Wrestling Observer Rewinder

August 15, 1988

Rewinder Note: Sorry about the lateness. Lots going on, so this is the first I've been able to get it done.
Details of the event are sketchy, but WWF’s July 31 show at Milwaukee County Stadium drew the largest crowd for a wrestling event since Wrestlemania 3. They announced 35,000, with the actual number likely falling in the 27,000-30,000 paid range, for a total gate of almost $400,000. Hulk Hogan’s return was the headline event in a cage match with Andre the Giant, and the card on paper looks good enough to Dave that he’s surprised it wasn’t put on ppv, or that some of the matches weren’t put on the Summerslam undercard, since that’s a bit lacking. Without details, not a lot to say here other than a couple items of note: 15 matches on the card, Savage successfully defending the WWF title was the 8th match, and Curt Hennig beat Terry Taylor in an unannounced (and reportedly pretty good) match.
Watch: Hogan vs. Andre from Wrestlefest 1988
Hogan looks to have dropped around 20 lbs during filming of No Holds Barred. Dave hears that Hogan’s adversary in the movie was Bill Eadie in a different costume so he wouldn’t be recognized as Demolition Ax, which is true to an extent - he hasn’t learned about Zeus yet, it appears. He’s gotten word from two people who I assume were involved, as I can’t imagine an advance cut being ready or screened yet, who said the movie will surprise people by being not that bad. It’s set for a May release and blew way past its $15 million budget, so it probably won’t clean up in theaters but might be able to become profitable off video rentals.
WWF tv is building up to The Summerslam. The main stories of interest are the Mega Powers uniting against DiBiase and Andre and the Brother Love interview. All that’s known about the latter is they’re billing the guest as someone who is new to the WWF, which pretty much means only Owen Hart, Terry Taylor, or Chris Hennig are possibilities. Dave’s guess is Hennig to start a big push, and he feels more like who WWF would give a push to. Hennig was in WWF before at one point, but Dave doesn’t think pre-1984 is likely to count. We’ll see if Dave picks up on this before Summerslam, but Bruce Prichard claims the original plan was Ric Flair and they abandoned it when the deal fell through. He also retracts his prediction of Beefcake winning the IC title based on the tv tapings, since Honkytonk Man appears to be starting a feud with the Ultimate Warrior, which promises to plumb new depths of match quality.
Listen: Bruce Prichard talks about Summerslam 1988
Dave has the official numbers for the Great American Bash ppv buyrate: 2.2%, 190,000 homes out of 8.7 million possible. They were cleared for 10 million, but transmission issues took out about 1.3 million of those homes. Anyway, that puts the gross at around $3 million, which only works out to $300,000-$500,000 for the NWA. Disappointing, to say the least. The NWA’s present plans include a non-Starrcade show for December ppv (this far in advance, plans may change, Dave notes). In order to make that have a better showing, Dave says it’s not a matter of their tv promotion of the ppv or their lineup - both were solid going into the Bash. What the NWA needs is outside media publicity - someone other than the NWA saying this is an important event. WWF excels at getting this publicity for their shows and NWA needs to work on this to compete. They also need to work on getting their tv viewership up, because without that outside coverage the only people who knew about the ppv were the shrinking pool of NWA viewers.
Two promotions have officially gone under: the Oregon Wrestling Federation and USA Pro Wrestling. The OWF officially shut its doors on July 17. Haynes claims it’s temporary and they’ll reopen in September, but that doesn’t appear likely. And if it were to happen, it’d probably flop worse. Ron Fuller’s USA Pro will be closing up on August 20, and the Continental Wrestling Federation will take over their tv and running live shows in Knoxville and Chattanooga. It’ll be interesting to see if any of the OWF guys get welcomed back to Don Owen’s promotion and where the USA Pro guys will go. Some appear to be heading to Memphis, others to Continental, and the majority to parts unknown.
Ken Mantell, who was running World Class, has walked out of the company about two weeks ago and it is now run by Kevin Von Erich and his mother, Doris Adkisson. Dave says he doesn’t “need to tell anyone what happened the last time Kevin was in charge,” which is great in 1988 when that was recent memory, but I’m over 32 years in the future from that and I don’t know what Dave means and I’m struggling to put together a good google search that will answer the question. Dave doesn’t know what happened here. Mantell had a lot of money in the company and it’d been improving slowly but surely with him at the helm. The best he can surmise is the Von Erichs and Mantell didn’t see eye to eye. Apparently part of Mantell’s contract stipulated he could no longer compete with World Class as Wild West Wrestling, so starting up a competing group also seems unlikely.
