April 11, 1988
- Dave has results from the poll he put up before March 27. Out of 532 responses, 504 enjoyed Clash more, with only 20 liking Wrestlemania more, and 8 rating them roughly equally. 489 voted for Clash as having the better card, while 39 picked Wrestlemania’s card, and 4 thought the cards were equal in quality. Only two picked a Wrestlemania match for match of the night, with Ted DiBiase vs. Randy Savage and DiBiase vs. Don Muraco each getting a vote. Flair/Sting got 245 votes for match of the night while Midnight Express/Fantastics got 242 votes, and the NWA tag title match got 36 votes.
- Anyway, it’s a really slow news week. So with the complete lack of anything interesting happening, Dave is gonna hit us with a bunch of semi-organized thoughts and such.
- Hulk Hogan and Sting are the two guys coming out of Sunday with the most buzz. The level of response Sting has been getting cements him as the #2 babyface in the country, jumping past Savage and the Road Warriors quite quickly. Sting’s a guy who never had a big push before a couple months ago, had never gotten a clean pin on a major star, he’s never even won a singles title in NWA. He’s good for his experience level, but he’s very unpolished, and he’s not a good talker. But the man has some kind of charisma and fans have latched onto it, and Sting/Flair is now the most viewed match in modern NWA history and potentially the most viewed match in U.S. cable tv history. Ric Flair deserves a lot of credit for the match turning out and for giving Sting the rub, but you can’t get over off a rub like that if you don’t have something to you. Unfortunately, they don’t have a lot of options for sustaining his push and keeping his momentum going. He’s worked Flair for four months now, and there’s no other heel he can have a meaningful feud with without cooling off. So Dave worries they’re going to whiff and fail to catch lightning in a bottle with Sting.
- Wrestlemania’s numbers may be down, but ppv kept it from being a flop financially. Roughly 585,000 homes paid $19.95 to watch Wrestlemania IV, roughly a 6% buyrate (maybe as high as 6.5%), which means a gross of $11.7 million. With closed circuit, live gate, and the site fee Trump paid, the total take is an estimated $16.3 million, with WWF pocketing roughly $7 million. Merch may get them another million. We’ll see the real success or failure when WWF returns in a month, because they’re taking four weeks off. So we’ll have to see if it’s profitable to off-set other losses of income - house show revenue leading to Wrestlemania was down from the same period as last year, and the summer slump is coming.
- Clash drew an overall 5.8 rating and 12.6 share, being viewed in 2,561,000 homes in an average quarter hour. It’s not quite Royal Rumble ratings, but interestingly the audience grew every quarter hour. You’d never see that in a modern Raw, that’ for sure. Flair/Sting topped out at a 7.1 rating/15 share with 3,138,000 homes on average, with the final 15 minutes having just under 3.5 million watching. Quite possibly the most watched slot of wrestling ever on cable tv. No matter how you slice it (ratings services assume a household means 2.2 viewers, based on their averages). Dave figures for wrestling the number may be closer to 3 particularly for ppv, but no matter how you slice it Wrestlemania didn’t have near as many viewers as Clash.
- Dave thinks there’s a criticism of Wrestlemania that isn’t really just: the card was too long. For what was billed (16-18 matches), it wasn’t too long, and the card only went 3 hours 40 minutes with a 12 minute intermission. Most matches were under 6 minutes, and cutting time would have made them even shorter. The card may not have been good, and it may seem long because of its badness, but any shorter and all the complaints would have been about the lack of wrestling.
- For Clash, Dave thinks the criticism of there being too many commercials is a bad one. Seeing that quality a show for free? You can live with commercials and let the advertisers foot the bill. And they didn’t break any match up with commercials. Sure, the breaks were longer than usual, but they avoided cutting off the action so it’s all good.
- For the most just criticisms of both shows, Dave thinks the Wrestlemania crowd and judging for Flair/Sting take the cake. The crowd at Wrestlemania was papered with non-fans who didn’t know the characters and stories, and even WWF operates at a level of complexity above the ability to just grab a random off the street and expect them to grasp everything and react appropriately with no background knowledge. As for Clash, they botched the judging completely. Nobody clarified if a judges’ decision could cause a title change. Having one judge be a Penthouse Pet on Ric Flair’s arm the day before on tv strains credulity to the breaking point. They promised a winner and gave a draw. They never made clear that Jason Hervey and Ken Osmond weren’t actually judges and were just sitting at the judges’ table as celebrities. If Flair and Sting had been average or even bad, this judging stuff could have completely ruined the show in Dave’s opinion.
