January 18, 1987
- Jim Crockett Promotions and WWF went head to head in Philadelphia last Saturday, drawing a combined 25k fans and $350k. This is a really good barometer for the health of the industry, because the companies draw such different kinds of audiences. WWF drew more fans, but a slightly smaller gate (and they ran the Spectrum, which is a more costly venue, so it’s possible JCP’s show might be the most profitable gate in Philadelphia wrestling history). The headline events of each show were a scaffold match and Flair/Koloff for the NWA World Title and Savage/Steamboat. Dave says it looks like JCP has nothing to worry about in terms of being a profitable enterprise, so long as WWF doesn’t try to be a wrestling company. Spoiler alert: JCP will be sold to Ted Turner by the end of 1988 because they fucked it up and weren’t profitable. And WWF never even had to try to be a wrestling company.
- The Crockett show was reportedly excellent for the most part. Two 30 second matches and the scaffold match were the only disappointments. Otherwise, Ron Garvin and Ivan Koloff had a really good 20 minute draw. Jimmy Garvin beat Brad Armstrong in a Texas Death Match with the double down and first man to his feet finish with a twist (Armstrong got up first but the referee was looking at Precious, so Bill Dundee knocked him back down and Garvin got up for the win). Ricky Morton, Robert Gibson, and Dick Mudoch beat Shaska Whatley, Rick Rude, and Manny Fernandez. Tully Blanchard beat Dusty via DQ to keep the TV Title. Dusty looked to have lost weight and was moving better. Dillon threw a roll of coins to Tully but Dusty intercepted and used it to get the pin (Dave makes a joke about Tully’s college football days and how it’s more realistic for Tully to throw the pass that gets intercepted), but Dillon then runs in the ring, gets the roll of coins from Dusty’s trunks, and gets the ref to overturn the decision (“what a perverted finish” Dave says). Barry Windham beat Arn Anderson as well, and Flair/Koloff went to a double count out. Road Warriors beat the Midnight Express in the scaffold match, with the highlight being Hawk shaking the scaffold as hard as he could after being the first to climb up.
- WWF’s show was not as good, and honestly kind of lousy. Not as lousy was the spike in ticket sales when it was announced Steamboat would replace Andre the Giant in the main event against Savage - 9000 tickets sold after that. Very impressive considering that last time they went head to head in Philadelphia a month ago, final week ticket sales for WWF totaled 1500 for a show headed by Hogan and Ordnorff in a cage match. Doing some Steiner math, it looks like Savage is 6x the draw Hogan is in Philly. Savage beat Steamboat by DQ and the match was bad - moves missed all over, slow motion, Steamboat in particular looked bad. Jake Roberts and Bundy did a double countout. Honkytonk Man vs. George Steele was the best match of the show (Steele lost by DQ). Valentine and Beefcake beat Dan Spivey and Mike Rotundo. Davey Boy and JYD beat the Hart Foundation (Dave says it’s scary when Mathilda is a better worker than Davey’s partner). There were also some junk matches featuring Barry O, Dino Bravo, Koko B. Ware, and Scott McGhee.
- Saturday Night’s Main Event did a final 10.6 rating. This breaks the record set by last year’s episode from this same time, headlined by Terry Funk vs. Hulk Hogan and makes this episode the most widely-viewed 11:30 pm Saturday night show in the history of organized television (Dave will correct this in a few weeks - since 1981 is the correct time frame). Crockett and WTBS are planning to air their own counter on Saturday February 7 - “Superstars on the Superstation.” It’ll feature six house show main event caliber matches, one of which will be the Arn Anderson vs. Barry Windham match mentioned above.
- Crockett is going to make a go of it in Canada, doing their first Canadian tv taping on February 16th. They’ll be in Ontario, where WWF used to have a presence. Back in the early 80s Crockett wouldn’t let his guys work for Frank Tunney, worrying Tunney would join up with Vince (rightly so, as he did), and Toronto was one of Crockett’s biggest cities. Flair would draw crowds in excess of 15000 back then. Nowadays Toronto is WWF’s hottest city, in part because there’s no competition. Should be interesting to see if Crockett can make it work.
- Dave gives a couple editorial notes about the Observer. He’s working on getting the 1986 yearbook out and that’s like 50-55 pages and counts as a month of Observers ($5/month). I don’t have that, nor do I have next week’s issue, so we’ll be going to February next up in the rewind. Also Dave notes that all material from here on is copyright Dave Meltzer and promises a tirade in next week’s issue on the subject of people outright copying and reprinting his material. Shame we’re missing out on it.
