May 23, 1988
- It’s a slow week, so the big story is still that Jerry Lawler won the AWA World Title on May 9. Word from those in attendance is that the show was one of the best live cards of the year. Lawler winning was a big news story in Memphis and was on the front page of the local sports section and on all the local tv news. Dave’s heard it was a good match. Nothing outstanding, but good.
- The WCCW show on May 8 in Texas Stadium, however, was not as good. You read the description last week and can already tell it was bad. A correction on the tag title situation - Steve Simpson and Terry Gordy went against John Tatum and Jack Victory for both belts, and Simpson lost the match by countout, which led to Tatum and Victory holding both belts, not the confusing Simpsons/Gordy situation Dave erroneously reported last week. But the real bad news for WCCW is that their big show grossed only $53,500 and had under 6,000 paid attendance. They wanted a big crowd to build momentum for the Gordy face turn angle and they wanted a hot show to get fans invested and interested in buying the show on video, and they wound up with neither. In fact, I don’t believe this show was ever released on tape, because the only video I’ve ever found of the triple tower of doom was the advertisement. Even worse for WCCW is that the Saturday Night’s Main Event that aired against it (and which drew one of the lowest numbers WWF has drawn for the season) still beat it in Dallas with a 6.3 rating in Dallas to WCCW’s 3.6 rating. Never before has Saturday Night’s Main Event outdrawn WCCW in Dallas on a Saturday night (at their peak, they were drawing a 12 rating weekly in the Dallas market), and this case is definitely because WCCW has been losing fan interest more than WWF enticing fan interest.
- New Japan’s May 7 show was the other big event of the weekend. They had to change the main event twice due first to Inoki’s broken foot and then due to demands by Fujinami to take the spot rather than Choshu, and then a rain storm hit and they canceled the show (it was in an outdoor tennis stadium) to run the next night, but then ran it anyway because the weather cleared. In the end, a crowd of 10,250 saw Fujinami win the vacant IWGP title by defeating Vader by disqualification. The other big matches saw Hiroshi Hase retain the jr. heavyweight title against Shiro Koshinaka and Don Nakaya Neilsen beat Keiichi Yamada by technical knockout in a wrestler vs. martial artist match. It’s the first time Dave is aware of that a wrestler has lost one of these mixed matches since they started doing them some 15 years ago. All reports are that it was excellent and if Neilsen ever took the leap into wrestling he’d be something of a natural. Dave thinks the end goal of this was to heat Neilsen up so he can do the job to one of the main eventers in August.
- The May 7 debut of Billy Jack Haynes’ Oregon-Washington Wrestling Federation drew 2,200 fans in Oregon City despite having no local tv to promote. Reports Dave’s received have the show as awful with resorts giving the best matches on the show half a star at most. Among the problems were a total of only 44 minutes of wrestling on a 3 hour show, no music for entrances (a big problem for the fanbase they drew), and poor work. At one point, someone from the promotion came to the ring and even apologized on behalf of Haynes and his wife that things weren’t going smoothly and requested the audience be patient and give them time to improve. That’s never a good thing to have to do on your first show. One of the guys was a trainee of Eddie Sharkey, Skip Luther. His ring name here? Lex Luther. Yeah. First rate shit.
- WWF took out a full page ad in Electronic Media Magazine titled “What A.C. Neilsen isn’t telling you.” So last week, Nielsen closed the loophole where syndicated packages added up all the ratings in the package to create a composite rating that allowed WWF to sit in the top 10 most rated syndicated shows at a level competing with or even beating the likes of Oprah, despite the fact that none of WWF’s individual shows came even close to beating Oprah on their own. WWF is clearly trying to stop the bleeding by claiming to still be number 3 under the old system. WWF already has most of their ad slots sold for the year, so if they’re already worried about its ramifications, then this must be a huge blow to them. Even then, it’s got to be hurting Crockett even more, because they still have a lot of unbought ad spots. WWF’s ad revenue for the year is likely going to come out around $15 million, and Crockett was hoping to get $7 million based on their relative standing.
- [NWA] Barry Windham won the US Title tournament on May 13, bringing all the gold to the Four Horsemen. Larry Zbysko was dropped from the tournament for no clear reason other than that his presence would have led to a heel vs. heel match. Anyway, Dave goes through the card and gives Windham a lot of credit for carrying Nikita Koloff in the finals. Flair and Sting had a cage match in the main event and Sting sold nothing and the match was subpar.
- Watch: Barry Windham wins US Title
- NWA has a new syndicated show starting up in Houston, Paul Boesch’s Houston Wrestling. The show will include footage from NWA’s other shows as well as interviews done by Boesch and house show matches from Houston. NWA is expected to now start running regular shows in Houston. So is WCCW, which is beginning bi-weekly tapings there starting May 27.
