Wrestling Observer Rewinder

December 28, 1987

The Complete Observer Rewind Archive by u/daprice82
This is the last issue of 1987. It's been real fun doing this, and I'll be continuing with 1988 in mid-May so I have some time to build a bit more of a buffer and also so I can focus on finishing up my work obligations for the semester unhindered. That said, I do have something special in store for us to keep Tuesdays and Thursdays worth looking at through the end of April, so keep an eye out.
Going into 1988, it may help to look at the trends of 1987 to figure out where the industry will go from here. What happened was basically inevitable, including the contraction to two major promotions in the U.S. from the three there were this time last year. UWF may have been absorbed by NWA, and the NWA gained new tv outlets and talent, but even so 1987 must be a disappointment to the NWA. WWF had some rough times, the worst being the PR almost-nightmare of Sheik and Duggan getting pulled over, WWF was strong on tv ratings, ppv, and profit.
As far as smaller promotions go, things only got worse. AWA is plumbing new depths and is inching closer and closer to critical condition. Central States has no names and no money. Memphis was strong early in the year, and though business has fallen they’re still the best model for a minor regional promotion to follow. Continental (Alabama) have fallen off, Championship Wrestling from Florida got bought out by Crockett, who abandoned them as a semi-independent circuit. International Wrestling in Montreal folded, World Class has only survived by making good contacts outside wrestling rather than doing anything good with wrestling. Stampede is doing fairly well, though - they’ve gained a lot of exposure from their TSN spot and word of Owen Hart’s performances spreading around insider sources.
Over in Japan, things are uncertain as well. New Japan’s facing crisis due to poor tv ratings, but their house show gates are far and away better than anything happening in the U.S. All Japan looks like they might rally in 1988 after the blow of losing Choshu and his guys now that Brody and Abdullah the Butcher are back. All Japan Women has fallen from its peak popularity in 1985, but as long as Chigusa Nagayo wrestles, they’ll be plenty fine so long as they can get some potential replacements to idol status in the next year.
Starting with the first issue of 1988, Dave’s changing the Observer to two columns of text per page. He did a couple issues in the past month in this way, while this one and the majority of the year were single-column. A regular issue is 10 pages, and Dave’s kind of cramming things in to keep it down to ten pages, while two columns will allow him to get about 40% more print on a given page. Theoretically, if there’s a slow news week, Dave could now put out an 8-page issue in two columns with more text than a 10-page issue with one column. It also keeps costs down so Dave doesn’t have to pay more to produce the newsletter or charge more to cover copying fees.
All is looking good in the land of Titans, as WWF has seen big ratings and ppv buys. WWF’s Thanksgiving weekend went exceptionally well. Saturday Night’s Main Event on November 28 drew an 11.3 rating and a 30 share. Their syndicated package that weekend drew an 11.5 rating, the highest they’ve ever done in a single weekend, and hitting third behind Wheel of Fortune and Universal Pictures’s networks. That rating suggests 10-14% more people watched that weekend than usual. Maybe more people watch tv on Thanksgiving anyway, but it also suggests curiosity and interest in current angles and how Survivor Series affected things. Meanwhile, Crockett’s ratings seem to have experienced no bump following Starrcade, so the gap between the two is widening.
Survivor Series was a big success. According to WWF, the show was available to 7.5 million homes and got a >7% buyrate, which means the show did approximately 525,000 ppv buys at $14.95 per home, for a gross of roughly $7.8 million. Dave notes that he does not trust these numbers, figuring they’re at least slightly exaggerated, but if that is the number, WWF probably only got half that with the rest going to cable. Combined with what WWF probably got out of the gate at Richmond Coliseum, the company probably grossed around $4 million for Survivor Series, which more than makes up for any drops in house show gates around November/December. WWF may not be as hot to the general public as it was in mid-1986, but the numbers are showing it’s more popular and profitable than before, even with less house show attendance.
WWF’s games with Survivor Series and the exclusivity stuff got them a bit of heat with the ppv industry. So there was major pressure to perform and pull big numbers. A failure at Survivor Series would have damaged the position WWF was in following the major success of Wrestlemania 3, but this success will placate the ppv companies a bit and allow McMahon to keep running interference on Crockett’s ppv. Another thing this proves is WWF doesn’t even need hot angles to pull in millions off a gimmick show.
Dave does some thinking about how ppv might be the future for wrestling. Right now ppv is available in about 7.5 million homes. At the rate that’s been increasing, by the year 2000 we may see ppv available in 50-75 million. So if Wrestlemania 2000 can get a 7% buyrate at $20 per buy, instead of $10 million like WWF would gross based on the current ppv market they’d gross $100 million (Wrestlemania 2000, which Dave managed to get right in terms of its name, saw 824,000 buys at a price of $35.95, so the overall gross was around $28.8 million). Anyway, that number is way beyond what any promotion could ever hope to draw from house shows in the course of a year. The future does not lie in house shows. The future of wrestling lies in ppv. And the only way to cash in on ppv is to promote nationally. So this is something promoters need to get their heads around quick before they get left in the dust.
