Wrestling Observer Rewinder

June 13, 1988

The WWF is the source of most of the news this week, and the first major thing is the Superstars taping on June 1. Dave was in Oakland and gives a full recap of the show. They had 12,120 in attendance (around 9,000 paid) and a gate around $110,000. Dave compliments the show’s atmosphere and WWF’s commitment to putting on a show, even if their style has some drawbacks. He does say that for an arena show, 29 matches is normally way too many, but since it was a tv taping, you know what you’re getting yourself into. Everyone who complains about modern tv tapings, be glad you weren’t going to these. They managed a good pace overall and kept the entire taping under 4 hours (last year’s taping in San Francisco was nearly 5 hours and had fans booing everyone in the last hour because they just wanted to see Hogan and get their money’s worth before leaving). Anyway, if you know 1980s Dave, you know his first major complaint is always going to be about unannounced changes to the advertised card. All during their tv hype for this, they were pushing Honkytonk vs. Beefcake with Jimmy Hart banned from the building. They forgot about that last bit and Jimmy was there. Then they talked about how the next show in town, Jimmy would be banned from the building. They also advertised free t-shirts to all fans in attendance, and they didn’t come through on that. Dave thinks it’s a real swing and a miss - 12,000 fans all wearing a Randy Savage t-shirt would have been a remarkable sight and been really effective. Anyway, Dave thinks most were pretty happy with the show as a whole.
I’m not going to go through everything on this taping, because Dave seriously covers all 29 matches, but here are some highlights and even that’s a lot. Dave gives a Brady Boone vs. Steve Lombardi dark match 3.25 stars. WWF is now doing all announcing from their studio in Connecticut, so no live announcing in the arena or even intros for each hour of the taping, which makes it hard to tell what’s going to be on what week’s show. That said, this did help things along in terms of speed. They had Slick do an interview introducing the Big Boss Man, and because they didn’t really work to change his look, he got some chants of “Bubba, Bubba” from those who recognized him. Dave takes the time to comment on Warrior’s utter lack of conditioning, as he was winded before he could even finish his entrance and could barely beat his chest. He says it’s a real statement to call anyone a worse worker than Andre the Giant right now, but Warrior has him beat by a mile. Bossman’s tv debut match was against Louie Spicoli. He squashed Spicoli in about a minute or so, then cuffed him to the ropes and beat him with his nightstick. The Hart Foundation has reunited as a face team and kicked Jimmy Hart to the curb. Rick Rude has a lot of heat thanks to the angle with Jake Roberts, and Dave can’t remember the last time a heel was so universally hated. At most he had a dozen women cheering for him, while everyone else was against him. Don Muraco “chased” Jimmy Hart to the back in an angle clearly setting him and Greg Valentine up for a feud and potentially writing Billy Graham off as a manager, but Jimmy ran so much faster that he beat him to the back by a mile and a guy behind Dave joked that Jimmy Hart is the best athlete on the show. The Rockers re-debuted for WWF and have made it two days with the company, doubling their previous record for WWF tenure. Dave thinks Michaels and Janetty are exactly what WWF needs: a babyface tag team with a rock and roll gimmick (WWF has never done that before, while other promotions have overdone it) and they got a good reaction. Dave makes an ill-advised comparison between Beefcake being over big in the area because he’s billed from San Francisco to “taking pride in living in the AIDS capital of the world.” I think we can expect letters about that in the coming weeks. Badnews Brown is doing a thing with the raising a black gloved hand in the air and Dave thinks it would have been really over if this were 1969, but it’s about 20 years too late to really strike that iron effectively and Dave jokes that you’d think Verne Gagne came up with that one until you realize he only just learned last year that baseball broke the color barrier. Dave compliments Rude again and says he’s such a good heel that Dave doesn’t even like watching him. By hour 3, fans were catching on with the Bossman’s gimmick and it was getting some good heat. The Hart Foundation’s first face match saw them beat a face jobber team and wrestle like heels while playing to the crowd like faces. The crowd was a bit confused, but Dave thinks faces who wrestle like heels could get over well once the crowd shakes off the classical conditioning. He especially compliments Bret’s fake knee injury as the best thing on the card and best sell of a fake knee injury he’s ever seen in WWF. Fans started leaving after the 26th match on the show and by the time the DiBiase vs. Savage (with Elizabeth) match happened, there were fewer than 7,000 left (and under 4,000 left by the finish). Dave quips that they probably left after seeing what Liz was wearing. Sure, Dave.