They’re rescheduling the arraignment of Invader #1 (fuck Invader #1) for the murder of Bruiser Brody. It was scheduled for August 8, and all Dave knows about the reason for the delay is that it has nothing to do with the case itself. Further coverage of Bruiser Brody’s death is set to hit the media in the coming weeks. Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone are putting out stories. The Texas Monthly story will be written by Irv Muchnick, son of former NWA president Sam Muchnick and writer of the Von Erich Story that has been long delayed but will be appearing in the October issue of Penthouse. Rolling Stone’s story will be written by Scott Ostler, who writes for the LA Times sports pages and has long been considered California’s best sportswriter. Ostler also plans to write a book (that doesn’t appear to have happened). There’s talk of a screenplay, though that feels a long way from happening, and Fox’s show The Reporters will devote a segment to Brody’s murder as well. Expect books and tapes in Japan as well, of course. The mystery factor to the case, since no motive has been established, is driving a lot of interest, and while the case likely won’t harm the wrestling business, it will probably expose a lot more people to some aspects of the business they weren’t previously aware of. Dave expects most of these pieces to focus largely on Brody’s life rather than his death as the primary focus, though of course his death cannot be ignored.
Lots of readers have asked about how to send condolences to the Goodish family, and Dave says to send them to the Goodish family at the regular Observer mailing address care of the Observer, and he’ll make sure they get to the family. He also relays Barbara’s wish that fans not send flowers, as Frank would have preferred to see that money put to more practical uses. He was active with the Patrician Movement, the oldest substance abuse program (and one specifically targeted to working with teenagers and minorities struggling with drug and alcohol dependency), so Dave also gives the mailing address for the Patrician Movement and recommends that in lieu of flowers, fans can send them a donation in memory of Frank Goodish or Bruiser Brody.
Dave went to two of the NWA Bash shows this past week, Las Vegas on August 4 and Oakland on August 6. The Vegas show was better, but the main difference was audience and audience investment. He notes that the Oakland crowd was fairly typical of the area in that only about 5% of the audience were women, and the other 95% were men age 18-35 who were largely very engaged for certain wrestlers, but not so much with the matches as a whole and even were fairly tuned out during parts of the WarGames match. Anyway, Dave runs through the Vegas card. The big highlight that night was the Fantastics vs. the Midnight Express in a 4.5 star match which was “as close to a perfect match with something for anyone as you will see.” Their match in Oakland was very good (3.5 stars) and better than the crowd deserved. Oakland’s crowd cheered the Midnights because they don’t go for pretty boys, and the wrestlers seemed at a loss for how to get the crowd invested in buying into the dynamic of the match. The WarGames match in the main event got 4 stars and Dave says while he’s seen better matches, you can’t complain about a match this good when you get one.
This week’s joshi update largely centers around the Crush Girls and tag team wrestling. The Fire Jets (Yumiko Hotta and Mitsuko Nishiwaki) are now the WWWA World tag champions as of July 19, and on the same show Chigusa Nagayo retained her world title. During the tag title match, Grizzly Iwamoto, one of the defending champions (with partner Bull Nakano) used scissors to cut Nishiwaki’s hair. Nagayo will defend the title against Lioness Asuka on August 25, and two days later they’re having a show honoring the five-year anniversary of the first time the Crush Girls teamed together. They’re already selling t-shirts for that show. Oh, and on another note about Bull Nakano, her new signature foreign object is a large nail that she gouges into the shoulder with, and Dave imagines a whole group of women Dustys who have scar tissue on their shoulders.
Watch: The Fire Jets vs. Bull Nakano and Grizzly Iwamoto, 2/3 falls for the WWWA World tag titles
Two days after winning the World tag titles in All Japan, Stan Hansen and Terry Gordy dropped the belts on July 31 to Jumbo Tsuruta and Yoshiaki Yatsu.
The first released balloting for All Japan’s Bruiser Brody Memorial Dream Card on August 29 shows just how popular Brody was. Most of the votes were in before his death, and Brody vs. Hansen was the most requested match. Of the 10 most requested, Brody featured in 6 of the dream matches, with spots 4-8 being taken up by Tsuruta and Brody vs. Tenryu and Hansen, Tsuruta and Hansen vs. Tenryu and Brody, Brody and Hansen vs. the Road Warriors, Brody vs. Abdyllah the Butcher, and Tsuruta and Tenryu vs. Brody and Hansen.
Bam Bam Bigelow appeared on the August 8 New Japan show in Yokohama.
