Wrestling Observer Rewinder

October 05, 1987

Ron Garvin beat Ric Flair for the NWA World Title in a cage match on September 25. The match was NWA’s debut in the city, and Crockett aired the last minute of the match on their Saturday show on WTBS. The finish saw Garvin do a flying sunset flip off the top. This is the first of what will surely be a number of angles to set up Starrcade 1987. Due to the WWF pushing Survivor Series for the same day, they had to change plans a bit. Dave thinks it’s a bad move, for instance, to change the start time to 5 pm on the east coast. Now it competes with the NFL Thanksgiving game (Detroit vs. Dallas, so could be worse on that front), but also a lot of families will be doing Thanksgiving dinner at that time so that’s probably going to be a huge hit to their numbers. WWF already claiming to have a reach of over 5 million potential homes. It’s clear to everyone that the main reason WWF is putting out Survivor Series is to hurt Crockett’s attempt to get into the pay-per-view market. On that measure, Survivor Series is already a success. Crockett already look like they’re going to have problems getting on cable systems to have the show available because of Survivor Series, and moving to late afternoon rather than evening is risky. Dave thinks they should have just switched to Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday of the weekend rather than earlier in the day, which would be much better for attendance and achieve the same goal of avoiding being directly against WWF on pay-per-view. In addition to the pay-per-view plans, Crockett’s planning to expand closed-circuit offerings. Starrcade 1983 was the first all-wrestling show to be broadcast over closed-circuit over several states. The Inoki-Ali match from 1976 was broadcast over closed circuit in several countries, but it was a big flop financially except in the New England area where the Bruno Sammartino vs. Stan Hansen match at Shea Stadium, which was part of the package, drew well. Dave then goes into the history of closed-circuit and wrestling. There’s been explosive growth in that area over the past few years. Starrcade 1983-86 were closed-circuited over 15-20 sites, most along the Mid-Atantic seaboard. The first Wrestlemania was in over 138 sites, and Wrestlemania 3 went to 166 locations. Back to Starrcade, Dave thinks that while Garvin defending against Flair might not be as strong a main event as they could make, the show would probably be financially successful Thanksgiving night due to the depth of the card. Dave’s less optimistic about it as a late afternoon show.
Dave hasn’t heard anything about plans for closed-circuit or ppv offerings of Starrcade in California. Crockett will be making a swing through Northern California over three dates in mid-November, so Dave doubts that they’d do a closed-circuit offering just a week or two after a live card. WWF is putting heavy pressure on for exclusivity on ppv, and with the success of Wrestlemania they have the muscle to flex like that, so Crockett’s going to have some difficulty breaking into the ppv market. Dave expects tape-delays for the West coast.
On September 23, WWF taped Saturday Night’s Main Event for October 3 in Hershey Pennsylvania, and the big highlight is Honkeytonk Man vs. Randy Savage. Reports are that the match was good and Savage carried the bulk of the match, while Jimmy Hart chased Elizabeth around for distraction. Savage punched Hart, leading Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart to carry Jimmy back to the dressing room before returning to interfere after Savage hit his elbow. They then held Savage for Honkeytonk Man to hit him with the guitar, and Elizabeth did the long-awaited bump of her career and stepped in the way only for Honkeytonk to knock her down. She ran off and returned with Hogan before Savage could get hit again, and Hulk/Savage wound up fighting off the heels before shaking hands. It’s a bit of a retread of Hogan and Piper with Piper’s face turn, but still seems like it came off well. Other matches taped for NBC included Hogan beating Sika (subbing for Kamala, who apparently left WWF because he didn’t want to job on national tv), The Hart Foundation beat Paul Roma and Jimmy Powers in a good match, Bundy beat Orndorff with Andre interference, and Ted DiBiase beat Hillbilly Jim with a powerslam.
In wrestlers on tv, Hulk Hogan appeared on the Dolly Parton Show and Roddy Piper’s pilot episode of The Highwayman aired a week earlier. The Highwayman was the 11th highest rated show of that week, which outpaces Hogan’s appearance in a tv pilot a few years ago which was among the lowest rated of its week. Word is Piper overacted.
Watch: Dolly Parton, "He's Got a Headlock on My Heart"
Coming into the NWA is Larry Zbyszko. Also coming in are Dick Murdoch and a team called the Canadian Kodiaks. They’re Road Warrior musclehead types, which NWA is not exactly lacking.
