For those of you just tuning in, these are the rec.sport.pro-wrestling.*
Year-End Achievement Awards.  They celebrate the excellence, as well as
the....opposite thereof, of the past year in professional wrestling.

The Awards are decided by the readers of r.s.p-w, voting for a 1st, 2nd,
and 3rd place in nearly fifty categories.  This is the unbelievable
ELEVENTH year for the Awards, as well as the tenth anniversary of the
first awards - we just keep going and going...  The first six years were
run by Herb Kunze (hkunze@uoguelph.ca) - from 1996 on, I have somehow
managed to churn this thing out even as it's grown into the monster you
now read today.

This year we've jam packed over 713K of results and commentary into this
set of awards.  Our participation was the highest ever, just shy of 600 -
about a hundred more than our previous high in 1998.  AND this doesn't
even count the handful of illegible or improperly formatted ballots, not
to mention the two dozen or so I got after the deadline and couldn't
include!

Thanks to Grooverider, Banco de Gaia, Dimitri from Paris, Breakbeat Era,
David Holmes, Clinton, Timo Maas, Dave Ralph, Roni Size, Kraftwerk, Gus
Gus, Underworld, and Victor Alicea over at promoonly.com for providing the
tunes to get me through this one more year.  Thanks also to Dr Pepper and
7-Eleven for providing caffeine after I got tired of drinking coffee at
work.

Thanks to XO Communications for continuing to provide me with a steady
paycheque despite the fact that I seem to spend an awful lot of time
dealing with writing about professional wrestling, which I've heard isn't
actually in my official job description.  ;-)

Thanks again to John C. and Rick Scaia for plugging the Awards without my
prompting (or, in Rick's case, IN SPITE OF my please to NOT do so).

Thanks to the readers of the DVDVR message board and tOA for responding to
my pimps over there.

And EXTRA special thanks, as always, to Kim...I finished before your
birthday, baby!

Thanks most of all to YOU! the readers of rec.sport.pro-wrestling, the
Mod, and RSPWI (all three of you) for your contributions and help in
making this document what it is.  Awards can't represent a community
unless the community represents, and once again, you've come
through.  Thanks.

The following pages provided invaluable assistance with research.  
Bookmark them ALL right now:

<http://www.CRZ.net/wrestling/>
  [slash] wrestling - my own repository of the past year's events

<http://hometown.aol.com/wsandt/cards/index.html>
  The Wrestling Supercards & Tournaments Web Page

<http://www.puroresu.com/>
  The Great Hisa's Puroresu Dojo

<http://www.webspan.net/%7Efender1/bbbowm.html>
  Rev. Ray's Page of 1,000 Holds

<http://www.otherarena.com/>
  the Other Arena

If you are interested in the whole shebang as opposed to the bits and
pieces I'm posting today, I recommend the following FTP link for your Web
browser:

<ftp://ftp.CRZ.net/pub/users/chris/00awards.txt>

Are we having fun yet?  I think we are!

DIG IN, BABY!

And so, without further ado...