Wrestling Observer Rewinder

March 03, 1997

Sorry I'm late. Life, ya know?
In a huge shocker, Ken Shamrock abruptly signed with WWF this week in a story that has implications throughout both wrestling and MMA. Shamrock signed a 3-year deal with a low 7-figure guarantee. It's an exclusive deal, which means Shamrock can no longer participate in UFC or any other shoot-fighting events or work for other wrestling promotions. Shamrock debuted on Raw and was interviewed in the crowd. They did a good job of portraying him as a former UFC fighter that they billed as "the world's most dangerous man." Given the size of the contract, Shamrock is going to have to be pushed as a major star and Dave says Vince is taking a huge risk on a guy who has never done American pro wrestling at this level before. He'll either pay off and end up a great investment, or end up a waste, just another more charismatic version of Mark Henry. Shamrock had been weighing offers from WWF, WCW, NJPW, and UFC before deciding on WWF. Coming in as a UFC outsider with little experience and making big money is sure to breed resentment against Shamrock in the locker room. It's expected Shamrock will officially debut at Wrestlemania, likely as a special referee for the Bret Hart/Steve Austin submission match.
This whole thing really fucks over NJPW because they had just announced Ken Shamrock vs. IWGP champion Shinya Hashimoto for a Tokyo Dome show next month as well as plans for Shamrock to work a few other big events this year. It was predicted to be an easy sellout and would have likely ended up being the biggest money-making wrestling event in history before Shamrock pulled out. But that's what you get when you announce a match before having the guy signed to a contract I guess. NJPW were stunned when they found out Shamrock had appeared on Raw. It's not impossible that the match could still happen, but it's highly unlikely now because NJPW would have to renegotiate the deal through McMahon and with NJPW having a business relationship with WCW, it likely wouldn't go well. Plus, McMahon would almost surely insist that Shamrock win, meaning he'd have to win the title (no chance now that he's in WWF) or do a screw-job finish which is totally unacceptable for that type of match in Japan. Dave thinks McMahon would actually be smart to let Shamrock do it. WWF still wants to get a foothold in Japan and if they let Shamrock work a few huge shows there, even if he loses some of the matches, it will establish Shamrock as a huge wrestling star in Japan and WWF could then run their own shows there with Shamrock and probably do good business. But word is NJPW has no interest in negotiating with WWF and feel like they were double-crossed by Shamrock. So now they've got a huge Tokyo Dome show booked for next month and the big main event they were counting on to fill the stadium is dead. They're looking for a new opponent for Hashimoto. Dan Severn's name has been tossed around and they also have interest in Royce Gracie, but in the past, Gracie has been against the idea of doing worked matches so for now, it's still up in the air.
When NJPW made their initial announcement about Shamrock, UFC counter-offered with a big money deal for 2 fights, one against Tank Abbott and another against UFC champion Mark Coleman (presuming Shamrock defeated Abbott). UFC's deal would have allowed Shamrock to work NJPW, but he couldn't do any jobs. WWF's deal offered more money than both NJPW and UFC but also requires much more travel and full time work and was an exclusive deal. Shamrock was scheduled to meet with Eric Bischoff for a meeting but WWF must have sweetened the pot because they convinced Shamrock to skip the meeting with Bischoff and fly straight to Connecticut to sign the deal. Shamrock had negotiations with WWF last year but he wanted $500,000 per year and WWF wasn't interested. But they're more desperate than ever now so negotiations reopened. Finally, Pancrase is still claiming to have Shamrock under contract and they have been tied up in legal battles over that, but they must not have too much of a case, since both NJPW and WWF were willing to sign him without concern.
The latest on Shawn Michaels is that most people within the company are now acknowledging that his knee isn't really the problem and that Michaels is taking time off because he was burned out from the travel and pressure of carrying the company, plus he was unhappy about the plan to have him put over Bret Hart at Wrestlemania. Also, by forfeiting the title due to injury and giving the sympathetic interview, he put himself in a position to be even more of a babyface when he returns, without having to put over Hart. It's true that Shawn has a knee injury, but the belief now is that it isn't that bad and he could have continued working on it if he wanted to, but he didn't. As of now, there are no plans for Michaels to appear at Wrestlemania at all. Contrary to rumors, Shawn is not in any sort of drug rehab and friends have said that after being away from the company for the last 10 days or so, he's already found that lost smile he talked about. Shawn reportedly showed up backstage at a WCW show last month, apparently just to see his friends, but he has 5 years left on his WWF contract so the chances of him showing up in WCW are slim to none because it would require WWF to release him from the deal and that simply isn't happening. There reportedly wasn't any major heat on Shawn for being there.
