October 31, 1988
- Rewinder Note: So you probably noticed that I didn't post a rewind these past two weeks. Without going into too much detail, these past two weeks have been heavily dysphoric for me and I wasn't terribly active on reddit at all for much of that time. I'm okay now and working on getting this to a manageable point. The rewinds will continue. Finally, thank you to those who reached out to check in on me. I really appreciate it.
- The negotiations have been finalized and contracts signed regarding the sale of the NWA to Turner Entertainment by Jim Crockett Promotions. The official date of ownership transfer will be November 2, following the exchange of money on November 1. Whether this will improve the NWA’s position or product remains to be seen, but two short-term improvements seem likely. First, this should spell the end of the issues with the wrestlers worrying about getting paid, and will likely lead to the wrestlers being made whole as a means of establishing good will and holding onto key talent. Second, with the need to build for the December ppv, Dusty will probably be feeling the pressure to book some really entertaining stuff to show his worth to the company. All that said, don’t expect this to lead to immediately perceptible operational changes for the company before next year. The best you can really hope for before then is just some shakeup of how they format tv. It’s gonna be a while before we know for sure how this will shake out.
- They Live is scheduled to open this Friday, and it’s apparent that the wrestling business isn’t the only business with problems, as Universal originally scheduled it to release on the same day as their latest Halloween movie. You know, just eat your own potential profits right there. Anyway, after hyping up the movie for release, they realized this and had to push it back a week to avoid releasing two horror movies on the same night. As long as the movie can manage two decent weeks, it should pull a profit thanks to its low budget, but this almost certainly hurt it a bit. If it’s a success, that will basically guarantee Roddy Piper’s five movie deal with John Carpenter doesn’t fall through, and if that’s the case, then don’t expect to see him back near a wrestling ring for a long while, if ever. They Live isn’t getting an advanced screening for critics, so which basically says the studio doesn’t expect it to be well received and are hoping to get good numbers before word of mouth kills it in theaters, if audiences wind up agreeing with critics on it.
- Dave watched two episodes of Learning the Ropes, the tv show with NWA wrestlers involved. The long and the short of it is that they really had to stretch to figure out how to involve the wrestlers and it’s just not good, especially the two minutes per episode where the main character actually wrestles. They treat the wrestling as completely legitimate, yet still have the Masked Maniac hanging out in either the heel or face dressing room playing cards and such with his opponents before the matches. Don’t give it a watch.
- Seriously, do not watch this
- Survivor Series has had some slight alterations to its lineup. The latest info Dave has Hogan/Savage/Hercules/Koko B. Ware against Akeem/Bossman/DiBiase/Haku, with a fifth member for each team not yet locked in. Then you have Warrior/Beefcake/Blue Blazer/Sam Houston/Don Muraco vs. Bass/Honkytonk/Valentine/Danny Davis/Badnews Brown, no changes to the tag team Survivor Series match, and finally Roberts/Duggan/Patera/JYD/Santana vs. Andre/Bravo/Rude/Perfect and a fifth guy, probably Red Rooster. Altogether, WWF clearly knows how to promote a ppv wrestling show, but nothing about this show screams that it’s a must-buy. It’ll most likely do well and make money, but not nearly as much as last year’s
- Dave got to watch the Road Warrior heel turn and loved it. The way they destroyed Sting at the end was really good, and the only improvement Dave can think of is if they would do an injury angle with Sting where they let him do a Japan tour and do occasional progress reports of him getting better before making a big return, but that would get him over more and they’re setting up the story that the Road Warriors attacked him to send a message to Dusty, who’s the real face of this feud. And hey, if Dusty can convince the top brass at Turner that he’s indispensable, that strengthens his position even if it turns out bad for the product.
- There’s not a lot of news, so Dave wants to talk steroids. Size has always been a factor in the industry, determining who gets pushes and such, but the past decade and the last five years especially have seen that taken to an extreme where you basically need steroids to have a chance of being a top guy, and your actual wrestling ability matters little to none. There are throwback guys like Ted DiBiase who aren’t roidheads, but it’s generally agreed that his non-roided physique holds him back from being seriously considered a top guy by many fans and by the company. Because it’s become such a necessity to making it in the business, it’s hard to knock wrestlers for using steroids. It’s unfortunate that what steroids have turned the business into, but if that’s the game then you can’t fault the wrestlers for playing it.
- Of course, the worst part of all this is the dangers of steroid abuse. It’s not clear in 1988 how much the warnings about the dangers of steroids might be accurate or might be exaggerated - a number of wrestlers in the last year have had heart attacks, strokes, and other heart complications attributed to steroids. Some heavy users have had cancer diagnoses in the past. Some admitted heavy users have had children with major birth defects. Since in the short term most seem not to be hit by these effects, and since the long-term effects are still uncertain, it seems most wrestlers are happy to take their chances playing Russian roulette with their health and well-being. But is it any more dangerous than wrestling already is? Injury is inevitable in this business, and that leads to painkillers and painkiller addiction. And there’s no obvious, ready solution either. The Olympics and NFL have testing, but Olympians have just turned to more dangerous drugs like human growth hormone and use oral steroids, which is undetectable. Dave talks about Canadian Olympian Ben Johnson, who went from a national hero to disgrace within days of setting a world record 100 meter dash after pissing hot. Wrestling could do testing, but it seems likely such a thing would only happen as a PR move, and without any public outcry to motivate it, it’s not going to happen anyway.
