June 01, 1998
- Hi everyone. I'm dying. I think. It's the only explanation. I'm not sure how it's possible for this much snot to fit into one human head, and yet here we are. I was hoping this post would be like my Michael Jordan flu-game, where I drag myself to my computer and still manage to post an all-time great Rewind. But this issue actually kinda sucks. Slow week. Sorry. Anyway, Monday is New Year's Day so there won't be a post on that day. Assuming I'm not dead by then, we will pick back up on Wednesday, Jan. 3rd. In the event I am dead by then, I'm going to be really pissed that I missed Okada/Naito. Anyway, please remember me fondly. In the meantime, everyone have a happy new year.
- It's apparently going to be a slow week because the main story is Dave looking back at the first half of 1998 and giving his personal opinion on all the bests/worsts of the year so far. I won't go into all of them because this is just Dave's opinions, not the actual year-end awards. But some notes: Wrestler of the Year, Box Office Draw, Feud of the Year, Best Interviews, Most Charismatic....Dave pretty much gives all of them to Steve Austin, who is by far the hottest wrestling star in the industry right now and says that even Hogan in his 80s peak wasn't at the level Austin is at right now in terms of having the company built around him, merch sales, etc. Best Promotion, WWF. Best TV show, Raw. Unless something changes between now and December, then Bill Goldberg is the obvious Rookie of the Year pick. But overall, the first half of 1998 has clearly been WWF's year. The company is simply firing on all cylinders right now. (someone on Twitter right now: "Waaaaaaah Dave never says anything nice about WWE!")
- In WWC in Puerto Rico, the universal champion El Nene quit the promotion and refused to drop the title because he claims he is owed $900 by one of the promoters. He was scheduled to drop the belt to Rey Gonzalez, but refused. They eventually paid him some of the $900 he was owed, so he returned the title belt to the company but still didn't work the match. So they tried to award the title to Gonzalez by forfeit but he refused to accept the belt and got on the mic in front of the fans and also said he was owed money.
- Promo Azteca is facing a lot of financial problems. The company hasn't folded yet, contrary to rumors, but it's not looking good. And most of the WCW wrestlers are no longer working there either, which also doesn't help. They're in desperate need of television but the network they were on said they won't be bringing them back to TV until after the World Cup ends, which might be too late for this promotion.
- WWF is putting together a WWF Latino show that will air in Mexico on Saturday afternoon and are looking to sign up several Mexican wrestlers. The idea is to start doing tapings later this year. The plan is to give the show a Mexican feel, and they plan to film it in American cities with large Hispanic populations and basically run it as its own separate Mexican promotion, apart from regular WWF programming. WCW has had a similar idea for years but have always dragged their feet on it. But now that WWF has secured a TV deal and already started signing guys, WCW is suddenly trying to catch up. They're meeting with EMLL's Paco Alonso to try to work out a deal since Promo Azteca is crumbling.
- Horace Boulder (Hogan's real-life nephew) recently signed with WCW and as a result, he no-showed what was scheduled to be his final tour with FMW. His scheduled opponent for many of the shows, The Gladiator, got on the mic and buried Boulder to the crowd and said he left to sign with WCW because wrestling there is easy. Dave says to tell that to all the guys who are currently injured or tell it to the wives of everyone there who are going through divorces.
- NWA president Howard Brody has issued a challenge to ECW after being harassed by ECW fans online this week. Brody challenged Heyman to put up his best guy against the NWA's best guy in a shoot fight. Dave thinks this is silly, but he also points out that Dan Severn is still the NWA champion so, yanno....if you're gonna make challenges like that, I guess it's good to have Severn on your side.
- Lots of people banged up in ECW: Shane Douglas is still dealing with a million injuries as talked about before. Sandman is still working despite being so injured from various things that he can barely do anything at all. Jerry Lynn's eye is swollen shut from an errant RVD kick. Mikey Whipwreck has an injured shoulder and bad knees. Justin Credible has suffered 2 concussions in recent weeks, and one of them had him totally unconscious for 2 minutes during a match but they kept wrestling around him until he woke up.