- This past weekend the INTV convention happened and many wrestling names were there to try and get more syndicated stations carrying their shows. This was mainly for independent stations, as the NAPTE convention is still a few weeks away. Anyway, Verne Gagne (AWA), Jim Ross (UWF), David Crockett (JCP), John Studd and Basil DeVito (WWF), someone from Continental Productions (WCCW), a bunch of the GLOW girls, and Joe Pedecino and Gordon Solie were all there. Bill Apter and Craig Peters covered the event for PWI. Dave feels like the tv people thought wrestling was oversaturated and they weren’t too interested in going to the booths, except to the GLOW booth so they could see a scantily-clad Tina Ferrari (you know her as Ivory) up close. Pedecino gets a nod for being a hard worker, since Pro Wrestling This Week has an amazing amount of cooperation from all promotions (except WWF) making it possible. Other notes: nobody cares about WCCW, WWF’s people are the most arrogant and pompous in the business, Gordon Solie is a really fun guy to talk to, Verne still hasn’t realized it’s 1987, the tv industry is as unscupulous as the wrestling industry. The convention program lists for WWF Vince as president, Linda as VP, and DeVito as PR head (Dave notes that DeVito and Studd were the least reprehensible of the WWF group present). As for Vice President of Operations, the program lists Jane E. Barnett, which Dave thinks must be someone’s idea of a practical joke (James E. Barnett, who sold Georgia Championship Wrestling and its timeslot to Vince leading to Black Saturday, is what it should have said).
- WWF Superstars tapings saw the build to Andre/Hogan continue over trophy sizes. Hogan gets a trophy for being champion for three years in one part of the taping, then Andre gets one for being undefeated, and Hogan’s is bigger. Later Hogan mentions the size difference and that fans cheer him louder, leading to the Hogan/Andre handshake and squeeze. Also debuting at the tapings, and hopefully putting an end to long-running rumors of the Road Warriors jumping to WWF, are Ax and Smash. Demolition has arrived!
- Watch: Andre the Giant is presented a trophy in Piper’s Pit
- Watch: Demolition debuts!
- Dynamite injury watch update: WWF is still not acknowledging his injury and falsely promoting him for the month. JYD is replacing him most of the time, though it’s still rumored that Johnny Smith will be coming in imminently. Dynamite is back in the hospital and in traction. The surgery he had was to remove the disc between his L4 and L5 vertebrae, and a doctor has said that it’s a longshot that he could ever get back in the ring. The surgery will cut his flexibility down significantly, and Dave supposes there’s no way he can do all his awesome flying moves anymore. He’ll also have to drop muscle mass and keep leaner, because there’s no way his back will stand up to the heavy weightlifting needed. So when he does return, he’s not going to be the same wrestler at all. As Dave puts it, Tom Billington might get back in the ring, but Dynamite Kid is done.
- Dave has a contest: give Owen Hart a nickname. Best serious nickname will be used in the Observer forever (or until Vince gets him and kills his style). Dave has a thing for nicknaming wrestlers at this point and it can be kind of irritating. Curious to see if anything comes of this contest.
- Luger’s coming in to JCP and will be the 5th Horseman. No word on what happens with Ole.
- [JCP] Instead of doing Petrov vs. Koloff, they’re going to do Koloff & Dusty vs. Petrov & Ivan. This is because JCP have realized that an untrained bouncer is not really ready to be put in a big singles feud. Crockett really ticked off a lot of the boys by trying to make Pietrov a main eventer with basically no training. Speaking of Peetrov’s training, he wasn’t trained by Eddie Sharkey. Apparently Sharkey is still trying to recover his reputation a bit after training the Warlord and Tijo Kahn, so letting someone graduate who was greener than a baby’s first shit is the last thing he wants on his head right now.
- All Japan’s tour is off to a rocky start. On the plus side, they sold out Korauken Hall. On the other hand, the card sucked. The main event of the first show of the year was a battle royale that Tiger Mask won, and while Japanese wrestling is good at a lot of things, battle royales are not one of them. A lot of the big names (including Tenryu, Wajima, Choshu, Yatsu, and Tsuruta) in the match got counted out, which I guess can happen in All Japan’s battle royales at this time? News to me. There were also a couple matches featuring 55 year old competitors Nelson Royal and The Destroyer (Dick Beyer), both of whom are clearly too old to keep up with the style in AJW.
