Wrestling Observer Rewinder

March 04, 1996

While nothing is official yet, Razor Ramon (Scott Hall) is expected to join WCW after his WWF contract expires in May. Hall sent a telegram to Vince McMahon last week, officially giving his 90-day notice. On that same day, Hall was suspended for 6 weeks for undisclosed reasons, which means he will miss Wrestlemania, which he was surely counting on to be his last big WWF pay day. It hasn't been a secret that Hall has been unhappy recently, due to earning significantly less money in 1995 than he did in '94 and because he was upset at having to work with Goldust. He's also missed several shows recently due to family issues. WCW is reportedly offering guaranteed big money and less travel, which would give him more time at home, so this isn't unexpected, though Vince McMahon is reportedly still angry about it.
Diesel (Kevin Nash) is also rumored to be headed to WCW when his contract ends and he missed this past weekends shows in controversial fashion. Diesel suffered some sort of shoulder injury during a recent match and is out injured. Even though he wouldn't be wrestling, Diesel was still expected to appear at house shows this week to interfere in Bret Hart's matches, but he refused to travel to the shows. Diesel has also been unhappy in WWF the past year since they took the title off him. Diesel jumping ship to WCW isn't as much of a guarantee as Hall, but it's considered a better than 50% chance that he'll be leaving. WCW is reportedly offering anywhere from $450,000 to $750,000 per year for him to come in and work as a top heel against Hulk Hogan.
The plan for Wrestlemania was for Razor Ramon and Goldust to have a "Miami Street Fight" which would be taped in a ghetto area of Miami (where Ramon is supposedly from) and would have been pre-taped and inserted into the show. They even taped a segment at the latest TV tapings, with Roddy Piper (as WWF President) telling Razor that he was booking them in a Miami Street Fight at Wrestlemania, but that will obviously never air now. With Ramon out, Roddy Piper will stepping back into the ring as his replacement in the Goldust feud. With both Razor Ramon and Diesel missing shows recently (as well as a show Shawn Michaels missed), Piper has been filling in there as well, coming out of semi-retirement to wrestle 1-2-3 Kid.
Ultimate Warrior has agreed to a new WWF contract and will make his return at Wrestlemania in a match against Hunter Hearst Helmsley. Warrior's deal isn't full-time, so he won't be working all the house shows, but should be appearing at all major events. Vince McMahon is reportedly upset at being called a hypocrite in the media for bringing back Warrior, given all the things he's said regarding steroids and WCW. McMahon has vowed that when Warrior comes back, he'll be subjected to the same steroid policy as everyone else.
Other Wrestlemania notes: Jeff Jarrett is expected to miss the show due to a back injury suffered a few weeks ago that is more serious than originally thought. The Vader vs. Yokozuna match has been changed to a 6-man match because they feel Yokozuna's out-of-control weight gain makes it impossible for him to have a decent singles match and concern over Vader's shoulder not being fully healed. And finally, the Huckster vs. Nacho Man match/skit (with Billionaire Ted as referee) has been moved to the pre-show for legal reasons. Since WCW owns the likenesses of the characters those people are based on, WWF was leery of putting the match on a show that people pay for, which could increase their legal liability if WCW sues. So they'll put it on the free show before the PPV.
At an awards dinner in Mexico, wrestlers from AAA and PROMELL got into a huge brawl that even involved guns being drawn. It's led to several of the wrestlers, most notably Konnan and Psicosis, reportedly being suspended by the Mexicali athletic commission for 3 months, which is bad news because it's where AAA tapes most of their television. There's been a lot of heat on Konnan for his role in creating a lot of foreign-style wrestling angles in Mexico (mostly stealing all of ECW's ideas and angles) and the old-timers are upset about it, including a show last month that basically broke down into the crowd throwing chairs and nearly rioting. Arguments over that is where the fight started, but everyone was drunk because it was a big dinner event, so that didn't help.
With UWA dead, many of their wrestlers are ending up in the other promotions. The most impressive of these newcomers is a guy named Super Crazy, who recently debuted in AAA.
Bill Dundee returned to USWA doing a shoot-style angle. Dundee cut a promo talking about the real-life incident last year where he and Wolfie D got into a backstage fight and Dundee pulled a knife out, which led to him being fired. Dundee talked about the incident in his promo, denying that the fight happened as it was reported. Wolfie D came out and responded, saying Dundee can't deny the story "because Dave Meltzer will tell everyone what happened."
A Current Affair ran their story on ECW last week. It was basically what you would expect. They showed a bunch of violent clips, had some morality crusader tsk-tsk at it, and that was it. It was a negative piece, but it gave ECW national TV exposure, so they can't be too upset about it. Missy Hyatt, Shane Douglas, and Joey Styles were briefly interviewed in the piece (I actually posted this same video the other day in an earlier issue, but if you missed it, here it is again. The first part of the video is an MSNBC story from 1999 and then the 1997 Current Affair piece is after that).