Watch: Big Boss Man makes his WWF tv debut
Electronic Media Magazine wrote a pretty frank kayfabe-breaking note in their May 23 issue, and they predict Ted DiBiase as the next WWF champ. They say:
While sports prognostication is normally a risky business, the scenario of who becomes the World Wrestling Federation’s champ is scripted out months in advance. It’s based on the popularity of the wrestler, not his record, according to the results each performer inspires in WWF’s multimillion dollar merchandising sales. Based on that criteria, insiders are laying odds that the next WWF champion will be “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase. But look for Hulk Hogan to reclaim the crown in a matter of months.
Anyway, Dave gives his thoughts on this prediction. Dave figures Hogan’s a draw with or without the belt, so he’ll probably be paired with Bossman and Andre for the fall while Savage needs the belt right now to remain a draw. He’s reminded of New Japan 1983, where everyone assumed the boom from January to August was due to Inoki and without him things would stall out, and the same would be the case for WWF this summer without Hogan. New Japan didn’t stall and that eventually led to the split that created the original UWF. WWF doesn’t have to worry about anything like that happening, but it’s conceivable that WWF continuing fine without Hogan could reduce Hogan’s pull because the company would know they can weather through without him. So Dave thinks, given that and how far behind the NWA is, that keeping the belt on Savage for the time being (provided he still remains able to draw) is the smart move. Ultimately, when Savage loses the belt comes down to Hogan’s ego and whether Hogan feels he needs the belt and if he’ll demand it when he returns, if he’ll have patience, or if he’ll leave the company if he can’t just call his shots. If Savage does stop drawing, by all means transition to DiBiase then Hogan, but right now Savage is working as an attraction and it’s best to work in such a way where you can have two of those (Hogan and Savage) rather than only just one. It may even be better to have Savage as champion since Hogan only works weekends and tv, rather than the full schedule like Savage does.
WWF is also expanding their schedule again beginning on July 7. They’ll be running a fourth touring group to hit small towns they used to consider too small to be worth going to and do charity shows. Dave interprets this as WWF’s attempt to deliver a killing blow to the other promotions that are currently run pretty ragged. The charity shows, for instance, are most probably designed to be able to snipe charity deals from smaller promotions because WWF will be able to offer a more lucrative product in place of, say, a charity show run by Ron Fuller. It also opens roster spots up for WWF, which means plenty of room to hire disaffected NWA guys.
Finally, on to something not WWF: Chigusa Nagayo appears to be preparing to retire from All Japan Women. The promotion is planning a huge show in a baseball stadium to commemorate her retirement. Chigusa is easily the most popular and highest paid woman wrestler in the history of the business, and she’s only 23. The implications for All Japan Women are huge. They just had three other key retirements recently, including Devil Masami, Dump Matsumoto, and Yukari Omori. For big draws from their golden era of 1984-86, they only have Lioness Asuka left, and her popularity is significantly down from its 1985 peak. Surprisingly, it looks like AJW wants her gone just as much as she wants to be gone. Maybe she’s outgrown the company and become difficult to deal with, maybe the promotion doesn’t feel they need her enough that they need to submit to her demands. There’s also the fact that since she has had her peak popularity, the promotion is worried that keeping her as the main attraction will make the promotion look bad for being centered around a fading star (Dave gives examples like Dusty in the NWA, Inoki in New Japan, the original Sheik in Detroit, the Von Erichs in WCCW, Lawler in Memphis, etc.). Just as the Beauty Pair (Nancy Kumi and Jackie Sato) and Mimi Hagiwara gave way to the Crush Girls (Lioness Asuka and Chigusa Nagayo), so too must the Crush Girls give way to the next big stars, and AJW seems to want Yumiko Hotta and Mitsuko Nishiwaki to be the next major stars.
Chigusa leaving will be a big blow to AJW for a long while, but if they can get these new wrestlers over, they can build up again. The company and Chigusa both know that she can’t be on top forever and she has nowhere to go but down from being the top star of the women’s wrestling industry. Chigusa has numerous options available to her. She has a clothing company, can use her celebrity to do game shows, and could even gather wrestlers together and start her own promotion, as some of the speculation suggests. Dave spends a bit of time describing Japanese teen idol culture and concludes that it’s very fun to follow how it all works and how it intersects with wrestling. Anyway, this is all a bit premature and a false alarm (the part about Chigusa retiring - all the implications of what would happen upon her retirement is super interesting and important to consider). Chigusa will do a tour in the U.S. and Canada later this year and will return to AJW in the fall, before retiring for the first time in 1989 (she’ll unretire in 1993.