- Ultimately, Dave thinks steroid use at the moment ought to be a personal choice for the wrestler. If the extra mass and strength is worth the risk, then it’s up to them. But a lot of wrestlers and would-be wrestlers are afraid of the health consequences, which is rational. Others are worried about how use might hurt their performance (that extra muscle mass can limit your agility and flexibility, and hurt cardio. Some give up on making it. Others give in to the pressure. Because the unfortunate reality is that if you want to make money in the business as it stands today, you’re going to have to do it, and it matters more than your charisma or actual skill, even, to get that initial push. Ultimately, change is going to have to come either from promoters changing policy or fans changing what they want to see. A lot of people believe the change in look from the wrestlers of yesteryear to the roided out muscelbound look of today has been a big factor in the media breakthrough of recent years, and promoters have responded to this by pushing unskilled lifters ahead of trained wrestlers with better personality and talent on look alone. It’s absolutely out of control in the WWF especially, where Ted DiBiase got far less over than anticipated despite being probably the best all-around performer the company has ever had, all because he’s compared unfavorably in look to Hogan and Savage. Which brings up the question of whether audiences can be taught that people who aren’t musclebound roid monsters can be top stars.
- In Memphis on October 23 they did another Kerry Von Erich vs. Jerry Lawler unification match, this time in a cage. The rule was that Jeff Jarrett kept the keys to the cage and the first to escape won both belts. No word on how they managed to do this one without unifying yet. Dave got to watch their recent unification match from Nashville, and they do good work within their limitations, but they’ve pretty well killed the unification gimmick. The matches aren’t really any different from a WWF match in style in a lot of ways.
- World Class’s Cotton Bowl show drew around 3,500 fans for a total gate of $43,000, about $7,000 shy of their target gate. It also shows how much drawing power this unification gimmick has (or rather, doesn’t have), that it only drew 3,500.
- This past Tuesday, Jerry Jarrett was supposed to sign a contract for 30% ownership of World Class, but he didn’t show up.
- Percy Pringle resigned from World Class. He got word that he’d be replaced in merchandising by Kerry and Kevin Von Erich’s wives and decided to quit before he got fired.
- Paul E. Dangerously and the Midnight Express (Randy Rose and Dennis Condrey version) have signed with the NWA and will debut on November 1. Their first TBS appearance will be the following Saturday, as they begin a feud with Jim Cornette’s Midnight Express.
- The NWA’s U.S. Tag Title tournament kicked off on the October 20 Saginaw, Michigan taping, which drew the only decent gate of the week at $40,000. Eddie Gilbert and Ron Simmons beat Larry Zbyszko and Al Perez and the Russian Assassins drew the Koloffs in a double disqualification. Dave expects the Fantastics and Sheepherders to be the final.
- Lex Luger had an eye infection, so Flair wrestled Sting at the top of all the shows this past week. Sting won by disqualification every time. Dave notes that the only things getting over like crazy are the apparent turn of Rick Steiner and Steve Williams joining the Varsity Club, and he hopes Sting gets a title soon so he doesn’t lose momentum going into the Sting/Luger vs. Road Warriors feud.
- The apparent first order from Turner is for all wrestlers except Ric Flair to move to Atlanta by the first of the month.
- Remember that cage match to unify the AWA and World Class titles I talked about earlier? Well it happened, and Lawler has unified the titles. The finish had Kerry with Lawler beat with the Claw, and when he asked Jarrett to open the door, Jarrett slammed the door on his head. Lawler then got out first, and Dave says this was the finish he would have done, though he expected another non-finish with both climbing out and hitting the floor at the same time instead. There will be a couple more rematches before the big ppv, so the unified title may change hands still between now and then.
- And as of Monday morning, TBS and Crockett official word is that the sale still has not been completed. Dave isn’t sure if this means the sale won’t be officially completed until the 1st when money changes hands, or if it means the contracts were not actually signed on Friday. More on this next week.
- Chigusa Nagayo has matches with Stampede scheduled for this week. Also, her match in Oklahoma against Pantera Sureña was reportedly really good.
- All Japan’s October 17 battle for the triple crown between Jumbo Tsuruta and Stan Hansen ended in a double count out. As expected.
