January 05, 1987
- Rewinder's note: If you thought that just because u/daprice82 ran out of available archive for the Observer and left to join the competition that you’d be deprived of content, never fear. I’m just gonna be the Rick Bognar to his Scott Hall. I promise a commitment to bring us up from 1987-1990 in Rewinds. By the time we get there, the official Observer Archive should have 2002 and 2003 up as well, so we can round out the few years before the 90s and then continue into the 21st century. Due to my work schedule, I’ll be able to do twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. And hey, we get to cover the wrestling war before the Monday Night Wars now.
- No major headlines as all the major promotions took a Christmas break. Crockett is doing well and WWF is also doing well (wherever they send Hogan, anyway), and it seems they’re the clear winners of this territorial collapse that’s going on.
- Correction from the last issue of 1986: Dave knocked the AWA for advertising Scott Hall when he no longer worked for them, but it turns out he is again and Dave found out right after he sent last week’s issues out. It won’t be for long, as it’s expected WWF will pick him up, and Verne Gagne had said to a Chicago newspaper Hall wouldn’t be working for him anymore.
- WWF, however, is falsely advertising Dynamite Kid to appear all over the country starting this week. Kid’s recovering from disc surgery and will be in traction until mid February, but the crazy SOB is already talking about returning to the ring as soon as he’s out of traction. Kid’s insistence on getting back in the ring has led to WWF scrapping the tag team tournament they had planned, because they’ll wait for Kid to return unless the doctors chain him to his bed through March when Wrestlemania happens.
- Last week Dave reported Andre vs. Hogan would main event Mania. That still looks likely at this point, but Andre’s health has made this a lot less certain. He hasn’t wrestled since he went to film a movie (The Princess Bride) four months ago, which screwed up the Machine angle in Japan and Japanese reporters are calling his career there done. If Andre can’t return by mid-February to turn heel and jump Hogan, they’ll have to consider an alternate main event. Dave will be surprised if they can pull off Wrestlemania this year, and if they can’t do Hogan/Andre, he’s not sure they have a big enough main event to carry the show.
- Christmas week is traditionally the biggest of the year, and crowds were good this year but significantly diminished from years past. The only sellouts were December 25th in Charlotte for JCP and December 28th in Toronto for WWF (and Crockett’s sell out was fan appreciation night with all tickets priced at $4).
- Mike Bellew, editor of Wrestling Eye Magazine, died in a car accident this past week. He was 27. A recent issue caused the biggest stir of anything a magazine has stirred up in a long time. The issue did an expose and defined several industry terms. Dave says he knows this will seem hypocritical and in poor taste, but he thinks that that article should not have appeared in a newsstand publication. More will have seen Eddy Mansfield on 20/20 and newspapers regularly attacking the authenticity of wrestling than will ever see that article, and the Observer exposes the business much more frankly and thoroughly. But, Dave notes, the cat is already out of the bag for anyone who finds the Observer, as opposed to those getting their Apter mags. Dave thinks it just looks foolish in the long run for a magazine that covers wrestling as if it were legit to then do an expose.
- WWF notes: Looks like WWF has gotten in with the Fox Network. (My how this feels familiar today). They’ve already gotten on affiliates in New York and Los Angeles, and it’s not clear how many more they’ll get on. This suggests if Fox does choose to pick up wrestling nationwide, it won’t be any of the competition they choose. This likely won’t improve WWF’s bottom line much, because of diminishing returns and overexposure.
- Smaller notes: Ricky Steamboat is being advertised for the show Sidekicks playing pro wrestler Ricky Steamboat. Previews show him with his voice box fully intact.... There will be a little Hulkster running around, as Hogan’s wife Linda is expecting…. Hogan vs. Kamala flopped so hard in St. Paul last month that they canceled a Christmas week show there…. Roddy Piper missed a December 4 main event and court appearance (he was in a high speed chase and car accident).
- Dave keeps getting letters asking him to cover Puerto Rico but he doesn’t get enough information regularly enough. He got some clippings of a big show from December 21st, though.
- Crockett: Looks like Ole Anderson could be on his way out as a Horseman. They’ve been snubbing him on interviews and Tully and Dillon have been talking up a surprise. Dave thinks they might just replace Ole with Lex Luger, which would be good for Luger as his weaknesses could be hidden pretty well.
- Ronnie Garvin has vacated the Mid Atlantic title because they’ve decided you can’t have two titles, and he’s tag champs with Barry Windham. Dave ponders the potential for an angle that won’t happen - Garvin gave up the title, so Barry wins the TV title and when he chooses which title to vacate, he chooses to give up the tag title, meaning those titles are vacant and need a tournament. Having lost two titles without losing a match, Garvin turns heel. Sounds like some solid fantasy booking to me.
