Wrestling Observer Rewinder

May 26, 1997

After the longest absence of his career, Ric Flair returned to the ring at Slamboree 8 months after surgery on a torn rotator cuff. Flair teamed with Piper and Kevin Greene against Hall, Nash, and Syxx in a match that was more interesting for all the behind-the-scenes drama in recent weeks than the match itself. Flair and Piper didn't want Syxx in the match and it eventually led to a bunch of quasi-shoot comments from both sides during TV promos. At one point, Roddy Piper wanted to pull out of the match and since he has creative control, there was nothing WCW could do to stop him. In order to convince him to do the match, the NWO members all agreed to do a triple-job (all 3 of them were pinned at once) which made the Charlotte crowd go insane but, as you can imagine, the NWO guys weren't super thrilled about it. Flair's arm and shoulder still clearly weren't at 100%. Overall it was a fine match and the crowd loved it, but by the typical Flair standard, it wasn't great. Turned out Kevin Nash was right: Syxx was the only one who made the match watchable from an in-ring standpoint so it's good they had him there. Flair is 48 years old and coming off an 8 month layoff. Dave says regardless, in the Carolina area, Flair will still be the biggest drawing star even 10 years from now. Sinatra still draws money and in wrestling, especially in the Carolinas, Ric Flair is Sinatra.
Other Slamboree notes: the show drew a sellout crowd and the second largest gate in Charlotte wrestling history. Merch sales for the show were also one of the highest in WCW history. Steve McMichael vs. Reggie White was by far the worst match of the year, with White putting on arguably the worst performance on a wrestling PPV ever. And for whatever reason, it went 15 looooong minutes. At one point, someone backstage called an audible and tried to get them to wrap the match up early, but they had carefully planned every spot and couldn't improvise so they didn't listen and kept going as planned. Dave gives it negative 2 stars. The women's match was billed as a #1 contender match for Akira Hokuto's title, because WCW is now reversing course on the phantom title change and saying Hokuto is still champion because apparently no one in the company has a clue what's going on. Ernest Miller debuted helping Glacier fight off Mortis and Wrath. Chris Benoit was insanely over with the live crowd but ended up jobbing to Meng and there's a lot of concern about Benoit's future now that Kevin Sullivan is out of the picture. Benoit has been Sullivan's opponent for so long and Sullivan protected Benoit and worked hard to get him over in order to keep their feud going, but now he's out of the picture and Benoit is back to doing jobs to Meng (I sometimes feel bad for Kevin Sullivan while reading these. He was the booker and he handpicked Benoit to work with, and he built a fantastic year-long feud that helped catapult Benoit out of the lower-card swamp of WCW and into a legitimate upper-card draw. Benoit repaid him by stealing his wife and killing her).
In the occasional MMA news that I cover, Dave has been reporting about all the PPV carriers that keep pulling out of carrying MMA. At this point, almost all of them are now refusing to carry the sport and Dave says "it is nearly impossible to see any kind of bright future for the UFC." It's expected that UFC will probably try to implement some rule changes to hopefully get the PPV companies to change their minds. The way the dominoes keep falling, pretty much everyone in the industry is all but certain that UFC is basically done for. Dave isn't writing them off just yet but it doesn't look good.
In Puerto Rico, Carlos Colon announced that he is vacating the WWC Universal title because he wants to spend more time with his family and being champion forces him to travel all over the world. Dave basically calls bullshit on this since Colon pretty much never leaves Puerto Rico anymore. Anyway, he said he's not retiring and is just vacating the title to allow others to have a chance to fight for it. He also said he had won the title 15 times in his career, which is false. As of the day he vacated it, he had actually won it 22 times. And of course, this only lasts a year. He eventually wins it again in 1998....and then again and again and again. He was a 26 time champion when he finally retired in 2014.
Hector Garza has jumped from AAA to Promo Azteca and also was backstage at the latest WCW Nitro. Just a few months ago, Garza had jumped from EMLL to AAA because AAA had promised to get him work in WWF. With that relationship pretty much dead, Garza decided to jump again to the company that can get him into WCW.