- Dave thinks the best swerve related to either show happened the week before in Springfield, Illinois. Santana and Martel came out wearing the WWF tag titles for a match scheduled to air after Wrestlemania, which made Dave expect them to keep the belts. Turns out they got into it with Slick and chased him to the back, and the ring attendant brought the belts to the back, then they re-entered without the belts and the cameras didn’t start rolling until the second entrance. Clever work by WWF there.
- Martel and Santana getting booed at Wrestlemania remains the most puzzling thing about the night for Dave. Even at the closed-circuit sites Dave got reports from, fans there booed them. At first Dave assumed it was because Demolition are kind of Road Warrior knockoffs, but reports Dave got indicate that they got booed a lot too, so Dave has no clue why fans aren’t feeling Strike Force.
- WWF and NWA each have a candidate for “best case of assuming fans have memory loss” with their shows. WWF gets theirs for the evil twin Hebner angle. A few weeks back it was being hailed as a great angle, but once it became clear the tournament was flopping as an angle, they dropped all mention of it. Never got brought up at Wrestlemania, and Earl Hebner even refereed several matches in the tournament without any mention of his name, Dave Hebner’s name, or any referee even being named. Meanwhile, NWA’s handling of Steve Williams returning gets a mention as well. Not only is he no longer mentioned as UWF champion, they’re acting like the UWF championship has never existed. And we thought McMahon was the worst when it came to ignoring wrestling history. They also forgot his heel turn from before he quit and his feud with Barry Windham, since he and Windham are teaming on the April 17 WTBS Main Event show.
- WWF still wins the PR game, even if they had less than a third the viewership on Sunday. All news media converge of the weekend in wrestling was about WWF. Even CNN, owned by Ted Turner, gave five minutes coverage to Wrestlemania and ignored the Clash, and several outlets went along with WWF’s claim of having 10 million U.S. viewers. USA today went so far as to claim 50 million. The lesson is obvious - NWA will be ignored in the media unless they start lying, and lying huge, just like WWF. And don’t blame WWF - until the media calls them on it, they’ve got no reason not to lie.
- So back to USA Today and their claim of 50 million viewers in 38 countries, that’s just not true. 36 of those countries have to be fictitious, because the U.S. was the only country getting Wrestlemania on ppv, Canada was the only other country with closed-circuit, and no other countries had it on free tv. They’ll probably be on free tv in about a year in the Middle East (Dave’s comedian brother toured over there last year and WWF is big there, but they’re about 11 months behind on tapes). For Wrestlemania to have had 50 million viewers would require an average of about 90 people at every home that bought it on ppv.
- Compared to previous Wrestlemanias, Wrestlemania was pretty bad on all fronts. The card was the worst yet by a large margin. It drew the worst on closed-circuit, only drawing half the numbers of Wrestlemanias 1 and 3. Due to the increased reach of ppv this year, it’s probably similar overall to Wrestlemania 3 in terms of overall money from ppv, but the buyrate was only a little over half the previous buyrates.
- Most Quickly forgotten major attraction: The Rock and Roll Express.
- Ric Flair gets spot of the night. At the 43 minute mark, he flipped into the turnbuckle and landed on his feet on the apron before going over to the other corner to come off with a flying body press that Sting reversed for a near fall.
- Hogan wins the best smartass remark. When asked by a reporter whether him not winning the tournament meant he’d be going to the movies, he said “Yeah, I’m going to see Fatal Attraction.”
- George Steele getting that green gets a note here for the best ratio of getting paid to doing work. Steele never even got in the ring or laid hands on anyone during the battle royal. Nevertheless, he surely got a handsome check. Get paid, Georgie.
- Wrestlemania wasn’t supposed to be available on satellite, but was. Dish owners got the show descrambled, just without audio. Honestly, it’s probably an improved experience.
- Dave poses a question and provides his own analysis: would Crockett and McMahon trade places? Crockett would surely take a $16 million gross for a show that is objectively an artistic failure, no doubt about that. Would McMahon prefer to have a great show that sabotaged his competition, even if he made less money? Very probably.