Crockett’s syndicated package has moved up to 4th place nationally in syndicated packages in ratings. The three above it are Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and WWF’s package. Dave notes that these can be misleading - Wheel and Jeopardy are based on the rating of the show itself, whereas Crockett and WWF’s packages are based on combined ratings of their various shows, and none of the individual shows come anywhere close to Wheel or Jeopardy. But ratings are for advertisers, because when they purchase a 30 second ad from either promotion they get the same ad on every show in the package. Ratings matter for advertisement, but they are effectively meaningless otherwise.
[Florida] Their new show is a studio show (Jim Ross is one of the hosts), and mostly shows clips from the main JCP/NWA promotion and a little UWF. With Florida closing down, it currently looks like Mike Rotunda is sticking around as Florida champion but the Florida tag titles held by the Mighty Yankees (Bob Cook and Jerry Gray) may disappear.
Rip Oliver has jumped from Oregon to WWF. He’s been Oregon’s top heel for a long time, and left early in September. He made his first big WWF appearance against Billy Jack Haynes (reprising, after a fashion, their big feud in the Oregon territory) on the September 23 show in Portland, which is a really smart move for getting him a big reaction right away.
All Japan is running a rematch of Tenryu vs. Jumbo Tsuruta to headline their October 6 Budokan Hall show. The first match from August 31 drew in reality around 8,000 (they announced 12,000) and a roughly $250,000 gate. It was a really heated match with Tenryu winning by countout, but it wasn’t on the level of a match of the year candidate which is what was anticipated.
New Japan’s tour from October 5-25 will feature a bunch of foreigners. Names currently known are Konga the Barbarian, Manny Fernandez (who seems to have left NWA), Eli the Eliminator, Steve Casey (the English wrestler, not the one from World Class and now in Oregon), Badnews Allen, and Darrell Peterson. Peterson is an All-American amateur wrestler from Iowa and was trained by the New Japan dojo. Steve Williams is booked for the tour, but Dave suspects he’ll cancel - he has had to cancel his last three tours in Japan ever since Crockett bought UWF.
Owen Hart has reportedly only been working at 50% in his New Japan tour due to knee problems. Despite his knee, he’s still doing a lot of his moves very well, including several suplex varieties.
Dave says UWF (Japan) promoted a card on August 29 at Korauken Hall, but they’re defunct, so I’m assuming it was largely those guys from UWF Japan who are in New Japan who were the centerpiece of the show. Setting aside my quibble about who promoted the show (cagematch says New Japan), the feature match was Fujiwara vs. Maeda in a shoot style match. Don’t confuse shoot style (submission heavy style, making things look legit through little to no showmanship or acrobatics or fooling around) with actual shooting. Maeda lost via submission, and it’s practically unheard of for a big star in this day to lose via submission in a match. And Maeda’s known for having an ego. That said, if he’d willingly do a submission job for anyone, it’d be Fujiwara.
According to Japanese Wrestling Journal, Masakatsu Funaki had the third best performance in New Japan’s jr. heavyweight tournament. Funaki is only 18 years old, and debuted just a week before his 16th birthday back in 1985. Barring injury, he should be one of the best around within a year at his current rate of progress.
New Japan’s jr. heavyweight tournament on August 19/20 officially ranks second all time in big money wrestling events behind only Wrestlemania III. The first night drew the equivalent of $433,944 and the second night drew $453,544. This week a two hour videotape featuring the tournament plus the Choshu/Fujinami vs. Inoki/Mutoh match, the ten-man elimination tag between the New Leaders and the Now Leaders, and other matches will come out at a price of $138 for the tape.
TV-Asahi is moving New Japan’s tv show back to prime time on Monday nights starting next week. They’ve been drawing low ratings (from August-beginning of September the highest they drew was an 8.7 for Bam Bam vs. Inoki, going as low as a 5.4 for a show including a live feed of Maeda/Takada vs. Fujiwara/Yamazaki). Those numbers are really low for prime time tv in Japan, and the low ratings are part of why TV-Asahi was considering moving the show to a midnight time slot. That’s more of a death slot than in the U.S. for a few reasons - kids are asleep and they’re a big part of the audience, but on top of that the Japanese work day begins at 6 am, so the potential audience would be tiny. TV-Asahi hopes that Choshu returning to tv will answer the ratings problems, though if he can’t get them solidly into the 10+ ratings they may wind up in an unfavorable slot anyway. Inoki and Baba have been negotiating behind the scenes about getting Choshu back on television. Anyway, there are several potential reasons for the low ratings. Viewers may be tired of Inoki in the main events. Viewers may be tired of wrestling itself. Maeda’s led a change of style to a more mat-based shoot style with less showmanship. It’s been a boon to live gates, but maybe turns off casual fans. Choshu being a key guy in the promotion but not on tv may make tv seem unimportant to fans. Inoki seems to be banking on the idea that the last scenario is the main reason.
