Wrestling Observer Rewinder

May 30, 1988

The NWA is the nexus of the three biggest stories this week, and the possible Turner buyout of the promotion may be the biggest story of the year. It’s been rumored for weeks that the Crockett family will sell the majority of their shares to Turner Entertainment, and Dave can confirm that such a deal is currently awaiting approval from Turner’s acquisitions committee. If all looks good, we should know within a week. We're not going to know within a week, this is going to take more time.
If Turner does buy the NWA, Jim Crockett is likely to remain in charge of day-to-day operations. The rest of the family would be divesting themselves of their interest in the company, and Turner will be in charge of promotion, PR, and other business activities. This should theoretically result in a “more professional and business-like approach.” Peers into the future HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Anyway, Dave thinks it’s foolish to speculate at this point about possible ramifications of the deal. And getting out of speculation and into fact: if the deal doesn’t go through, NWA is in a lot of trouble going into the summer, and they need to make major changes to how they conduct business no matter the outcome of the deal. There are wrestlers in the NWA who are owed money, and they’re not going to work for free.
Thanks to Turner’s help, the NWA has already cleared availability for over 8.5 million homes for the Great American Bash ppv on July 10. Vince McMahon’s attempt to monopolize ppv wrestling has failed, at least for the moment. This is the second widest potential audience for a ppv wrestling event ever (Wrestlemania IV cleared 10 million potential homes). With WWF running a ppv (the Summerslam) from Madison Square Garden on August 29, that means most ppv providers have elected to ignore Vince’s ultimatum prohibiting competing wrestling ppvs 60 days before and 21 days after a WWF ppv. That ultimatum killed Starrcade last year, but let’s be thankful it’s pretty much dusted. This all means WWF has failed to kill Crockett’s ability to run ppv events, which was one of their goals.
The card for the Great American Bash is set. Flair vs. Luger for the NWA Title; Windham vs. Rhodes for the U.S. Title; Triple tower of doom featuring the Road Warriors, Garvins, and Steve Williams vs. Kevin Sullivan, Al Perez, Mike Rotunda, Warlord, and Barbarian (yep, they’re going forward with it); Tully and Arn vs. Sting and Koloff for the world tag titles; and Midnights vs. Fantastics for the U.S. tag titles.
The income potential is big for the Great American Bash. If they equal their previous buyrates, they should clear over a quarter million homes and take in ppv sales of over $4 million (ppv for the show will be $15.95), which will at the most conservative estimate give the NWA a cool $1 million in revenue after all the other splits on the ppv total revenue.
The FCC ruled in favor of syndicated exclusivity this past week, and this has some potential consequences for the NWA. Syndicated exclusivity means that any program carried in your local market (so a show that’s put on free tv) cannot be shown on cable by bringing it in from another market. Dave gives the example of how if your local channel 7 carries the Beverly Hillbillies, then your cable company can’t show Beverly Hillbillies by pulling it in from another station in a different market, even if it's in another time slot. This is a potential catastrophe for WTBS, because so much of their programming is old network reruns which duplicate stuff shown in most markets, meaning they have to completely change up their programming or have so little of their material picked up by cable companies that they drop the station altogether. This is effective a year from now (plus any time that might get it stalled by court appeals), so there’s probably a couple years before it really goes into effect, but this is the main reason Turner is starting the TNT network and why eventually you’ll see wrestling get on there alongside the sports and movies and there won’t be old network tv reruns on it.
Curiously, the NWA was doing the hard sell of the May 22 Omni house show on this past Saturday’s TBS show. The press boxes were really full (they’re usually totally empty), and Dave supposes they were probably filled with Turner executives checking out what they’re considering buying. It worked, by the way - 7,300 fans turned up for the Omni show, triple the crowd at last month’s show (and no, the card wasn’t any more enticing than last month’s either).
Reborn UWF had their first show on May 12 and the fans flooded in. They sold out Korauken Hall in 15 minutes about a month ago, with all seats priced at $40 (a $92,000 gate). The first match of the three match show had Nobuhiko Takada vs. Shigeo Miyato in a ten minute exhibition, where Takada won with two submissions to nothing for Miyato. Tetsuo Nakano made Yoji Anjo submit in a 24 minute match for the second match of the show. Lastly, Akira Maeda and Kazuo Yamazaki had a match with tremendous heat and it is clear that there is no man in wrestling as over as Maeda is. Maeda hasn’t wrestled since he shot on Riki Choshu in November last year, and as a result he wasn’t quite in top condition and blew up part of the way through the match, but they went 25 minutes and Maeda won by submission. Dave was told American fans would likely be bored by the match, but the fans there were eating it up. UWF’s next show is set for June 11 in Sapporo, and all 6,000 seats sold out on the weekend of May 13. The real test is coming, though: will they be able to maintain interest with only three major stars and no regular foreigners? They’ll have foreigners in Sapporo, with those guys probably doing singles matches against Takada, Yamazaki, and Maeda.