- Dave went to an AWA ESPN taping and says there’s no question that the AWA is the worst major promotion operating today. The May 14 taping drew a whopping 750 fans to see Riki Choshu’s first American wrestling appearance in almost 6 years. Choshu’s main reason for being there was his Las Vegas honeymoon, so he put next to no effort in and who could blame him? Even so, he wrestled circles around just about everyone else. The advertised card had five main event matches, four of which didn’t happen and there were six no-shows (the Midnight Rockers, Manny Fernandez, Wahoo McDaniel, and the Nasty Boys). The Rockers are the only draw AWA has in Vegas, so their absence was a big issue. Turns out they’ve quit again because they didn’t like the contract Verne offered. The Nasties were fired, apparently. Riki Choshu was billed as “Shoshi” which is a hell of a butchering. They also misspelled Curt Hennig’s name (they used only one n), as well as those of Madusa and Marty Janetty. It wasn’t the worst card Dave’s seen, but it was one of the worst collections of wrestlers Dave’s ever had the displeasure of seeing. Dave gives the move of the match between Jerry Lawler and Dennis Stamp to a fan who yelled “Lawler, watch out for the windshield.” Dave says Madusa did the worst abdominal stretch ever and says while she gets good reactions, she’s hopeless in the ring. They tried to claim the Rockers missed their flight. One match made Andre vs. Warrior look like Flair vs. Owen Hart and Dave gives it -2.5 stars. Anyway, there were 21 matches on the card and nearly everything was garbage with the only good matches being Lawler and Greg Gagne beating Mr. Saito and Riki Choshu (2.25 stars) and Diamond & Tanaka vs. Mando and Hector Guerrero (3 stars, but compared to the rest of the show, 5 stars) in what was mostly a comedy tag match with some good action. Diamond and Tanaka had Diamond Dallas Page in their corner, and Dave thinks the only issue he seems to have is he’s bigger than the guys he’s managing.
- Watch: Greg Gagne and Jerry Lawler vs. Masa Saito and Riki Choshu
- WWF’s May 10 Superstars/Wrestling Challenge taping had no major angles or debuts. They did a Beefcake interview and that got Honkeytonk out to hit him with the guitar. Ken Patera and Dino Bravo did a tug-of-war. Randy Savage did two title defenses, most likely dark matches, against Virgil and Ted DiBiase. Demolition beat Powers and Roma by disqualification because Strike Force got involved.Jake Roberts pinned Rick Rude. Andre beat Duggan by countout. Nothing much here, folks.
- Watch: Ken Patera and Dino Bravo tug of war
- Linda Hogan gave birth on May 5 to a baby girl. You know her as the future Executive in Charge of the Knockouts Division, Brooke Hogan.
- Watch: Brooke Hogan has business to take care of
- Official word is that Ricky Steamboat has retired to spend more time with his family and run his gym. That’s probably not going to be permanent. And Dave has a story about how truly lovely the Steamboat family is, because he just got a few Steamboat gym t-shirts in the mail last week.
- Dave gives it a 99% probability that Owen Hart arrives in WWF in July as a masked wrestler. “The Cheetah Kid” Dave says, though he notes that may change. The 1% is if Inoki makes him a big offer, but that’s highly unlikely to happen.
- Apparently the schedule Dave got for WWF’s show schedule was missing a lot of spot shows, so they’re running more than Dave had said a few weeks back. So it looks like most guys will have schedules of 10 days on then 3 days off.
- Wrestlemania IV hasn’t come out on video yet, but Sports Inc. magazine lists it as the number 1 sports video currently due to distributor demand. Four of the top 10 are Wrestlemania videotapes.
- A recent Tokyo newspaper ranked Antonio Inoki as the ninth highest paid Japanese athlete. Number 1 was a baseball player, and the highest paid sumo wrestler ranked 19th.
- Futahaguro (Koji Kitao) did indeed train at Larry Sharpe’s Monster Factory to train while he was in the U.S. It’s looking more and more likely he’s going to make the jump to wrestling and that could be one of the biggest stories in Japanese wrestling since Rikidozan. His ego and laziness about training are likely to be the biggest issues he has, which may make for a rough transition. Given the amount of money he’ll want to start with, he may well get better than top star pay if he gets what he wants, which might lead top stars to quit. Dave thinks treating him like a Brody or Hansen - someone brought in for ten week shots and given big money without insulting the current top stars by outright just giving him better than their pay as a matter of course might be the way to go.
- It’s looking like World Class is going to basically take over Central States. Officially they’re just coming in on a temp basis to test whether they can draw bigger crowds and maybe do tv out of Kansas City, but let’s be real. They’re getting together to prolong their lives as promotions because neither has much gas left to survive on their own.
- If/when Owen Hart leaves Stampede, a lot of folks are worried about the future of the company. A lot of folks feel he’s been their biggest draw for a while, but Dave’s been reporting attendance figures for a while and he’s not been a particularly strong draw. Hart’s gone on Japan tours twice now and crowds held up without him. What he does do is get a lot of really good heat.