[WCCW] Kevin Von Erich has vanquished Brian Adias and his dreaded Oriental Thumb move. Von Erich kayfabe broke Adias’s thumb on Labor Day and got counted out in his rematch for the WCCW title against Al Perez. Perez defends against Bruiser Brody on October 2.
Curt Hennig got back his AWA title in Minneapolis. Two weeks ago they held the title up between Hennig and Greg Gagne (Hennig had a contract dispute and there was a chance of him leaving), but they announced last week that Stanley Blackburn had ruled Curt was still champion. That is, they settled the dispute and kayfabe clarified the kayfabe holdup of the title). Curt will likely stay and seems to be looking at a tour or two in All Japan to make more money.
Soon to be AWA Women’s Champion Madusa Miceli is apparently really bad. So bad that Dave thinks her last two matches he’s seen are the worst non-GLOW matches he’s ever seen. She, Nick Kiniski, and Kevin Kelly seem to have potential as a group, but the moment they do a promo together it’s like three children playing pro wrestler.
Dave gives 4 stars to a UWF match from September 19 in Lubbock Texas. They drew a crowd of 650, and the match was Michael Hayes/Shane Douglas/Sting vs. Big Bubba Rogers/Terminator/Rick Steiner in a six-man first blood elimination tag team cage match. After all the others were eliminated by blood, Sting pinned Bubba in the end to win the match.
Billy Graham and George Steele have been reinstated in New York State. Apparently the bulk of the tax money received by the New York State Athletic Commission comes from WWF (specifically, from WWF’s shows at Madison Square Garden), so they pretty well needed to back down to keep their money maker happy. Dave doesn’t get the point of having the commission govern wrestling, since they don’t enforce any regulations or safety standards, and safety is no different than in states with commissions and those without. It’s really just a layer of politically appointed bureaucracy designed around how boxing works that doesn’t make sense for wrestling - in New York it’s illegal for a wrestling promoter to have any kind of financial stake in any wrestler who appears on the promoter’s card. That’s just asinine.
[WWF] The September 21 Madison Square Garden show sold out. They had nearly 20,000 paid and a $250,000 gate for Hogan vs. One Man Gang (double countout) and Savage vs. Honkeytonk Man (Savage victory). They were not on track for a sellout, but there was a surge in ticket sales when it was announced that Savage was replacing Jake Roberts in the semi-main event.
[WWF] Barry Horowitz pinned David Sammartino on September 26 in Nashville. Dave notes that this is a surprise, but credits Barry as a “much better wrestler than David.”
Alabama (Continental) has officially been sold to Mike Costello. Costello is a businessman with no previous involvement in wrestling. Ron West will be handling the wrestling end of the business for Costello, which is good for the promotion because Robert Fuller has been pushing himself like Ric Flair on interviews, which is unintentionally funny.
They’re pushing Doug Furnas Hard in Alabama, but he’s just not there yet. He was part of the Thunderdome battle royal match on their September 21 show and after taking a hit from a chain in the match, he had to blade six times before any blood came out. Furnas is a local college football star and a great powerlifter, but Dave thinks he’s going to struggle to get over anywhere but near home. He’s improving, but in addition to the ineptness of his blading, he’s just a terrible worker right now. He’s got tremendous athletic potential and freakish strength, but his physique is not like a Tony Atlas/Dingo Warrior/Road Warrior or any of the other big guys, and he’s also only 5’9”.
Final note on Alabama - The Midnight Rockers have been looking okay here. They seem more interested in showboating than working, though.
Wild West is continuing to push the women big. Robin Smith is the focus of the push, and she’s now called Rockin’ Robin. She’s only been wrestling a few weeks. She recently wrestled Debbie Combs with Susan Greene as the heel referee. Greene gave Robin a piledriver, but Combs refused to cover her and dropkicked Greene out of the ring, and then Nickla (Baby Doll, and Robin’s sister in law through her brother Sam Houston) came out to check on her, so it looks like we might have a tag team of sisters in law. Later on Robin was the referee for a match between Combs and Greene and fast counted Greene out as revenge.
