March 14, 1988
- As mentioned last week, WWF has changed up the bracket for the Wrestlemania IV tournament. They showed the updated bracket on tv this past weekend without any announcement or explanation for the change, and the only explanation Dave can find for why they have updated the bracket is so they can get DiBiase vs. Savage in as the final. So, now that we have an updated bracket, Dave goes into speculation mode. There are only three possible winners here in his eyes: Hogan, DiBiase, and Savage. He’s not going to rule out the possibility of a Hogan win, though he puts that as least likely due to the movie being in the works. DiBiase would seem to be the favorite, then. But if that’s the case he doesn’t really need the title any earlier than July in order to set up the august ppv. Hogan winning would probably require Hogan vs. Rude for the final. Savage or DiBiase are best off winning by facing the other in the final. Dave’s already leaning toward a Hogan/Andre double elimination as the most likely possibility there (whether they double eliminate through some kind of draw or through Hogan winning then getting jumped and being ”too injured” to continue by a bunch of guys paid by DiBiase is anybody’s guess). Of course, the real question is why change the bracket so suddenly? Did they just not think through the original one before they put it up that it would probably lead to Don Muraco being the most exciting face they could put against DiBiase in the final (or Savage/Rude)? It beggars belief they wouldn’t think this through hard, so there’s gotta be some reason like the original plan no longer seeming like a good idea. Is it that they’ve got cold feet about DiBiase’s drawing power? Does that put Savage as the likely winner, only to drop it to DiBiase in July for Hogan’s return in August?
- Look: Final bracket, drawn by Dave
- Dave’s doing a poll for those who watch both Wrestlemania and Clash of the Champions. Six questions: 1) which show did you enjoy more; 2) which show you thought was better overall; 3) match of the night; 4) your opinion of blood and wrestling; 5) should wrestling be regulated by state athletic commissions; 6) a question for those tape traders who sample widely: what promotion’s style do you enjoy most? You know what? These aren’t bad questions. I think we should answer these in the comments.
- Syndicated tv ratings for the week ending February 7 are out and NWA is on the rise. They ranked sixth with an 8.9 national rating on 185 stations, just behind WWF which was fifth with an 11.4 rating on 258 stations. WTBS does not count for viewership on this. Probably too close for Vince’s liking. Of course, these ratings aren’t an accurate measure of how many different people are watching, as many watch more than one program from each of these syndicated packages so some viewers are counted three, four, or more times. But syndication ratings are the numbers advertisers look to, so that makes them meaningful because it determines how much money they can get by selling ads. And ad revenue from tv is a significant part of WWF’s advantage: they’ve been able to get a lot of it and leave every other promotion in the proverbial dust. The three shows at the top (Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and Oprah) are all just one show in each tv market, so those homes are counted just once, which really puts things into perspective when you consider WWF (fifth place) was watched in 10,078,000 homes across four shows (thus a home that watches Wrestling Challenge, Superstars, Spotlight, and All-American would be counted four times) and Crockett got 7,868,000 homes (with three TBS shows and other syndicated shows, Crockett viewers could get counted as much as five to even seven times). Wrestling may be highly viewed, but in terms of absolute number of individual viewers it’s still small potatoes compared to the real juggernauts, and while they may have some of the highest rated syndicated packages, neither Crockett nor McMahon can claim to have one of the top rated syndicated shows. Crockett got a big boost from the inclusion of the TBS shows, which should boost their ad revenue and help them compete. And that’s reason enough for Dave to expect WWF to try and counter this - it’s important to the way WWF presents itself that there not be any other major league company in wrestling.
- Sports Illustrated ran a story in this week’s issue on Hiroshi Wajima. Dave hasn’t had the chance to read the story yet, but it’s apparently an old story put together in November 1986, and Dave has no idea why it just came out. Ironically, Tokyo Sports ran a story this week that Wajima was going to retire (though this apparently isn’t true). Anyway, I found the story.
- Read: Down from Sumo’s Summit
- Also in the media this week were the Von Erichs. They were on the 700 Club this week, doing their usual job of mixing truth, minor falsehoods, and major lies. On Monday they took over AWA’s old rerun timeslot on ESPN (4 pm EST) with “Legends of World Class Wrestling” which covers early 80s matches featuring Kevin and Kerry before in the pre-Freebird days of the company. They also curiously seem to have a Ken Mantell match every episode, as well as a trivia contest that’s unintentionally funny. One of the questions asked where and when David Von Erich died, which is almost pushing the exploitation of the family tragedies to the point of parody. Lastly, the latest on the Von Erichs story in Penthouse is that it’s tentatively scheduled for the July issue unless the magazine decides to do a feature on the upcoming Michael Spinks vs. Mike Tyson fight (yeah, they do that feature).
