Wrestling Observer Rewinder

November 04, 1996

Roddy Piper agreed to a deal with WCW and made a surprise debut at the end of Halloween Havoc. He came out and cut a meandering promo on Hogan that ended up getting cut off on PPV because they ran out of the 3-hour time window they had for the show, so Halloween Havoc just went off the air with Piper still talking. There's not many details on Piper's deal, other than it also includes some movie deals through Turner and probably only calls for a few matches since Piper is mostly retired from in-ring work. The deal had been in the works for weeks but was only finalized shortly before Halloween Havoc and they tried to keep it quiet, even hiding it from most employees in the company. But word leaked out to WWF a few days before and Jim Ross spoiled the surprise on the WWF Hotline over the weekend. The plan is for Piper to basically be the replacement for Randy Savage, who is likely leaving (more on that in a bit). But Piper isn't going to wrestle nearly as often and will mostly just be making TV appearances.
Hulk Hogan signed a new 3-year deal with WCW 4 days before the PPV. Hogan had a 5-year offer from WWF on the table that he turned down. WWF's offer was reportedly for $5 million per year and would have started with Hogan making a surprise return at Royal Rumble and winning it, leading to another world title run as a heel.
Randy Savage's WCW future is still in question. He was still negotiating with Eric Bischoff during the week but hadn't come to terms on a new deal yet. WWF had hoped to bring back both Hogan and Savage at about the same time, and have them resume their WCW feud in WWF, which would have been a huge blow to WCW. But with Hogan deciding to stay with WCW, it really hurts Savage's bargaining power with WWF, so right now, no one knows where he'll end up.
Monday Night Raw's start-time will be moving up one hour. The decision was made by USA Network fairly abruptly and didn't give WWF much time to promote the time change, so it's probably going to take a couple of weeks before the normal Raw audience gets familiar with the new time change. WCW Nitro has been starting an hour ahead of Raw for awhile now and it gives WCW a strong head start on hooking viewers so they stick around for the 2nd hour. So this move means Raw will be going head-to-head with Nitro's first hour instead of it's second. This also helps WWF avoid having to go up against Monday Night Football. There are still no plans for them to follow WCW's lead and extend Raw to 2 hours as of yet.
As mentioned, WCW's Halloween Havoc is in the books. The show broke WCW's all-time live gate record, bringing in over $220,000 in ticket sales and another $69,000 in merch sales which was also a record. Half the merch sales were NWO products, which has been a huge seller everywhere. Dean Malenko vs. Rey Mysterio Jr. was the best match. Eddie Guerrero wrestled sick, with a high fever and also broke a rib during his match, causing them to end the match earlier than planned. When giving results, Dave says, "The ghost of Hulk Hogan pinned the corpse of Randy Savage in 18:37 of what turned into a Jimmy Valiant style comedy match which made no sense given the storyline of this as the ultimate grudge match." Hogan wrestled the first several minutes in a wig and sunglasses that didn't come off, which should tell you just how physical that match was.
The shit hit the fan in Mexico this week as Konnan, Rey Mysterio Jr., and all the other AAA wrestlers that work for WCW all left to join Promo Azteca. The story made huge headlines throughout the country and was covered on all the network news shows and newspapers. Promo Azteca is an off-shoot of the PROMELL promotion, both owned and run by a television station called TV-Azteca. They held a big press conference announcing plans to run the 2 promotions separately and eventually build to a big promotion vs. promotion feud. PROMELL has already been around for awhile and will stay as it is. Promo Azteca will be run by Konnan and be more of an ECW-style promotion and will have wrestlers from WCW coming to work there. In a big surprise, they announced Vampiro will be joining the promotion. Konnan and Vampiro have long had issues with each other but apparently buried the hatchet and are on good enough terms now that Vampiro is willing to come work for him. Several wrestlers spoke during the press conference and while some were respectful, others attacked AAA and Antonio Pena, claiming he ripped off the wrestlers and claimed Pena was gay. As for AAA, they have tried (and in many cases succeeded) in convincing several wrestlers to stay who had been planning to jump ship. Several of them managed to get nice raises out of it. Pena also claimed that many of the wrestlers who left were still under contract and that he and Televisa would be suing them and TV-Azteca.
