February 10, 1997
- WWF and USA Network have been heavily discussing expanding Raws to 2 hours and running live every Monday night. Both sides want it, but the hold-up is negotiations over what percentage each side is going to pay for the weekly $100,000+ costs of doing the show live each week. USA is especially pushing for the 2 hour change because their new show Le Femme Nikita has been struggling against TNT's new Robin Hood series, probably because of the extra hour of wrestling lead-in that TNT has. February is sweeps month, so it's especially important for USA to have high ratings so they can demand more money for advertising. USA wanted to air the entire Royal Rumble match during last week's Raw episode, figuring that would do a huge rating. They ran commercials for several days advertising it, but then Request TV and Viewers Choice stepped in and threw a fit, claiming they had an exclusive deal to air the Rumble and prevented USA from airing it.
- Dave mentions that a lot of the wrestlers have been upset about the weekly Shotgun Saturday Night shows because the payoffs for working the show are so small (usually only a few hundred bucks) and that money is eaten up by the guys having to travel there for the show, stay overnight in expensive NYC, weird locations without proper locker rooms, and often screwing up their sleep schedules because the shows run until after midnight. The fact that the shows have been getting piss-poor reviews doesn't help. If Raw goes live weekly, it may negate the need for another live weekly show. There is talk of taping several weeks of the Shotgun show in advance but no word on any of that yet.
- There's another long story about New York trying to shut down the upcoming UFC PPV in the state, demanding a bunch of rule changes (some of which were ridiculous, but many of which would later become what we see now in modern day UFC such as weight classes, 5 minute rounds, athletic commission judges, 10 point systems, certain banned strikes, etc.) Once again, it's all pretty interesting since we know it leads to MMA being banned in New York for the next 2 decades, but it's not wrestling soooo...
- Dark match at the latest Raw taping was a triangle match between Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, and Sid. I only mention this because in the past, WWF triangle match rules were weird 5-minute time periods where guys would alternate in and out of the ring. But this time, the way they did the match was having all 3 men in the ring at the same time and whoever scored the pin became champion, which Dave calls "the same totally illogical and lame rules as WCW." And of course, to this very day, those are the rules of three-way matches and I'm not sure why Dave shits on it. Makes perfect sense to me.
- Time for some number crunching, as Dave looks at both WWF and WCW and compares TV ratings and house show attendance numbers for the last 5 years in great detail. There's a lot of numbers and stuff here but I'll try to sum it up easily. When it comes to WCW, they're obviously in the midst of their hottest run ever. But there's a misconception that WCW winning the cable ratings war is some new thing, when in reality, WCW has pretty much always beaten WWF in cable ratings, with the Saturday Night show beating early Raw and Prime Time ratings all the time, but they weren't in prime time. And no one really paid attention until the companies began going head-to-head on Monday nights. The truth is, yes, WCW is winning the war but the alleged "decline of WWF" is overrated. 1996 was WWF's strongest house show year since 1991, even though their TV ratings have hit new lows. But overall, WWF is still doing strong business everywhere else and TV ratings haven't shown to have that much effect on ticket sales. In fact, WWF's house show business grew at a faster rate than WCW's did last year and with increased ticket prices, their house show business became even more profitable. There's a perception from people who believe the Monday night ratings are the entire business and believe WWF is in trouble because they're losing the ratings war, but overall, they're still pretty strong (I find stuff like this interesting, because the revisionist version of history is that WCW damn near put WWF out of business until Vince heroically fought back and conquered his enemy. Reality is, they were never even remotely in danger of it and aside from TV ratings, they were doing their best business in years on every other front. Sure, they were a distant second in TV ratings but in all other aspects of the business, WCW was only barely winning).
- Fake Diesel, fake Razor, and Jake Roberts worked an AAA show this week in Mexico. They all worked in the main event against 3 AAA stars in a match that was said to have sucked. Fake Razor in particular nearly killed Pierroth Jr. with a botched Razor's Edge finisher.
