September 26, 1994
- So as a lot of you are aware, Dave called these posts "kind of sleazy" on Twitter last night. I have a few thoughts on it. For starters, I get the impression that Dave probably isn't familiar with these posts. The initial tweet made it sound like some guy on Reddit is just copying and pasting all his stuff and claiming it as their own, which is obviously not the case.
- On every post, there's a link at the very beginning to his site, encouraging people to subscribe to f4wonline because it's worth it. I'm not now and never will try to monetize it or do any of this for my benefit. I don't care. I'm only doing it because I genuinely love reading them and writing the recaps. It's enjoyable to me and I like learning new things. Hell, for the first several months I was doing this, I didn't even get useless Reddit karma-points for it because text posts didn't give karma. But allow me to reiterate: these posts only scratch the surface of his archives. For every paragraph I write, there's usually several more paragraphs of details and context that I'm leaving out that are incredibly interesting. His site is 1000% worth the money and the old newsletter archives are only a fraction of the reason why.
- Literally dozens of people have commented saying these posts made them subscribe. In fact, almost all of the replies to Dave's tweet are people telling him they subscribed to his site because of these posts when they otherwise wouldn't have. If anything, I truly believe these posts are driving traffic to him rather than away, which I think is awesome.
- I really don't want to stop posting these, I enjoy writing them, people enjoy reading them, and I truly believe (and many of you have proven) that these posts are actually driving subscriptions to his site. I respect the hell out of Dave Meltzer. If he reads this and still has a problem with me doing it, let me know, let's talk about it. I don't want to step on anyone's toes. But given how much of his new content is directly copied and pasted here every day, I honestly don't think what I'm doing is remotely comparable.
- One last thing: the overwhelming majority of you have been super supportive of this and have been defending me and I appreciate it. To those who have tweeted to Dave and told him that these posts are the reason you subscribed, thank you sincerely, I hope it changes his opinion. I'd love to have his blessing on this. To those of you who have shit-talked Dave over it, please don't. I don't think he knows the full situation here and he's got a right to feel however he wants about it regardless. I can respect that and only hope he can see that this isn't what the initial tweet made it sound like.
- So with all that being said...
- The only good news right now for WWF is that Summerslam's buyrate came in only slightly lower than last year's Summerslam, which in this day and age, is considered a success.
- UFC 3's PPV buyrate is in and it did a 0.65, which is better than every WCW's PPV in the last two years, aside from the recent Hogan/Flair show and is almost in the low-end of WWF buyrates. And considering they did this without any television promotion (whereas WWF and WCW have hours of TV each week to promote) and without any household name stars, this can only be considered a monster success and everyone expects UFC 4, in December, to do even bigger numbers. The big question of UFC that everyone wants to know is, "Is it really a shoot?" Dave thinks it is and he thinks someone is going to eventually get seriously hurt. Which will then lead to PPV distributors getting squeamish about carrying it and UFC can't survive without PPV.
- Side note here: Dave goes on and on about UFC and while it's definitely interesting, I'm not enough of an MMA fan to really recognize when something from 20+ years ago is noteworthy enough to include. Plus, this is the wrestling subreddit. I'll continue to drop MMA tidbits in there as I see them if I think they're interesting or it affects wrestling, but I probably won't spend too much time recapping MMA stuff, even if Dave does.
- WCW's Fall Brawl is in the books and Dave was underwhelmed. He heard a lot of complaints from people upset over the lack of blood in the War Games match. Cactus Jack lost a loser leaves WCW match and he's done with the promotion. Jim Duggan filled in for Ricky Steamboat and won the U.S. title in 35 seconds by squashing Steve Austin. Vader/Sting was the best match on the show, even though the booking didn't make a lot of sense.
- The biggest news coming out of Fall Brawl is that Ricky Steamboat had to pull out of his match with Steve Austin and forfeited the U.S. Title due to a legit back injury. Steamboat injured his back in one of his recent matches with Steve Austin last month and WCW has known about the injury since then but continued to advertise an Austin/Steamboat match despite knowing that he wouldn't be wrestling (Dave has a real pet peeve about false advertising). Steamboat isn't expected back until at least January, but there's real concern that the injury might be career-ending (indeed it was. Steamboat didn't wrestle another match until 15 years later, when he finally returned to the ring at Wrestlemania 25 and had that brief feud with Chris Jericho).
- WCW held a press conference in Detroit to officially announce the Halloween Havoc PPV, featuring appearances by Muhammad Ali and Mr. T as the special referee. Earlier in the week, negotiations with Mr. T over money caused him to pull out of the show and they were going to drop the special ref gimmick, but they worked it out so he came back on board at the last minute. Because of Muhammad Ali, the story got a lot of mainstream coverage and WCW sold $40,000 worth of tickets the first day they went on sale, which is their biggest first-day sales in years.
- FMW had to cancel 2 recent shows because they were outdoor events and the cities had just been hit by a typhoon. I suppose that's a decent reason.
- In Michinoku Pro, they did an angle where Shiryu, Sato, and Terry Boy formed a stable called Kaientai (Sho Funaki and Taka Michinoku would later join the group and they would eventually reform it as a tag team in WWF during the Attitude Era. But this is the beginning of Kaientai.....indeed).