The June issue of Washington Monthly has a piece on commission regulation of pro wrestling. Mostly it kind of laughs at how wrestling is regulated currently. It’s written by the same guy who wrote the Penthouse piece on the Von Erichs that’s in development hell. That’s tentatively scheduled for the September issue now, by the way.
There were three shows in Oregon last weekend: Owen, Haynes, and McMahon. Haynes put on his championship tournament final and won that in front of a crowd, while Owen did a kids get in free gimmick and had Buddy Rose vs. the Assassin in a bullrope match to main event. WWF, however, drew their biggest crowd ever in Oregon on May 30, getting 7,500 people (Hogan never even cracked 5,000 in Portland).
Also, the advertised Hennig vs. DeBeers AWA title match in Salem Oregon on May 19 did not happen, as expected. Hennig was no longer champion and didn’t even show up, so they made a battle royal the main event. Matt Borne won. DeBeers claimed in an promo that “Verne Gagne has put economic sanctions on me.”
The IWGP Title is currently held up because of silliness involving Riki Choshu. The main event on May 27 was originally supposed to be Fujinami defending against Seiji Sakaguchi, but Riki Choshu complained and got inserted as challenger instead. The finish to the match, which to be clear was obviously a work due to the fact that Fujinami took his boot off, involved the ring breaking and Fujinami “spraining” his ankle. So Choshu attacks the ankle, Fujinami removes his boot and tries to fight on, but they stop the match and rule it a no contest. Choshu says that since it was an accident, he didn’t want to win the title that way, so the belt is held up until the June 24 show in Osaka.
Owen Hart also won the IWGP Jr. Heavyweight title on the same night. He’ll likely drop the title before the end of the tour, but he is scheduled for another tour in late August, which throws a wrench in Dave’s understanding of any plans he has vis a vis WWF.
Adrian Adonis is being cheered in New Japan. He was a big star here several years back and the fans still remember him. He’s definitely put on a lot of weight since those days, though, so the fans have also been pretty shocked by his physique.
Steve Williams is probably not going back to New Japan any time ever. He’s skipped out on too many tours and they weren’t happy about that.
UWF has announced their June 11 card. They’ve got Maeda vs. Takada in the main event and Kazuo Yamazaki vs. Norman Smiley. The show is already sold out (7,000 seats at a price of $28/ticket = $106,000). All Japan has a show in the same building a week earlier and tickets are selling slowly. UWF is trying to get Bob Backlund in against Maeda for their December show, but that’s conditional on getting Backlund to do the job. Good news from the future: Backlund will be on the show. We’ll get into the details and how plans change down the line.
Devil Masami came out of retirement for JWP’s May 28 show. JWP was going to fold on May 29, but they managed to draw 4,000 fans and are going to do occasional spot shows from here on out. Dave says those shows will be “promoted by the local mob” and that may or may not be snark, I’m honestly not sure.
No real news from All Japan Women beyond the Chigusa Nagayo situation. Retirement rumors are swirling, and Leilani Kai beat her in a non-title match on May 28, so it might be that they’re prepping Kai as her retirement match.
The lineup for the second NWA Clash of Champions has changed. Barry Windham will now be wrestling Brad Armstrong in what’s sure to be a fantastic match if it’s given time. TBS’s press release about the show gave Dusty the biggest bio (no surprise) which called him “one of the two biggest stars in professional wrestling today, along with Ric Flair.” Dave notes that Windham’s bio calls him the “frequent tag team partner of Lex Luger,” so obviously these are a touch dated. Clash shows are set for September 7 and December 7 as well.
[NWA] Jimmy Garvin did a great promo on the June 4 TBS show. He admitted he’s married to Precious and really heated up the rivalry with Kevin Sullivan. Dave thinks it’s no coincidence they’re doing this at the same time as Rick Rude is feuding with Jake Roberts over Jake’s wife. It’s a formula that gets over big.
NWA is putting a lot of hype into Luger vs. Flair at the Great American Bash, and it’s getting lots of buzz among fans. Most people Dave talks to think they might even put the title on Luger. Nothing’s certain yet, but they’re definitely doing good work in the build here.
