Wrestling Observer Rewinder

September 26, 1988

It’s official: AWA, Memphis, POWW, Southern Championship Wrestling, and WCCW will be teaming up on ppv on December 13 at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago. We’ll get an official announcement soon, but the info Dave has is that they’re going to call it Superclash II (Dave ponders the fact that a few years back he went to a show called Superclash II in San Francisco). Thus far, Dave can confirm that the main event will be yet another Kerry Von Erich vs. Jerry Lawler unification match. Theoretically, all the promotions will be plugging the show and it’ll have so many angles heading in that the viewer should perceive it as a major event. But the Great American Bash ppv, which came with a stronger national syndicated network behind it, was barely profitable and WWF’s buyrates are also declining, so it seems wrestling has hit the saturation point in the ppv market. Compounding this, the groups involved here don’t have a single wrestler who is over to a national audience the way a Flair, Sting, Hogan, Savage, or DiBiase is. They have guys who could be at that level, but they haven’t had the exposure, and these promotions are all perceived as minor league to the average fan. And the show’s going to air on a Tuesday night sandwiched in between Survivor Series and whatever Crockett has for their December ppv. This show has a really hard road ahead of it if they expect it to do even moderately well.
The above groups did their first combined ESPN taping on September 17 in Nashville, to cover the first three weekends of October. They got in 6,000 fans, and they’re in Louisville taping the night that David writes this to get the remaining weekends covered ahead of Thanksgiving. While Verne will be taking point on the ppv show, Jerry Jarrett took lead on the Nashville taping. They’ve clearly learned from a similar multi-promotion taping in Memphis back in 1984, which involved using the local main event guys as jobbers to the visiting wrestlers, as they’re not doing cross-promotional matches at all here or at the ppv except for the Lawler/Von Erich one. Dave gives match results and reported ratings from the Nashville taping, and the only really interesting bit is how they did the title unification part this time. Lawler and Von Erich ended officially with Lawler winning by DQ, after a series of events where both guys punched the referee, so a second referee (Frank Morrell) came to call the match a double disqualification, only to order the match to continue after both guys insisted it continue. Then the second referee took a bump and Kerry did a piledriver on Lawler and a third referee came and alerted Morrell to the illegal move. Morrell asked Von Erich if he did in fact use a piledriver, and he couldn’t lie but claimed not to know it was against the rules. Lawler then claimed that since the World Class belt changes hands by disqualification, he should get both belts and Kerry handed him the belt, but Lee Marshall came out to say that the rule doesn’t apply because this match is under AWA jurisdiction. All Dave can say about this is that he’s glad WWF stole Rod Tronguard last week because it means we don’t have to hear him try to explain this. Nevertheless, the report Dave got says the match itself was great, 4 stars easily.
The sale of the NWA to Turner isn’t final, but it looks like the only holdup left is that Jim Crockett needs work out a deal with Bill Watts over the remainder of his payments from the UWF sale last year. Reportedly, he still owes Watts around $3 million, and he’s trying to make deals to settle his debts at approximately 40-60% of their actual values, so he’s hoping to settle at around $1.5 million to Watts, and Jack Petrick of Turner, who will run the new company, is mediating their negotiations.
Jim Crockett has also been meeting with Fritz Von Erich. It’s not clear what they’re discussing, but if it does become a working agreement, that would pull World Class out of their current alliance and take away the most-syndicated part of the All Pro Wrestling syndicated network. It would also pull them from the ppv discussed above and kill its main event.
Now it’s time for Dave to talk about the NWA’s financials and get to what he promised last week: a long form discussion of what he thinks the NWA needs to do not only to survive but improve their position. Financially speaking, if the NWA continues as they have been under Turner ownership, then Turner will have wasted its money. The UWF buyout is the root of some of their problems, but it can’t be blamed for things like declining house show attendance and revenues or tv ratings. Dave’s talked about the problems with NWA booking and production at length before, but a bigger factor for Dave is that Jim Crockett’s tenure as the head of the NWA has been marked by an inability to strike when the iron is hot when it comes time to make changes. And while Jack Petrick will be above him, Dave isn’t sure how much actual power Petrick will have, and worries that if Crockett remains driving things, the NWA will stay the same. While changing management styles isn’t guaranteed to win, keeping the same style is guaranteed to lose. He wants to be clear that he enjoys the NWA, but he’s enjoyed a lot of things that aren’t financially viable and aren’t around anymore, and if Turner weren’t stepping in, it’s very probable that the NWA would be gone by the end of the year.