- The biggest news in WWF is that Bruno Sammartino has left the company. Bruno got an offer to promote a national wrestling hotline that paid more than WWF pays him as a color commentator, and that’s the issue that seems to have served as reason for him leaving. It’s no secret that Bruno has been unhappy with WWF for some time and doesn’t like the company’s direction. And Vince never gave David the push he promised. When Bruno retired back in 1981, he never planned to make a comeback years later; that only happened to help David get his career launched. But once he did get back in the ring, they pressured for more appearances, slotted him in as their pinch hitter for when guys like Duggan, Patera, or Jake Roberts weren’t available due to injury or suspension to main event a show. And this extra work has caused Bruno’s back injuries to be reaggravated, and yet he still completed all bookings through last August before deciding to call it quits for real in the ring. WWF still wanted him on in the northeast, though. The real core of everything, though, is that McMahona nd Sammartino have vastly different ideas, setting aside the usual friction of the promoter/wrestler relationship, about the credibility of the business and about promotional ethics. McMahon’s way of promoting completely violates Bruno’s sense of credibility for wrestling and ethics. Bruno ought to know a bit about what works promotion-wise, given he’s got a long record of drawing consistent sellouts in places WWF only draws a few thousand fans today.
- Dave saw the March 5 WWF show at the Cow Palace and runs through the card, giving ratings and making observations. Badnews Brown won his match with an enziguiri (that’s the Ghetto Blaster, though it hasn’t quite been named that yet). Steamboat and Rude had a 20 minute draw that was the best match of the show, and Steamboat is still one of the best for high spots in the country. Sherri carried Rockin’ Robin to a watchable match, though Robin is still obviously quite green. She’s a tremendous heel when they give her a chance, though they don’t often give her the chance. In the main event, Hogan and Duggan beat DiBiase and Virgil. Virgil was in the way too much and Hogan seemed like he might have been sick because he mostyl did rest holds and when on the apron he kept his head down. Hogan is absolutely the biggest draw in the industry right now, but there are a lot of folks who get bigger reactions live, including Carlos Colón, Antonio Inoki, and Chigusa Nagayo. Dave thinks it might be that fans look at Hogan as an entertainer/performer, whereas with Nagao or Colón they live and die by the rhythms of their matches. So when Dave talked back in December about how Hogan gets half the reaction live that Nagayo gets, he was being kind to Hogan. This isn’t to knock Hogan, though - he still gets incredible reactions and is an incredible draw, but there are others beyond him.
- Dave’s had a chance to watch a lot of tape from Puerto Rico lately, and there’s only one good worker from the area: TNT. That’s the future Savio Vega. The standard match here is slow-paced, though when they bring Abdullah or Brody in you can get some blood to make up for it. The company is very successful, though, so they’re doing what works for their audience, and Dave speculates their audience has the highest percentage of true believers of any in the world. The heat they can generate is ridiculous.
- Watch: A match between TNT and Super Black Ninja
- Iron Sheik has been fired, probably setting a new record in WWF.
- Adrian Adonis is trying to get back to WWF. No real surprise. Not going to happen before he dies.
- NBC and WWF have come to a deal for five Saturday Night’s Main Events and one prime time special for the 1988-89 season. The Main Event proved they can be put in a weak time slot with a lot of hype and deliver a solid rating, but they can’t appeal enough to consistently compete in prime time.
- Memphis has brought Sputnik Monroe in to feud with Billy Wicks on March 7. Dave thought Eddie Marlin feuding with Tommy Gilbert was ridiculous, but this takes the cake. Wicks was a big star in Memphis before Jackie Fargo (so we’re talking the 1950s) and Sputnik Monroe was a legendary heel who refused to work shows with segregated crowds. More on Sputnik Monroe by u/broken_beat. Anyway, Monroe and Wicks were big deals and their feud in the late 50s was legendary, setting an indoor arena attendance record in Memphis in 1959 that stood until the Monday Night Wars (specifically, In Your House: St. Valentine’s Day Massacre broke the record). According to cagematch, this is a one off and Monroe’s last match ever. This show was not for tv and there’s no video of it anywhere I can find online, but I wish I could put it here.
