July 27, 1998
- Tonight Show host Jay Leno has signed on to wrestle at WCW's Road Wild PPV next month. The negotiations have been going on for weeks and that was the reason Eric Bischoff spent $70,000 on a Tonight Show-like set, with the plan being that he would host a weekly talk show segment every week on Nitro, spoofing Leno and taunting him. But the first and only time they did it was horrible and the ratings dropped like a rock, so they scrapped the idea.....until this week, when it was brought back and was just as unwatchable the 2nd time around. They plan to do more of the angle on episodes of the Tonight Show leading up to the PPV. So will it lead to PPV buys? Dave is skeptical. Considering how bad the last PPV main event with Dennis Rodman and Karl Malone was (and those guys were real athletes), it's entirely possible that fans won't risk getting burned again. It's also taking place at the Road Wild PPV in Sturgis, which has been a disaster every year WCW has attempted it. The buyrate is always lower than their average, the show always sucks, the crowd is always full of racist drunk bikers who aren't wrestling fans, etc. Plus the show is free for the live crowd, which means WCW is missing out on a good $400,000 or so gate that they could usually draw with an arena show. But Leno is a biker and one of the big reasons he agreed to do the show was because it is taking place at the rally in Sturgis.
- Dave lists other expected matches and one of them is Kevin Nash vs. Scott Hall, but both of them are trying to get that match nixed because they both believe that it's too soon for them to really start that feud, and they also don't want it to be in front of that crowd. Dave agrees with them (they got their way. The match doesn't end up happening). Country music star Travis Tritt is also scheduled to perform a 30-minute concert during the PPV, which Dave thinks is a bad idea.
- The RINGS promotion in Japan set their all-time record by drawing almost 18,000 fans for Akira Maeda's retirement match. The whole show overall was bad and Maeda was heavily booed after the match. Despite being billed as his retirement, there's still hope that they can one day put together a Maeda vs. Nobuhiko Takada match at some point. Dave recaps Maeda's career, which is a long interesting story covering his early years, his run in NJPW, jumping to the original UWF, working in WWF during 1984, back to NJPW, the infamous shoot-attack on Riki Choshu during a match that led to the formation of UWF in 1987 which led to the hard hitting "strong style" and worked-shoot matches that other Japanese promotions soon began imitating and in some ways birthed modern-day MMA. Dave thinks Maeda's retirement isn't great news for RINGS because a lot of the promotion's popularity is due to him. Without Maeda on the cards, Dave doesn't have high hopes for RINGS (yup, they slowly died before folding in 2002).
- For the 7th time in 8 weeks, Raw beat Nitro in the ratings (the Goldberg/Hogan show is the one victory WCW managed to get). Raw didn't just win this week, but they were dominant, winning almost every segment of the both head-to-head hours in decisive fashion. And the 2 Steve Austin segments on the show spiked the ratings even higher, with one segment in particular being the highest they've done and solidifying Steve Austin as the biggest ratings draw in the history of the Monday Night Wars.
- La Parka reportedly tore his ACL in a match with Goldberg a few weeks ago and has been at home in Mexico recovering but, unbeknownst to WCW, has still been wrestling at small border town EMLL spot shows. Dave thinks this could get messy since he's under contract to WCW and isn't supposed to wrestle anywhere else without explicit permission from them. Especially since he's supposed to be injured.
- WWF's Raw show is getting really popular in Mexico, with a lot of the younger fans preferring it over the traditional Lucha Libre style of Mexican wrestling on TV. It's thought that WWF could probably draw well if they decided to start running shows in Mexico.
- Great Sasuke will be wrestling at an upcoming Osaka Dome show for NJPW. If you remember, Sasuke was scheduled to work the Tokyo Dome show in January, but WCW complained about it because Sasuke had been working with WWF and ECW at the time, so they pulled strings and got NJPW to cancel the booking for Sasuke. But he's no longer working with WWF or ECW, so NJPW has decided to book him again and this time, WCW isn't making a fuss about it. Speaking of Sasuke, he recently returned to action after being out for most of the year with a knee injury but he's still not 100%.
- Notes from a recent Power Pro Wrestling show at the Mid South Coliseum in Memphis: Jerry Lawler faced Giant Silva and at one point, Randy Hales got involved, leading to Lawler's girlfriend Stacy running in to give Hales a low blow and then sat on his face, leading Dave to say, "there are men who would pay a lot of money for that." There was also a Bill Dundee vs. Koko B. Ware dog collar match that is only notable because both men bladed and they stupidly shared the same blade to do so, which Dave says is insane. And finally, there was a crazy high flying match everyone raved about featuring Willow The Wisp (occasional WWF-jobber Jeff Hardy) against a guy named Kid Dynamo (real name Shannon Moore).
- Jake Roberts recently spent 3 nights in jail in Jacksonville, FL for failure to pay child support.