There’s a lot of potential in a well-run new company built on the NWA, though. By run correctly, Dave means paying attention to what the fans actually want. He gives Dusty Credit for being able to be creative without changing the cast at the top, but they really do need a change in the main event scene with new stars and he hasn’t been willing to make those changes even when circumstances like the UWF buyout gave him everything he needed on a silver platter. So Dave’s calling for a nearly complete overhaul. A former promoter and friend of Dave’s has long complained about how seedy the business is behind the scenes, and part of that, according to the friend, is that most who have been in positions of power in the industry have come up through the business as a wrestler first. They’ve been screwed, stiffed on payouts, lied to, etc., and when that wrestler becomes a booker or promoter they perpetuate the same thing on the wrestlers and the business perpetuates in this way. And this cycle needs to stop, and that’s the first thing that needs to be done. To that end, Dave feels the big thing that needs to happen is a major change in employee relations. Wrestlers deserve medical insurance and for road expenses, including travel and lodging at decent hotels (and it should be possible to get a good group rate) to be paid. A guy like Flair may want to stay at a more expensive hotel, and he should be able to, provided he covers the difference from the base rate. Wrestlers should be paid a salary, either at a weekly rate or a per-match rate, regardless of gate figures - guaranteed contracts are necessary to reduce avenues or exploiting wrestlers. Ultimately, the wrestlers need consistent and fair payouts. They might not make as much on a really hot week with high gates, but they’ll be okay because they’ll have a set amount of money coming in even on the bad weeks.
Dave notes that wrestling tv shows shouldn’t be self-contained, but like a soap opera or a puzzle piece, fitting into a larger whole and giving you a reason to want to watch the next episode. The issue for the NWA is that their tv writing right now shows almost no planning for the future. They don’t tease the next week, or even the Sunday shows. They can’t give away the house show main event, nor should they since they don’t need to give those away to get good ratings, but they don’t give away anything of consequence on tv at all, and that leads to ratings decline. Squashes are important to get over specific moves as deadly, but they can be longer to make them look competitive and like the winner has actually worked for it. Jobbers who get nothing in make the product look weak and diminishes the effect of the win - anyone can win a fight against someone who puts up no offense. Plus, too many quick squashes is just bad television. Do surprising things to keep fans on their toes. Spread angles among all the tv shows - the TBS morning and Sunday shows never have any angles, so you know nothing is going to advance there. More variety than matches, speeches, interviews is necessary to give the Saturday show more personality. Do some face vs. face or heel vs. heel matches with imaginative finishers sometimes to help build up title contenders. A world title contender should be beating midcard guys on Main Event with his finisher to build him up and set him up well ahead of his title match. Do interesting angles to recapture interest when ratings go down. That’s the gist of Dave’s advice on NWA’s tv format.
For merchandising, Dave begins by mocking the idea of the Four Horseman vitamins. There need to be checks and balances to prevent such dumb ideas from getting made. WWF has an advantage in that they aim their product at children and design merchandise accordingly. Merchandising for adults is harder, but given the 18-30 male demographic where the NWA is strongest, you can still come up with good ideas. Sting or Luger workout videos, videos covering Flair’s career for the past decade, a full-length tape of legendary matches should all be no brainers. House shows shouldn’t be the only way to get posters, t-shirts, or photos, and wrestlers should be wearing their merch during interviews to get the merch over. The NWA could put out a magazine and if it were any good it would print money in the long run, but you can’t just give up after an issue or two.
