlingObserver.com but being a father?

Bryan Alvarez: They’re very, very busy days. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Every day I do at least two radio shows, some days three, and there was a period when I was doing four on Sundays. We virtually never have a day off, because the UFC runs almost every Saturday. Believe it or not, I have this Saturday off, which is mind-blowing. And I’ve got the baby and all the website stuff to do. It’s very busy, but it’s fun.

Fred: You’re a broadcaster, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner, a former pro wrestler, the author of “The Death of WCW” and the longtime author of a newsletter. What came first as far as your loves?

Bryan Alvarez: The very beginning was writing. I wanted to be a writer from the time I was about 5. Then it was martial arts. I did a lot of karate in junior high, and right around then, in seventh grade or so, I discovered pro wrestling and really wanted to be a pro wrestler. Some friends and I started filming matches, then doing matches at assemblies at school, and from there we started our own promotion with a public access TV show. Broadcasting came in the mid-’90s, when I discovered Art Bell. Somehow, in the late ’90s, I found a way to put them all together, and that led me to where I am today.

Fred: If I’d asked 15-year-old Bryan where he saw himself in 25 years, what would he have said?

Bryan Alvarez: All I knew at that time was that I probably wanted to run my own business, because my dad ran a fence company. My first job was when I was 11. I put an ad in the paper to do magic shows at kids’ birthday parties. My only requirement was no kids older than 11, because I didn’t want to be an 11-year-old at a 12-year-old’s party getting heckled and belittled. I charged 20 bucks for an hour, and I thought I was ripping people off. At 13 or 14, I started getting actual jobs at a gymnastics facility, at a restaurant and with my dad, and they all had one thing in common: I had a boss, and I wasn’t a big fan of that. So I would have said I wanted to run my own business, and my best guess would have been that I’d be an author writing books all the time.

Fred: Your dad had a fence company. Did you ever commission him to build a steel cage?

Bryan Alvarez: Absolutely. He still has the fence company today. He mostly did chain-link, and he built what they called dog runs, basically big 10-by-10 cages so your dog could be outside without getting away. He had all these panels lying around, and he did in fact build us a cage that we filmed matches in. But we had no ring, so we put it on cement and did cage matches on a cement floor. It was a total disaster, but we thought it was pretty cool.

Fred: When did you decide to actually get trained by a real professional?

Bryan Alvarez: I was a gymnast, and my friends and I were all wrestling fans. After our gymnastics class, we talked the guy who ran it into letting us do pro wrestling on the spring floor, which is already way softer than a wrestling ring, and we’d lay an 8-inch foam crash pad on top. We’d take backdrops and bumps over and over, watch the shows and practice moves. We were totally self-trained. Then I discovered an old wrestler in Everett, about 20 minutes from my house, who had a ring. I figured we should train, because that’s what professionals do. He charged $100 for a two-hour class, and all he taught was really basic chain wrestling: how to do a hammerlock, how to reverse into another hammerlock, how to go from a headlock to a top wristlock. We’d learned all that from watching TV. I was learning nothing and being charged an exorbitant amount of money for a 15-year-old in the ’90s, so I went to about three classes and never went back. When I finally got into wrestling, I had no official training, but I could do everything except run the ropes, because we’d never had the chance to practice that. After our first match, the promoter, who was hurting for talent, said, “Come back. You can work all the shows.” Some of my buddies had a little training and showed me some stuff. The hardest thing was learning to run the ropes and basic sequences like a tackle, drop down and hip toss. There was nothing like today, where you can go to Lance Storm’s school for 12 weeks and come out a good worker. Back then, you learned from a guy taking your money, or you found a guy who liked you, took you under his wing and taught you on the job.

Fred: You worked a lot with Buddy Wayne, a well-respected veteran from your area, and you were getting quite a few bookings while starting the newsletter. Was there a point when you were aiming to work for WWF, WCW or ECW?