Given all of the above, Dave is going to proclaim in advance that Wrestlemania IV is a guaranteed success. If Survivor Series could gross more than the first two Wrestlemanias with a gimmick show and no celebrities, what can they do with the culmination of several angles, celebrities, national publicity, etc.? If WWF simply grows with the ppv industry, they’ll be well placed to not have to worry about having a year of bad gates for house shows.
The question for Crockett now is whether they have responded well enough to turn things around and if building around Lex Luger is the right move. There are some arguments for building around Luger over Ric Flair, chief among them being age. Luger is 29, while Flair is 37 and may even be a year or two older than that. Luger’s body fits the mold that works these days, and he’s bigger than Flair too (Hogan wouldn’t be where he is if he were only 6 feet tall). Only Dusty has beaten Luger on tv, and Flair has put so many lesser guys over. Crockett needs to build for the future, but is that future Lex Luger? Dave doesn’t think so. And not just because Luger is a bad worker - that’s actually a rather small part of it. Luger has the look to be a star and can easily be a supporting player, but he lacks the charisma needed to be THE star. Hogan has it, no question, and it wasn’t something Vince gave him. Flair had it as a face in the Carolinas, Sammartino had it in the Northeast, Dusty in the South until age and physique destroyed it. The charisma these men had was the ability to appeal beyond the wrestling fan bubble and toward the general public. The future star of the business needs to be someone who can bring in the public by being a broad appeal babyface. And the only other wrestler not listed who has that is Jerry Lawler, and even then he can only do it in his territory and is too old to be that guy for a major promotion. Luger’s going to do fine, definitely short term and maybe even long term. Maybe he’ll develop the charisma, but he comes off too flat right now. And the fact that he blows up during promos is something concerning.
Rumors swirl about JCP’s finances. Dave’s pretty sure the rumors are exaggerated and it’s premature to write off the NWA as a major group.
That said, Crockett’s ratings and ad revenues are significantly down, and that makes it hard to make good on the contracts wrestlers are signed to. Unlike WWF, Crockett’s guys are mostly on long-term contracts. Dave does a bunch of talking about hypothetical numbers, but the gist is the wrestlers make money based on gates and stuff and then at the end of the year if they are short of their contract, they get the difference made up at the end of the year. And that’s a big crunch for Crockett, since a lot of their guys are due to have the company pay them to make it up to their contracted amount. The theory was that with Starrcade and Christmas, Crockett would be flush with cash and no worries about this. But ratings and revenues have been down, so this is much more difficult than they expected. And if Crockett can’t make good, those contracts aren’t worth anything, and the only reason they have contracts is to prevent WWF from signing their guys away.And that’s why Crockett will most likely honor the contracts, to prevent talent theft. Dave proposes a hypothetical of Luger wants to go to WWF and he has two years left for an example case, as long as Crockett is honoring the contract, precedent in other sports shows that Luger can’t be forced to work for Crockett, but he will have to sit at home for the duration of the contract. So the fact that Crockett could theoretically force someone to sit at home to run out a contract is why Dave doesn’t generally buy rumors about every NWA star jumping to WWF. It’s not a simple process.
A lot has changed for NWA since Thanksgiving. They’re restructuring tv down to two tapings per week (one arena taping for syndication and one WTBS taping). NWA Pro and Worldwide will be the main shows, UWF will be dropped, Power Pro and Florida will be secondary shows replaying matches from the main shows with different commentary. One of the reasons is that having so many tapings (which have lower revenue than house shows due to production costs) meant a lot less money for wrestlers and much higher production budget for the promotion. And Dusty had to write 7 hours of tv each week, which was the main reason the quality dropped so much - that’s too much for a man to be expected to do. “Nobody could come up with enough ideas to make seven hours a week interesting, and if they did, there would be so many things going on that nobody could keep up with them.” Ultimately, these changes should be for the better for the fans and for the wrestlers (mostly, there’s less tv time to go around now, though), but probably not for the ratings and ad revenue. It also leaves the question of what will happen with WPIX in New York - no UWF show anymore and Turner blocking any NWA shows on that station makes for a big question - does Turner force Crockett to drop New York as a tv market?
Speaking of New York, Crockett’s first national ppv will be the Bunkhouse Stampede finals in New York on January 24 at the Nassau Coliseum. Ten of the eleven wrestlers involved in the big match have been announced (Animal, Steve Williams, Luger, Ivan Koloff, Warlord, Wilbur, Tully, Arn, Bubba Rogers, Barbarian). Dusty will probably be the eleventh guy, but we’ll find out on January 1 at the Omni. If everything works out to Crockett’s hopes, they might get 180,000 buys and gross $1.8 million (which Crockett would get to keep half of). Not as good as WWF, but something that could help.
They’re doing a Dusty Rhodes retirement angle, and it looks like Crockett plans to stretch that through most of 1988. For now, it’s just an angle to get Dusty cheers for sympathy, and maybe they’ll do a retirement match in the fall. Dusty could be a great attraction as a once a year type of wrestler.