- Watch: Here’s a Sputnik Monroe match from 1966 because I can
- More guys gone from Memphis. Manny Fernandez was fired for missing shows. The Samoans quit right before they were probably due to win the Southern Tag Team Titles. Bill Dundee has left to go be a babyface in Knoxville (they wrote him off with a Gilbert family attack, so that leaves the door open for him to come back as a face and team with Lawler at least). Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson are also out. And Steve Keirn, who headlined February 29, isn’t back this week. This led to the March 7 card having 15 matches with a lot of guys pulling double duty.
- Owen Hart injured his back taking a bump on a guard rail during his Japan tour, so he missed two weeks right after getting back to Canada.
- Billy Jack Haynes was on a local talk show in Oregon and we get a bit of insight into his thinking about his new promotion. He’s only interested in guys who weigh at least 280 lbs and is promising sizeable guaranteed contracts. No indication when he’s going to start it up yet, but he said something to the effect of it being in arund 6 weeks. He also said they’d hold a wrestling camp.
- Continental is continuing the same bait and switch stuff that killed Birmingham in the first place. Their February 29 show was a double taping, and among the promises not kept were Larry Hamilton no-showing his match with Scott Hall and the two other matches he was supposed to have and both Danny Davis vs. Lord Humongous and Frank Lancaster vs. Detroit Demolition didn’t happen despite all four guys being present.
- AWA announced on tv this past weekend that Masa Saito would be returning, and he’d be bringing Riki Choshu with him to wrestle the Midnight Rockers. This comes as a surprise to all.
- AWA has changed March 19 to have Diamond and Tanaka challenging the Rockers for the tag titles. At least they figured out what to do to make it make sense.
- GLOW’s live card in Houston on February 26 drew 3,500 fans. That’s more than Hogan vs. DiBiase drew last time they were there, and more than Flair vs. Sting did this past weekend at the Houston Coliseum. Verne Gagne was there, and it seems GLOW wrestler Olympia is headed to AWA to be an opponent for Madusa. If Verne wanted someone to look better and wrestle worse than Madusa, he found his woman, Dave says.
- Adrian Adonis lost his weekly guarantee from AWA back in December. Then he broke his ankle just a week before he was supposed to go to Japan, so he lost out on two weeks of Japan and hasn’t been getting income. He even asked Verne to help while he was injured and Verne told him no. Adonis has had a terrible run of luck lately, and it’s just not going to work out well.
- New Japan officially announced that Akira Maeda has been fired. So now the question is what is Maeda’s future in wrestling, if any? Obviously someone will have the idea to start a new promotion and make him the star, but they’re gonna need television to get it going, and that could be a tough proposition. We’re on the cusp of Newborn UWF in the next couple weeks.
- Dump Matsumoto’s retirement was such a big deal that Fuji TV ran a half hour retrospective of her career. Her retirement show took place in her home town on February 28, and she beat Bull Nakano and Condor Saito in a handicap match to send her off. The co-main event was Lioness Asuka going to a time limit draw against Yukari Omori in Omori’s final match. The last tv taping Omori and Dump did took place on February 25, where they went to a draw against the Crush Girls via double countout. Then they requested five more minutes, and the match went to a draw after the request was granted. On that show Bull Nakano and Kumiko Iwamoto won two of three falls to take the vacant tag titles against Mitsuko Nishiwaki and Yumiko Hotta. Dave anticipates a ratings drop now that Matsumoto is out, as she brings a lot of drama and heat to the shows.
- The big news out of All Japan is that Tokyo Sports ran a front page story on February 23 about Hiroshi Wajima needing to retire due to neck injuries. Wajima insists he’ll be back, and Dave’s not sure the details, but Wajima is 40 years old and Dave’s understanding is he’ll be out for several months at least. At that age “career ending” become very common words with this sort of thing, so…. Yeah. This is pretty much the beginning of the end for Wajima. He’s not going to take time off, and by the end of the year he’ll wrestle his last match.