WCW and Turner Broadcasting reportedly attempted to purchase part of New Japan this week. NJPW has been the most successful company in the world for the last few years, with numerous Tokyo Dome sellouts bringing in millions of dollars per year. But the future of pro wrestling is PPV and television. NJPW and all the other promotions in Japan have TV deals in place, but the TV industry in Japan is vastly different than America. It's all complicated and I barely understand everything Dave is talking about. But the point is, the TV landscape is changing and Eric Bischoff's belief is that NJPW isn't ready for all the changes that are on the horizon. With Turner behind him, Bischoff wants to buy NJPW and set them up for bigger success in Japan by having them be the leaders when it comes to innovating their TV product. Bischoff openly admitted to interest in buying NJPW during an internet chat last week, saying that he believes much of the future talent in the next few years will come from Mexico and Japan. Bischoff will be in Japan later this month to discuss the possibility of buying a portion of the company and to become a major stockholder in it. If that doesn't work, there have also been discussions of WCW starting their own rival promotion in Japan to go against NJPW. Dave says buying NJPW will be nearly impossible because the promotion is already owned by numerous conglomerates rather than one person, and most of them don't have incentive to sell unless the money offer is just too good to ignore. The biggest chunk of the company is owned by TV-Asahi, which is one of Japan's 4 major TV networks and is backed by Rupert Murdoch. Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch are huge business rivals who basically hate each other, so they especially would likely have no interest in selling NJPW. There are also several wealthy businessmen, former wrestlers, and office employees who own portions of the company. It's very possible that Bischoff and WCW could buy a portion of NJPW and therefore have some say in how things are run, but near impossible that they could buy the whole thing outright unless Ted Turner is willing to dump an ungodly amount of money on something so unsure.
Notes from the show itself: during the 6-man lucha match early in the show, the referee botched the finish and counted 3 when he wasn't supposed to. The match was scheduled to go longer and there was a ton of heat on the ref backstage after. The crowd chanted "boring" during the Chris Jericho/Eddie Guerrero match and fans went to the concession stands in droves during it. During the Hall/Nash vs. Giant/Luger tag match, Syxx was interfering and ended up getting a legit separated shoulder and will be out for a few weeks. In the main event, Randy Savage turned heel and joined the NWO, which doesn't make storyline sense for at least a dozen different reasons, but whatever. That's WCW for you (shout out to the guy who's gonna get mad at me for saying that!). Dave also mentions that Piper may have the most out of control ego in the company, even more than Hogan. He was no-selling moves during the match and during his promos in recent weeks, he's just been going totally off the rails and basically going into business for himself at every turn.
As always, WWF lost the ratings battle to WCW this week, but there was a curious thing about the numbers. This was the Raw that featured the ECW invasion and interestingly enough, the ratings actually went up slightly during all the ECW segments, with the episode peaking during the BWO segment. It was obviously a huge win for ECW since they got to promote their own PPV during the show and expose their wrestlers to a much larger audience. In fact, there was more hype for ECW's Barely Legal on this show than there was for Wrestlemania in 4 weeks. Jerry Lawler was fantastic as playing the heel to Paul Heyman and ECW and Dave says it's interesting because Lawler legitimately does hate Heyman (more on that in a bit) but he's a pro and put his feelings aside and did a great job trashing ECW while still getting them over. And if Lawler ever goes to work an ECW show, he'll be the hottest heel they've ever had (damn right he was).
Former UWFI champion Nobuhiko Takada has announced plans to form a new pro wrestling promotion and the idea is to build up to a Tokyo Dome show headlined by Takada vs. Rickson Gracie. Dave goes into all the details of the planned formation of the company, thoughts on the Takada/Gracie match and more, but I'm skipping it because it's actually not a wrestling promotion. It was MMA. And thus, PRIDE was born. I know that this is obstentsiably a wrestling newsletter, but if you have any interest in MMA, Dave covered it pretty much from day 1 with just as much detail and passion as he does wrestling, so for your MMA history buffs out there, you should really subscribe to it.
Just a side note from the NJPW recaps of the last few weeks that I haven't been mentioning: Buff Bagwell and Scott Norton have been working over there as the NWO in Japan and for the last few weeks Dave has been talking about how well Bagwell is doing. He's getting over, he's having good matches and overall just seems to be kicking ass in Japan. Buff Bagwell. Yes, the same one.