Last, Dave plays booker and makes his suggestions for fixing NWA’s booking. Nobody is going to be 100% successful, and anyone can come up with a bunch of ideas and throw them at the wall to see what sticks. But some key things Dave thinks would improve NWA booking include not having the head booker wrestle. The booker should be receptive to all ideas from the wrestlers and involve the wrestlers in the process of planning out their programs to go along with the general booking direction. The booker should also be receptive to what the fans want. If a wrestler is getting over without a push like Sting is, it’s bad to hold him back in favor of the guy you want to push. So don’t let original plans be the be all and end all - go with the flow of what the fans want and push the wrestlers they want to see. The booker also needs to be able to tell when an act is getting stale and shake things up so they don’t get as stale as the Road Warriors have gotten. Specific to the loss of Anderson and Blanchard, Dave pitches how to work that to their advantage once the shows that are already booked through early October are done: have the Midnight Express promise to wipe out the Horsemen and feud with Flair and Windham. Have the Road Warriors turn heel by attacking Sting, who can team with Luger in the short term, and suddenly you have several non-stale acts in the tag division, and you can postpone a prospective Flair face turn because you don’t want too many turns all at once.
Dave also suggests giving a real push to get the junior heavyweight division over (a young Eric Bischoff just read this and had a brilliant idea, then burned his copy of the Observer so he could claim he came to it on his own). The idea that they can’t draw has no actual basis in reality, but the way the NWA has handled the division has created a self-fulfilling prophecy that the division is meaningless (sounds like the WWE Divas division in the future). Dave suggests bringing in an outstanding, charismatic wrestler to serve as the lynchpin of the division, and another charismatic opponent to get him over. Further, don’t job out your jr heavyweights to the heavyweights - let them hold their own and when they do lose, make it clear that they were on the verge of winning. He also suggests making Sting the NWA champion and getting in a killer heel in Vader, Bigelow, or Stan Hansen to feud with him while they groom Flair and Windham for subsequent feuds. Flair as champion right now is stale. Aside from a couple blips, he’s effectively been champion for seven years now. He’s great, but that’s just too long, and an over young guy like Sting should get the chance to run as far as possible. Plus, Flair is maybe even better as an obsessed challenger than he is as champion. Other smaller notes include not repeating finishes in the same building, less screwjob finishes (Dave says no ref bumps for the next six months). Finally, giving fans reason to think about the product hooks them and makes them more loyal as customers.
Makhan Singh’s time as Stampede’s color commentator has come to a close thanks to his current headline feud with Steve DiSalvo over the North American Title. But the story for Dave is about how Ed Whalen pushed DiSalvo’s face turn and Dave figuring out what he doesn’t like about Whalen. And that’s that while guys like Gordon Solie or Lance Russell might be better known than the wrestlers in their local areas, they put over the wrestlers as the stars, while Whalen puts himself above the wrestling and wrestlers rather than trying to build up the show with his notoriety in the area.
Lance Idol has debuted in Stampede, and they’re a bit out of hand with their build up. He’s one of the better workers and works like Ray Stevens, but they have him claiming wins over Randy Savage, Ric Flair, Ted DiBiase, and Brutus Beefcake. One of these things is not like the other. One of these things is the NWA World Champion. Anyway, he’s a good worker but overacts a bit. By the way, Dave mentions that the most impressive guy in Stampede is one Chris Benoit, who is the calibre of Brad Armstrong but works a style patterned off Dynamite Kid.
All Japan closed their latest tour on September 9 with a Jumbo Tsuruta vs. Abdullah the Butcher match for the International Title, setting up Tiger Mask II and Jimmy Snuka as a team for the winter tag tournament. Abdullah got disqualified by bashing Tsuruta with a chair, then Tiger Mask ran in to make the save, but got taken out. Jimmy Snuka then came out and turned on Abdullah to help Tiger Mask and Tsuruta. Snuka has signed full time with the promotion lately, in a similar deal to John Tenta.
On September 5, Hisashi Shinma told the New Japan audience that Antonio Inoki was retiring from wrestling in Japan. Inoki said he would go to the U.S. for a tour to wrestle guys like Hogan, but that was it. He hasn’t wrestled since his draw against Fujianami. This is, of course, a ploy, to build interest in Inoki again so he can get back on top in due time, as he and Shinma assume that having Choshu and Fujinami on top will fail and they will come begging Inoki to restore order and bring ratings back up. Speaking of ratings, New Japan’s ratings are still dangerously low and in danger of cancellation when baseball season starts in the Spring. Because of this, New Japan has already begun putting out feelers to local stations in case they lose their current deal.