Brian Christopher was temporarily fired from USWA last week after an incident with USWA general manager Larry Burton. Apparently Burton said something to Christopher's girlfriend, which he didn't like and got into Burton's face and was fired. But they worked it all out and he's back now, but will apparently be doing jobs on TV for a bit as punishment.
Stevie Richards suffered a stinger when Terry Funk threw a guardrail on him and it hit Richards in the back of the head and neck. He was knocked out and couldn't move and had no feeling in his extremities for several minutes. He was taken to the hospital but recovered enough that he was able to do a run-in at an indie show the next day (this ends up being quite a bit more serious. Richards briefly retired from it and had surgery. The multiple surgeries even changed his voice. Here he is talking about it).
Tammy Sytch's 16-year-old niece passed away in a car accident this week, which is why Sunny wasn't at Raw and Chris Candido missed the recent ECW shows.
Mikey Whipwreck still needs knee surgery but he's still wrestling. He's got some sort of insurance issue keeping him from getting the surgery. He can still work brief matches before it starts to really hurt him, so he's doing that until he can get the surgery. When he can, ECW is expected to film a big angle to write him off for a few months.
Paul Heyman is still trying to work out a deal to get Jerry Lawler to shoot an angle at the ECW Arena. The idea being that Lawler would undoubtedly be the biggest heel ever in ECW. They want to work him into an angle with Rob Van Dam, who they're pushing as the top heel. Speaking of RVD, everyone in WWF was surprised at how well he got over during his match on Raw last week. He's also had offers from WCW, and at one point was planning to go, but he's taking off as one of ECW's top stars right now so he's chosen to stay with them because he knows WCW would never see him as a top star.
Paul Heyman is also trying to book PG-13 as a credible tag team in ECW, but after so long of getting bounced around like jobbers in WWF, he's not pushing them hard and hopes to slowly rebuild their credibility. He's also doing the same thing with Tracy Smothers, who was also jobbed out on WWF TV. Speaking of PG-13, they're gone from WWF completely now, and they reportedly blame Jerry Lawler and claim he got them fired because they've been working indie shows for a promotion that competes with USWA in Tennessee, but Lawler denies it. The team, specifically J.C. Ice, reportedly had a lot of heat during their time in WWF but Dave doesn't say why.
Tod Gordon got some unwanted media attention this week. Outside of ECW, Gordon also owns a jewelry store called Carver W. Reed Jewelers. Well, turns out a murder suspect named Craig Rabinowitz allegedly killed his wife and then took her engagement ring and sold it to Gordon at his jewelry store. Several local TV networks, Good Morning America and even People Magazine were all trying to hunt down Gordon to talk to him about it. Some of them even showed up to a recent ECW show looking for him (here's an old Washington Post article about the case. It doesn't mention Gordon but it's interesting).
Dave saw the 2-part news piece that ran on WJAR in Providence, RI about ECW and the Mass Transit incident. He recaps it and since I can't find the video, I will too. Basically, they showed some of the footage but not the most graphic parts. They also showed a clip from an RF shoot interview where New Jack was shown watching the footage and laughing about it. Paul Heyman was asked about it and refused to answer questions and referred the newspeople to the lawyers. They also talked about the crowd at the show and how they reacted to the violence and interviewed a sociologist who basically compared it to human cockfighting and was disgusted at the crowd reaction. Heyman was quoted as saying that ECW is for adults and kids shouldn't come to the shows, but then they showed footage of kids buying ECW tickets and entering the building. Overall, Dave doesn't think much will come of this, but Paul Heyman is definitely walking a fine line. Considering the political climate, one false move could doom ECW. With all the PPV providers pulling out of MMA and likely killing off companies like UFC (lol), all it would take is for one big enough publicity hit and they could start getting banned from TV stations, PPV, arenas, etc. and if that happened, it would be the end of ECW. Dave says they wouldn't be able to survive a political attack like UFC has faced. Because of this, Heyman has reportedly been carefully editing every ECW TV show and video that goes out, to make sure nothing that could get them in serious trouble is ever seen or aired.