Watch: Maeda vs. Yamazaki
Former wrestler and referee Fred Atkins passed away at the age of 77 on May 13. He was originally from New Zealand and refereed for Frank Tunney in the Toronto area for a long time. He also managed Giant Baba in the 1960s during Baba’s heel tours of the U.S. His biggest match as a referee was the Terry Funk/Harley Race NWA World Title change at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1977.
Watch: the final ten minutes of Funk/Race
Financial News Network, which debuts Continental Wrestling Federation on May 29, announced that they’ll be airing World Wrestling Council’s anniversary show this fall. WWC’s show drew 42,000 fans to three locations last fall, and will be aired live starting at 8 EST on September 10. Just an aside, but that means the card starts at 9 pm in Puerto Rico. Billed for the show are 12 championship matches featuring the likes of the Road Warriors, Rock ‘n’ Roll Express, Iron Sheik, Bruiser Brody, and more. Sadly, we’re going to have very different news related to Brody soon. As far as Dave knows, this is the first time an international big show is being broadcast live in the U.S.
Dave got a chance to see the tv from the Oregon promotions and there’s a lot of sly remarks about the other promotions going on. Haynes’ OWF (Oregon Wrestling Federation, the Washington part isn’t there anymore) is emphasizing the size of their wrestlers and how they’re trying to put Oregon on the Map. Don Owen’s Big Time Wrestling, on the other hand, is emphasizing action as well as touting how they have only a 3.5 hour delay between taping and airing, as opposed to the OWF taping a week in advance. Dave says it pretty much is a battle of action vs. size from watching the shows. And if you know Dave, he prefers action to size.
On Big Time Wrestling, they announced Curt Hennig would defend the AWA World Title against Col. DeBeers on May 19. Two reasons for that to be silly. First, Hennig lost the title five days before they announced this. Second, why are they billing DeBeers with his South African gimmick when he was a major headliner here for years as Ed Wiskoski?
Turns out Abdullah the Butcher had gallbladder and ulcer surgery, not kidney surgery. He was released from the hospital on May 19, and should be back in action in late July. This really hurts the current All Japan tour, since he was set as one of the big headliners for the tour.
All Japan will be unifying the tag team titles rather than the singles titles on June 10. Tentatively, they have Tenryu and Ashura Hara putting up their World tag titles against the Road Warriors and their International tag titles. But first they have a world tag title defense scheduled for June 6 in Sapporo (just 5 days before UWF’s show there, so note the timing and how they’re dealing with competition) against Jumbo Tsuruta and Yoshiaki Yatsu. Most expect Tsuruta and Yatsu to win and go on to the unification. And All Japan will deliver on expectation.
JWP, the younger of the two women’s promotions in Japan, will be closing up shop after their May 29 Korauken Hall show. The wrestlers haven’t been getting paid lately because there’s just no money coming in for them. The promotion debuted in 1986 and just never got a television foothold established to ensure survival and cash flow.
All Japan Women is limping along after the retirements of Dump Matsumoto and Yukari Omori, which has led to their ratings being cut in half. There are even rumors that Chigusa Nagayo may retire out of shame that the company’s business has fallen so far and that she hasn’t been able to keep ratings up.
In other news about All Japan Women, some of the owners (the Matsunaga brothers, the last of whom died in February 2020), are trying to sell stock and divest themselves of a portion of the company. They thought bringing in the Jumping Bomb Angels as WWF tag champions would drum up interest, but they haven’t proven to be drawing and really what they are drawing is pretty much down to Chigusa Nagayo. So if Chigusa leaves, the whole company’s in major trouble. On June 8, the Jumping Bomb Angels defend the WWF women’s tag titles against the Glamour Girls, and spoiler alert - that’s going to be an unauthorized title change and kill the women’s tag division as a thing in WWF.
