July 13, 1987
- Crockett’s Great American Bash Tour is looking more successful than expected. The first four shows drew big, grossing roughly $600k in total, including a $250k gate for the July 4 show at the Omni in Atlanta for the first ever WarGames match. Dave spends the bulk of the first page running down that card and giving impressions based on readers’ reports. It opened with Michael Hayes in concert, and the crowd loved it. They also had a David Allan Coe concert as well, so the wrestling didn’t start until 8:30 pm. Between that and the WarGames match going about 30 minutes by necessity, the rest of the matches were short, but Dave is told they were action packed. You’re obviously here for WarGames. That went 26 minutes and J.J. Dillon surrendered as the Road Warriors annihilated him. Not a match of the year candidate, but full of great action and the order of entry was Dusty and Arn followed by Tully, Animal, Flair, Nikita, Luger, Hawk, Dillon, and Ellering. The pops whenever a babyface entered the cage to even things up were wild.
- WWF settled out of court with John Stossel of 20/20. Back in 1984 David Shults slapped Stossel hard on each ear during an interview in MSG. The settlement gives Stossel $425k, $275k of which will come from WWF directly with the rest covered by insurance. WWF didn’t want this to go to trial, especially not with the Duggan/Sheik incident fresh in everyone’s minds. And if it had gone to trial, odds are very good the payout would have been much more.
- International Wrestling (the Montreal territory) will be no more by the end of the month. They’ve been struggling since WWF took Dino Bravo and Rick Martel, and word is that WWF will be picking up the tv and arena contracts from the promotion. Dave expects they might pick up Steve Strong, their top babyface, as well (Strong will only work one match for WWF in the 80s and instead become The Minotaur in WCW).
- [JCP/NWA] Jim Cornette is out with injury. He injured his knee on June 27, kicking Ricky Morton. It’s not the knee he injured in the scaffold match in November, but the damage was similar in nature though less severe. He had arthroscopic surgery this past week, but he needs major surgery (and rumor has it he won’t get it, since it’ll keep him out for several months).
- [JCP/NWA] The New Breed are recovering well. Chris Champion’s arm was broken in two places, but the breaks were clean and he’s mending quickly. Nelson Royal will be out longer due to the burns he got on the back of his head.
- Crockett is promoting a Dating Game segment for July 25 in Philadelphia, featuring Lex Luger. Should be the same idea as when they did it in Florida with Ed Gantner, and they’ll probably have Nikita Koloff pretend to be one of the girls, leading to Lex winning a date with Nikita and building some matches. Florida’s version was pretty good because Gantner had some funny promos for it and played dumb jock well. Luger fits the bill, but Dave’s not sure he has the sense of humor to pull it off (or any sense of humor at all).
- Richard Landrum, former Crockett tv announcer until Tony Schiavone took the job, has been sentenced to 90 years in prison. He was convicted of nine felonies in a case that looks like it came right out of a Lifetime movie - he wire-tapped his estranged wife’s phone and then put a bomb in the car of a guy she was dating.
- [Stampede] The Owen Hart vs. Badnews Allen match from June 19 sounds like it was a wild match. They drew 1200 fans and it ended with Allen going nuts and beating down two referees. Hart did two dives to the outside onto Allen after the match, and they did fines and a suspension and everything.
- Central States is a mess and it’s unclear who the tag champions are. Karl Kovacs and Warlord won the tournament on June 8, but they fired Kovacs shortly thereafter and Warlord left for Japan. Dave’s also heard that Bobby Jaggers and Bart Batten won the belts, but they’ve now split up with Jaggers turning heel on Batten. No idea what’s going on here.
- A small note from WCCW’s June 29 tag tournament: “Ted Arcidi & Texas Red (Gene Lewis) down Bruiser Brody & The Spoiler (Don Jardine--the original famed Spoiler from the 1970s).” They wound up losing in the finals to Killer Brooks and Len Denton. One issue - that’s not Gene Lewis as Texas Red. Some big green guy named Mark Calloway is under the mask. That’s right, this was a tournament featuring several tag team matches against the Undertaker, playa.
- Watch: A different Texas Red match from around this time, because I can't find any of the matches from this tournament
- In other news, WCCW’s new tv efforts are looking really impressive. It’s still stupid to push Kerry like this (even if it makes sense in that they make more from merchandising the Von Erichs than they do from wrestling), but it’s very sad to see. WCCW’s tv from June 28 was better than any other promotion’s television show in the past several weeks.