Bryan Alvarez: Never. The closest I ever came was around 1998 or 1999, when Chris Kanyon called me. He’d seen some of my matches, and he said, “Just send me an 8-by-10 and some videos, and we’ll think about trying to do something.” I don’t think I even sent him any videos. I had no desire to work for the WWF or WCW or anywhere but local promotions. I didn’t even like traveling. If I were a teenager doing the newsletter today, I might have a different mindset, but back then I was 145 or 150 pounds, and you had to be exceptional, like Rey Mysterio, to have any chance at that size. And from covering the business, I knew so much about the lifestyle. People are just now finding out how bad concussions are, but in the ’90s, I never let anyone come near my head, and I tried never to do anything stupid in my matches. I knew that if I were on the road four days a week, it wouldn’t end well. I was very happy doing it for fun on weekends with my friends. Every now and then, somebody offers to hook me up with a match, and I never do it. I’ve done one match in seven years, as a favor to Buddy Wayne on a show in Oregon. Pro wrestling is not a healthy endeavor in the long run.

Fred: Writing is a little healthier. When you started Figure Four Weekly, were you already wrestling?

Bryan Alvarez: I did the Youth Wrestling Federation first, and we built it up pretty big, with a weekly show on Seattle public access. A guy who owned some nightclubs watched it, thought there was so much potential and offered to finance us. One of the things he paid for was a newsletter, which eventually became Figure Four Weekly. It went out free to anybody who wanted it, with our storylines and upcoming events. We kept getting bigger at the gymnastics place, with more people showing up and more wrestlers, until one day they told us their insurance covered gymnastics, not pro wrestling, and we couldn’t run there anymore unless we got insurance. The cost of insuring all those crazy teenagers was too much for our backer, and that was the end of the Youth Wrestling Federation.

But I still had the mailing list. The only newsletter I knew was Pro Wrestling Illustrated’s weekly, which I subscribed to, and with all due respect, it wasn’t very good. It had a little news on page one that continued on page four, and the inside was nothing but results. If I’d ever seen an Observer, I would have known better than to try it myself, but I thought, “I can do better than this.” So I told everyone on the list that it was turning into the Figure Four Weekly wrestling newsletter, with all the inside news on the WWF, WCW and ECW, and that it would cost $39.99 for 52 issues, which, because of printing costs, left no profit margin. I didn’t think it out very well. Something like 37 people took me up on it, and that was the beginning of Figure Four Weekly.

Fred: You were the young gun among the Observer, the Pro Wrestling Torch, PWI and all the hotlines. What growing pains did you go through?

Bryan Alvarez: Oh, man, where to start? I had no idea what I was doing. I just floundered along. Once people started telling me I needed to read the Torch and the Observer, I started getting them and thought, “This is a steep learning curve.” I got a design program and designed the newsletter, and the only ones I had to go by were the Observer, which was plain, and the Torch, which wasn’t. Then Wade Keller called and said, “Your newsletter looks too much like mine.” So I went through something like 9,000 designs: different paper stock, different paper colors, columns, no columns, interviews, no interviews. It was rough. I had my own hotline, which was a disaster, and eventually that led me to hook up with Dave.

Fred: What was your first interaction with Dave Meltzer?

Bryan Alvarez: My hotline went out of business, so I sent Dave a fax asking if he’d be interested in having me on his. Somebody was leaving his hotline at the time, so he said, “Sure, go for it.” I started doing the Wrestling Observer hotline two or three days a week. I didn’t even talk to him for a long time. I just faxed him, and the next thing I knew, I was working on his hotline.

Fred: For those who don’t know, Dave Meltzer is a legend in pro wrestling and MMA journalism and has been doing this since before I was born.

Bryan Alvarez: He’d kill me if I don’t get his age right, but he was 10, 11, 12 or 13 when he did the California Wrestling Report, and the actual Observer started in 1982, when I was 7. He’s been doing it ever since, God bless him. The guy is a machine.

Fred: The hotline led to the radio show, which opened the door for your broadcasting career. How did that come about?