[Stampede]: Steve Blackman’s nickname is Rambo. Just thought that was funny.
Owen Hart wrestled his last match in Calgary for Stampede before going to his Japan tour. It was an absolutely wild brawl against Makhan Singh for the North American title. The finish had Hart thrown onto the floor and Singh’s manager Abdul Wizal started choking him with a chain, only for Hart to escape and tuck the chain in his trunks, which led to him using it to KO Singh and pin him. Then Vulcan Singh (Gary Allbright), dressed as Jason the Terrible, came and attacked Hart and told the referee to check Hart’s trunks, where he found the chain and reversed the decision.
Jerry Lawler’s first defense of the AWA World title against Bill Dundee drew only 2,200 on May 16. Face vs. face and Lawler used a chain to win. Other matches included Robert Fuller beating Jeff Jarrett and Max Pain beating Curt Hennig by disqualification in a CWA title match.
Dave got a chance to watch the tv from the week before the AWA World title change in Memphis and is amazed they didn’t sell out the show with the title change. They hyped the show great, but it’s clear Memphis is trending downward, and no amount of local news coverage or having the mayor on air begging people to come support Lawler seemed to get them there. All the local stations, bar one, covered the title change as just straight up news without even being tongue in cheek about it, and you never see that in tv news these days. When ESPN and CNN and ABC radio covered Wrestlemania, all of them were treating it like a joke. Memphis is really the last bastion of kayfabe, in a way.
Visiting Memphis on the May 23 tv show and making his Rewind debut is Bob Holly. He’s teaming with Pat Rose in an AWA Tag title match, and they’re coming in from World Organization Wrestling in Pensacola. Nobody knows who Holly is, and nobody in the area remembers Rose, so they’re not going to be exciting anyone at the show.
Missy Hyatt is gone from Memphis. There seems to be heat, but Dave’s not sure what the story is. Robert Fuller has twice stolen angles of Eddie Gilbert’s design for Continental and used them days later in Memphis, so that’s probably part of it. The planned Lawler vs. Gilbert AWA title defense set for May 29 has been canceled.
Missy Hyatt is in Continental now as a tv announcer. Also newly added are Mr. Olympia and Willie B. Hurt. Willie is Pez Whatley doing a comedy gimmick where he tells the fans they know his real name and who he is and where he’s been, but now he’s Willie B. He’s a comedy gimmick who won his debut in a squash, though, so that’s different.
Watch: Willie B. Hurt
Gone from Continental are Steve Armstrong and Robert Fuller, who both no-showed. Dutch Mantell also appears to be gone.
In USA Wrestling, Terry Gordy and Wendell Cooley did a 20 minute draw on May 14. The match itself was so-so, but they brawled for another 20 minutes after the match and went all over the building, and that was great.
They also did a big heart attack angle with Ron Wright in USA that was all taped for tv. It all came on the heels of a match where Mongolian Stomper wrestled the Bullet and if Bullet lost, he’d have to unmask. Well, Bullet lost, and under the mask was the Bullet! Yeah, he wore a mask under his mask.
Watch: The Bullet unmasks and causes a Ron Wright heart attack
Word from Larry Sharpe’s Monster Factory are that Futahaguro’s training drills showed him to be really agile for a 350 lb guy. Word in Japan is that if he does go into pro wrestling he’ll go with All Japan over New Japan. Inoki doesn’t sign sumo wrestlers because TV-Asahi holds the purse, and they have a good relationship with the sumo world (they even have a weekly show called Sumo World). Bringing Futahaguro in would be highly disrespectful of New Japan, considering that he was banned from sumo, so yeah. Koji Kitao will not be likely to head to New Japan.
Before he left for the U.S., Riki Choshu banned two major Japanese magazines from conducting interviews and taking photos of himself and the other wrestlers under his banner. That means Super Strong Machine, Hiroshi Hase, Kenta Kobayashi, and more. The magazines? Weekly Fight and Weekly Pro Wrestling. This seems to be in retaliation for positive and strong coverage of UWF, with Weekly Pro in particular getting strongly behind them and even saying things like NJPW doesn’t have top heavyweights and saying Choshu jumping back and forth between All Japan and New Japan has caused the recent hard times in the business in Japan. This got Choshu upset and he’s already hard to deal with at the best of times, but he really didn’t care for being told he’s past his prime or hurting the business. And yet… they kind of have a point.