- Crockett and Florida relations are done. Crockett’s running in opposition to Florida now, and that’s going to force Florida out of the NWA (which will lead to the magazines trying to make them look bad, the same as they did to WCCW). Florida people claim this is violating a gentleman’s agreement with Dusty where he said he’d never work against them.
- Dave declares the NWA dead. Flair’s refusing to defend in Florida, and Gordon Solie is saying on tv that Luger or Badnews Allen could beat him any time. Also Central States, which Dave calls pro wrestling’s Purgatory, is still burning. They’re drawing anywhere from 300 to 3000 (the latter their Christmas show), and at one show Arn Anderson was so uninterested he spent his time in a tag match talking to girls at ringside.
- Nothing interesting is really happening in Florida, but Steve Keirn quit. He’s apparently making more doing real estate than wrestling. Scott Hall is apparently coming in here in February, so Dave supposes the WWF thing has fallen through. Ah the joys of having to physically type up a newsletter on paper so you have weird things like the progression of Scott Hall news in the course of one issue.
- Paul Orndoff’s nerve endings in his shoulder are dead. He’s been advised to quit wrestling. (He’s going to wrestle the rest of this year, briefly in 1988, then come back full time from 1990-1995).
- Memphis: the Lawler/Rich feud is reportedly doing really well. Dave knocks Lawler sometimes because he doesn’t do any moves, but Dave credits him for being a tremendous worker and being able to carry even the most pitiful opponent. Speaking of Lawler, he and Harley Race have been the voices of animosity between WWF and Memphis. Race calls Lawler “Queen” and Lawler disses Rich’s 5-day NWA title run by noting that Race was a “60-year-old gray-haired drunken bum who couldn’t even wrestle.”
- World Class’s Christmas show did good numbers headlined by a Bruiser Brody vs. Abdullah the Butcher loser leaves town cage match. (They accidentally hyped it as “the winner gets to leave town,” though). Somehow Tony Atlas got knocked out by the cage door opening in his face. Abby won the match. No real heat to the match, or most of the show. Dingo Warrior vs. Bob Bradley was completely silent. There was also a loser rides a mule match between Scott Casey and Black Bart. According to Dave: “the mule relieved himself at ringside and the place stunk almost as much as the card did.”
- AWA had their best live card in a while for their St. Paul Christmas show. Dave’s getting a tape of it and hopes to comment more next week, but the big talk is for Nick Bockwinkel and Curt Hennig in the main event that had everyone thinking the title was going to change.
- The Alabama territory’s offices are being moved to Birmingham from Pensacola, Florida. Apparently they’re looking to run up in northern Alabama and Tennessee and pull out of southern Alabama and the parts of Florida where business is dead.
- New Japan is in crisis. TV Asahi pre-empted them twice in November, and it’s said they’re planning to dump wrestling in April. New Japan’s deal with them is for $1 million annually, so losing tv would be crippling.
- Akira Maeda has toned down what he calls shooting and says he now conceives of it as making wrestling look legit and eliminating fake looking moves. He doesn’t mean having shoot matches, street fights, or genuinely attempting to maim. That’s good…. He and Inoki had no problems in their match on December 8th.
- Letters section: A number of letters. One wonders if a Japanese wrestler could get over in America without the stereotype gimmicks (Dave suggests the original Tiger Mask could easily), some mumbling about taking the title off Hogan and what that would mean for WWF, commendations for Tom Prichard on improving. There is one where Dave is asked about the ethics of writing an obituary for a wrestler. Do you mention their real name, their marriage (even if never referred to publicly), that their reputation may be mainly hype? Dave points to how this was handled when David Von Erich died. All the papers mentioned his name and marriage even though WCCW pushed the idea that he was single. Most papers hyped his role model status, though one noted his popularity was mainly the result of Fritz’s manipulation. Dave figures honesty is best.
- All Japan had a bizarre occurrence. They sold out Budokan Hall (12,700 seats) on December 12th, but after the 7th match on the card and before the matches that determined the winner of the tournament, several thousand fans left. They had come for the sole purpose of seeing Hiroshi Wajima (a famous sumo wrestler turned pro wrestler). Less than 10,000 were left by the end of the show.
- The joshi are off for a few weeks. Only real news is Dump Matsumoto and her stable have started painting swastikas on their foreheads to take their heel work to the next level.