Bryan Alvarez: Dave was contacted by a company called eYada, which was running one of the very first internet streaming radio stations. They set up a multimillion-dollar studio in Times Square, and the idea was a radio station broadcast over the internet. If you’re a youngster, you’re probably thinking, “What a great idea.” But this was 1999, and if you remember trying to stream in 1999, it was a great idea before its time. It also had the worst advertising I’ve ever seen for anything, and that includes WCW. They called Dave to do the wrestling show, and I think he did exactly one three-hour show by himself, then called me and said, “Do you want to come on, and we’ll bounce ideas off each other?” At first I just went over the news for the first 10 minutes and left, because I coached gymnastics, but after a while I became the permanent co-host. It was the No. 1 show on eYada, but eYada went out of business, and we were the last show before they pulled the plug. Shortly after, Sports Byline USA in San Francisco offered to pick up “Wrestling Observer Live” on its over-the-air radio network. Dave and I did the show together until the mid-2000s, when he dropped off, and I took over. I’ve been doing it ever since, and now I do it with Mike Sempervive.

Fred: Welcome to part two. Unfortunately, we have to start on a somber note. There were a ton of layoffs at ESPN, partly because of skyrocketing TV rights fees for sports. As an observer of pro wrestling and MMA, do you think the state of ESPN is a bad omen for WWE and the UFC, which are looking for raises in TV rights in the next couple of years?

Bryan Alvarez: That’s a loaded question. If things are bad for the USA Network, you could argue things might be bad for WWE, whose deal comes up in 2018 or 2019. But if things are rough for USA and WWE is one of its highest-rated properties, it could actually be better for WWE. Same with the UFC. If ESPN thinks bringing in the UFC would help the network as a whole, things might be good for the UFC. The last time WWE’s deal came up, Vince McMahon kind of promised they’d double their rights fees, and they didn’t, though they did increase them, with escalating fees, so they make more every year regardless of the ratings. WWE’s ratings are down something like 29 percent since 2012, when Raw went to three hours, but it’s still one of the highest-rated properties on cable outside of the news networks. So my guess is they’ll get the same or better next time. The UFC may be in a better place, because it’s with Fox now, and you could conceivably have a bidding war between ESPN and Fox. So much changes in a short time in the television business, and cord cutting is really what’s affecting ESPN. We’re still a couple of years away, so it’s hard to predict.

Fred: Do you foresee a near future where Hulu, Amazon and Netflix get into the mix?

Bryan Alvarez: It’s certainly possible, and everybody likes to talk about cord cutting and over-the-top services, but if you look at the number of people still just watching television, WWE is way better off on television. Look at Lucha Underground, which was on El Rey. Its first season went on Netflix in mid-March, and a lot of people thought it would be a game changer. It’s been well over a month, and I haven’t heard anybody talking about it. I never get emails from people saying they just discovered Lucha Underground on Netflix. There was way more buzz when it was on El Rey, which is in far fewer homes. To this day, pro wrestling, and I’m sure the UFC too, has to be on a strong cable network to really be successful.

Fred: How long did it take before you could make a living doing this full-time?

Bryan Alvarez: In the late ’90s, I was making enough to survive, and that’s about it. I remember asking Bruce Mitchell of the Torch for advice, and he said something like, “Don’t quit your day job,” not just because it’s an extra source of income, but because people who devote their lives to pro wrestling full-time often go crazy. There has never been a time when I didn’t have another job that had nothing to do with wrestling. I probably could have survived on wrestling alone by 2005, when we went online, started getting a lot of subscribers and had low overhead. But I always had another job, because if all you do is pro wrestling, you’ll go a little crazy. After a day of dealing with all this pro wrestling insanity, I go teach a jiu-jitsu kids class, and I feel great afterward. I don’t think about wrestling the whole time, I’m having fun, and I come home refreshed. I could make a billion dollars, and I’d still want a second job where I’m not doing wrestling and I’m just a normal human being.

Fred: What challenges did you have to overcome moving online in 2005?

