April 20, 1998
- We start with all the crazy behind-the-scenes turmoil in WCW, as about a dozen different stories are brewing. Despite their dominance for the last year and a half, Dave seems to already be seeing the writing on the wall, saying that these sort of issues are what crippled the once-thriving NJPW during the 80s.
- The biggest story is the future of Ric Flair in WCW. Flair had been announced to appear on Thunder last week in an angle where he would reform the Four Horsemen, which would include Bill Goldberg, himself, Lex Luger, and likely Dean Malenko (but Dave offhandedly mentions that Malenko is trying to get out of his contract so it might not have ended up being him. More on that in a bit). But Flair had already made plans to go see his 9-year-old son Reid wrestle in his amateur wrestling competition. Flair insisted he had gotten the time off cleared months ago but Bischoff disagreed and was furious when Flair didn't show up and was talking about firing or suspending Flair. A few days later at Nitro, Bischoff held a backstage meeting with the wrestlers. Bischoff has already got a lot of heat for firing Sean Waltman for no good reason and for essentially being an asshole to everyone in the company other than Hogan. Bischoff even recently admitted that he had become an asshole after his friend DDP confronted him about it and promised he was going to try to be nicer to talent. He then went on to give a speech completely burying Flair, saying that everyone knows Flair isn't a man of his word and promising to make an example of him. Dave thinks it would be insane for them to fire Flair, since that would be handing WWF a huge coup. WCW's website was given word to remove all references to Flair (this turns into one of the biggest ongoing stories of 1998).
- Flair's future isn't the only one in question, as several other WCW wrestlers are also wanting out. Chris Jericho, Dean Malenko, Eddie Guerrero, Meng, Scotty Riggs, and Scott Hall were all backstage at a recent ECW show, mostly just visiting since the 2 promotions were in the same town. Malenko and Guerrero were openly talking to people in ECW about wanting out of their WCW contracts, which end in Nov. 99. Malenko in particular has his lawyer working on getting him out. Chris Jericho's contract expires sooner and he also wants out. Then there's Chris Benoit, who's contract also expires in Nov. 99. Paul Heyman wants Chris Benoit in ECW more than anyone because he wants to make him the ECW champion and believes he can make Benoit a superstar. WWF is also interested in Rey Mysterio Jr. who's contract is up in a couple of months, but given how much WWF has squandered smaller guys (including turning Taka Michinoku into a joke), it probably wouldn't bode well for Mysterio in WWF.
- As for why Scott Hall was backstage at the ECW show, it was near where he lives and he was visiting his friend Justin Credible. When Hall was backstage, he was confronted by Shane Douglas, Bam Bam Bigelow, and Chris Candido, all of whom had well-known problems with Hall back in the WWF days. It was said to be a tense situation, with Douglas in particular getting in Hall's face and screaming at him and Bigelow backing him up, saying they didn't want him in the ECW locker room. Hall eventually called a cab and left after a few minutes, and as he was leaving, Francine yelled at him to get in line and buy a ticket like the rest of the marks. This led to a funny moment where Tommy Dreamer then walked in the room as Hall was leaving and, not aware of the tense situation that was happening, jovially offered Hall a ride home.
- WWF finally ended WCW's 83-week ratings winning streak with arguably the hottest 2-hour show in company history. WCW has been producing stale TV for the last month, while WWF has been riding an incredible wave of momentum and they've been closing the gap with WCW for weeks. This week, Raw set multiple ratings records, highlighted by Steve Austin challenging Vince McMahon to a match, with Austin having one hand tied behind his back. I expected Dave to have more to say about this.