Watch: Rockin' Robin vs. Debbie Combs with Susan Greene as referee
Tommy Rich is going full time with AWA. He’s always been a big draw on the Georgia independent scene, so this hurts them a bit.
Al Tomko’s All-Star Wrestling promotion in British Columbia is going to a mostly women format and are rebranding to Wild Women of Wrestling. All the matches will be women’s matches or mixed matches.
Awards favorites time once again, as Dave expresses his thoughts on the categories. Dave thinks the category of Best Heel is hard to call this year because a lot of the best heels are playing faces right now or are so good at being heels that they’ve started to get cheers. Austin Idol, based purely on his promos in Memphis, is the clear winner to Dave. Dump Matsumoto’s significantly mellowed (last year Dave thought she should win and voters gave her third place), but she’s still one of the most fearsome heels in the business so Dave puts her second, above Terry Taylor (who narrowly beats out Ted DiBiase and Honkeytonk Man). For Most Underrated, Dave explains that he’s looking at great wrestlers fans don’t give the credit they really deserve. Guys like Sam Houston, Dennis Condrey, Biff Wellington. Dave thinks lots of people underestimate Ricky Morton as a worker and dismiss him because they don’t like his character. Hell, even though he’s a world champion, Dave feels like Curt Hennig is a possible choice simply because he’s such a good wrestler, top 15 range in the world right now, and fans just don’t seem to recognize his skill. Dave winds up going with Brad Armstrong, Sam Houston, and Tiger Mask II as his top three picks. As for Dave’s thoughts on Best TV Color Commentator, he only has two words to say: Jesse Ventura.
Buddy Roberts left the Freebirds primarily because he’s tired of life on the road. He and his wife have a new baby boy, so that’s also a big factor.
Bob Geigel is cutting the Kansas City promotion back to running shows every other week. The promotion is once again at death’s door.
The NWA Title change airing on tv was handled in such a way that it frustrated Dave again with the whole live/taped bother. Dave asks yet again why pretend it’s happening live? Why make unnecessary lies that don’t further the angle and insult the viewer’s intelligence because the viewers know better? Ricky Morton and Bobby Eaton were in the studio, but watching them somehow teleport to Detroit to be the first to congratulate Ronnie Garvin on his victory is funny, if frustrating.
With the internet we can watch the whole match now. Watch Ron Garvin win the NWA World Title
Wrestling magazine writer George Napolitano has started up a rumor that got picked up by several newspapers about pro wrestlers like Brody, Stan Hansen, and others looking to try out for NFL scab teams. Just a publicity stunt by Napolitano, but a decade ago it might now have been a terrible idea. Brody was once a member of the taxi squad of the Washington Racial Slurs under Vince Lombardi and Hansen was a middle-round draft pick for the Baltimore Colts, but that time was over 15 years ago and neither is probably thinking about playing football again.
Hulk Hogan’s lawyer has moved to have all trial documents made confidential in the suit filed against Hogan by Richard Belzer. As mentioned before, Hogan put Belzer in a headlock and Belzer alleges he squeezed too hard, causing Belzer to pass out and cut the back of his head when he fell.
Riki Choshu will finally be allowed to wrestle on tv for New Japan. Baba and Inoki cut a deal to make it happen. No details yet, but it appears that Inoki may have agreed not to interfere with Baba contracting Jimmy Snuka and Abdullah the Butcher for tours as part of the agreement. Choshu’s first tv match will be on October 5 in a match against an opponent selected by fan vote. That’s going to crush Inoki’s ego, Dave thinks. Fujinami and Maeda are neck and neck in the voting currently, with Fujinami in a slight lead. The show will be a two-hour special, and Inoki is trying to steal the spotlight with a take on the Memphis empty arena match that Terry Funk and Jerry Lawler had a while back. Inoki’s going to do a “fight to the death” with Masahiro Saito on the island of Ganryujima the day before and put a tape of the match on the show. There will be no referee, no fans, no ringside attendants. A tv crew will be there and sportswriters can watch from a distance of 50 meters. They’ll start fighting at sundown and go until there’s a submission.
Steve Williams looks like he definitely will make the October New Japan tour. He will wrestle Inoki in a rare interpromotional world champion battle on October 16, though neither title is on the line.
At the NWA convention last week, Jim Crockett was elected president of the NWA. Carlos Colon and Giant Baba were elected vice presidents. They were, Dave believes, the only major promoters in attendance, as the convention was basically a Jim Crockett Promotions company party.
Austin Idol suffered some kind of legit injury while in Japan and missed the end of his tour.