April 08, 1996
- Coming out of Wrestlemania 12, the biggest question now is about Bret Hart's future. After next week's Germany tour, he's taking a long hiatus and may not even come back at all. If he does, there's been discussions of doing a Bret/Shawn rematch at Summerslam, possibly in a ladder match. Bret's hiatus is partially to pursue acting and partially a business move. If business declines with Shawn on top and Bret gone, it helps his bargaining power when/if he returns. But Bret has also told people that if business thrives with Shawn on top, then he doesn't see a place for himself in WWF and may not return. And he's told people point blank that he'll never go to WCW. Dave talks about how Bret takes this business incredibly seriously and that "he really believes he's better than Flair was at his peak and it drives him crazy when there are people don't have the same assessment" and says Bret feels the same about Shawn Michaels.
- So obviously, Wrestlemania 12 is in the books and Dave was there live and in person. He says the iron man match, with all its rest holds, actually bored a lot of the crowd (most of whom were seemingly only there to see the return of Ultimate Warrior) and that people were actually leaving during the main event. He wouldn't say they were leaving in droves, but enough people left that, by the end of the match, there were a few thousand empty seats. A lot of people went to get snacks during the early part of the match, since they knew they would be wrestling for an hour. Halfway through, when it started to become apparent that there weren't going to be any falls, a lot of fans began booing every near-fall and rest hold. Dave has since watched it back and says it was an excellent match to watch on TV, but live, the audience just couldn't have cared less. It was a great match, but the WWF-hype calling it the greatest match of all time is over the top. Dave doesn't even think it was the best title match WWF has ever had and says it wasn't even in the same league as the famous Flair/Steamboat hour-long matches that people are comparing it to.
- Other notes from the PPV: it felt more like a well-produced house show than a PPV. Nothing was really bad, but nothing was that great either. The Nacho Man vs. Huckster "match" with Billionaire Ted during the pre-show was terrible and ended with them all having heart attacks. The Piper/Goldust backlot brawl (which was taped the day before) was shown on the big screen and got a bigger reaction than anything on the show except for Ultimate Warrior and lampooned the O.J. white Ford Bronco chase. Ultimate Warrior beat Hunter Hearst Helmsley in less than 2 minutes and got by far the biggest reaction of the night.
- The lineup for Antonio Inoki's multi-promotional show should be announced this week. There's still some confusion over whether WWF will be involved. Last week, Dave got word that they wouldn't be but this week, he's hearing that they've been in contact with Inoki and still may participate as long as they retain all TV and video rights to the WWF performers (so that their matches won't be aired on TNT or TBS outside of their control). The initial plan was for Inoki to face Vader in the main event, but WCW reportedly pushed Inoki and NJPW to not use Vader (because he's with WWF now) and so WWF is considering pulling out because of that.
- Eddie Guerrero is returning to AAA for the first time in over a year to work a show this week. The show is just across the border from El Paso, where Eddie lives, so Dave isn't sure if he's only working the show because it's nearby or if it's possibly setting up an angle for Eddie to work the upcoming Triplemania show (appears to have been the former).
- The feud between New Japan and Weekly Pro Wrestling magazine continues. NJPW recently banned Weekly Pro from covering their shows and banned their reporters and photographers from ringside. Weekly Pro is confident that they will prevail because they have a very loyal readership and its thought that if they stop covering NJPW, it will hurt the promotion more than the magazine. Weekly Pro has been in situations like this before (including with All Japan in the 80s) where the promotion bans them and they always end up getting invited back when the company realizes they need the magazine more than the magazine needs them. Weekly Pro is the biggest wrestling publication in Japan and has nearly half a million weekly readers.
- Louie Spicolli was supposed to debut for ECW this week but he broke his ankle earlier in the week so that didn't happen.
- Last week on Nitro, The Giant turned babyface. This week, only 7 days later, he turned heel again (yup, that sounds about right).
- The Road Warriors reportedly gave notice to WCW that they were leaving because they heard what Kevin Nash and Scott Hall are going to be paid compared to what they make and were upset about it. But things have been smoothed over so the Road Warriors are staying for now (not much longer though).