- Dave makes a snide remark about what WWF can sell to counter the Four Horsemen vitamins (which he calls a total joke). For $39.95 you’ll get the perfect system you can use to calm “hyperactive children and put them to sleep, and help your own insomnia late at night.” Wrestlemania IV the video tape.
- Watch: there's so little this week, so here, watch Wrestling With Wregret's review of Wrestlemania IV
- Dave gives himself the worst analysis award. His read that Crockett couldn’t hurt WWF and that Wrestlemania would gross $25 million was so wrong it’s laughable, and his only solace is that he didn’t make the most ridiculous projections. That award goes to WWF. What this weekend really proved is that fans pretty much only care about personalities and belts mean nothing.
- Big props to the Fantastics, because they worked their asses off.
- Duggan being unable to have a good match with DiBiase is the saddest sight of the two shows for Dave. Especially sad considering the match they had in August that was pretty good, despite Duggn weighing over 300 lbs and blowing out his hamstring and blowing up within two minutes. And that was still a better match.
- Dave says Randy Savage, Ricky Steamboat, Bam Bam, and the Road Warriors all lost steam on Sunday. Savage is particularly notable, being the first guy to lose steam while winning a world title.
- For years, Flair has lost a lot while Hogan wins all the time, which would make the average mark think Hogan is better. A mark watching both shows this past Sunday may well come away thinking Flair is a better wrestler.
- Does this mean the wrestling boom times are over? Well, we’re down from the peak and wrestling is overexposed nationwide. Smaller promotions are not going to survive, and the big ones are drawing smaller crowds. Wrestlemania is probably just a stubbed toe for WWF. It’ll hurt for a short bit, but things will go back to normal soon enough.
- Finally, Dave looks to the future. Crockett is undoubtedly the big winner on March 27 and they’ve turned momentum around by proving they can present a show right and give quality matches that lead to a show that WWF’s glitz can’t match. They won’t surpass WWF to become number one, but they don’t need to. Their success does not depend on WWF. Their success depends on their audience, and the enthusiasm of their audience has breathed life into them once again. And yet, they’re still making unforced errors. Saturday after the Clash, they have Flair and Sting headlining matches in both Baltimore and Philadelphia, having to rush a match in one city, drive to the other quick, and do it again. It’s a recipe for two bad shows. And as long as they keep doing stuff like that which makes their live shows bad, they’re going to fail to be what they can be and they’ll start to slide again. And they have a lot of potential. Given their ratings for Clash, they may not have as many fans as WWF, but for all WWF’s advantages NWA is far closer to WWF than you’d think they would be. They’re real competition at this stage, and it’s ironic because until Vince decided to pick a fight on Thanksgiving and again in January, they simply were not any kind of competition to WWF. Vince forced Crockett to have to retaliate, and it gave Crockett the motivation to take steps he never would have taken before. Still, we’re back to NWA being the Dusty Rhodes show. Every heel talks about Dusty in their promos and half the faces as well. It’s what hurt them last year, putting all their eggs in Dusty’s basket, and just as they begin having some success, they go right to the poisoned well again. Then again, their most recent main event show was really good, so maybe they are on the right track.
- Nobody in Hollywood knows anything about any Hulk Hogan movie. So that whole biopic that we’ve been talking about for months? Yeah, that doesn’t seem to be a thing and won’t be for over 30 years when they cast Hulk Hogan properly: as a beautiful Australian man with the body of a Norse god. Anyway, Hogan’s definitely taking time off, what with his child being born soon. As for any momentum lost, WWF will probably mitigate that issue with clever sound editing to make Wrestlemania look like a success. What matters to WWF is image, not substance. If they can make their fans believe the show was a success, it will cease to be a failure. They’ve got some truly magical powers there, but there are problems they need to overcome. And the biggest is that nobody except Hogan is truly over. They spent months building angles that flopped (such as Heenan vs. Matilda) and nothing they’re hyping next has any kind of box office potential. Do you think after what we got at Wrestlemania people are going to want to see Rude vs. Roberts? JYD vs. Ron Bass? Duggan vs. Andre? Savage vs. DiBiase won’t mean anything.