- Speaking of, there's a lot of people (Dave included) who think AAA is making a mistake with this WWF partnership. AAA is heavily promoting the WWF stars on TV as if they are major stars but when they come in, it's obvious they aren't that good and can't hang with AAA's main eventers. Furthermore, most Mexican fans don't have a clue who guys like Bret Hart or Shawn Michaels are, much less Fake Razor and Fake Diesel. For AAA to bring these guys in and have them win matches over their own homegrown top stars makes AAA look bad. Furthermore, AAA is making the same mistake that other promotions have made, where they heavily promote the shows featuring WWF stars and thus make their own shows seem less important. In the past, when that happened, it's led to fans seeing the local promotion as less special and they would only draw big crowds if there were WWF wrestlers there and it ends up hurting the smaller promotion (SMW and USWA are good examples of where this happened) who are then unable to draw on their own unless they have a big WWF star on the card.
- Dave hasn't yet seen the recent Kobashi vs. Misawa match in AJPW but he's been told by people that it's the best match of Kobashi's career, which is saying a lot (I checked and it looks like Dave ended up giving it 4.75 which is barely watchable by mid-90s Kobashi-standards).
- Former USWA general manager Randy Hales and announcer Corey Maclin are the latest names to leave the company over issues with new general manager Larry Burton. After Dave Brown left last week, Corey Maclin wanted a raise since he was to become the new lead announcer. He didn't get the raise, so he left. So now, with both announcers gone, they brought in a couple of local sports talk radio hosts to handle the announcing duties. Word is they were terrible. As for Hales, he was apparently just sick of it all. There's a lot of people in the company who are bitter at Jerry Lawler because of all this and feel like he turned their back on them by putting Burton (who is universally disliked) in charge of the day-to-day operations of the company.
- At the beginning of the most recent ECW Arena show, Paul Heyman and all the wrestlers came out (heels on the stage, faces in the ring) and Heyman gave a speech and thanked every wrestler, one-by-one, and formally announced ECW's first PPV taking place April 13th, which will be called Barely Legal (part of this is shown on the Network on ECW Hardcore TV ep. 198 and it's so great). Dave notes that the end of the PPV is scheduled to be some sort of finish with Terry Funk in the ring standing tall with all the fans, almost as the father figure of the promotion since he helped build them since the very beginning.
- Also of note from the ECW show, Bubba Ray Dudley turned heel and joined up with D-Von Dudley. It will lead to those 2 Dudleys feuding with The Gangstas (and thus, the Dudley Boyz we know and love today were finally born. And they hit their first ever 3-D during this bit too).
- Other random ECW show notes: Lance Storm debuted, beating Balls Mahoney in his first match and looked great. Roadkill didn't tuck his chin on a powerbomb from Bubba Dudley and hit his head hard and got a concussion and had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. Mikey Whipwreck blew out his knee and will be out for about a month and is on crutches.
- Indie promoter Dennis Coraluzzo is promoting an Eddie Gilbert Memorial Show right across the river from Philadelphia the night before ECW's PPV, which Dave says isn't a coincidence. Man, this Coraluzzo guy would look for any opportunity to try to fuck over ECW.
- An unnamed Hollywood movie studio is working on a documentary about pro wrestling along the lines with the movies Hoop Dreams and Pumping Iron, where they will follow the stories of a couple of aspiring pro wrestlers. Ron Howard is an executive producer on the project. If you're interested, Dave gives an address to send your videos and resume (if you're curious, the concept obviously changed and this would be the movie that eventually became Beyond The Mat).
- An indie promotion called Soul City Wrestling ran a show last week called Beat The Whiteys night. It was all black babyface wrestlers against all white heels.
- A group in Japan is trying to put together a big show for the Tokyo Dome and the hope is to have former UWFI star Nobuhiko Takada face Rickson Gracie in the main event. The promotion offered Gracie $1 million to do a worked match with Takada, but he turned it down. Then they made a second offer, where the match would consist of 3 ten-minute rounds, with the first round being worked and the other 2 rounds being shoot. But Gracie turned it down again and said he wouldn't do the match unless it was a 100% shoot. Word is Takada wants to retire anyway, so he may be willing to do the fight since he'll get a big payday out of it, even though he'll almost certainly get destroyed by Gracie (the fight eventually happened at the first ever PRIDE show and yeah, Takada got roasted).