- World Class has a bunch of title changes. Kerry Von Erich beat Al Perez for the WCCW Championship on March 6 in Dallas. Small crowd, and it was originally supposed to be Michael Hayes against Perez, but they had Hayes attacked at the concert on March 4, so he was “injured” and couldn’t wrestle. The concert drew much better than the Dallas show, getting roughly 2,000 fans. Terry Taylor won the Texas Title on February 26 from Matt Borne. The Simpsons won the Wild West Tag Titles from Tatum and Victory on February 29 in Fort Worth, gaining a measure of revenge from the week earlier (maybe it aired on the 22nd but was the Feb. 14 show? Cagematch is sketchy on details and I can’t find a match on February 22nd where the titles changed. Possible Dave has some things mixed up) when they lost the Texas Tag Titles to Tatum and Victory. After losing the Texas Tag titles, they came out later that night with the Wild West tag title match contract. February 29 was set up so that Victory and Tatum were meant to defend both sets of titles, The Wild West titles against the Simpsons and the Texas titles against the Fantastics, and they whined that it was unfair. Anyway, Bobby Fulton didn’t show up, so Rogers wound up teaming with someone else and lost the match.
- Bill Alfonso, who used to be a referee in Florida and is the brother of David Sierra (who works under a mask as The Assassin in Oregon), will be the man referee in Billy Jack Haynes’ new Oregon promotion. That Oregon civil war in wrestling has brother against brother now.
- Peter Maivia Jr. (that’s The Rock’s uncle) won the California Championship Wrestling tag title with partner Toru Tanaka on February 26. Just an interesting note from the indies, because I had no idea The Rock’s mom had a wrestling brother.
- Also in the sons(-in-law) of wrestlers from long ago, Karl Gotch’s son-in-law is Masami Soranaka. He wrestles in Global in Florida as a foreign menace heel, V.C. Minh.
- Brody’s March 4 show in St. Louis drew 1,200 fans for a gate of $14,000. Brody vs. Jerry Blackwell in the main event had a weird ending, but the match itself was good, if slow-paced. Blackwell threw Brody over the top and the ref missed it due to ref bump, then Brody got back in, took a powerslam, was pinned for a three count, but another referee overruled it citing the initial toss over the top and calling the match a disqualification. Then Brody dropkicked Blackwell and pinned him. When the finish is dusty, everybody wins, right?
- World Wrestling Council in Puerto Rico has just put out three video tapes. Tape #1 has a bunch of their bloodiest matches. Tape #2 has the September 1986 WWC Universal Title tournament that saw Terry Funk in three matches, including matches against Rick Martel and Barry Windham. Tape #3 is an Invader #1 (fuck Invader #1) highlight tape. One of the matches has the ring surrounded by a cage of fire and now that I know this I wish he had gotten shoved into it.
- Letters this week are all over the place. The first one is a big one and about Hogan’s limited appeal. How much can a balding sausage man who looks ten years older than he is really appeal in the true mainstream? Can he really make anyone switch away from Dallas or The Cosby Show? Not unless the hypothetical viewer already likes wrestling. But that’s the thing the writer argues: Hogan might not be able to appeal to the mass market, but nobody else really can either because wrestling just isn’t that big and never will be. Hell, setting aside his skill or lack thereof in acting, his size alone is going to limit his options in Hollywood, and those limitations will not help him appeal more broadly either. He’s got strong appeal to a small audience, and that's okay because wrestling is a niche interest. Anyway, the writer eventually concludes her time in this issue after a long detour onto the subject of long storytelling matches by suggesting John Carpenter could have saved a lot of money on fake blood for They Live by hiring Ric Flair instead of Roddy Piper.
- Dusty Rhodes gave a really weird promo hyping up Clash of the Champions. He told viewers that if they don’t watch the Clash, he’ll remember and come down the chimney at Christmas and beat up their kids. Whatever idea of humor he has, it didn’t really land, and a lot of readers called in to ask Dave if he lost his mind.
- Hogan and Duggan vs. DiBiase and Virgil on March 6 in LA drew the smallest crowd Hogan has ever drawn in LA. Nothing really good on the show, either, except that main event.
- More details for the Hayes concert finish on March 4 for WCCW: Hayes was going to sing a Willie Nelson song and invited the Von Erichs on stage because he dedicated the song to David. King Parsons came out and started arguing with Hayes, and Buddy Roberts came out too and got into it with the Von Erichs. Roberts tried to swing a guitar at Kerry’s head, but Kerry ducked and he hit Hayes instead.
- Watch: The end of the Michael Hayes concert and the brawl
- Turns out the Sputnik Monroe vs. Billy Wicks match in Memphis was billed as an “Old Timers Special Attraction” match. That’s fine - they were really hot in the area around 1961, and it’s not like WWF haven’t done similar like their 1985 Fred Blassie vs. Lou Albano match at Nassau Coliseum.