Mr. Pogo, who was injured in an FMW match with Terry Funk back in August, is scheduled to return to the ring this month. He did a backstage angle at a recent show where he tried to get Atsushi Onita to be his tag partner, but Onita refused and said he's retired. Of course, this is all still slowly leading to Onita coming out of retirement.
USWA's return to Monday nights didn't help, as the latest show once again only drew 375 fans. The week after drew 800 people, because Sid Vicious worked the show. In unrelated news, USWA also has a wrestler named Macho Warrior Ric Hogan, who's gimmick is that he basically acts like all 4 of those guys. Well we gotta see that.
Olympic gold medalist Kurt Angle appeared at a recent ECW show and did commentary on a match with Taz vs. Little Guido, which led to Taz trash talking Angle, trying to set up a match (Angle on commentary is hilarious to listen to, because he clearly knows fuck-all about pro wrestling at this point, with Joey Styles explaining rules to him and stuff). Following this, Taz is expected to do an angle where he refuses to wrestle until he gets a match with Sabu.
On the same show, they did an angle where Raven pulled a cross out from under the ring and "crucified" Sandman, tying him to the cross and putting a ring of barbed wire on his head. Apparently this angle was too extreme even for ECW because later in the show, Raven came back out to the ring, as Scott Levy, and apologized for anyone who may have been offended. Word is Kurt Angle was very upset about it backstage, feeling that it could ruin his public image to be involved in something like that. Some fans were also upset. Dave says it's unlikely Kurt Angle will be back after this.
Chris Candido debuted in ECW this week and was over huge. Sunny was backstage and Candido led the crowd in chants for Sunny, but of course she didn't come out, since she's still under WWF contract. The crowd also chanted "Skip is dead!" Afterward, Candido cut a promo trashing WWF but then turned heel on them and started trashing ECW. On the same show, another guy named David Morton debuted and was impressive enough that Paul Heyman wants to bring him in full-time (he later became Kid Kash).
At the same show, there was also a scaffold match between Tommy Dreamer and Brian Lee, with tables piled up underneath. Brian Lee ended up taking the bump off the scaffold and through the tables (this is, of course, one of the most iconic images of ECW).
At another ECW show, New Jack got into an altercation with a police officer who was working security for the show. At some point, New Jack hopped the barricade and ended up with he and the cop throwing punches at each other and a lot of fans getting involved a mini riot breaking out until several other ECW wrestlers ran out to break things up. Afterwards, New Jack collapsed and was treated by paramedics. No word on if he was arrested, although you would assume so (busy week for ECW).
Dave finally got around to seeing some of AWF's TV show (headlined by Bob Orton beating Tito Santana for the title) and said it reminds him of the recent Brady Bunch movies, with guys wrestling a style that was popular 15 years ago, being transported to modern day in a time machine and it looks silly and campy and out of place. The TV show looks good because they've got a "money mark" funding the whole thing with big bucks and he's pushed as the babyface president of the company. Dave says it's good for a few laughs (they'll be dead in a month).
Gene Okerlund still hasn't returned because his contract negotiations with WCW aren't finalized yet. They've offered him $180,000 per year to work 5 dates per month (one PPV and 4 Nitros) but apparently no Hotline duties. Okerlund hasn't agreed to the terms yet.