Continental is building a feud between Missy Hyatt and Eddie Gilbert while acknowledging their real-life marriage. The story started with Alan Martin, whose gimmick is kind of a nerdy playboy, kissing Missy, and later on announcer Charlie Platt mentioned Hyatt and Gilbert’s marriage during an interview with Gilbert. This shocked the audience, and they built things up over the course of the August 1 tv taping.
NWA’s Great American Bash tour ended on August 7 in Kansas City, and they’re taking a break until this weekend when they do their next tv taping. The middle of next week will also be a recovery period and at the end of the month they should be on a full schedule again. Luger vs. Flair and Windham vs. Sting will be the two headline feuds for the next tour, while the Midnight Express vs. Tully and Arn might be the hottest feud overall, while the idea for the Fantastics to turn heel has been scrapped. They were supposed to feud with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Express, but Robert Gibson is gone and Ricky Morton’s probably not sticking around. Dave gets the feeling that most fans have figured out that Luger’s not taking the title unless it’s at a major show, so that has kind of killed some of the interest in the feud since everybody knows the title’s not changing hands any time soon. Also, the Sheik will return for a single date in Detroit on September 4 to team again with Kevin Sullivan against Dusty Rhodes and Dick Murdoch (the same match they had on July 31, about which all reports suggest the Sheik’s performance was embarrassing).
The NWA sold out their August 3 show in Seattle (7,500 capacity), but that’s a bit of a disappointment since they accidentally booked the wrong building. They wound up booking the Seattle Center Arena (nowadays called the Mercer Arena), but they meant to get the Seattle Center Coliseum (nowadays called the Climate Pledge Arena), which has a capacity of roughly 16,000. They wound up having to turn away 2,500 fans at the gate when they ran out of tickets and pulled a gate of $110,000.
Before the Detroit show, the NWA hosted a pre-match “party with the wrestlers” event that went extremely poorly. The only wrestlers to show up were Jimmy Garvin and Brad Armstrong. One reader reports complaining writing to the NWA and Gary Juster about how disappointing the event was and Juster apparently gave him free ringside seats for the next show and made arrangements for him to meet the wrestlers at the next show too. Similar parties happened in Oakland and Vegas, but of the 600 fans who paid $50 for tickets in Oakland, only 30-40 showed up, while only about 20 knew about it in Vegas. In both of those locations most of the major faces showed up.
Dave was going to go to the Vegas party, but he got hungry and went out for dinner with friends instead, and he missed being shown on screen at the party. Just after the wrestlers arrived, the venue was playing the Entertainment Tonight segment on Adrian Adonis. Dave was part of that, and according to reports, seeing Dave on the tv spooked some of the wrestlers good. Dave jokes that if he had gone, some reporter would probably be doing a report today on the reporter who got decapitated by a bunch of wrestlers hitting him with stiff clotheslines.
NWA morale is up now that Crockett’s starting to pay the wrestlers some of what they’re owed. They’re getting the money as small bonuses added onto their weekly checks, but some effort to make them whole is better than none.
Summerslam (or as Dave calls it, Summer Scam ‘88) seems to be an experiment in finding out how little you can give fans for a major ppv and still draw. Pretty much the entire thrust of this week’s tv tapings centered around the main event with next to nothing for the rest of the card. They’re being super subtle in teasing a Hogan heel turn that will never happen by having him call Liz his manager in order to set up tension between Hogan and Savage, questioning whether Ventura will be able to remain neutral (Dave expects Ventura to keep character and mostly be by the book but favor the heels slightly, but another referee will count the fall for the faces in the end), and apparently the tv on the Saturday two days before Summerslam they’re going to have Hogan and Savage claim that Liz will wear a string bikini. As a more famous man than I am once said, “That’ll put butts in seats.”
[WWF] In a wink and a nod moment, the August 3 Superstars taping featured a match including a jobber named John Ziegler. That name probably doesn’t mean anything to you or to the people watching, but it’s the name of the man who first developed anabolic steroids for use by weightlifters about 30 years ago.
The third hour of the August 3 Superstars taping had a segment where Ultimate Warrior stole the Intercontinental Title belt after the second hour taping and before the third, and in the third hour he was interviewed while wearing the belt. Honkytonk Man hit him with the guitar to knock him out but didn’t take the belt when he left, which leaves Dave with the distinct impression that the belt theft was a dark segment and Warrior’s winning the title at Summerslam.