- We should really figure out who had more turns, Big Show or Bill Dundee, because Dundee is a face again in Memphis. He and Lawler headlined May 16 in an AWA title match that was face vs. face. Dave jokes he turns so much he should be called the human ping pong ball.
- [Memphis] They announced on tv that the only way Hennig will get an AWA title rematch is if he wins the CWA title. When Brickhouse Brown heard that, he said no problem and told Max Pain to give the title to Hennig, but Pain said Hennig would have to earn the title. Brown will be managing Hennig in Memphis.
- Apparently Jerry Lawler got the AWA title because Memphis agreed to pay Hennig’s weekly guarantee of $1500 while Lawler holds the champion. This frees Gagne up on the cash, so expect Hennig to work Memphis for a while.
- Over in Continental, Robert Fuller no-showed his loser leaves town series against Dutch Mantell. So he’s out. He also copied yet another angle from Memphis with his booking here. In Memphis he broke a bottle over Jeff Jarrett’s head and then he booked a parking lot brawl where Tony Anthony broke a bottle over Tom Prichard’s head. So yeah.
- Continental also has a guy named Allen Martin who wears black and white striped tights. His ring name is “The Ref.” Wow.
- Coming to World Class are Masahiro Chono and the Samoan Swat Team. Dave thinks the team is Samu and Kokina (the future Yokozuna).
- Abdullah the Butcher is out of his planned Japan tour due to kidney problems. He’s been hospitalized and will be out of action for about 7 weeks.
- The June issue of Washington Monthly will have a story on state athletic commissions and the regulation of pro wrestling. I’ll have to try and track that down.
- Steve Courson made his “debut” on May 13 at an independent show in Pennsylvania. They drew 900, but he’s not ready at all so they had him arm wrestle three guys and did an angle where they ganged up on him and he press-slammed one in his comeback. His actual debut is probably imminent.
- The letter about smart fans having a responsibility to play along and help the show out got a bit of response this week. One writer disagrees completely and says it should be up to the wrestlers to get heat for themselves and they’d rather hear fans chanting “smart” What? phrases What? than What? “USA.” What? Another writer thinks there’s a good point there, although that doesn’t mean smart fans shouldn’t heckle the guys - cheering for the heels is fun and shows them appreciation when normally they don’t get that appreciation. And the heels seem to enjoy getting appreciation like that. Faces are where you get some really interesting reactions. Some of them find it fun and interesting. Sometimes it fires up fans of the face and gets them more involved. Some of the faces hate it.
- An interesting question comes in a letter about Bruno’s interview: could 1963 Bruno keep up with 1988 Ric Flair, at Ric Flair’s pace, for an hour? Bruno talks about how matches are shorter now and uses that as a point against current wrestlers, but the style he worked in his prime was slower and more mat-heavy with rest holds. Would Bruno have the stamina to work a Ric Flair broadway? I don’t know about them specifically, but it’s an interesting question that raises the issue of the evolution of wrestling style. And naturally, I think we could look at wrestlers today - could 1988 Ric Flair work a 60 minute broadway against 2013 Seth Rollins, at Seth’s pace? Different pacings to meet the needs of different eras, really.
- Rumors are swirling that Ted Turner is going to buy the NWA. As far as Fave knows, no deal has been made. But if such a deal were to happen, Jim Crockett would still be in charge of the wrestling, while the rest of the family would probably be less involved due to it being their stock Turner buys out. Lots of speculation also about the role of one Dusty Rhodes should Turner buy the company, but again, this is all too early to say much of anything. We’re officially on track to the birth of WCW, y’all.
- Turns out Dave wasn’t always a big fan of lucha (he’s said in the present actual time that he loves CMLL). He recently got a tape of the best matches in Mexico City in the past 6 months and he just can’t get into the style. Atlantis does high flying stuff even Owen Hart can’t imagine, but the style is so different from American or Japanese style that Dave just can’t get into it and the style itself almost makes the workers seem like they’re bad even though they aren’t. That said, he gives a Pirata Morgan/El Verdugo/Hombre Bala vs. Atlantis/La Azteca/Ringo mendoza match 4 stars. Mexican fans don’t seem to react to any moves unless it’s some crazy suicidal flip and the crowd offers no help in identifying faces or heels by reaction - you only have the way they work to really tell. Finally, Dave does give his thoughts on one Eddie Guerrero, the youngest Guerrero brother. He’s got the best arm drags Dave has ever seen.
- And in breaking, end of the issue, news, Missy Hyatt is finally selling a swimsuit poster. Dave gives the address where you can send a check to order your poster and notes that if you’re polite, she’ll autograph it for you. Look at Dave, helping Missy make some extra cash.