In fact, that's been a problem with a lot of the recent shows, that Hall and Nash are so over that they're the ones drawing the crowds and the fans don't care about anyone else. The NWO fans come to see NWO. WCW fans don't come at all because their "side" always loses. And Hispanic fans don't come because all the Mexican wrestlers are treated as curtain jerking prelim guys. WCW's recent show in San Jose drew around 2,000 people and had most of the top Lucha names on the card. But there were almost no Hispanic fans in the crowd, despite having huge Mexican draws like Mysterio Jr. and Konnan on the card. Meanwhile, when AAA runs shows there, they draw bigger crowds than WCW did. "Mexican fans want to see Mexican heroes, not people they thought were stars in prelim matches." They don't work when they're portrayed as jobbers.
On the fake tombstones they used for the set of Halloween Havoc, one of them said "CROCKETT."
They did an angle on WWF Superstars where Steve Austin destroyed Brian Pillman's ankle to write him off TV because Pillman had to get another surgery done on it. His ankle didn't heal properly from the previous surgery so they had to re-break it and start the healing process over, so it'll be at least 6 more months before he can wrestle again. As for Austin, after taking out Pillman, they had Austin on Raw threatening everyone and even facing down the police. "Austin is working really hard to get his character over and it seems to have broken him out of the pack into a genuine headliner."
WWF has begun airing vignettes for Dwayne Johnson, who will use the name Rocky Maivia in honor of both his father (Rocky Johnson) and grandfather (Peter Maivia). They showed old clips of both men in the vignettes as well as footage of Dwayne at the recent Cauliflower banquet where his father was honored.
WWF road agent Chief Jay Strongbow was found slumped over sitting in a chair backstage at the Raw tapings and they feared a heart attack. Turns out it was an 80% blockage of an artery. He was hospitalized but since has been released.
Achim Albrecht (the bodybuilder guy that WWF signed) should be on the road in a few weeks doing house shows. Dave has been told Albrecht has a great attitude when it comes to wanting to learn, "which is the exact opposite of Mark Henry." Well okay then.
Chris Candido quit WWF because they didn't have anything for him, but they still wanted him to stay on as a trainer, to teach guys like Albrecht, Mark Henry, and Dwayne Johnson. But Candido is only 24 years old and felt he was too young to basically retire from wrestling and become a trainer, so he quit and joined ECW. There was also heat between Candido and Shawn Michaels, because Michaels would get upset at Candido using flashy moves in prelim matches, which Shawn felt took away from when he would do similar spots later in the show. (also, Shawn was fucking his girlfriend but, yanno...) As for Candido's girlfriend Sunny, she has a long-term big money contract so she isn't going anywhere, but she's been taken off the road and will mostly only appear on TV tapings as well as hosting Livewire and doing public appearances for the company.
Both Barry Windham and Vader suffered broken feet this week. Windham broke his in a match, no word how. Vader broke his while taping a fake match for the Boy Meets World episode he's in. He still worked the PPV match against Sid with a broken foot but missed a few shows after, but he's back now.
Speaking of Vader, original plans were for him to defeat Sid at the PPV and then go on to defeat Shawn Michaels for the title at Survivor Series, but those plans have been changed. Dave isn't sure why but he thinks it might be because Bret Hart returned and they want to build to a Bret/Shawn rematch at Wrestlemania 13 and decided they didn't want to move the belt around before then. Vader was reportedly told that they changed plans because J.J. Dillon had been aware of the plan to put the belt on Vader, but now that he's left and gone to work for WCW, they had to change plans because they don't want WCW to know what they're doing. If that's true, Dave thinks it's the silliest thing he's ever heard.
On Livewire a few weeks back, when Ahmed Johnson was guest hosting, a "caller" called in and said he was black and asked about racism in the WWF. Ahmed Johnson told the caller that there isn't any racism in WWF. Turns out the "black" caller was actually a white WWF producer named Kevin Dunn.
Too Cold Scorpio is gone from ECW and headed to WWF. No word on what his name will be yet but his gimmick is a babyface pimp character, similar to Huggy Bear from the 1970s show Starsky & Hutch. Ever timely as always, Vince...