- Memphis wrestling returns to its traditional live Saturday morning TV spot this week with the first episode of the new Power Pro Wrestling promotion. Live wrestling has been a tradition on Saturday mornings in Memphis dating back to the 1960s until the demise of USWA last year. The idea is to only run shows within a 100 mile radius of Memphis. Dave recaps the history of Memphis wrestling before diving deep into the latest on all the legal issues. XL Sports is suing Larry Burton, his wife and son, Jerry Lawler, Stacy Carter (Lawler's girlfriend), an attorney that USWA used, Barry Bloom (sports agent), other assistants and TV people, and even Jerry Lawler's mom, who held a minority interest in USWA. This is a loooooooong story and it all gets really messy and complicated but it's also super interesting. I'm leaving out a TON of stuff here. Anyway, XL Sports paid $1.1 million for 55% of USWA (immediately after Lawler had just bought Jerry Jarrett's half for less than $200,000). XL Sports claims Burton and Lawler fudged the numbers to make the company look more valuable on paper than it actually was. Burton himself is an interesting story, as it turns out he has at least 22 known arrests under various names all over America, many of them for violent crimes, but also some financial and fraud charges, including trying to use someone else's social security number to receive death benefits. He met Lawler in 1993 and even was occasionally called in to the WWF to do favors (Dave says Burton was one of the people who helped set up the area where Roddy Piper and Goldust had their backlot brawl at WM12). Dave goes into a ton of detail on all the meetings leading up to the sale, WWF and Vince McMahon's pretty significant role in it, ECW's small role, and all the ways that Burton pretty obviously lied his ass off to defraud these people. TL;DR - Larry Burton was an absolute fucking snake and Lawler was...probably complicit, but I guess it couldn't quite be proven in court. But seriously, this one paragraph isn't really doing the story justice, it's one that's worth going to the archives and reading in full if you're into this sort of legal mumbo jumbo.
- TV-Asahi in Japan did a weird thing when it came to airing Antonio Inoki's retirement show. They aired a 2-hour show called Antonio Inoki: This Is Your Life with actors doing dramatic re-enactments of Inoki's life story in between airing clips of Inoki's famous moments and then highlights of him arriving to the arena for his final match and all that stuff. The presence of Muhammad Ali was heavily hyped but when they showed him, it was sad to see, since Parkinson's has done a number on the former boxer, with someone having to literally hold his hand and walk him out. It was made even worse when he stood next to Inoki, who basically doesn't age, and made Ali look even more frail and feeble. The show was capped off with the Inoki/Frye match, which was fine for what it was (a 4-minute worked shoot basically). Surprisingly, the show didn't do nearly as well in the ratings as everyone thought, which was a shock considering how much of a cultural icon Inoki is in Japan. (Sadly, I can't find the 2 hour Inoki show. But here's a short Inoki documentary that has some highlights near the end of the retirement show. Shout out to u/IQWrestler-39 for finding this the other day).
- Dave talks about Mitsuharu Misawa's health. He turns 36 soon and has been wrestling at a high level basically his entire life, dating back to amateur wrestling as a kid. And in AJPW, missing matches for anything less than hospitalization is strongly frowned upon. As a result, Misawa's body is breaking down on him. He's currently working with serious neck and back issues, plus a broken finger and last week he suffered a broken kneecap and still didn't miss a show. Finally doctors have told him he needs surgery, which would cause him to miss 6 weeks and miss the rest of the Carnival Champion tournament, which he's heavily figured into the finals of. The tournament was already thrown into disarray when Akira Taue had to pull out due to a serious knee injury. So it's unknown for now if Misawa is going to have the surgery he needs or if he will keep working, but he's basically falling apart.
- Sid Vicious won't be working in Power Pro Wrestling after a falling out with Jerry Lawler and promoter Randy Hales. Sid has a friend who is a 6'10 black guy and he wanted to bring him in and work an angle with him. The gimmick would be that Sid would bring the guy out in chains. Lawler and Hales pointed out how that might not be the best idea. Sid also wanted to help book the promotion and they turned him down for that too. So he walked.
- Welsh wrestler Adrian Street may have had his career come to an end this week at an indie show in Alabama. He was taking a flying cross body but Street didn't have his footing and when the guy landed on him, it tore his knee to shreds. Street had major surgery the next day and the recovery is said to be anywhere from 12-18 months. Considering Street is almost 60 years old, this is probably the end of the road for him (nope! He came back and wrestled periodically until 2010, although not much).
- Jake Roberts is reportedly working on an autobiography (never happened but man, I can only imagine the stories he could tell).
- A promotion called Can Am Wrestling Federation is running shows in Calgary and Edmonton using several former Stampede wrestlers as the top stars. They also have a member of the Hart family on the roster, Teddy Hart who is Bret's nephew.
- The Bushwhackers worked an ECW show this week, using the name Bushwhackin' Dudleys. They were only brought in as a one-time deal though.
- Sandman and Sabu were suspended by ECW for a few days, causing them to miss the weekend shows. It apparently is due to a recent incident where several hotel rooms registered to them were trashed, causing all ECW wrestlers to be banned from the hotel. Others were involved too, but Sandman and Sabu ended up taking the heat and had to pay for the damages. They were only suspended for those few shows and have since already been brought back.
- D-Von Dudley was injured over the weekend from "taking a nut shot a little too hard from New Jack."