Bryan Alvarez: By 2005, everybody was going online. People stopped reading newspapers and magazines, and it was the same with the newsletter. I was 30 years old, I was struggling, and I was looking at the rest of my life thinking I couldn’t survive like this. I asked my brother-in-law whether I could do an email newsletter, so I wouldn’t have to pay for printing and postage. He said it would be a lot easier to make a subscription website where people log in and read it. We tried it, and a bunch of people signed up. My profits were higher because the overhead was lower, but I still wasn’t doing great. Then he suggested a podcast, and I said, “What’s a podcast?” There were virtually no podcasts then. He said it was like a radio show people could listen to on their iPods. I’d always wanted to do radio, since I’d been doing Sports Byline over the phone and was a big fan of Art Bell, so we set up a little studio with a microphone and a mixer, recorded a show and put it online, and everybody loved it. We were one of the first wrestling podcasts on iTunes. We did a show five days a week and put one free on iTunes each week to plug the members area. That was the explosion, and that’s what turned everything around.

Fred: The other boss of WrestlingObserver.com is, of course, Dave Meltzer. When you joined forces, was it a no-brainer, or did you both have reservations, since you’re both used to being your own bosses?

Bryan Alvarez: Around 1999 to 2001, there was a very primitive WrestlingObserver.com where you could read the Observer, and long story short, it was a disaster. So when I went online in 2005, I immediately said, “Dave, do you want to do this together?” He had serious reservations because of the earlier disaster. He wanted to keep his site free, with a daily update that pushed people to the print copy. I kept saying, “Let’s merge these. We’ll put the Observer online, and you can do the podcast with me.” He didn’t want to, so I went it alone for three years, and after three years, it was successful enough that he realized it would work. That’s when we merged.

Fred: It feels like a family affair. Your brother-in-law runs the back end, and you do shows with your best friend Vinny and others. Was the intention to bring in your closest friends, or did it happen organically?

Bryan Alvarez: It was never designed that way. If you go on our message board, you’ll find people critical of the website and of Tony, but the reality is he has been the best person for the job. A pro wrestling subscription website is unlike anything else, and he’s done an exceptional job over the last 12 years turning it into what it is. My grandmother came on one show because I wanted to review a book I didn’t want to read, everybody thought she was hilarious, and she’s been on for 10 years. Vinny was my best friend, and we wrestled together. He thinks he’s horrible, but he’s awesome at his job, and that’s why he’s still here. I didn’t grow up with Filthy Tom or Mike Sempervive. Mike did a show for us back around 2006, and when I needed a fill-in for “Observer Live,” I called him, and he’s done it ever since. We did a couple of shows with Filthy Tom, he was great, and he’s still here. I’m just looking for people who do a great job. A lot of them happen to be friends or family, and a lot of them started out as neither and are friends and family today.

Fred: Bryan, it’s been a pleasure. What’s one piece of advice you’d give anybody who hopes to have similar success in any industry?

Bryan Alvarez: You’ve just got to keep going. If I wrote a book on how to succeed in any endeavor, you’d open it up, and it would say, “Just keep going.” There will be ups and downs, roadblocks and challenges, but if you keep going, you’ll get there. It’s one of the reasons I love jiu-jitsu. If there’s something in your way, you can’t just keep smashing your head into it, or eventually you’ll quit. The key is asking how you can get around it, then going around it and continuing, and when it happens again, finding another way. Sometimes you’ll want to end up in a certain spot and end up somewhere totally different, and as long as you’re cool with that, it’s not a failure. When I was a little kid, all I wanted was to be an author, and eventually I wrote a book. It was harrowing, second only to witnessing childbirth, and I don’t really have any desire to write another one. But where I ended up was podcasting and radio, and I love doing pro wrestling and MMA radio with every ounce of my being. I don’t sit back and think, “I wanted to be a writer, and I only wrote one book.” I moved past that, found this and just kept going, and at some point, I’ll run into another roadblock, go around it and keep going, and everything will be fine.

Fred: Wise words from a wise man. Bryan Alvarez, thanks so much for your time.