March 23, 1987
- While JCP announced the full lineup for the Crockett Cup, WWF did a couple copycat tournaments. WWF’s first annual Frank Tunney Memorial Tag Team Tournament took place March 15 in Toronto. In McMahonistan, history shows that Frank Tunney took tag team wrestling from Australia and brought it to North America. The Killer Bees won the tournament and got a shot at the Harts, and they were forced to remove their masks. After a little bit, they pulled new masks from their trunks and switched again. They had Bret pinned, but Danny Davis nudged the small package and gave the victory to the Hart Foundation. A week earlier, WWF did a similar tournament at the Meadowlands arena. Dynamite Kid “wrestled” this one (he could barely walk to the ring and Beefcake/Valentine beat the Bulldogs by DQ in 30 seconds). Beefcake and Valentine won the tournament, facing the Harts and losing to the same finish as the Tunney tournament in the only good match on the show. Dave heard from those there that selling tapes of this show to dentists would cut out the need for Novacaine.
- Meanwhile, JCP has announced the full lineup for the Crockett Cup. Dave thinks they should seriously consider trimming the number of teams next year unless they make real plans to work with other promotions, which he finds doubtful (we're two issues from the surprise sale of UWF to Crockett, so not that doubtful after that). There are always too many obvious jobber teams, and cutting down to 16 or 12 teams would reduce pointless bloat that makes the card super watered down. I’m not going to type out all 24 teams, so you can look here instead. The headline for the finals will be Flair vs. Barry Windham for the NWA title.
- Dave is moving, so there won’t be an issue next week. He gives an updated phone number and PO box for mail. The first issue of April will instead be a double issue that should cover all kinds of stuff, including Wrestlemania and JCP’s LA and San Francisco shows.
- Wrestlemania is continuing to impress. They’ve sold 78,500 tickets, which is 9500 shy of a sellout, and there are still two weeks left. Dave fully expects a sellout and thinks this may be the largest live crowd for any indoor event ever in North America. No other stadium is big enough, and the current recordholder is a Rolling Stones concert at the Superdome that had 87,000 or so. No word on how ppv orders are going, but Dave expects a success there, while closed-circuit ticket sales aren’t going great. That said, Wrestlemania got a huge boost for closed-circuit after a publicity push in its final week, although Wrestlemania 2 was mostly a disappointment in closed circuit. WWF shouldn’t worry much about closed-circuit, though, as their live gate this year should more or less be double Wrestlemania 2’s live gate in three arenas, increased ppv availability will ensure greater profitability there, fewer celebrities means less spending on them, and broadcasting will be cheaper from one location. Ontario, for whatever reason, loves them some closed circuit, and has sold out nearly every location, including 12,000 seats at Maple Leaf Garden. By comparison, MSG has only sold a thousand. All together, Wrestlemania 3 should rake in almost $20 million, which is ridiculous.
- The latest Saturday Night’s Main Event has aired and it’s an impressive feat of editing. The matches were distinctly average, but the Roddy Piper bit was great. Dave didn’t care for the Hogan interviews, but he understands their purpose since he’s the major draw, and he didn’t care for McMahon’s commentary because he tends to lose control of himself when he’s on a network or pushing a big story. Otherwise, Dave liked most everything. The battle royal looked pretty solid, Savage/Steele was watchable, Bundy/Roberts was better than at MSG but not as good as Dave was hoping, and the Hart Foundation vs. Spivey and Santana was good and Spivey showed some willingness to try new stuff. Andre didn’t look good, and looks to have lost a significant amount of weight. Dave figures the match being bad is a given, but as long as Hogan/Andre isn’t embarrassing like Piper/Mr. T from last year, it’ll be fine.
- Jim Neidhart’s trial was to start on March 16, so US Marshalls waited for him at the dressing room in Toronto on March 15 and cuffed him and brought him back across the border after the show that night. If convicted he could face up to 20 years and a $250,000 fine.
- Not much of note in Crockett country. There have been some good Ole and Arn promos, and a couple chuckleworthy bits here and there, but otherwise not a lot to say other than match results.
- Aside from Hall, Sullivan, Simmons, and Gantner, this is the end of the line for most everyone in Florida. JCP will be replacing them with their own people pretty fully. In the process, a whole lot of mess has happened, including this sequence of title changes for the Florida title: “from Badnews Allen to Sir Oliver Humperdink on 2/24 in Tampa when Badnews had destroyed Hump, then there was a ref bump and Sullivan interfered and gave Allen the spike to the throat and put Hump on top. Hump then gave the belt to Gantner, who lost it to Rotunda” on March 15. They also did a “Thunderdome” match which was basically a cage match with a roof.
- In Stampede they had an unusual chain match between Hiroshi Hase and Gama Singh. You’d expect a chain match to be a wild brawl and use the chain a lot, but Hase dominated with wrestling holds, particularly hitting multiple consecutive bridging suplexes. I guess Calgary is Suplex City, bitch. Other notes in Stampede include Brian Pillman refereeing until his shoulder is better and feuding with a heel referee and Beef Wellington looks like he might be a top contender for rookie of the year.