- The Debra McMichael/Woman angle where they've been bad-mouthing each other has been dropped (Dave doesn't say why but I assume because of the real-life heat between them that was mentioned a few weeks ago). It's a shame because the Debra/Woman feud was actually getting over pretty well. Instead, Debra is now bad-mouthing Jacquelyn (formerly Miss Texas in USWA). Dave says the Jacquelyn storyline is going to flop hard. "She has the look for Memphis wrestling but not for national television. She can't talk and she has no chemistry with Kevin Sullivan." Jacquelyn was also involved in the botched finish of a Konnan/Benoit match on Nitro, where she was supposed to get a chair from under the ring, but some WCW production idiot had taken the chair and was sitting on it, leaving Jacquelyn frantically looking for a chair under the ring that wasn't there, while the finish of the match totally fell apart.
- Curt Hennig is expected to start with WCW in May.
- NBA player Dennis Rodman was offered $500,000 by WWF to be in Goldust's corner at Wrestlemania and eventually set up a tag team match at Summerslam with Goldust and Rodman against some other team. Rodman then turned around and went to WCW and gave them a chance to beat WWF's offer. No word on whether or not WCW will bite or not and it's also unsure if Rodman's NBA deal will allow him to be involved in wrestling.
- Arn Anderson is out with a hand injury. No word on what it is exactly, but word is it's serious and he's expected to be out for awhile (wasn't exactly his hand. It ended up being the neck injury causing numbness in his arms and hands and it eventually led to his retirement soon after but of course, we'll get to that).
- Rey Mysterio Jr. has been told that he needs major knee surgery which would keep him out of action for around 6 months. Instead of getting the surgery, Mysterio has continued working while wearing a heavy knee brace, "because he's 22 and that's how 22-year-olds think," Dave says. In the past, guys struggling to make a living in wrestling might have had no choice but to work injured. But in this case, Mysterio is lucky enough to work for a company that would pay for the surgery and pay him his guaranteed contract amount while he recovers, so Dave thinks he's kinda foolish for not getting the surgery. Dave says the long-term effects of working on bad knees like this are inevitable (sure enough, 20 years later and Mysterio's knees are basically held together by duct tape and wishes at this point).
- WCW referee Randy Anderson was diagnosed with testicular cancer last year. He underwent 25 chemo treatments and it is believed the cancer is gone now and doctors gave him a good recovery prognosis (sadly, not for too long. The cancer eventually returned and Anderson died in 2002).
- Last week at the WWF Superstars taping, they filmed an angle where Undertaker chokeslammed Sable after a match with Marc Mero. But when the show aired this week, the chokeslam angle was edited out and never aired. Dave doesn't say why, but I assume WWF wasn't quite ready to risk airing the man-on-woman violence yet that would eventually become a staple of the Attitude Era.
- In his Calgary Sun newspaper column this week, Bret Hart once again took some shots at one of his favorite targets, Hulk Hogan. In the article, Hart wrote, "WCW has something far worse than bad referees, they have Hulk Hogan. Hogan lost his flair so long ago that it boggles my mind why people would want to tune into that. Watching myself plod along like Hogan, an old, pathetic embarrassment would be too much for me to take. When I walk out, whether it is three months from now or three years from now, I will hold my head high. Perhaps the strongest reason I didn't go to WCW is because I pictured myself getting lost in the shuffle in a deck of cards filled with Hulk Hogan. One thing about the WWF in contrast to WCW is that we almost always take their previous stars and make them brighter and they take our stars and make them dimmer. I'm sure Diesel and Razor are quickly finding out what it's like to be on the Hulk Hogan show. They smile when they go to the bank but they cry themselves to sleep." Dave says he doubts either Hall or Nash is crying over their career choice.