- The story of Jim Cornette's arrest made several local and national newspapers. Jim Cornette changed his answering machine message to say, "Hi, this is Richard Kimball (the character from the movie "The Fugitive") and I swear it was a one-armed man with that baseball bat. If you've got a message about Smoky Mountain Wrestling, leave it. If you've got a message about my new paint, body and auto glass shop, leave that too." (Cornette's pretty funny, I gotta give him that). Cornette has agreed to pay for the damage to the car if O'Connor returns his video camera.
- Ole Anderson got fired from WCW. Anderson's son Bryant is expected to debut for SMW soon, so Ole Anderson filmed several promos for SMW, promoting his son. Eric Bischoff apparently told Ole that it wasn't in his best interest to be associating with Cornette and SMW and then fired Ole the next day.
- Chris Jericho's broken arm has apparently spelled the end of he and Lance Storm's tag team in SMW. Cornette was paying them each a $900 a week guarantee, which is more than anyone else in the company is making, because he expected the team to turn the promotion around. But the Thrillseekers didn't get over as well as Cornette hoped and with the promotion struggling, they can't justify the price tag, especially with Jericho on the shelf, so they're gone.
- Missy Hyatt appeared on the Sally Jessy Raphael talk show in what appeared to be a fictional role, playing a woman who was mistreated by her boyfriend. Dave had a friend of his appear on the show several years ago and the friend told him the whole thing was scripted and fictional. (Can't find any video of Missy on this show).
- Jim Crockett held his second TV taping for his new NWA promotion and it was a total bust. All no-name wrestlers, no continuity from the previous TV taping, very few wrestlers who worked the first show returned because they were unhappy with their pay, and the show only drew about 300 fans to a building that holds 2,500. And finally, the matches all sucked.
- Sabu and Tazmaniac had a hardcore match at an indie show in Michigan that included the following foreign objects: A car radiator, a television, a radio, a VCR, a freezer door, a baseball bat, a fan, a toaster, a vacuum cleaner, a pool cue and more.
- Speaking of Sabu, he's apparently talking about going to WWF in a few months, but no confirmation on that.
- Road Warrior Animal is telling people he plans to return to the ring in early 1995 and reform the tag team with Hawk in New Japan and probably WCW. Animal reportedly looks enormous lately.
- Sandy Barr is talking about re-opening his Championship Wrestling USA promotion soon. The company has been shut down ever since they lost tons of money promoting the big show that Tonya Harding appeared on.
- The AAA show being produced by WCW is called "When Worlds Collide." However, ECW (Paul Heyman in particular) is throwing a fit because ECW recently released a video with the same name. Heyman has gotten lawyers involved and the two sides are discussing a settlement. Heyman is willing to drop the issue if Ric Flair would come work a 60-minute draw at the ECW Arena against Shane Douglas. Flair was approached about the idea and flat out refused. There's been talk about WCW allowing Ron Simmons to work ECW's upcoming Florida show, but that's up in the air also. For now, latest word is WCW is planning to go ahead and use the "When Worlds Collide" name anyway and just take their chances against ECW.
- WCW has found themselves in the midst of a bit of a bidding war. UWFI in Japan was wanting to sign a deal with WCW to exchange talent, but when New Japan heard about it, they offered WCW more money for a similar deal. Honestly, most of WCW's stars don't really mean much to the average NJPW fan, but they mostly just want to sign the WCW deal in order to keep UWFI from getting it because if they could get Hogan or Flair to come work UWFI shows, that would still be a pretty big deal for them. So NJPW is mostly just doing this to fuck over UWFI, not because they actually care about working with WCW.
- Vader is now scheduled to work against Hulk Hogan at Starrcade. Hogan had initially refused to work with Vader because of his reputation for working stiff, but Vader has promised WCW that he'll take it easy on him, so that is now the plan. The original plans called for Hogan to drop the belt to Sting at the show but that's obviously been changed.
- Bad weekend for Steve Austin, who not only had to put over Jim Duggan in 35 seconds at the PPV, but his house flooded the day before.
- WWF's All-American show is being renamed The Zone and will feature more wrestling and less talk in an attempt to counteract the ratings beating the show has been taken on Sunday since the NFL and FOX deal started.
- Dave offhandedly mentions that WWF is trying to bring back Ultimate Warrior.
- Superstar Billy Graham's long-standing lawsuit against WWF was partially settled and then dropped this week due to a statute of limitations issue. Graham had sued WWF, Dr. Zahorian, and the makers of several different brands of steroids. The steroid companies settled and Graham will receive around $30,000 total, but it is believed the entire amount will go to his lawyers because his legal costs exceed that amount. Meanwhile, WWF and Zahorian both refused to settle and then the suit was dropped because there's a 2-year statute of limitations and since Graham waited many years before filing the suit, a judge would have tossed the case out anyway if it had gone to trial.
- A recent TV Guide article listed WWF as one of the magazine's favorite guilty pleasure shows, but also mentioned the steroid scandal. Linda McMahon wrote a letter to the magazine that they printed, saying she was glad they liked the show, but argued that they have been testing for steroids since 1991 and that they were cleared of any wrongdoing in the trial.
- On the WWF Superstars show that airs in Belgium and the Netherlands, the guy who does commentary for the shows completely buried the product, saying repeatedly that the matches are fake, the wrestlers are all friends, and no one ever really gets hurt. Needless to say, he's probably going to get fired.
- Razor Ramon has told friends he plans to take some time off at the beginning of the year to spend some time with his family.
- Sparky Plugg's name has been changed to Bob "Spark Plugg" Holly.