WWF also has press issues of late related to Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth. They’ve been trying to get Elizabeth and Savage featured in newspapers and on tv to get him over in the media as the face of WWF while Hogan’s gone. It has not gone well. The very first interview, which Dave believes was with a Boston paper, called Elizabeth an airhead, and all subsequent interviews have been canceled. While she may not be a great actress, Miss Elizabeth is definitely a character and Elizabeth Hulette Poffo is not an airhead, according to those who know her well.
World Class now has a committee handling booking. You’ve got Bill Irwin, Eric Embry, Scandor Akbar, Michael Hayes, and Ken Mantell handling booking. Dave’s never seen booking by committee work in the past because you have too many cooks in the kitchen. Their three shows this past weekend drew under 400 fans each, so at least they’re trying something.
Jerry Lawler is working on a deal to do AWA vs. WCCW title vs. title matches with Kerry Von Erich in Dallas, Memphis, and Kansas City. This is the beginning of the eventual formation of the USWA.
Roddy Piper’s next two movies out in theaters have completely opposite word of mouth about them. Buy and Cell, according to someone who saw a preview showing, is absolutely terrible. They Live, however, is good and genuinely scary. If it does well, expect Piper to do more films with Carpenter. If it flops, he’s probably done as an actor.
World Class has gone to the WWF school of crowd estimation. Mark Lowrance called the crowd at Texas Stadium “20,000 fans” while Kerry von Erich said “15,000.” The reality was they had 5,900 paid.
Scott McGhee, who suffered a stroke in January and was thought would never wrestle again, may return to the ring. Dave got a report that he’s starting up or soon to be starting up in Florida. Unfortunately, it’s a false alarm. McGhee will have a match in 1989, but he’s done.
There’s a lot of heat between Verne Gagne and the Rockers. So much so that Verne wants to put together a new team under the name the Midnight Rockers since he owns the trademark (that’s why they wrestle as the Midnight Rock & Rollers in Continental). What's with companies wanting to put knockoff guys in Kliq guys' gimmicks?
Deep South wins the “lowest class act of the month” award. They have a segment with the reader mailbag, which Dave has always assumed was largely kayfabed. Well, some subscriber wrote a letter in and it was highly critical, particularly of the cheap shots they take at Joe Pedicino on tv. Well, they read the letter on the air. Only they changed all the content to make it highly complimentary to Deep South. So there you have it, they kayfabe the letters to make themselves look good. I feel like this is more Dave being offended on behalf of a subscriber than something shocking and truly low, though.
Dale Gagner, who used to work for Eddie Sharkey in Minnesota, now books for Billy Haynes as booker in OWF. When he worked for Sharkey, his manager name was Diamond D. You might know him as the guy who tries to claim a relationship to Verne Gagne and use the AWA name in the late 90s (check the Feb. 22, 1999 and March 21, 1999 rewinds for more on that business). Dude’s a snake, and not in a fun Randy Orton or intimidating Jake the kind of way.
One of Buddy Rose’s former “Playgirls” is now suing Hugh Heffner. Okay, so back in 1983 Buddy Rose was “Playboy” Buddy Rose and his valets were his “Playgirls.” Well, one of them was a model named Carrie Leigh, and she eventually moved in with Hugh Heffner and is suing him, which has made news lately. We’re never going to talk about this again, so here’s the brief: she’s suing for palimony (basically, they were not married, but she felt they had a relationship of marriage-level significance and then the same basic idea behind suing for alimony goes forward). She alleges Hugh told her he wanted to marry her, have kids with her, etc. and now that’s not happening and they’ve separated and she’s suing. And this won’t even get a settlement, but this was apparently a trendy kind of lawsuit in the 80s. They never worked.
ITV in the UK will be dropping wrestling by the end of the year. It’s part of an effort to “polish up” their image. Wrestling audiences on ITV have fallen from over 7 million to 2.5 million in the past few years, and production costs for wrestling have been costing the station almost $2 annually, so time to cut costs. The big reasons for the drop off in ratings and interest is the death of Mal Kirk via heart attack in the ring and the public revelation that Big Daddy, whom Dave calls a 50 year old, 350 lb version of Dusty Rhodes, was really the promoter’s brother. Kirk’s heart attack happened right after Daddy splashed him, too. It’s also come out just how poorly promotions have been paying wrestlers in England. In short: Britwres has always been an absolute shitshow, and I’d say the only difference between then and now is how many nonces they have today, but they had Jimmy Saville back in the day so fuck it, Britwres is and always has been proper fucked.