- On the April 1st Nitro, Bobby Heenan announced he was retiring from wrestling and they kept playing it up on TV as if he was leaving to return to WWF. But at the end of the show, Heenan revealed it was all an April Fool's joke.
- Gene Okerlund hinted on the Hotline that Ted Dibiase will be coming in to WCW as an announcer. Dave says there may be some truth to this one. Dibiase's WWF contract expires in the fall and there's been talks of him coming to WCW at that time as a character called Zillionaire Ted.
- WCW referees are noticeably wearing earpieces now so that producers in the back can instruct them on things (that's common practice nowadays in WWF, but looks like WCW was the first to do it back in '96).
- Dean Malenko got married over the weekend, so he missed the recent house shows. Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit also missed the shows because they were at Dean's wedding.
- The main event of Halloween Havoc will be Hulk Hogan vs. Randy Savage. The reason we know this 6 months in advance is because Slim Jim is paying $300,000 to sponsor the show in Las Vegas and part of the agreement for that sponsorship was that Slim Jim wanted the first Hogan vs. Savage match in WCW to take place on that show. So Dave expects a Savage heel turn before then (or, yanno, a Hogan heel turn).
- At Wrestlemania, they aired a backstage segment that the live crowd didn't see, featuring the debut of "Wildman" Marc Mero (formerly Johnny B. Badd). He was interrupted by Hunter Hearst Helmsley who was with a valet they called Sable. Dave says Sable is actually Marc Mero's real-life wife and she's going to eventually become his valet.
- At the latest TV tapings after Wrestlemania, WWF security were confiscating tons of anti-Shawn Michaels signs from Bret Hart fans. Undertaker and Ultimate Warrior both got much bigger reactions than Michaels at the tapings.
- Other notes from the tapings: Vince McMahon's son Shane worked as a referee for a few matches. Jim Cornette cut a great promo about an upcoming Vader vs. Razor Ramon match, with Cornette basically burying Ramon with inside references about him leaving for WCW and said Razor made the worst decision of his career.....long pause.....by agreeing to face Vader (wink wink nudge nudge). And Shawn Michaels got pissed off at fans at ringside during a promo and lost his temper, yelling "Fuck you!" and telling fans to blow him.
- They did an injury angle on Raw with Vader "injuring" Yokozuna's knee to write him off TV. They even carried him out on a forklift because he couldn't be taken on a stretcher. In reality, Yokozuna is being sent to a weight loss place because his weight has simply gotten out of control and this is an effort to, quite frankly, save his life.
- Goldust faced Savio Vega at the tapings and there was a huge "Faggot" chant which Dave found disturbing, especially since they showed little kids chanting it along with parents. Dave says to imagine if Goldust was some other racial minority and picture the crowd chanting "Spick, Nigger, or Slant Eyes" at him. Dave says no matter how you try to rationalize it, it's the same thing and it's disgusting.
- There will be no more Billionaire Ted skits, since that "angle" was blown off at Wrestlemania.
- The Slammy Awards took place the night before Wrestlemania. The awards were voted on by calls to the 900 number, so by law, the results have to be legit. Here are the results. WWF had initially planned to do a live call-in vote during the show letting fans vote for who the greatest WWF champion of all time is, with the nominees being Hogan, Yokozuna, Bret Hart, Bruno Sammartino, and Bob Backlund, with the obvious idea that Bret would win the award. But since they'd be legally required to give the real winner, there was concern that Hogan might win, so they decided to just not do it.
- Vader is expected to file suit against WCW for breach of contract stemming from his release last year after the Paul Orndorff fight.
- Lots of letters about ECW this week. One guy writing in to bitch about how the arena was too over-packed that no one had seats and their view was blocked because there were too many people. A couple of other people writing in to say it's amazing and Paul Heyman is a genius. Someone else says ECW and Heyman are totally overrated and that characters like Bubba Ray Dudley are a total embarrassment to the business. Oh, smarks...don't ever change.