- In closing, Dave says the moral of the story is that WWF made good short-term moves that came back to bite them big. They destroyed Crockett on Thanksgiving, costing Crockett over $2 million of their potential for Starrcade and keeping them off ppv in a big way. On January 24, they ran a free show against the Bunkhouse Stampede to sabotage the show. Crockett’s retaliation in March, however, showed they have a cable audience nearly as large as WWF’s and they cost Wrestlemania several million dollars in lost revenue. It may be a lucky day for them. Maybe it’s a turning point for wrestling as a whole that we’ll be talking about years from now. But the main takeaway is Vince has nobody to blame but himself. Live by the sword, die by the sword, what goes around comes around.
- As we all know, WWF ran an ad during Clash of the Champions. Apparently they bought five ad slots under a fake company name. Four of them were caught, but one made it to air.
- Wrestlemania V is scheduled for March 19, 1989. That's all Dave knows.
- Financial News Network has begun airing weekly main events from Memphis on Saturday nights. The April 2 show had Eddie Gilbert and Jerry Lawler from March 28, while next week will be Curt Hennig vs. Jerry Lawler in a stretcher match. NWF is scheduled to do a tv taping later this month for FNN which will debut in that timeslot, but for now Memphis will continue airing.
- Watch: Eddie Gilbert vs. Jerry Lawler, parking lot brawl
- This past Sunday NWA debuted their NWA Main Event show and it was good. The show was taped on March 31 and had a super invested crowd and it showed on tv. It really helps matches to have a crowd that’s going crazy for every spot (looking at you, Corpus Christi). Some production issues aside, it’s becoming a lot of fun to watch the NWA. Road Warriors squashed Super Destroyer and Larry Zbyzkso, Dusty beat Ivan Koloff for the U.S. title in a surprisingly good 6 minute match, and Flair/Blanchard/Anderson beat Luger/Windham/Sting in an excellent match.
- [AJW] Chigusa Nagayo and AJW toured Thailand two weeks back and drew big during their visit. Crowds ranged from 8,000-11,000 and the Bangkok newspaper called them “The new craze of Thailand.” Not everybody’s quite so impressed, though, Dave notes. One Thai reporter wrote this: “I didn’t know that women’s wrestlin[g] was drawing so much attention in Thailand. The visit of the Japanese wrestlers has created tremendous interest and according to promoter Sombhop Srisomwongse, a record crowd is expected tonight at the National Stadium. How surprising it is that a few women with about two months of training and especially big framework, a few flying kicks and some TV exposure could be a draw here when traditional Olympic sports like Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling failed to find a foothold.”
- [All Japan] When Brody won the International Title from Jumbo Tsuruta on March 27, he went into the crowd and started hugging the fans. It got him over huge as a babyface. Brody’s one of the smartest guys in the business, seriously.
- During an All Japan press conference with Tiger Jeet Singh and Abdullah the Butcher, Singh went nuts and started attacking reporters (?). I think it’s reporters. Dave wrote “reports” but the context of a melee makes me think reporters. Anyway, Butcher did stuff too once things got out of hand and wound up throwing a glass, which hit the head of a Gong Magazine reporter hard enough that he bled and needed two stitches.
- The Malenko brothers met Mike Tyson when they were in Japan. Tyson’s “all the rage” over in Japan, and he thought they were the British Bulldogs. The Malenkos went along with it and pretended to be the Bulldogs until he asked if he could pet Matilda.
- WCCW’s financial issues have caused significant cutbacks to tv tapings. They’re running shows in Fort Worth every third week now, a cutback from every other week and a far cry from the weekly shows they used to run dating all the way back to the 40s, and these shows are four hour tv tapings. The regular tv show is also taping only every three weeks.
- The Penthouse Von Erich story has been dropped from the July issue. No reschedule has been announced.
- Fabulous Lance still hasn’t shown up in WCCW because he extended his South Africa tour, where he’s a babyface. He’s even using the Von Erich name down there. There’s legit heat between him and Kevin and Kerry due to all the stuff that went down when he left and Fritz’s burial of him, and Dave just wonders how bad a Lance vs. Kevin match would be in the best of circumstances, never mind if they can’t stand each other enough to cooperate.
- Not much details about the March 28 Memphis card, but Lawler threw fire in Eddie Gilbert’s face. The Bruise Brothers (Harris brothers) won the Southern Tag titles from Gary Young and Max Pain. The crowd had 5,500.
