Meltzer earned a journalism degree from San Jose State University and started out as a sportswriter for the Wichita Falls Times Record News and the Turlock Journal. He demonstrated an interest in professional wrestling and a journalistic approach to it early in life. Meltzer wrote several wrestling-related publications that predate WON, dating back to 1971. The most notable of these was the California Wrestling Report, ca. 1973–1974, which reported on the still-extant National Wrestling Alliance territories operating out of Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The beginnings of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter date back to 1980, when Meltzer began an annual poll amongst those with whom he corresponded regarding professional wrestling. According to Meltzer, he was just a fan at first. A short time later, he began maintaining a tape-trading list, and would occasionally send match results and news updates along with tape updates. Meltzer stated that he wanted to keep his friends in college "in the loop" for his tape trading and the happenings in the business, as the mainstream wrestling magazines catered to a somewhat younger demographic.
Meltzer popularized the star rating system (devised by Jim Cornette and his childhood friend Norm M. "Weasel" Dooley), which rates matches on a scale of zero to five stars (sometimes going into negative stars in the case of very bad matches) in a similar manner to that used by many movie critics. Meltzer has also given ratings that have exceeded five stars. The first 6 and 6.5 star matches took place in 1981 (as rated by Dooley, not Meltzer). The highest he has ever rated a match was seven stars, given to Kazuchika Okada and Kenny Omega for their match at Dominion 6.9 in Osaka-jo Hall in June 2018. Wrestlers such as Bret Hart have written how proud they were when their performances were praised in the WON. Others, such as Cornette himself, PWInsider's Dave Scherer and Seth Rollins have criticized Meltzer's system.
Meltzer himself has stated that his star system is "the least important" work he undertakes and has said that wrestlers and fans place far more importance on the star ratings than he does. Nevertheless, Meltzer's ratings are frequently are hot topic within the world of professional wrestling, and were so particularly in the late 2010s following the awarding of six stars to the Omega vs Okada match at Wrestle Kingdom 11 in 2017.
Reputation
Meltzer's reputation is divisive; his work is generally praised amongst journalists, scholars and historians. In the professional wrestling business, he is considered more controversial, particularly by those targeted by his reporting or damaged by it.
In 2016 the Washington Post referred to Meltzer as "pro wrestling’s preeminent journalist" while in 2013 Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated called Meltzer "the most accomplished reporter in sports journalism" and stated "You could cover the Vatican or State Department and not do as good a job as Dave Meltzer does on wrestling". R. Tyson Smith, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, cited Meltzer as "the foremost authority on professional wrestling in the United States" in his 2014 book exploring identity, masculinity, and the act of violence in professional wrestling, while wrestling historian Pat Laprade has called WON the "Wall Street Journal of professional wrestling".
Bret Hart recalled that during his career most of his colleagues were keen to be featured and praised by Meltzer in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, and stated he was glad that WON served as a legitimate source of news within professional wrestling following the Montreal screwjob incident. Industry veteran Terry Funk recalled in his 2013 autobiography being impressed by WON:
I immediately thought that this thing was going to take off. There would be no stopping it. Instead of talking about the matches as if they were real competitions, like the newsstand magazines had one, Dave Meltzer wrote about the business behind the scenes. It had news and results from all over, and was obviously written about someone who understood the business...I saw it as a thermometer of sorts, to see how different things were getting over in different places.
Conversely, PWInsider writer Dave Scherer has criticized Meltzer's work. After a collaboration between them during the 90s, Scherer alleged that he gave him first-hand information, but then Meltzer published something different. Former WWE wrestler John Bradshaw Layfield has alleged that WWE gave Meltzer false information, which Meltzer then published.
In May 2015, Meltzer reported that Destination America had decided to cancel Impact Wrestling by late September 2015. Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) vehemently denied the reports, claiming that they "constitute[d] defamation" and that they were "seek[ing] all legal remedies available", but TNA was off Destination America by January 2016 and no legal matters ever arose.
^Observer, Dave Meltzer, Wrestling (September 27, 2021). "AEW's Battle With WWE Is Heating Up". Sports Illustrated. Archived from the original on November 9, 2021. Retrieved September 27, 2021.{{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Smith, R. Tyson (2014). Fighting for Recognition: Identity, Masculinity, and the Act of Violence in Professional Wrestling. Duke University Press. ISBN978-0822357223.