Akira Maeda will miss the September 24 UWF show, which means that show will be the first big test of the promotion. He apparently has appendicitis or some other abdominal illness, so the main event will be Takada vs. Yamazaki. If the show is successful, it proves that it’s not just Maeda who is over, but the style itself.
Chigusa Nagayo’s U.S. tour from October 12-October 26 will see her performing both at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas on October 15 and in Memphis on the 17th. Word is she may pop in for a show or two with the NWA (against Misty Blue) or the AWA (against Madusa). For the Dallas and Memphis shows, her opponents are not confirmed, but Monster Ripper, Debbie Combs, and Candi Divine are the main names being talked about.
Ricky Morton has left the NWA. No surprise, as he was going to Japan anyway. But that’s done now.
This past week the NWA’s Saturday show on TBS didn’t air because the Braves has a make-up game that pre-empted them. Despite wrestling having higher ratings than baseball, baseball is higher on the priority list for TBS.
The NWA’s recent Clash is estimated to have grossed $500,000 in ad revenue, $400,000 of which should be profit. That profit is almost entirely for TBS, not the NWA, to be clear.
Dustin Rhodes made his debut on September 13 in FCW against Bob Cook.
Nord the Barbarian is negotiating with Giant Baba to come work for All Japan. With the death of Bruiser Brody and how that’s been playing out in All Japan, Nord could get over huge as Brody’s protege for at least a year before anyone realized his in-ring capabilities weren’t up to snuff. And there are worse ways to improve your ring work than spending a year in Japan. It could actually make him a damn fine wrestler, even.
A Minneapolis radio show did a poll and Sting won most popular wrestler in the state. Second through seventh places were Hogan, Luger, Savage, the Road Warriors, Flair, and Dusty Rhodes. The most hated were Honkytonk Man, Andre, Flair, Jim Duggan, Barry Windham, and Curt Hennig. It’s a bad sign for the AWA that none of their guys finished in the top ten on either side except Ron Garvin in 7th on unpopularity.
Dave issues a correction in the reporting of the Summerslam buyrate, as it turns out that Request TV did not actually report a lower than expected buyrate. A spokesperson for the company said the buyrate was lower than projected, but that seems to be the spokesperson’s personal take. Otherwise, reports from last week seem pretty consistent overall at around a 9% buyrate in the New York area, which is below what WWE has previously done but well above the national average.
When the NWA took the tag titles off Anderson and Blanchard, they did a very interesting double pin situation. Blanchard and Eaton were the legal men, but Eaton wound up pinning Anderson as Lane was pinned by Blanchard, and the referee counted three with both hands, apparently counting both pins. However, the referee awarded the match and the gold to the Midnights. No tv cameras were present and the reports Dave has received also say that the match was changed from best 2 of 3 falls to one fall on the fly.
Global Wrestling in Florida is canceling all house shows.
According to the gossip column in USA today, the New York Daily News is considering running a weekly pro wrestling column. The decision ought to be final within a week or so, and word is that Vince McMahon will not be a fan of this if it happens.
WWF’s syndicated network fell to the lowest Dave’s ever seen it for the week of August 14, getting an overall 8.5 rating, compared to the NWA’s 6.4. They were up the next week, however, getting an 11.0, while the NWA fell to a 5.8.
A man named Karl Kunnert pled guilty of misdemeanor theft for promising a wrestling card at Campe Lejeune featuring Ric Flair, Lex Luger, Nikita Koloff, and Jimmy Valiant. He got the Marine Corps to give him $3,500 to put on the show, so he made a small amount in his fraudulent attempt here. Kunnert never contacted Jim Crockett Promotions about this, so therein lies the problem for him. He’ll be sentenced later this year.
Mel Saraceno has applied for his promoter’s license in Oregon so he can run opposite of Don Owen with his Pacific Coast Championship Wrestling promotion. Moondog Ed Moretti will be the booker, and Dale Gagner (the future fake Gagne) will be running the office. While it turns out he will not be buying out Billy Jack Haynes’ group, Saraceno will be using a bunch of the wrestlers Haynes had.
WWF’s TV tapings on September 13 had a lot of stuff happening, including the debut of Terry Taylor’s new gimmick as “The Little Red Rooster. He’s being paired with Bobby Heenan and it’s going to be a comedy routine with him being the new designated jobber of the Heenan crew, but a jobber who gets a bit of a push. Dave feels like Owen Hart’s getup makes him look like a chicken, so between Hart and Taylor he jokes that next up we’ll see Arn Anderson as a hen.
