March 31, 1997
- Scott Hall voluntarily checked himself into rehab this week and that's about all the details Dave has as of press time. On Nitro, they acknowledged Hall wasn't there but didn't give a reason why. As of now, there's no word on how long he's expected to be gone or how it will affect upcoming shows where he's scheduled to be a part of. But regardless, he's expected to be gone for at least a little while and WCW is continuing to advertise him for shows and have given fans no clue that Hall won't be there, which is a poor way to handle the situation (Yeah, that gets worse over the next few weeks as WCW continues to falsely advertise him despite knowing he won't be there).
- Wrestlemania 13 is in the books and it was 100% the Bret Hart and Steve Austin show. Their match stole the show and established Austin as the top babyface, Hart as the top heel, and even got Ken Shamrock over as a legit threat. Before reviewing the show, Dave goes into an examination of WWF's new edgier product, with blood, foul language, and sexual content. Dave doesn't mind it, but he does think it's funny and hypocritical that just last year, Vince was writing letters to Ted Turner about how barbaric it was that he would allow blading, and now they're showing close-ups of a bloody Austin on the biggest show of the year. But hey, desperate times. Anyway, the show more than doubled the largest gate ever for wrestling in Chicago. Also, Dave talks about some of the signs in the crowd. He says the most creative poster was someone who had made giant cut-out cardboard scissors with "Arn" and "Sid" written on it. And the least creative sign? The "Austin 3:16" signs because everybody has them.
- Anyway, other notes from the show: Rocky Maivia has the look and ability to some day be a big star but a lot of people resent his push because he's not ready yet. Austin/Hart was a classic with a perfectly executed double-turn that Dave says we'll all remember for a long time (true dat) and gives it the full 5 stars. Shawn Michaels did commentary on the main event and during his entrance, he looked right in the camera and gave the NWO hand signal (aka the "too sweet" hand gesture). On Nitro the next night, Kevin Nash cut a promo and said, "Right back at ya, HBK." Sid/Undertaker was as bad as you'd expect and marred by repeated Bret Hart run-ins and Dave says all the screwjobs and multiple title changes in the last few months have destroyed the credibility of the title. But regardless, the Bret/Austin match was so good that it overshadowed much of the bad.
- One final Wrestlemania note: Curt Hennig, has been expected to join WCW when his WWF contract expires. Last week, however, Hennig had a meeting with Vince McMahon and there was rumored to be a plan that would involve Hennig making a surprise appearance at Wrestlemania. The idea being that it would be like the time WCW stole Lex Luger from WWF, they wanted to have Hennig show up at Mania as a "fuck you" to WCW. However, Eric Bischoff got word of the meeting and contacted Hennig who assured Bischoff that he was just messing with McMahon and had no plans of showing up at Wrestlemania. But until the show aired, no one was sure if Hennig would show up or not. When he didn't, WCW was relieved, as you would expect. They also had Curt Hennig's father Larry Hennig appear on Nitro the next night in order to tease that Curt is coming to WCW.
- Giant Baba again proved to have significant political power in Japan, as he was able to get Steve Williams into the country after just being arrested a few days before for drug possession. Japan is really strict about keeping drug offenders out of the country and Dave again tells the story of Paul McCartney being banned for many years due to his drug charges. Baba having enough pull to get Williams allowed into the country shows just how respected he is there. Word is Williams was lucky his passport wasn't taken away when he was arrested. The amount of drugs he was busted with was enough that it's a surprise that he wasn't charged with intent to distribute and was lucky they allowed him to post bond. Williams had been heavily promoted for an upcoming AJPW tour so Baba pulled strings to get Williams allowed back in Japan for the shows.
- All Japan Women held their annual biggest show of the year, but the crowd was a disappointment. They only drew around 5,000 to the Yokohama Arena, which is the 2nd smallest pro wrestling crowd ever for that building. The first, you ask? WWF when they decided to tour Japan a few years ago and flopped. Anyway, AJW has been waning in popularity in recent years.
- Missy Hyatt has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in the new Howard Stern movie Private Parts. There's a scene with a bunch of lesbians in bikinis in a cave. Missy Hyatt is one of them. Dave also says Missy is still making appearances on various daytime talk shows, talking about her various cosmetic surgeries and also says she's expecting her first child (it's been a few years since I've watched that movie but I've seen it several times and I don't remember a lesbian cave scene? Deleted scene maybe? Or am I just forgetting it?)
- Great Sasuke suffered a broken orbital bone in a match this week. He's scheduled to face Jushin Liger for the J Crown title at the Tokyo Dome in 2 weeks and then immediately flies to the U.S. to wrestle at the ECW PPV the next day. Knowing Sasuke, Dave expects him to work through the matches.
- USWA's Brian Christopher is expected to start with WWF soon. He's actually been under WWF contract for about 2 years despite never wrestling for them. Christopher has pretty much been USWA's top star in recent years and has been the only one really keeping the promotion afloat. Lawler announced on USWA TV that Christopher was headed to WWF, but said he'll continue to work USWA shows also.
- ECW held another show in Revere, MA and once again, the crowd was said to be completely disrespectful and awful. Pretty much ever since the Mass Transit incident (where they chanted terrible things at the injured kid and at the paramedics trying to keep him from bleeding to death), the Revere, MA crowd has gained a reputation as the worst of what ECW fans represent.
- Lots of rumors about ECW guys leaving the promotion after the PPV. Dave knows Rob Van Dam has been offered a deal by WCW, but he hasn't accepted it yet.
- Dave criticizes a Sandman vs. Balls Mahoney match that aired on TV because of the absolutely sick unprotected chairshots to the head. Dave says the idea of wrestling is to make it look real without actually hurting each other. The chairshots were so hard that "you can almost see the brain cells dying" and says they should't be trying to give each other concussions just to prove how tough they are. Relax Dave, I'm sure it's fine...