- Shinobu Kandori, four months since turning pro, has become UWA World Women’s Champion (UWA is in Mexico). She beat Lola Gonzales, and the speed of her rise to the top from her in-ring debut may be some sort of record. Compare to 31 years later, and that’s the exact timeline Ronda Rousey would follow from her first match to her championship win. In another coincidence Kandori, like Rousey, was a world class judoka who took Bronze in the 1984 World Judo Championship.
- UWF has a lot going on behind the scenes that could surface soon. Their death spiral continues, though nobody yet recognizes it as such.
- Dave is correcting himself from a few issues back on a Puerto Rico update. Mil Mascaras wasn’t the North American champion in Puerto Rico, challenging for it on December 21. The champion was Jos LeDuo, at least until he no-showed a card and they put the title on the son of Roy Heffernan (of the Fabulous Kangaroos fame).
- Florida is a complete mess with their titles due to guys leaving. They did a bit where Luger lost the Southern Title to Badnews Allen, but the referee overturned the decision because Allen used the ropes. But Luger is on his way out so doing this makes no sense. Speaking of Badnews Allen, he’s an absolute riot on promos. His most recent, before a match with Kendall Windham, was that he was afraid to wrestle Kendall because he was worried he’d be put in jail for beating a minor. Dave is floored that no major promotion has signed Badnews.
- Kevin Sullivan will begin booking for Florida on January 13th. Expect Bruiser Brody to become the top face.
- Dave says the best new manager since Jim Cornette is Big Bad Downtown Bruno. He’s hilarious and a perfect wimp.
- He also notes that despite the tv overexposure of wrestling, Memphis is doing good. They’ve been making good use of less expensive signings and have a good number of popular acts to keep things profitable.
- In good news for wrestling, Dave guesses, John Studd says he’s staying out of wrestling to focus on tv until September. In other tv appearances, Ricky Steamboat’s appearance on “Sidekicks” isn’t the only one of late. Studd is on “Hunter,” while Bam Bam and Scott Hall are on HBO’s “First and Ten.”
- The December 29 World Class show where kids got in free drew 3,400 fans. Sounds great compared to 150 on their last one, until you remember all the kids were free and got free concessions. World Class’s death spiral continues.
- AWA is doing well, selling out in Vegas every week recently for tv tapings. WWF just got tv out there, though, so that streak might be over.
- Jim Duggan’s UWF contract had a very interesting “escrow” clause in it. Apparently he receives this “escrow fund” only if he fulfills his contractual obligations on the way out. Explains why he’s jobbing out and actually going along with it.
- [WCCW] Dave doesn’t understand why Dingo Warrior and Sting are still in facepaint. They’re both good-looking young men and it seems absurd to hide their faces. Speaking of Dingo, he apparently thinks he’s Hulk Hogan now, what with telling all the children to train and eat vitamins and such. Dave reasons that if Hulk’s fans are the little Hulksters, that must make Dingo’s the little Dingbats.
- Someone writes in to ask about the lawsuit between Dusty Rhodes and Big Daddy. Dave says Big Daddy (Steve DiBlasio, not the Big Daddy of British wrestling fame) sued Dusty a few years ago after his career ended. He shattered his ankle doing a bump over the top in a match with Les Thornton and claimed Dusty told him to take the bump when producing the show. Dave’s gotten a lot of news clippings about this, most of which show Big Daddy is ridiculous. He claims to have been roughly equivalent to the Road Warriors in terms of his status (including claims such as being “undefeated in 41 matches having beaten Ric Flair, Roddy Piper and Abdullah the Butcher” and making $4k a week). Nothing’s been settled yet, and Dusty could have some problems because the court sent him a questionnaire to answer and he just gave smart-ass answers that were mostly just foul language.
- A fan from Memphis writes saying Hogan/Andre is a good idea. The average fan will think it’s the greatest main event in history. He then predicts that UWF will be able to draw well in WWF and AWA cities by the end of the year unless Crockett or McMahon can talent raid the top three or four guys (guess what happens, y’all).
- Magnum T.A. update. He’s beginning to exercise in water and is in the early stages of relearning how to walk. A return to wrestling seems completely out of the question at this point (and sadly so).
- Kerry Von Erich update. Looks like he’ll be returning in the fall. This would be the return from the motorcycle accident that took his foot from him. Dave said in his initial coverage of that accident and says again here that whatever Kerry will be like in the ring when he returns, don’t expect it to be the Kerry of old.