Mr. Hughes is apparently gone from ECW. He and Too Cold Scorpio had a match where they were having problems and Hughes wasn't cooperating. Eventually, he just walked out of the ring in the middle of the match. Backstage, Scorpio and Hughes got into each others' faces and Scorpio challenged him to a fight and Hughes backed down.
ECW is talking about adding a balcony to the ECW Arena so they can expand the capacity to 1,500. The other option is going to a new building but the problem is, most other buildings won't let them do all the crazy stuff that they do in the ECW Arena.
On last week's Nitro, there was an unintentionally hilarious bit where Elizabeth was supposed to handcuff Hogan to the ropes, but she couldn't seem to get the handcuffs working and spent forever trying to cuff him while Hogan had to continue to sell and eventually he basically cuffed himself.
Dave notes that WCW is making the mistake of relying too much on the old-timers rather than using them for their name value while helping to build up the younger stars for the future. He blames it on Hogan mostly, since Hogan basically has full control of everything and is the one making all the decisions, which means bringing in all his friends and working with them in the main events. He also says those in WCW seem to be more focused on "fooling people" than making money and is always changing things and trying to work everybody, even the other wrestlers, in order to try to surprise people (these criticisms would follow WCW until the day they died).
The last two weeks, Raw and Nitro combined set a ratings record. The two shows together did a total 6.3 ratings, which made it the largest total wrestling viewership for a Monday night on cable in history.
On Nitro, Bischoff was talking about WWF again, giving away their Raw results and also made a comment about how having a spy in the enemy camp is a great strategy, implying that he has spies working in WWF. So much for the gag order.
WCW announcer Chris Cruise wrote a scathing letter about Gordon Solie to another wrestling newsletter. Gordon Solie has criticized the WCW announcers recently and Cruise responded saying that even though he was a great announcer back in his heyday, for the last ten years, Solie just wings it and doesn't prepare for shows and has sucked. He criticized Gordon Solie for his "legendary drinking" and said Solie had overstayed his welcome in the business by more than a decade and called him a "bitter old fool" and an "old windbag."
Ed Leslie has dropped his lawsuit against WWF. He was suing to try to get the rights back to his Brutus Beefcake name but had to drop the suit because he couldn't afford the legal fees. So Vince still owns the name.
At the latest WWF tapings, Al Snow worked 2 different gimmicks, first as a masked wrestler named Shinobi and later as Marty Jannetty's tag team partner Leif Cassidy. The tag team is called The New Rockers and the gimmick is that they are two out of touch guys doing all the old 70s and 80s style stuff. The idea is for the fans to turn on them, thus making them heels.
A gay rights group has been making noise in the media, protesting the Goldust character. They're mad at the message portraying gay people as predatory homosexuals who are trying to threaten straight men and were upset that WWF glorified beating them up (noting the backstage brawl with Razor and Goldust from a recent Raw). GLAAD claims they've had upwards of 100 complaints regarding the character. WWF acknowledges that Goldust has gotten a negative response but say they don't plan to change the character. Dave notes some of the comments he's seen on internet message boards such as one that said "Ha ha ha it's good to see WWF is showing the new generation how faggots should be treated anyway." So, yanno....typical internet.
This week's Billionaire Ted skit was Huckster and Nacho Man being interviewed by the fake Larry King. It was mostly juvenile jokes about them being old, fart sounds, etc. Basically, exactly what you'd expect McMahon to find funny.
On Raw, they had a segment with Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, and Roddy Piper, with Piper announcing the match between them at Wrestlemania would be a 60-minute iron man match. During the segment, for some reason, many in the crowd booed both Bret and Shawn, to the point where Piper actually chastised the crowd for it and they booed him too.
WWF is giving conditional releases to many of the prelim wrestlers they aren't currently using, most notably Mo and Mabel. The terms of the release means they can wrestle anywhere they want except WCW until their contract expires.
Apparently WCW has been making some offers to Bret Hart (through an intermediary, to avoid contract tampering accusations). The idea is that they have offered Bret the main event at Starrcade against Ric Flair. For now, the odds seem to be against it.
Speaking of Bret, he has had a long-running weekly column he writes in the Calgary Sun newspaper. Apparently, at least some of them were actually ghostwritten by Bruce Hart (in some cases, it's been obvious, says Dave) but the most recent ones were actually written by Bret.
Cactus Jack wasn't supposed to debut as Mankind until after Wrestlemania, but due to a lot of recent injuries, they've talked about bringing him in for house shows before then. Also, fun fact: the rat that Mankind has been using in the vignettes on TV is actually a trained pet rat owned by Jim Cornette's girlfriend.
Most of the letters are about the Billionaire Ted skits. One guy writes in and says WWF should learn from politics about how people don't like negative ad campaigns. He basically says Bob Dole isn't going to be the Republican nominee in the 1996 election for that reason and WWF should make sure they don't follow in Dole's footsteps (fun fact: Dole did in fact become the nominee).