There's belief that Kevin Sullivan no longer booking WCW isn't as temporary as people have been led to believe and that he might be gone for good. Though according to Sullivan, he fully expects to still be the booker when he returns. Terry Taylor and J.J. Dillon are now doing the bulk of the work, but word is Kevin Nash has a strong influence in the booking decisions right now also. And Nash was a strong critic of Sullivan's.
The latest on WCW's proposed Thursday night TBS show is that Eric Bischoff doesn't want to do it unless TBS will guarantee him that they won't be pre-empted by other sporting events. But given all the baseball coverage TBS does of the Atlanta Braves, they couldn't make that guarantee.
Kevin Greene did an interview and said that when he retires from football, he doesn't plan to go into wrestling and will be retiring from all physical sports.
AAA president Antonio Pena lost his lawsuit where he claimed he had the rights to several of the Mexican wrestlers who now work for WCW. Pena claimed he had them under contract first and their WCW contracts weren't valid but the judge disagreed.
Curt Hennig will likely be debuting on the June 30th episode of Nitro.
Dave says WWF's Raw has pretty much turned into a complete copy of Nitro. Rapid fire angles, all the matches are basically 4 minutes or less now, they have similar openings with all the exploding pyro, and they've even starting adding another announcer at the beginning of the second hour like WCW.
Vader was legit beat up from the PPV match with Ken Shamrock. His legs were beaten black and blue from all the leg kicks to the point that he couldn't even walk and needed fluid drained from his knee. He also caught a knee to the nose during the match which broke his nose in 4 places and gave him a broken septum. He'll likely need surgery to repair it and will be out for a little while.
On Raw this week, they aired part 1 of "an absolutely fantastic" interview segment with Mankind, revealing his real name as Mick Foley and showing videos and pictures of him from high school and talking about his Cactus Jack days. They're planning to show clips from his death match tournaments next week. (I mean, yeah, if you haven't seen this before, what are you doing with your life?)
Shawn Michaels got a lot of heat from a promo he cut on Raw this week, where he made a reference to Bret enjoying a lot of "Sunny days" lately, which is obviously some sort of inside reference to Sunny. Dave also said there seemed to be something wrong with Shawn and his delivery in the promo (Dave doesn't outright say it but it's pretty obvious that Shawn was pilled out of his mind here. Talking slow, slurring his words a little, cadence just seems off. It becomes a pretty common theme with Shawn promos in the next few months. Anyway, back to the story at hand, we obviously haven't heard the last of this drama).
Goldust got a great reaction this week from the live crowd after the recent interview segments that have aired with him. The pop he got shocked pretty much everyone in the back. They also brought his 3-year-old daughter out and gave her the mic and tried to get her to say "Goldust" but instead she took the mic and ran away with it, which led Jim Ross to comment that she's just like her grandfather, hogging the mic.
They announced Steve Austin and Shawn Michaels are being forced to team up on Raw next week, which was originally planned for the next PPV but they're rushing it and doing it on TV next week instead because they're hoping to pop a big rating. It's short-term thinking and Dave thinks it's a bad idea. PPV is still where the money is made. Popping a quick rating is nice but it doesn't translate to dollars.
On Shotgun Saturday Night, Brian Pillman was doing commentary. During one bit, Sunny was teasing Mankind and told him, "I won't bite." Brian Pillman then said, "She won't bite but she certainly will swallow!" Jim Ross quickly added, "Her pride" to try and salvage it from being too graphic.
Expect several Michinoku Pro wrestlers to be brought in as part of WWF's new light heavyweight division.
There have been 2 recent WWF matches with blood (Vader at the In Your House PPV and Austin at Wrestlemania). This was brought up in a recent Baltimore Sun newspaper article and Vince McMahon responded to it by saying the blood was accidental in both cases. Dave calls bullshit and says in the Vader case, they replayed his bloody face repeatedly on TV and that it fit perfectly with the match. And in the Austin/Wrestlemania case, Dave says no matter what McMahon says, he knows for a fact that Austin bladed. Whether he had Vince's approval or not is still unknown, but it definitely wasn't a hardway cut.