A couple weeks back Big Bubba Rogers debuted as the Big Boss Man on WWF “C” team shows. He’s still got the sunglasses, but he’s now being billed as a prison guard and squashing Jose Estrada. Until he’s facing bigger guys, he’s been told not to sell a thing. Expect him to debut on tv in mid-June.
WWF managers are officially said not to be traveling except for tv nights. So now Fuji and Heenan will make the shows they’re supposed to wrestle on and Jimmy Hart, due to his gimmick, will show up to some of the shows in buildings he’s supposedly banned from. Slick and Humperdink will only be used on tv, and Humperdink may even be at risk of being let go. Elizabeth will be on all Randy’s shows due to her importance to his act.
WWF is reviving the weasel suit angle for Heenan vs. Ultimate Warrior in Philadelphia next month. The weasel suit originates in Heenan's AWA days.
Watch: Bobby Heenan vs. Greg Gagne and the birth of the weasel suit
Wrestlers in the NWA were due their big payments on May 1 and they still haven’t come in. Lots of disgruntled wrestlers, now. Also the Main Event show hasn’t resulted in any payments either beyond standard tv money, which is like $100, and those shows were put together to be bigger paydays for the guys in the neighborhood of a few thousand per show.
Loads of NWA guys rumored to jump ship to WWF, but that’s always the case. Dave’s only heard three names from WWF people, and only one of them is an NWA guy (probably Sting, I’d guess).
Dave’s not seen the whole schedule for the Bash tour, but NWA is about to start promoting it heavily. There’s going to be something like 19 scaffold matches and 15 War Games matches between June 26 and August 7. There will even be a triple tower of doom or two. Flair/Luger for the NWA title on July 10 is set to be the only NWA title match on the tour. They’ll be put in tag matches otherwise, including War Games matches.
At an NWA show in Houston taped for the local market, Steve Williams apparently looked directly into the camera during his match and asked “How did you like that, Vince?” Not a clue what that’s about.
Dave’s got complaints about NWA tv. They didn’t follow up on either main event angle from last weekend. Instead they did a bit where Kevin Sullivan kidnapped Precious for all of 90 seconds, because they had the Garvins find her under a table shortly after the kidnapping, at which point she shouted "You stay away from me, Jimmy Garvin." That's some fast-action brainwashing right there. They also did a Road Warriors vs. Powers of Pain match that had Hawk do a stretcher job, but they didn’t show it on tv and never followed up. They also haven’t announced a single match for the second Clash on tv yet. That’s only two and a half weeks away. Stop showing palm trees in your commercials and start advertising matches.
Larry Young, an umpire for the American League, writes in to say he’s happy to have discovered a newsletter for smart wrestling fans. He talks a bit about pro wrestlers who had baseball careers. Mostly I bring him up because during the 1995 umpire lockout he winds up refereeing Undertaker vs. King Kong Bundy at Wrestlemania 11.
More letter writers are big mad about the letter in the May 9 issue that thought Dave was off the mark about Clash vs. Wrestlemania. They're upset about the letter being insulting to Dave and disagreeing with them about what wrestling was good that night and honestly Dave doesn't need them to defend him.
A letter asks about the whereabouts of a bunch of wrestlers from the old California promotion Big Time Wrestling. Dave gives an overview. It was run by Roy Shires from ~1961 through 1981 and occasionally did shows in Hawai’i, Samoa, and Nevada as well. It wound up folding because when their top talent got stale, they replaced them with cheaper talent and the fans could tell the difference in quality and stopped supporting them. When AWA started running in the area, they pretty much gave up. Dave says he always thought it was ironic Verne would complain about Vince’s business practices, when Verne did the same thing to Big Time Wrestling. Anyway, Dave goes and gives some updates on the wrestlers. Pepper Martin is an actor. Kinji Shibuya has been retired for a decade and lives in the Bay Area. Masa Saito is still a big star in Japan. Raul Mata trains wrestlers in Florida. Dutch Savage does color commentary for Don Owen in Portland. Paul DeMarco still occasionally wrestles independent cards. Lars Anderson hasn’t been heard from since he booked for Mrs. Maivia in Hawai’i two years back and it went poorly. No clue where Mephisto is. Lonnie Mayne died in a car accident about ten years back. No idea what became of Bobby Garrett and Jim Starr.