Watch: Ultimate Warrior's first promo with the IC title
Quick hits from WWF’s Wrestling Challenge taping on August 2. Owen Hart made his tv debut, but didn’t do any of his impressive moves, which just raises the question why hire him in the first place if you’re not going to try to make him a star. They could hire any number of guys his size with a tenth of his talent if they have no interest in making him a star, so hamstringing him makes no sense. The Powers of Pain appear to be losing some of their steam.
WWF’s debut in the new Greensboro Coliseum, headlined by Hogan vs. Andre, drew a disappointing 3,670 fans. Dave would have guessed they’d sell it out, but with these numbers they’ve shown Crockett doesn’t have to fear WWF competing in their strongholds for now.
Les Thornton’s efforts to compete with Stampede are not drawing at all.
Update on Steve Blackman’s eligibility for rookie of the year. Apparently he worked all of last summer in Nova Scotia, so he just misses the cutoff to be considered a rookie by having started a couple months earlier than the award allows for in its consideration.
WCCW’s Bruiser Brody Memorial show in Dallas on July 29 drew a near sellout of 3,400.
[Continental] Eddie Gilbert almost caused riots in both of the past two weeks in Dothan, Alabama. They teamed against Austin Idol and Willie B. Hert, with Dangerously getting replaced by Nightmare Freddy and returning for the finish to knock out the ref and put the shirt on himself to count the fall. Then Ken Wayne came out and threw something in Idol’s face, handcuffed him to the ropes, and the heels started beating him with a stick and trying to break Willie’s leg. The fans tried to make the save. A week later, they had Gilbert vs. Idol in a death match (old school last man standing type of death match) where Gilbert lost to the figure four in the end after a number of false finishes, and once again Ken Wayne came out to attack Idol. The heels then tried to break Idol’s leg, and one fan pulled out a gun. Security got him and eight fans wound up arrested in the ensuing melee.
Paul Boesch is closing up his Houston office and is looking to sell off his collection of memorabilia. Dave likens what Boesch has to a museum collection and tells readers to write to the address of the Houston office if they’d like to buy anything.
Bugsy McGraw debuted in Global and had a loser eats a cockroach match against Red Roberts.
This week’s letter section is nearly all about the Brody obituary issue. People reminisce about his matches, how naturally he managed to work his character, how effortlessly over he was, and more. Many are highly complimentary of Dave’s work on the writeup, with one saying that the Japanese reporter who called Dave the “World champion of sportswriters” is probably saying it again after seeing that obituary. Jeff Bowdren provides a particularly fun example of Brody’s work ethic from a February 1987 show in Miami where he wrestled the Original Sheik, who was 65 at the time. The crowd was small and Sheik was so limited (he had two artificial hips) you wouldn’t blame Brody for taking it easy. And yet he went all over the arena with Sheik, smashing his head into a hot dog cart, covering him with condiments, chasing him from the entrance back to the ring. Bowdren calls it the greatest carry job and individual performance he’s ever seen and says not a person in the arena was sitting down for this absolutely insane brawl.
Sugar Ray Leonard is planning a boxing match on Thanksgiving night on ppv, which would compete directly with Survivor Series. While boxing and wrestling have different audiences, Leonard is a bigger draw in his sport than Hogan is in wrestling, so that might even hurt Survivor Series. Meanwhile, no way does Crockett attempt to compete on ppv on Thanksgiving again, so Crockett will likely stubbornly try to run Starrcade on closed-circuit, which would be a financial disaster.
Supposedly Hulk Hogan wants a real match at Wrestlemania with Mike Tyson and even believes he can win. Even with Dave’s doubts about Hogan’s acumen for legitimate wrestling, he notes that if Hogan can take Tyson down and knows how to ride him, he should be able to tie up Tyson and win easily. If it becomes a game of conditioning, though, Hogan doesn’t have a chance. But that’s almost a non-issue. In this hypothetical, either Tyson lands a punch and Hogan goes down, or Hogan takes him down and we find out just how well Hogan can actually wrestle.
Apparently Paul E. Dangerously, Bam Bam Bigelow, and Eddie Gilbert are negotiating with the AWA. If this were to go off, it’d probably lead to Gilbert being champion.
Mike Miller and Brian Adams won the OWF tag title in a tournament on July 17 in front of a crowd of 1,320. A bittersweet accomplishment, since the promotion folded that night. Don Owen countered in the same city with a show where all tickets were $3, but only drew 200 fans. Talk about losing the battle and winning the war. Also, Moondog Moretti jumped from Owen to OWF on July 17, which definitely wasn’t the smartest move in hindsight.