- ECW probably won't be back to Monaca, PA anytime soon. A local priest attended their last show and then went on an anti-ECW crusade, writing letters to the local paper and throwing a fit to the venue owners, so the building they were at has decided to no longer let ECW run shows there.
- ECW will have a CD being released soon, featuring lots of rock bands such as Slayer, Anthrax, Pantera, ICP, Rob Zombie, Biohazard, and more (a lot of those bands didn't actually make the album but here it is).
- Dennis Rodman is pretty much confirmed to be working next month's Bash at the Beach PPV in a tag match with Hogan. WCW is trying to get another major NBA name for that show and Dave suspects it will be Karl Malone, since they've been bringing up his name a lot recently.
- Ultimate Warrior is expected to start with WCW soon (going by the name The Warrior) but it seems to be dependent on the ratings. Basically, they'll keep putting off his debut as long as they can still beat WWF in the ratings, but if WWF wins the ratings war for the next week or two, then WCW will likely pull the trigger and bring him in sooner than later. They've also had discussions with Sid Vicious about coming in. Between the two of them, Dave says this is proof that no matter what your track record is, you can always find work in wrestling if you were ever popular in the past.
- Eric Bischoff's secretary Janie Engle had quit WCW and was planning to jump to WWF, but she was given a huge raise by Bischoff and it was enough to change her mind, so she's staying with WCW now. She has worked for the company dating back to the pre-WCW Jim Crockett days and is one of the people with the most inside knowledge of WCW aside from Bischoff himself. So he was desperate to keep her from going to WWF, thus the giant truckload of money to get her to stay (I'm surprised this didn't happen more often. The WCW office employees weren't under contract. Seems to me like WWF could have swooped in, made big money offers to all the important staff people, and hired them away all at once and it would have been devastating to the company. Or vice-versa, why didn't WCW raid the Titan offices?)
- On Nitro, Mortis cut a promo saying he's changing his name to Kanyon.
- Nitro ended with the NWO Wolfpac offering Sting a Wolfpac shirt and asking him to join. The show went off the air with Sting unsure if he would accept, which Dave says was a good cliffhanger. For what it's worth, after the show went off the air, Sting accepted the shirt and put it on which got a huge pop from the crowd, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything and was likely just done to send the crowd home happy.
- All the Nitro Girls' contracts are coming due soon. Dave says WCW has missed the boat by not merchandising them more, like putting out a Nitro Girls calendar for instance. Speaking of, the Nitro TV rating has been changed from TV-PG to TV-14 which seems to indicate they may be going a little more risque to try to compete with WWF.
- WCW is considering doing Thunder tapings every other week in order to ease the travel burden on the wrestlers. Morale in the locker room is said to be at an all-time low due to the schedule and all the other usual WCW reasons. Obviously if they tape Thunder in advance, it would probably create continuity issues because WCW basically books everything on the fly at the last minute, which means taping things in advance never works out well. Over the years, it's led to tons of problems with the Saturday Night show, where storylines and matches don't make any sense because the booking changes constantly. It's not uncommon to turn on WCW Saturday Night and see some guy holding a title belt that he lost 2 weeks ago on Nitro.
- As for the other morale issues in WCW, a lot of it comes down to money. The midcard guys who work all the house shows and TVs and PPVs are making less money that the top guys who don't work house shows and basically have part-time schedules. In particular, there were a lot of people upset after the last PPV where Roddy Piper was the referee for a match. Piper's payoff for being a referee in that one match was more than a lot of the undercard guys make in an entire year of full-time travel and working. With rumors of Ultimate Warrior and Sid being brought in, surely for big money and minimal dates, the overall lay of the land in WCW has got a lot of guys upset as you can imagine.
- Scott Hall will probably be back in about a month, since he's back in rehab. Dave says the angle where Hall turned on Nash at the PPV pretty much has been dropped and not even mentioned since Hall is gone. And since they knew he was going to rehab before they even did the angle, Dave questions why even bother doing it in the first place?