- Wrestler Jim Wilson responds to Dave’s long discussion about him from a few weeks back. He issues a number of corrections and takes a few shots, including noting that Dave going over his awards favorites each week puts a strong influence on the award results. Anyway, among the things he enlightens us with are the fact that apparently the 1956 judgment against the NWA led to monitoring by the Justice Department all the way through 1985, when the Justice Department refused the NWA’s request to lift the consent decree; Ron Pope was a witness not a litigant in the NAACP’s 1979 investigation of pro wrestling in California; what killed the Georgia bill to establish a wrestling commission was pressure from Ted Turner and Carl Sanders on state Senator Culver Kidd; some stuff about Jimmy Carter that I’m not sure what he’s getting at; and that it’s laughable to claim that blacklisting doesn’t happen in wrestling. Wilson takes issue with Dave’s claim that a wrestling union would be impractical or unlikely to success, saying that’s an excuse, not an actual reason to give up on trying, same as Dave’s thoughts on the business not being stable enough for pensions - the California State Athletic Commission was able to create a pension fund for boxers out by using 3% of the live gate and 3% of each boxer’s net purse. Dave’s discussion of the drunkard soccer player reads like insinuation to Wilson, and he doesn’t appreciate that, and he also takes issue with the information Dave gave about his pro football career. He also corrects Dave’s figures on the percentage of audiences that is Black, having paid to have a study done and found that 50% of paid attendance in Georgia is from Black folks and 5% of wrestlers are Black. As a final interesting bit, here’s a paragraph in full to give a better picture of Wilson’s overall argument:
- Your remarks that “the wrestling business is far from perfect, nor is any other business,” and “certainly there are cases in which management doesn’t pay wrestlers what they are truly worth, but that holds true for every business,” and the “sad realities of the entertainment business[“] are also ideological. They are classic conservatism. There’s a little bad in everything. It’s probably inevitable, so let’s not worry about it.
- Dave responds, as you might expect. He notes that he got his information on Wilson’s football career from a football encyclopedia and then discusses the actual salient stuff. He notes that in the 30ish years following the Justice Department’s consent decree, they never brought any charges against the NWA or any body in pro wrestling. Dave says he would like to see a wrestler’s union personally, but he’s “realistic enough to know that you would have a virtually impossible time starting it,” which seems to just not really offer support on why that’s realistic and doesn’t seem to fully engage Wilson’s argument. Dave also discusses systemic racism in wrestling and, well, he says a lot of correct things about tokenism in wrestling, but I really can’t shake the feeling that his discussion of Ron Pope’s workrate is almost beside the point and Dave fixates too much on that when trying to discuss systemic issues in the business. Anyway, here’s what he has to say, please let me know if you think I’m off base in thinking he’s whiffing:
- Whether Ron Pope was a litigant or a witness in the NAACP’s investigation of wrestling in California (and I will assume Kim Wilson is correct as he would have more knowledge of those proceedings than I would), I can recall Pope still working in the wrestling business on-and-off through 1986 for both Fred Behrend’s Texas All-Star Wrestling, and after quitting that office and picketing the office claiming racism, he still got a job with World Class as Zulu before quitting that when he refused to put Mike Von Erich over. Now I am not denying that many pro wrestling promotions are racist, and those that aren’t totally racist do practice an unwritten rule of “tokenism” (ie. you get a black star, but usually only one and he is your black star and when he leaves, you try and replace him with another black star, which is an attitude that is decades behind the times, particularly when some of the most popular entertainers in this country, and equally popular to all races, are black and it hasn’t hurt their TV network or their movie company to push several “black stars” at once). The plight of the black in wrestling is something this business should hang its head in shame over, no matter what percentage of the live audience is black. So Pope’s charges were valid, but nevertheless he testified in many places, including the New York State Senate, against pro wrestling, and Pope was certainly an abysmal worker, one of the worst around, yet he was still able to find employment in this business after all this, which shows that a total worldwide blacklist is more paranoia than fact.
- In “That escalated quickly” news, oe of the letter writers offers their unofficial 1988 awards and gives Vince McMahon the “Adolf Hitler Award (for trying to take over the wrestling world). Vince is a scuzzy guy, but I feel like printing that is just poor judgment, Dave.
- Time once again for Dave’s award picks. For Most Obnoxious Personality, Dave doesn’t offer his picks and just outlines the criteria. For Worst TV Announcer, Dave picks Ed Whalen (Stampede), Billy Graham (WWF), and David Crockett (NWA) for his top three. For Worst Promotion, Billy Jack Haynes’ Oregon Wrestling Federation takes the cake, as it was a disaster from start to finish. The wrestling was bad, the talent was bad, the planning was nonexistent, and the whole thing cratered within about two months.
- Larry Sharpe’s students did a show on October 22 that drew 800. The best worker was Tony Stetson, who will be the future Broad Street Bully in ECW.
- Invader #1 (fuck Invader #1) did a babyface promo on tv in Puerto Rico a couple weeks back where he talked about being falsely accused of murder and wanting a trial to clear his name. He’s regularly appearing in the babyface dugouts at the big shows and fans are buying it, and Dave says the general expectation at this stage is that the charges against him will wind up being dropped, though there is a chance the case still might make it to trial.
- Sputnik Monroe, who was a major proponent of integration in wrestling during the late Jim Crow era, is running a weekly independent show at a Memphis bar. He’s also reportedly wrestling on those cards as well.
- George Steele had colon surgery and has dropped over 60 lbs. He’s considering making a comeback to the WWF.