- On WCW Thunder, a fan jumped the barricade and grabbed Raven by the hair during his promo, dragging him out of the ring before he could be tackled by security. And a few days later, another fan jumped the rail at Nitro while Raven was cutting a promo in the aisle and tackled him. Security jumped in and pulled the guy off and held him down as the cameras cut away. Not a good week to be Raven (I'm pretty sure the first one was legit but I think they eventually made an angle of it. So I don't think the 2nd one on Nitro was legit).
- Jesse Ventura, who is running for governor, was in attendance at Nitro in Minneapolis. He was never mentioned or shown on TV, but he was all over the building shaking hands and kissing babies and whatnot. He also brought a camera crew with him to document it which WCW wasn't happy about but they ultimately allowed. There were crowd chants for Ventura throughout the show.
- Hogan's new movie 3 Ninjas: High Noon At Mega Mountain was a spectacular bomb, opening at #33 in its first weekend. It got bad reviews too, but that's nothing new since all of Hogan's movies get bad reviews but none of them have opened this poorly before. (So on top of wrestling, I'm a history and political nerd also. Fun fact, back in 1978, a South Korean filmmaker named Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife were both kidnapped by North Korea. They spent 8 years living in North Korea, being forced to produce movies for Kim Jong-il. In 1986, they escaped and defected to the United States where they resumed their film career. Sang-ok directed and/or produced several American movies during the 90s, including.....3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain.)
- Ricky Steamboat has threated Ultimo Dragon with a lawsuit over the name Dragon, which Steamboat has apparently had trademarked for usage as a pro wrestler for years. So if Ultimo Dragon ends up changing names, that will be why (nothing ever really came of this).
- WCW finally got around to releasing some Bill Goldberg merch and, to no one's surprise, it sold like crazy. Goldberg shirts alone counted for nearly 20% of the merch sold at Nitro last week.
- As mentioned a few weeks back, there was a porn movie released called Nude World Order. Well, funny enough, there was even a small reference to the Observer in the film, although they gave it a different name "so as to not make my reputation any worse." Dave says he didn't even find out about it until after the movie was made and someone told him. Anyway, looks like it was successful because there are plans to do a Nude World Order II (man, I can't find either of these but this sounds hilarious).
- Wrestlemania looks to have done around a 2.3 buyrate and is around 720,000 buys which would be the largest WWF PPV gross in history. Dave says a lot of the wrestlers will be getting some huge payoffs pretty soon from that show.
- They did an injury angle on Raw with Chainz from DOA. The reason is because just before Wrestlemania, he showed up to work "in no condition to perform" and was sent home. He was almost fired but was spared since he's friends with Undertaker and was allowed to work his scheduled WM match. But now the injury angle was done to send him home for a couple of weeks, I guess as a suspension.
- Earl Hebner is still in ICU after his recent brain aneurysm but is apparently improving.
- WWF has talked about bringing in porn star Jenna Jameson as Val Venis' manager when he debuts. She has made a few appearances for ECW (she eventually appears in one of his taped vignettes but never live).
- Shawn Michaels took part in a parade in San Antonio this weekend. As for his WWF career, it's basically on hold right now due to his injury. There's also a lot of behind-the-scenes problems with Shawn that need to be addressed before he returns. Now that they managed to convince him to do a job and got the belt off of him, they don't seem to be in a hurry to bring him back.
- Steve Regal has signed with WWF, although he can't be used until his no-compete clause with WCW expires which is another 3 months. WWF is planning to challenge that. But they're not rushing to get him in the ring because they want him to lose weight and get back in shape first. Regal is good friends with Steve Austin and is expected to be put into a storyline with him, so they want him in top-notch main event condition (this doesn't work out so well for Regal).
- Longtime jobber Scott Taylor is finally being given a gimmick. They will give him the nickname "Too Hot" and he will team with Brian Christopher, who will have the nick name "Too Sexy."
- Here's a quote from Phil Mushnick about the recent New York Times story about pro wrestling: "Credit is due to The New York Times for its page 1 story last week, that revealed pro wrestling to be so pervaded with degenerate acts that it's no longer suitable for viewing by children. Pretty sharp observation, given that this story is about 15 years old. If The Times stays on top of things, it will be able to report that pro wrestling is infested with steroid abuse and other illegal drug use--a story that's about a dozen years old--and that pro wrestlers have this nasty habit of dropping dead or committing suicide at around age 30, a story that's only about 10 years old."