Jim Ross is being moved to Crockett’s WTBS show. He’s the best in the company at calling a match. Schiavone is professional, but lacking in play-by-play when more unusual moves are used.
Crockett hasn’t sorted out the stale top card, though, despite all their other changes. No new signings of note, Luger’s in a fresh role but isn’t a fresh guy to the scene, and the main event just isn’t really changing much.
WWF has gone back on their promise of no blading, as Hogan and One Man Gang both juiced heavily at the December 13 show at the Meadowlands. The New Jersey commission is unhappy about it.
Dave saw the most recent Saturday Night’s Main Event. Not as good as the one before Survivor Series, and the sound mixing was super off. Ventura working from a script rather than live is a waste of Ventura. Andre came off great, and Vince has done a great job at building him as a heel. Randy Savage vs. Bret Hart was very good, though they had an unrealistic ankle injury bit where they removed the boot. With that kind of injury you tighten the boot to limit the swelling, but since when was WWF about realism? The executive producer (Dave gets it wrong here, he should say director) of the Slammy Awards was Kay Fabe, after all.
Watch: The 1987 Slammy Awards
[NWA] Luger’s face turn and the related promos the past few weeks have all been going fantastically.
[NWA] They’re building to Williams vs. Windham for the UWF Title, with the winner meeting Flair in a unification match. Dave guesses this might get Williams to cancel his Japan tour in January.
[NWA] Injury update for Crockett: Robert Gibson hurt his back (Dave had mistakenly reported Ricky Morton), Barry Windham broke his collarbone, and Rick Steiner has a collarbone/shoulder injury.
Ken Mantell has scheduled four cage matches for WCCW’s Christmas show, and Dave’s hopes for the company to recover have disappeared.
Jerry Blackwell’s new promotion in Georgia (Southern Wrestling Association) had its first tv taping on December 14. They had 125 fans at Miss Kitty’s Saloon in Marietta, Georgia, and should start airing in January in Georgia and Tennessee.
[Alabama] They’re running a unique tournament idea for a mink coat to be given to a female fan. There will be boxes in the arena lobby for the duration of the tournament bearing the names of the wrestlers, and female fans are to put their name in the box of the wrestler they think will win. A name will be pulled from every box, and all selected women will be sat in a special area until the guy they chose is eliminated. The tournament will end with the “fan” (almost certainly the winning fan will be a plant) getting the coat.
The Chairman of the City of Calgary Boxing and Wrestling Commission, Laurie Mills, writes in about what his commission does. The people in Mills’s department do their work as civic duty and for no pay, so it’s not a hack or patronage type job like you might see elsewhere. They try to keep order at events so things stick to wrestler vs. wrestler rather than wrestlers getting into it with fans. They ban sticks and fire of all kind, as well as animals of all kind without prior permission (due to the mishandling of a dog taken into the ring in the past). The first time they have a problem with an animal being brought into a ring with permission will be the last time an animal gets in the ring. They level fines in real dollars, not kayfabe dollars, and though they’ve not used the right, they have the right to order a medical exam for wrestlers. The reason they haven’t is wrestlers tend to work in Edmonton right around the same time and Edmonton requires an exam, so no point making them pay for two exams in a couple days. The commission stays out of the kayfabe action in all ways possible. Mills can’t comment on other commissions, but seems pretty proud of the job he is doing with Calgary’s commission.
Bob Ivy, managing editor of Pro Wrestling Digest, writes in with some of his thoughts on where Crockett is falling behind. Namely, it’s down to a couple things for Bob - a failure to push UWF guys. Buying UWF purely for the tv contracts is an incredibly stupid move, and keeping the angles and main tv limited to the same group of 10-14 guys is what has killed their tv. Vince has a lot of tv shows, but he has so many wrestlers that he can shuffle people around and you don’t see the same 10-14 guys in the same angles several times every weekend. Hogan’s almost never on tv in a live match. So keeping things tight like Crockett has and not injecting the UWF guys into the top of the card has overexposed the guys who are at the top of the card, and has to be a major reason Crockett’s ratings are in the dumps.
Another letter writer with a media background laments Crockett’s insistence on a studio show for the WTBS show, and argues a slicker tv product will usually win the day. When you see a WWF show and have a camera angle showing a big crowd and start the show with a loud cheer from the audience, that makes a studio show seem dinky. Dave points out that the studio aspect is something Turner has insisted on for the WTBS show, and Crockett would run it as an arena show if he could.
Lou Albano is running for president of the United States.
The Penthouse story on the Von Erichs is being pushed to later in the year and won’t appear in the February 1988 issue.
A bill has been introduced in the Florida legislature to regulate wrestling. They’re apparently wanting to model off California’s regulations.**
Just as they turned Luger face, Crockett came out with a new line of Four Horsemen sweatshirts. Good ol’ advanced planning.
This might be the sweatshirt in question
Stan Hansen returned from Japan this past week and discovered that his home and all his belongings had burned down while he was gone.