- WCW injury report: basically everybody. Reportedly there's about 30 contracted wrestlers dealing with injuries right now. In fact, Nitro on May 18th was cut back to a 1 hour show at the last minute (instead of the usual 2 hour show) and when TNT asked why Nitro was going to be an hour short that week, they were told that WCW didn't have enough un-injured wrestlers to even do a 2-hour show. Dave isn't buying that, but whatever. Point being, lots of guys are hurt. Add Wayne Bloom (disc removed from his back) and Ray Traylor (back issues also) to that list.
- WCW took out a full page ad in an industry magazine touting that Nitro is the highest rated show among adults in certain demographics. Dave says the numbers WCW used are highly misleading and explains why. But either way, the purpose of it was to attract advertisers. Dave says it's true that wrestling (both WWF and WCW) draw way bigger ratings than something like basketball or baseball. But the perception is that wrestling fans are a low-rent audience that doesn't have disposable income. So even though ratings for wrestling are through the roof, advertisers still don't spend a lot of money on wrestling. Dave talks about how later this year, Raw will be pre-empted for 2 weeks because of tennis. Even though Raw would get way higher ratings than tennis, advertisers will spend more money on tennis because they believe a "higher class" of people watch it.
- Kevin Nash is reportedly interested in bringing Ric Flair into the Wolfpac group (assuming the legal situation gets cleared up), which Dave thinks is funny since just a few months ago, Nash was openly trying to push Flair out of the picture. But everybody sees big money in Flair's inevitable return, so...
- The New York Times ran a big story about Mike Tyson's lawsuit against Don King and the story talked at length about Tyson's time in WWF and how that played a significant role in his firing King. Basically, there was talk about WWF doing an action figure of Tyson, which would give him a lot of money in royalties. At this point, Tyson learned that Don King apparently owned his likeness and would be making as much, if not more money than Tyson would on something like that, and was furious because he felt like King had misled him. I think. I don't know. I didn't actually read it, I'm just sorta paraphrasing what I think Dave means. Here, read it for yourself. Shane McMahon was interviewed for the story as well and it basically seems like Shane was the one who talked Tyson into getting rid of Don King.
- On the WWF Hotline, Jim Ross was still throwing a fit about Eric Bischoff's challenge to Vince McMahon, claiming it was false advertising and implying that WWF might sue them for it. Even though Bischoff repeatedly told fans that McMahon wouldn't be there, Ross says that fans are conditioned to believe the opposite when they hear something like that. Dave thinks the judge would probably go postal and murder everybody on both sides if this silly shit ever makes it to court.
- At the Raw tapings in Nashville, there was a fire in a bathroom that sent a woman to the hospital in critical condition. Apparently she flushed the toilet and fire shot out instead. The fire dept. wasn't sure what happened but there was speculation that it could have somehow been tied to the pyro WWF was using that night. How even the fuck?!
- Sunny has been taken off the road and off TV for now to handle "a personal situation" and will come back whenever she's ready (that would be drug problems, no-shows, backstage heat with Sable, and allegedly lying about a miscarraige among other things. She ends up getting fired soon after this and wouldn't appear in WWF again until 2007).
- Edge will probably debut later this month.
- Jim Cornette went on a major rant against Mark Madden on the WWF Hotline this week. Dave offers no details.
- In the letters section, someone writes in asking why people like Benoit, Jericho, and Guerrero want to go to WWF. He says in 5 years, the business will be totally different and guys like Hogan, Flair, and Nash won't still be wrestling in 2002 (lol) and then guys like Benoit and Co. can step up and fill their shoes in WCW. And in the meantime, they're gonna keep making $300,000 a year in WCW while they wait. Dave responds and points out how WWF has a reputation for creating stars while WCW has really only created 2 (Goldberg and DDP, and Dave points out that DDP owes a lot of his success to being friends with Bischoff and being given chances he otherwise wouldn't have gotten). I love this letter because, of course, WCW didn't even exist by 2002 and all 3 of those guys were still wrestling for years beyond that.