- Memphis dropped ticket prices for students to $1 for the April 4 show to ensure good turnout for Jerry Lawler vs. Curt Hennig in a non-title stretcher match. Eddie Gilbert is also putting up a $25,000 bounty for anyone who can break Lawler's leg. Gilbert’s gone from the territory, but he’s supposedly going to keep sending promo tapes in to keep the bounty thing going as part of a working arrangement between Memphis, Continental, Jerry Blackwell’s Georgia promotion, and the Florida promotion Steve Keirn and Jerry Jarrett are talking about starting. Also, Missy Hyatt will be managing Hennig in the Lawler match.
- WWF has announced a bunch of post-Wrestlemania shows with Savage/DiBiase headlining through the end of May, at the very least. No sign of Hogan anywhere through that period.
- All of the letters are reactions to Sunday’s shows. Some choice quotes presented without other context:
- “If someone had spent millions of dollars on an anti-wrestling propaganda piece, he couldn’t have approached the job that Vince did on himself this weekend.”
- “Crockett smashes. Titan crashes.”
- “$17 for pay-per-view and $20 for pizzas, pretzels and chips. And what did I get for it? Nothing. Wrestlemania was a bore, plain and simple.”
- “Vince has sucked me into my last PPV. Never again.”
- ”The Crockett wrestlers put on one hell of a show. It was better than Titan’s They had to. They’re number two. But the booking still left a lot to be desired.”
- ”Titan usually learns from its mistakes.”
- ”I thought Wrestlemania IV was better because of superior atmosphere and the fact that the guys all tried to work hard.”
- ”Vince went for flash and name dropping. Crockett went for good wrestling. Crockett succeeded.”
- Ron Simmons may be headed to New Japan in May.
- Verne Gagne has started showing lots of pre-1984 tape of WWF main guys like Hogan, Ventura, etc. Why? To build his tv ratings by showing that he used to have the guys who get the ratings now. It’s a clear sign he’s pretty much giving up on house shows and is looking to keep alive through small sold shows enough to keep producing tapes for ESPN. The death of the AWA is a slow, pathetic thing that already feels really drawn out, and there’s still years left.
- [NWA] The Dusty Rhodes suspension has been delayed and won’t be announced until this weekend’s television, and will go into effect April 16. The reason is to allow him to wrestle April 15 in Boston Gardens. They’ve already got Midnight Rider appearances booked for some shows, though.
- Nikita Koloff will face Ric Flair on night two of the Crockett Cup. Sting would make the most sense, given how hot he is. Luger or Steve Williams would be hot, since they’ve never had the opportunity. Even Windham would at least guarantee a fantastic match. But Dusty’s giving the match to Koloff. Whatever reasons he has, they have little to do with making sense.
- Magnum T.A. is being sued by Charlotte Memorial Hospital and Charlotte Rehabilitation Hospital for $56,692 in back medical care. His medical expenses have gone over $100,000, and his insurance coverage only covers $25,000. Related, a Toronto spinal cord expert has proposed an operation which he claims will give Magnum full use of his bad limbs and even a slim chance of returning to the ring.
- Syndicated ratings for the week ending March 13 have WWF in 4th place with a 10.7 on 248 stations. Crockett ranks 6th with a 7.8 on 178 stations, and All-Star Wrestling (AWA, GLOW, etc.) ranks 9th with a 7.2 on 174 stations.
- There’s a planned wrestling movie with Roddy Piper for a Christmas release. Nothing comes of this. But it’s nice that Piper has so many movie role ideas being thrown at him.
- [All Japan] The thing with Tenryu and Hansen has made Stan Hansen’s popularity surge in Japan. They worked the shoot all the way to Tenryu’s hotel room, with Tenryu leaving the arena early and Hansen looking for him in the dressing room and later going to Tenryu’s hotel to try and find him, but Tenryu wouldn’t leave the room. Fans in Japan now believe Tenryu, the hottest wrestler in the country, is afraid of Hansen, which puts Hansen in that upper echelon of guys who come off as “real” like Brody and Akira Maeda.
- Jim Shyman’s 976 wrestling hotline in L.A. was rated top 976 number in an L.A. publication. It’s the first time Dave’s seen anything pro wrestling top any chart in any category.