[WWF] Islander Tama (Sam Fatu, aka Tonga Kid) has quit WWF. That leaves the islanders as Siva Afi and Haku, which really sucks because Tama and Haku worked really well together and Siva is… not great. Dave’s heard two stories here. One is that he was upset with his Wrestlemania paycheck and the other is that he was upset with how Sika was let go and the rest of the family put pressure on him to follow suit.
[WWF] At the Rochester, MN tapings on May 11, Vince apparently gave a speech about the evils of steroids. According to the speech, being on tv will make you larger than life and you won’t need steroids because you’re on tv. This all stems from an employee in some auditorium finding a needle and leftover steroids backstage after a WWF show and accidentally getting stuck by the needle and freaking out about potentially getting AIDS. Remember, kids, don’t share needles.
Terry Taylor is coming to the WWF to work as a babyface. I think he’s too chicken to try being a WWF heel.
There’s talk of WWF doing a feud between Cheryl Roberts and Raven. No, not Scott Levy. Cheryl is, of course, Jake Roberts’ wife. Raven is Rick Rude’s valet, played by his sister Nancy.
TV in Memphis to set up the June 6 Hennig vs. Lawler match was really hot. They had Hennig in studio making fun of a local car dealer and attacking him, then later demanding Lawler come out and when Lawler didn’t come out he destroyed the studio. Lawler only came out when Hennig threatened to beat the shit out of Lance Russell if Lawler didn’t come out by the count of 10. Of course, they kind of undercut some of the tension by having the Toyota dealer promise to refund the fans if Lawler doesn’t win on June 6.
WCCW’s Memorial Day card in Fort Worth drew roughly 1,500 (5,000 claimed on tv). That’s the biggest crowd they’ve had in a long time. Plans for Lawler to come work with Kerry Von Erich appear to be shelved - he’s coming in on June 17-19, but he’ll be working with Terry Taylor and Iceman King Parsons instead.
Makhan Singh is a heel and currently feuding with Kerry Brown in Stampede, but appears to be developing a cult following. He’s doing well on promos and he’s doing color commentary with Ed Whalen and a lot of folks feel like his work on the desk has significantly improved the show. So he’s developing a fanbase that quite likely will cheer for him. Can you believe that this guy winds up being Bastion Booger?
Dave gives a June 1 Continental match between Tom Prichard and Tony Anthony 4 stars. It was a 9 minute first blood match and Prichard bled first, but Danny Davis wiped the blood off him to keep the referee none the wiser.
In USA Wrestling, Doug Furnas almost won the Tennessee championship from Buddy Landel in a tv match, but Guerrero shenanigans kept the gold off him. Furnas won clean, but Hector Guerrero slipped a foreign object into Furnas’s trunks and told the ref, who reversed the decision promptly upon discovering the weapon. Guess we can see where Eddie got his ideas from.
Watch: Hector Guerrero lies, cheats, and steals
Over in Europe, Otto Wanz still reigns supreme. Scott Hall is over there right now working for him, and Wanz is defending his version of the world title against Bruiser Brody on July 9. Apparently he got Andre the Giant back in January and Andre did a job for him too. Well, it was December, and it was by countout, but yes.
Watch: Otto Wanz vs. Andre the Giant, December 1987
AWA is looking for a new booker. They fired Wahoo McDaniel and Ray Stevens for running their own independent show in Virginia without telling AWA about it. Just in case you thought Vince was the first promoter to not like his guys running their own shows.
Windy City Wrestling is holding a show on July 16 at DePaul University and they’re hoping to get Brody in to wrestle Nord the Barbarian in a cage match. Brody is already booked that weekend, though, so if he doesn’t come, it’s because he’ll be in Puerto Rico. He really should have picked Chicago that weekend.