At a recent Promo Azteca show, Konnan got on the mic and talked about how "Razor Ramon" and "Diesel" are working shows for AAA. Konnan said those are imposters and that he's planning to bring in the real Kevin Nash and Scott Hall soon.
WCW has created a women's cruiserweight championship and are holding a tournament to crown the first champion. You may have missed it because the title has only been mentioned once on WCW TV, during an episode of World Wide, which nobody watches. So expect them to crown a champion for that in a few weeks.
During a Chris Candido vs. Sabu match in ECW, a fan in the crowd was really heckling Candido hard. Candido's girlfriend Sunny was backstage and poked her head out and began screaming back at the fan, which completely diverted attention from the match and had the crowd focusing on her.
Sandman got into a big argument with Tod Gordon this week. Sandman was scheduled to appear at a Q&A fan thing and Gordon went to wake up Sandman (who had been out all night partying). Sandman apparently went nuts on Gordon because he was hungover and didn't want to do the event. Paul Heyman later said that if they weren't so close to the PPV, he would have suspended or fired Sandman for it. As it is, he is reportedly hitting Sandman with a big fine.
Mikey Whipwreck needs reconstructive knee surgery and will be out of action for at least 6 months.
Missy Hyatt was recently on a Ricki Lake show for an episode about plastic surgery (can't find video).
In more news you may have missed, WCW created an NWO hotline but it was a total flop. In its entire first month, the NWO hotline did about the same amount of business as the normal WCW hotline usually does in 1 normal day.
Ric Flair did an internet chat that was put together by KQRS radio station in Minneapolis, but it was so popular that it ended up blowing out the phone lines. Gather 'round children. You see, back in the olden days, internet used to run over phone lines and it was very, very slow and awful...
Last week, WCW did an angle where the NWO ran the Steiners' car off the road. They got so many complaints over it that they won't air the angle on TV anymore and haven't even mentioned it since.
A Pittsburgh newspaper ran a story about the WWF lawsuit against WCW, stemming from certain claims that Mark Madden made about WWF on the WCW hotline last year. During depositions in the lawsuit, Madden invoked a journalist's shield law in order to avoid having to reveal his sources. However, during the same deposition, Madden admitted that WCW has veto power over what he says on the hotline and that they could fire him if he didn't make script changes they requested. WWF's lawyers say that this makes Madden a shill for WCW and not a journalist and thus he should be forced to reveal his sources and say he deliberately passed false information to the public about WWF. Luckily, there were cameras in the courtroom to catch this whole debate.
Marc Mero and Steve Austin are both dealing with injuries. Marc Mero suffered a torn ACL and word is he will need reconstructive surgery and will be out for at least 6 months. And Steve Austin suffered a partial PCL tear in his knee and will be out of action until Wrestlemania and there's concern that he might not even be able to work Mania. But the belief is that it's such a big show and Austin is such an important part that, even if he's not 100%, he'll still work the match with Hart and take time off after (yup, that's exactly what happened). Because of those 2 injuries, they had to pull Billy Gunn back onto the road. He had been off doing an injury angle (he's not really hurt) but the roster is thin and they needed someone who could work, so Gunn is back doing matches on the road.
Shotgun Saturday Night and Superstars are now basically the same show, just recaps and throwaway pre-taped matches.
On Raw, there was real heat between Paul Heyman and Jerry Lawler, when Heyman made a reference to Lawler's legal problems from a few years ago (the alleged statuatory rape) and Lawler responded with a comment about breaking Paul Heyman's jaw, which is true. Lawler punched Heyman back in 1987 and legit broke his jaw.
WWF's Knoxville house show was basically an SMW reunion show with Freddy Joe Floyd and T.L. Hopper working under their old SMW names (Tracy Smothers and Dirty White Boy) and Sunny was over huge. She cut a heel promo saying she missed the building, but not the people. And of course, Jim Cornette got beat up to a huge pop.
More on Yokozuna's alleged weight loss: he's apparently lost more than 200 pounds because he was retaining an absurd amount of fluid and when they got rid of that, it was an almost immediate 100 pound drop from that alone. They're also planning to do liposuction and hope to get him back down to a manageable weight soon (none of this ends up being true).
Jim Ross' father recently passed away.
The Road Warriors (using the Legion of Doom name) made a surprise return to WWF on Raw this week.
Dan Severn had a meeting with WWF last month and it went well, but neither side wanted to do a full-time deal. It's expected Severn will probably end up working some shows for WWF but nothing full time.
Davey Boy Smith is expected to win the European title tournament.