[WWF] Hercules has turned face and is feuding with Ted DiBase, who is pushing an angle where he is going to get something nobody else in the country has, which will be revealed to be a slave. Heenan sells Hernandez to DiBiase, who rebels and gets supported by Savage. Oh boy. That’s a fuck of a lot to unpack right there and I am not in a position to do so as I type this. What the fuck.
Watch: Ted DiBiase buys his "own personal slave" Hercules
Jake Roberts is back from missing a few dates because his stepfather died.
With Blanchard and Anderson coming to the WWF, it seems pretty clear that if they get split, Anderson will probably fare better. That said, if they come in as a team, even with the workrate drop they’ll experience they ought to be able to put on some good matches with the Bulldogs and Hart Foundation.
[Continental] The reason their show didn’t air on FNN this past weekend at the scheduled time is because the tape never made it to the station. It’s set now for 8:30 EST on Sunday, and they’ll re-air the major angle the following week as well. Strap in, y’all, big shit is going down in Continental and that’s going to begin blowing up next week.
Dave is going to go to the September 19 WWF show at the Cow Palace, to be headlined by Randy Savage vs. Andre the Giant. Apparently, he swore he wouldn’t do it, but he’s going to give it a go, and if it sucks, well, at least we can be assured he felt it sucked based on his own eyes.
One letter writer asks how Jerry Lawler manages to make his punches look so real, and wonders if it’s in part because Lawler has a reputation for humility that makes his opponents generally amenable to making him look good. Dave replies that he thinks part of the reason has to be Lawler’s background as an artist, which factors into the hand-eye coordination necessary to pull punches at the last second and make them look so good. As to the humility part of the question, Dave notes that since Lawler almost always has some degree of control, his opponents are careful to put him over in order to ensure they get good bookings in the future.
Jerry Lawler talks about teaching Becky Lynch to punch like he does and talks about being an artist
Another writer asks Dave to separate the awards between American and Japanese wrestling. He points out that the majority of fans simply don’t have enough exposure to be able to fairly compare American and Japanese stuff, and that he is just one reader who did not vote in the awards last year at all due to not feeling familiar enough with Japanese wrestling to vote. American readers without Japanese language ability can’t evaluate promos or commentary, and it makes following angles difficult. And if you can only evaluate based on the wrestling, why not include NCAA wrestling while we’re at it? Finally, he suggests covering more of the Mexican scene to see how much he influences his readers - the writer bets Dave will see a big uptick in votes for Mexican wrestlers if he does. Dave counters, with his most amusing/interesting point being the number of US promotions you can barely discern angles for (Global, AWA, Deep South come up) and how it's really not that hard to get the basic gist out of a Japanese promotion's angles. He also points out that there's not much worry about readers falsely voting for Japanese wrestlers for best on interviews when the reader doesn't speak Japanese - the readers tend to vote for wrestlers who speak their language.
Three more award categories and Dave’s thoughts on them. For Best Heel, Dave says that since retiring, it’s really apparent how much of an impact Dump Matsumoto had and that she should have been winning this category for the past few years. Nobody has had as much of an impact on ratings for their promotion as Dump did and she should have won in past years, especially last year. But that’s last year, and this year Dave thinks it’s got to be some ordering between Ted DiBiase, Eddie Gilbert, and Rick Rude. He gives DiBiase the slight edge over Gilbert for his exposure. For Best Television Show, of the weekly shows, it’s clear that Memphis has not had the same quality as in years past, while World Class is doing better than it was last year. NWA’s weekly shows are why speed search was invented and most have forgotten the AWA and we should as well. Ultimately, Dave comes up with New Japan, Continental, and WWF Superstars of Wrestling as his top three. Finally, for Worst Wrestling Show, and having seen several recent episodes from Deep South, the choice is really easy for him. The best things he can say are that the matches are bad, the announcing is bad, and the interviews are the worst you will ever see. When it comes to production values, then you’re getting into its real bad points. So that’s Dave’s pick.
Because I want you to suffer, watch an episode of Deep South if you can