- [Memphis] Dave saw a newspaper report of a fan in Louisville suing Lawler because Lawler spat on them.
- Ted DiBiase’s vignettes are getting over big. Dave thinks Virgil might wind up being WWF’s answer to Big Bubba and make it big as a face (well, they’ll try it several years from now). But Dave also can’t abide that thought because Virgil is so bad at wrestling that “words haven’t been invented to describe him.”
- Watch: Ted DiBiase's debut vignette
- [UWF] Rick Steiner’s younger brother Scott will start in early August using the name Scott Sanders. Ron Simmons will also be coming up around that time, which will be great for him as it’ll get him in there with top workers and help him become the future star many want him to be already. He may be set up to tag with Steve Williams.
- Scott Hall seems to be gone from Florida.
- Dave believes the WarGames match was taped in full and might appear on the Bash video tape they’ll release in the fall. Gotta love how uncertain this kind of stuff was back then in a way.
- Clarification on Montreal territory: they might still run in Northern Ontario, but they’ll be out of Montreal by the end of the month. WWF won’t be taking over contracts. If they manage to survive, they’ll be little more than a skeleton.
- [JCP/NWA] More on Cornette: they’re kayfabing his injury as Robert Gibson putting him in a leglock and tearing up his knee. Dave’s understanding of the real story is Corny jumped up to stomp Morton and his leg gave out when he landed due to major cartilage damage.
- Continental did a whip on a pole match between Dutch Mantell and Wendell Cooley. It went to a no contest, with a biased referee in favor of Cooley, tradeoffs of the whip, and a heel jobber giving Mantell a whip and both guys popping each other with whips until they were pulled apart. Next week they’re going to have a no-rope bullwhips legal match.
- Watch: Highlights from what I'm pretty sure is the whip on a pole match described above, and if not, it's another one between the two
- Honkeytonk Man pinned Bruno Sammartino on June 18 to keep the Intercontinental Title. Dave thinks it might be the first time Bruno’s been pinned since he lost the WWF Title to Billy Graham about a decade ago. We're getting a correction on this one, because Bruno was not pinned.
- A show featuring Negro Casas vs. El Hijo del Santo drew 5000 fans to Olympic Auditorium in L.A. on June 27. That’s more than NWA and UWF have drawn in the area, as well as more than any WWF card since before Wrestlemania with the exception of WWF’s July 4 show this year.
- AWA’s June 13 tv taping drew 2200, mostly because the fans didn’t realize the Midnight Rockers weren’t going to be there. They weren’t advertised either.
- Andre the Giant is due to resume his feud with Hulk Hogan in the fall. Business is usually down during the summer, so Dave supposes they didn’t want to waste the angle on the summer crowds when they could make much more money later in the year.
- A couple letters this week ranting about how much they hate Dusty Rhodes and one is irked that even those who hate him qualify the statement by saying “Well, he’s a good booker, at least.” One goes so far as to say it’s vomit-inducing to see people say he’s the best booker in the business. Dave responds to that one and, while he doesn’t like coming to Dusty’s defense, it’s pretty clear that he’s the reason JCP survived through the initial contraction and are the clear number two promotion today. He doesn’t think Dusty’s a genius and he disagrees with several of Dusty’s ideas on how to use talent, but the data speaks for itself: Dusty is a good booker if for no other reason than he knows how to make his promotion money at the gate.
- Pennsylvania’s legislature is debating about deregulating pro wrestling. WWF is campaigning to deregulate, and Linda McMahon and Gorilla Monsoon both testified for deregulation. Linda compared wrestling to the Harlem Globetrotters and the Ice Capades, which are not regulated. However, when asked if wrestlers cut themselves to bleed for the matches she replied, “I am aware of past practices of that happening. In the World Wrestling Federation, it is not permitted or condoned.” Monsoon’s testimony focused on shows being hurt by having to have commission-appointed referees (it should be noted that Monsoon's son is a referee under contract with WWF). Unless the legislature rescues the state commission on this, the commission will likely be out of wrestling by the end of 1987, at which point NWA matches in Pennsylvania will probably once again feature all the blood. Because they love blood in Philly.
- Jack Hart from Memphis will be getting a rename in WWF. He’ll be using his real name, Barry Horowitz.