There’s a really fascinating letter about the western Pennsylvania wrestling scene from the 1950s and into the 70s. They used to get tv from the International Amphithetre in Chicago featuring guys like Thesz, Gagne, Buddy Rogers, the Lisowskis, and others and the letter writer wonders if anyone still has the old film of those matches sitting on a shelf somewhere. They did, and there’s a youtube channel dedicated to all this old wrestling: The Chicago Film Archive. Anyway, by the late 50s, tv wrestling in Pittsburgh got taken over by a live studio show from Philadelphia every Saturday, but it wasn’t very good and then another promoter took over the tv there and you had guys like Waldo Von Erich, the Tolos Brothers, Ilio DePaolo, and others. Soon after, Toots Mondt (an associate of Vince McMahon Sr.) started romoting in the area and brought in the best of the NWA at the time - Argentina Rocca, Buddy Rogers, the Kangaroos, Haystacks Calhoun, Sweet Daddy Siki, and a young Bruno Sammartino. But the biggest star was the Crusher (Reggie Lisowski), who started heel and became even bigger when he turned face, and in his later years they tried turning him heel again to go against Bruno, but the feud died because his appeal was gone and turning him heel was a mistake (this is weirdly reminiscent of Steve Austin’s trajectory and the mistake of his heel turn, it feels like). When Bruno became the champ, that was shortly after WWWF broke off the NWA and the local shows started to die off as he went on tour, but the big shows still did well and there was still a surge of excitement and popularity. Big monthly shows in the local arena did well, but rarely sold out. Things went bad when Bruno dropped the title to Ivan Koloff and wrestling interest dropped significantly and it wasn’t until Bruno got the title back that things interest started rising again. It’s really remarkable how important a figure Bruno was in the western Pennsylvania scene at the time.
A writer asks Dave if he thinks Flair should consider jumping to WWF, and Dave responds. He says there’s a bigger chance of it happening now than at any previous point (not that he’s saying Flair will jump, just that the circumstances are most favorable to a jump right now), and that does make it an interesting question. If they wanted to, they could go all in on Flair and he’d be a big draw. But because Flair’s synonymous with the NWA, there’s a lot of ways they could sabotage that because of the egos at play and the need to show that they’ve been better than the NWA all along (see WWE and anything remotely WCW in the past 19 years). And some of the reasons they might convince themselves Flair wouldn’t get over with their audience are even valid: Flair thrives in long matches and WWF doesn’t really do those. He’s pushing 40, and that’s pretty old (ha!). So yeah, if Flair were to be the top of the card in WWF, that would feel to some like an admission that the NWA is on par with the WWF, and that won’t sit well with some of the suits with big egos. But at Flair’s age, a run with WWF to make the big bucks and work shorter matches is likely to have some appeal - he’s an old man in a young man’s game, and he’s got to know that. Well, let’s look at what Ric Flair had to say about the idea of being too old to do it and retirement, about 20 years later.
Watch: Ric Flair’s thoughts on being an old man in a young man’s game and retirement
Another letter asks Dave for some more information on his sources for the OWF debut and the World Class Texas Stadium show. Basically, some quibbles about attendance in the former, including asking for clarification on what Dave meant when he said the crowd had “a higher class of fan, similar to a WWF crowd.” In the case of the World Class stuff, the writer straight up disagrees on the quality of the latter and asks Dave to be more positive about WCCW for the sake of the business. Dave goes ahead and answers the challenge. He names the source for his claim on the “higher class of fan,” which he meant in terms of socioeconomic class: Mike Rodgers, who publishes the major newsletter on the region called Ring Around the Northwest. Rodgers has been following wrestling in the area enough to know what kinds of crowds different promotions draw in the area and Dave stands by Mike’s assessment. As for World Class, Dave had 21 letters from those who attended the show and all but four (and those four include this letter Dave is responding to) considered the show subpar, and Dave makes sure to clarify that he didn’t call it subpar, but that he reported fan reception as indicating it was subpar. Dave even called a contact who knows the regulars for WCCW’s shows in the area after getting this letter and asked him what people generally thought, and that contact also reported general disappointment. As to being more positive about WCCW, Dave gives credit where due (he was very positive on Michael Hayes as a booker), but the promotion is showing no signs of a turnaround. It’s loads better than it was when Fritz was still in charge, but they’re still flubbing basic business in so many ways and making terrible booking choices and Dave can’t just give them a pass for that. There’s also some stuff about WWF in here where the writer calls WWF fans idiots and claims nobody intelligent would pay to go to a WWF show, and Dave mentions that he has paid to go to WWF shows and finds them enjoyable as a social outing with friends, even if he’s not interested in their wrestling enough to go on his own. So yeah. Mostly included the stuff on this letter because it’s a peek behind the curtain of Dave’s contacts and how he gauged fan reactions back in the day.
Also, Percy Pringle is playing face and holding the mic for interviews on World Class tv now. Dave says his facial expressions are hilarious, and I’m demanding we get a Percy Pringle facial reactions subreddit and simp account like the Alexa Bliss one asap.