- Random notes from Nitro: Dean Malenko has been getting unusually loud crowd reactions and is one of the most over people on the show lately. Mortis has great ring presence and has lots of potential, but the martial arts gimmick is death (we're 6+ months into the Glacier era and Dave has still yet to pick up on the fact that this was all an attempt to leech off the Mortal Kombat popularity). The reason the NWO was standing tall at the end of the show was because Kevin Nash has been complaining lately that he and Hall were selling too much and putting over the WCW guys too much and that it was weakening the NWO gimmick so the ending was done to appease Nash. And finally, Hogan wasn't on the show this week because the show was in Minnesota, and he hasn't been back to MN since the sexual assault allegations from last year and is apparently avoiding being in the state.
- Eddie Guerrero will be out of action for about 6 months due to a torn pec muscle. He was scheduled to be in the NJPW Top of the Super Junior tournament in May, where he is the defending champion, but it's questionable if he'll be able to work that tour.
- Dave says that if you read any stories in the tabloids about Rey Misterio Jr. and one of the women from the TV show Friends, don't believe it. It's 100% a work. And that's all he says. What the fuck Dave, elaborate! (he explains more in the coming weeks)
- The New York Daily News had a story about Chris Jericho being the son of former NY Ranger hockey player Ted Irvine. It also featured a story about Dale Torborg, who is the son of former Mets manager Jeff Torborg. Word is Dale is training to be a pro wrestler (he would later become WCW's KISS Demon, but we'll get to that eventually...)
- After Disco Inferno was fired last week for refusing to put over Jacquelyn, Eric Bischoff reportedly told Disco that he'll never find another job for the rest of his life making $80,000 a year, just as a parting shot as he was walking out the door. Disco has a 3-month non-compete clause in his contract, so if WWF is interested, it will at least be a few months before he can go.
- Both WWF and USA Network put out apologies for Bret Hart's swearing on live TV last week and they are starting to air the show now on a 7-second delay so they can edit out swearing. This week on Raw, they even edited out words like "sucks" and "ass" just to show how serious they are I guess.
- The big angle on Raw was Bret Hart cutting a promo to turn himself heel in the U.S. while making sure he stays a babyface everywhere else, especially Canada. Hart ran down the American fans and said they glamorize people like Charles Manson and O.J. Simpson. Shawn Michaels came out to do the standard defend-the-fans promo and took a few shots at Bret, calling him "mark man" for taking himself so seriously, among other things (these promos are when you can really start to feel the real-life hatred these 2 had for each other).
- WWF has reportedly been making offers to some of the guys who are training at WCW's Power Plant. They aren't under contract to WCW, they're just training at their place. Needless to say, WCW is irritated about it.
- WCW has a show booked in Los Angeles in June. In turn, WWF then booked a show on the same night less than an hour away in Anaheim, just to stick it to WCW.
- The Slammy's aired the night before Wrestlemania and was pretty much built around the bikini contest between Sunny, Marlena, Sable, and the Funkettes (Flash Funk's girls). Dave actually goes on a brief tangent about unrealistic beauty standards for women and then talks about how all the awards were works, and not voted on by the fans. Also he says all the jokes on the show were awful and Vince was the only one laughing who seemed to find it funny. There were also a lot of sad and desperate digs at WCW that Dave thinks were more pathetic than anything. Overall, the show went to a lot of work to try to push Sable ahead of Sunny as the woman they will be giving a big push to. At one point, Helmsley made a tacky comment about Sunny, saying she's "only good for one thing and he's heard from his best friend that she isn't even very good at that" which apparently upset some people and understandably so (I believe Shawn and Sunny had split up around this time and Shawn was being openly hostile towards her. We're also getting close to the "Sunny Days" promo. Anyway, here's Pt. 1 of the full show. Let the videos keep playing and it should auto-play parts 2, 3, 4, etc.).
- Expect Charles Wright (Papa Shango/Kama) to return soon. He's been managing a strip club in Las Vegas since leaving the WWF last (I think he still runs strip clubs in Vegas to this day).
- On a radio show in Toronto, Bret Hart actually tried to walk back some of the comments he's made in the past about Ric Flair. Bret talked about how he's approaching 40 years old himself and said his comments about Flair being old and washed up, "It's all coming back to haunt me. It's kind of a misconception because I do like Ric Flair actually. What it is about Flair is that I just don't think he was the best wrestler in the world. When you say that you offend everyone. I rate him in the top 30 or 40, maybe the top 20. He was really good in a lot of ways. He was a great wrestler. I'm a little less harsh on Ric because I notice I'm going through a lot of the same things he went through. Nobody worked harder than Ric Flair. He worked very hard and I don't know how he stayed with it as long as he did. He didn't ever look the part of an embarrassment like Hogan. Hogan was never a genuine guy. I'd like to say a lot of the things I've said about Ric Flair have sort of been misinterpreted. He was just from a professional standpoint of one wrestler to another, he was this legend that everybody talked about for years and years and years and years. Finally I get in the ring to wrestle the greatest wrestler of all-time kind of thing. I've wrestled a lot of really great wrestlers, which maybe a lot of people don't realize. When it was all said and done, he was good, but he wasn't the greatest. I've wrestled too many guys who were way better than this guy. He's still very good and he's a great wrestler in his own right, especially at his age. Maybe when he was younger he was that legend. Terry Funk at the Rumble, he and I started talking and I said I'd like to go a few more years. I'm sort of wondering about it even right now. I don't want to see myself embarrassing myself like Hogan has. Funk told me, 'I just love it too much to give it up.' I don't have that problem. I actually look forward someday to going home for good and watching tapes of myself."