- Indie wrestler Mike Modest is expected to get a WWF tryout soon, mostly as a favor to filmmaker Barry Blaustein who is doing a wrestling documentary movie and will be there filming it (yup, that gets shown in Beyond The Mat).
- Another day, another incident at an ECW show. Lots of versions of the story going around, but the general consensus is that the Dudleyz were inciting the crowd and someone threw a drink at them, leading to Big Dick Dudley to go over the rail after the fan. Then Bubba Ray Dudley got on the mic and challenged anyone in the crowd to get in the ring, leading to a few brave souls trying to jump the rails and getting taken out by security and by the Dudleyz. Then fans started throwing chairs. It ended with Big Dick Dudley and a 13-year-old fan both being arrested. It could be especially bad for Big Dick since he's on parole.
- Louie Spicolli's official cause of death has been released and was basically a heart attack from drug overdose, as everyone already knew.
- WCW hasn't announced who the final member of the new Four Horsemen will be because they're still pushing hard to get Ric Flair to return and be involved. They promised Flair the Horsemen will get a big push and be heavily marketed, and they want to call them Four Horsemen 2000 (which did wonders for LOD, Dave says sarcastically).
- The tentative plan is for Ultimate Warrior to debut on Nitro on the Aug. 17th episode. Dave says they better promote it hard because Warrior is probably only going to be good for a 2-3 weeks rating boost before he goes back to meaning nothing. So they better get all they can out of him.
- Dave thinks Goldberg is quickly losing steam now that he won the WCW title. Since it was such a spur of the moment decision, they didn't have any storylines planned for him and the TV shows are still entirely built around Hogan. This is basically exactly what happened after Sting won the title, they still didn't make him the focus of the show and it killed all the momentum. He talks about how Giant Baba and even Inoki were smart enough to phase themselves out when they got old and although they still worked occasional shows, they weren't the main event and they allowed themselves to work midcard matches while younger stars were pushed to the main event. But they owned their companies and were smart enough to see the future. Hogan doesn't own WCW and doesn't care about its future as long as he's able to keep himself on top, so he uses WCW as a way to keep himself as the top star and it's hurting the company.
- They did a really good angle with Buff Bagwell getting out of his wheelchair and revealing that he is still with the NWO and had him attack Rick Steiner. Dave thinks it was fine as an angle, but thinks WCW pissed away a lot of money by doing it. Bagwell could have come back as a huge babyface given the reality of his injury and probably drawn a pretty big rating or buyrate with his first match back, and then they could have turned him heel at the height of his popularity and solidified him as a top heel. Instead, they just skipped right to the end of what could have been a good, money-drawing story.
- Dave attended a recent Thunder taping and was surprised by a couple of things. For starters, despite not really being pushed as a top star, Bret Hart is still insanely over as a heel and got bigger reactions than almost anyone. And also, the Goldberg-backlash seems to be starting. He still got big cheers, but not much more than DDP and there were a few of anti-Goldberg signs in the crowd like "Goldberg sucks," and "Goldberg can't wrestle" and stuff like that.
- Kevin Nash and Goldberg are both set to film guest spots on upcoming episodes of the show Love Boat: The Next Wave.
- Next month's WWF Fully Loaded PPV will feature a match with Owen Hart vs. Ken Shamrock that will be taped in the famous Hart Dungeon. It's obviously an interesting idea for a match but it's also interesting because it means Stu Hart is letting WWF tape a PPV match in his house even after everything that happened last year in Montreal with Bret. Even though Owen is also his son and surely WWF is paying him to use the house, it's still gotta be seen as a slap in the face to Bret.
- WWF will be running a 1-hour prime time show on Sunday nights starting next month on a trial basis. If it does well, it will likely lead to a second weekly show (and thus, Sunday Night Heat is born). Interestingly enough, the first episode will be airing at the same time as ECW's next PPV.
- At the last Raw tapings, Shawn Michaels (on commentary) was all buddy-buddy with DX member X-Pac. Dave bitched about it at the time, saying Shawn's eventual return could lead to a big angle with DX and it would be stupid to just have them squash the beef now while he's still injured and doing commentary. But when the show aired, they edited that out. So no harm no foul.
- The woman with the absurdly huge breasts who appeared on Shotgun Saturday Night this week in an angle with Jackyl is a stripper named Rachel Rockets, who has done some porn movies as well. She was there with some of the Howard Stern crew. She had a shirt that said "Smells like ratings" leading Jim Cornette to say it smells like tuna, not ratings (here ya go, around the 27 minute mark).
- Steve Austin's matches at house shows have been moved to the middle of the card (before intermission). The reason is that he's so damn popular that when he works main events, it's impossible to get him out of the arena after the show because fans are climbing all over his car as he drives out and shit like that. So they have him work the middle of the show and then he leaves while the fans are still in the arena watching the rest of the show.