- Watch: Great Gama vs. Viet Cong #1 in a Russian Chain match
- Memphis wrestler Jerry Bryant has been out of action and his doctors have advised him to give up wrestling. Basically, if he keeps wrestling, he’s not going to live much longer. Spoiler alert: the doctors were right.
- Eddie Gilbert now has the book in UWF and Jim Ross is running the show day-to-day. Bill Watts has stepped aside (two more issues), so expect new faces and some changes to the product. Also, UWF is back on tv in Philadelphia and will debut in San Jose in April.
- Misc. WWF Notes: Jim Neidhart’s trial is postponed until April 8. Samantha Fox, a British pop rock star, was supposed to present the crown at the end of the Race/JYD match but has canceled her appearance. Dave suspects if Race wins, we won’t see much of JYD anymore.**
- At a WWF taping on March 11 they had a Harts vs. Roma & Powers match where they botched the finish. Unbelievably, they went out and did a retake, wrestling the whole match over again and not botching the finish. So that happened.
- CNN reported that Andre would retire and turn on Heenan after Hogan pins him at Wrestlemania. Most people are thinking something along those lines will happen, but Dave’s been told by somebody on the inside that if Andre’s back can hold up (it looks like it can), they want to bring him back for a few select cities on the tour later this year.
- AWA doesn’t have a lot of note going on. The only interesting thing is that they’re promoting an all tag team show for April 19 in Minneapolis. Bockwinkel & Ray Stevens vs. Masa Saito & Super Ninja will head the card, and they’re billing Bockwinkel and Stevens as the greatest tag team of all time.
- Jeep Swenson is the latest musclehead in WCCW. He’s been wrestling for about two weeks now, doing 30 second jobber squashes, and is pretty okay all things considered. Dave suggests a tag team weightlifting contest between Swenson, Dingo, John Nord, and Ted Arcidi since none of them can wrestle (though Dingo Warrior is noticeably improving).
- Pro Wrestling Canada has been shelved. This means no more Moscamania shows, and Mosca has sent a memo to tv stations saying he’s not involved anymore. This means JCP has lost all Canadian television and there won’t be any return dates to Ontario in the foreseeable future.
- Canada’s TSN channel has been running AWA tapes acquired from ESPN, but that looks to be ending. Instead, they’ll be running Stampede, which means AWA just lost Canadian tv as well.
- One letter writer notes that it’s a bit premature to call a win for Crockett as they enter new markets. They have freshness, sure, but we’ll see if there’s staying power. There’s also the very silly nature of “smart” fan debates about WWF vs. JCP. It’s way too early to say that realistic fake wrestling is triumphing against human cartoons, and “smart” fans are too bogged down in the details by making that distinction anyway. Look at it from the outside, and you have two organizations that stage scripted wrestling shows with predetermined endings and the action simulates violence while nobody actually suffers. The only real difference is that one group (the one smart fans tend to favor) requires its performers to cut themselves with razor blades. You could take this letter from 1987, reprint it in 2019, get the F out and call JCP AEW, and it would be applicable to today’s landscape.
- Remember when Dave made that comment about Misty Blue a couple issues back? One letter writer responds to the comment and she says that it doesn’t matter who is wrestling, cutting off a match, not showing the finish, and not even bothering to announce the result is insulting to everyone in the match and to the promotion. JCP came off really unprofessional to the letter writer when they interrupted Linda Dallas and Misty Blue, and she doesn’t take kindly to Dave’s remarks about Misty’s looks either. She reads a “newsletter for information, not gossip among little boys in a treehouse giggling about girlies.” She further points out that Dave’s assessment that Misty is the ugliest woman ever called beautiful doesn’t jive very well with how a lot of men seem to feel about her and suggests Dave’s brain has been fried in the California sun. In short, legit women’s wrestling (as opposed to GLOW, which our letter writer concedes is about selling ass) doesn’t need self-proclaimed beauty judges like Meltzer demeaning the wrestlers and it doesn’t need promotions that only pretend to promote them and give them air time. Dave’s only response to the content of this letter is that “the costume [Misty Blue] wrestles in makes her fair game for the comments I made, plain and simple.” Yikes to that take, Dave.
- [JCP] Lex Luger is officially a Horseman. Many in Florida are also impressed by his improvement of late, which shows what you can learn by teaming with Tully and working against Barry every night.
- Vivian Vachon has been touring Japan lately and readers have wanted to know about how that’s going. She was a well-regarded wrestler in the 70s, but hasn’t wrestled in about a decade and it shows (she’s looking slow and not good). She’s about where you would expect someone in that position to be when thrown into the joshi meatgrinder.
- Bill Watts did a radio interview where he gave UWF’s side of their inability to book Kiel Auditorium. Basically, he says that WWF and St. Louis city officials have been blocking him. The interview made UWF and Watts seem like underdogs going against the machine to the public, but it’s also pissed off a lot of St. Louis politicians and everybody in arena management. Watts isn’t wrong when he talks about restraint of trade here, though.