Wrestling Observer Rewinder

August 31, 1998

This past week, the new season of Monday Night Football debuted featuring a SuperBowl rematch between the Packers and Broncos, and it drew a 9.5 rating. Airing at the same time was Raw and Nitro, which did a combined 9.9 rating. In other words: wrestling beat out a SuperBowl rematch in prime time. Because of the differences between network and cable TV, the NFL game still had about 2 million more viewers watching but still. For what it's worth, Nitro won the ratings battle this week, almost certainly due to Warrior's return leading to a ratings boost (even though the segment where Warrior appeared actually lost to Raw). On the flip-side, Nitro was also a terrible show highlighted by another meandering Warrior promo while Raw was outstanding yet again.
Terry Garvin passed away last week at age 61 from stomach cancer and unfortunately, his life can't really be talked about without addressing the elephant in the room of the 1992 sex scandals that he played a role in. Dave does a brief recap of his career in the business leading to him working as Pat Patterson's assistant for WWF from 1985-92. Of course, in early 1992, an underage ring boy alleged that he had been sexually harassed by a male employee of WWF and the stories were picked up by major media outlets. With the company already reeling from steroid accusations, the story gained major traction and led to Terry Garvin, Pat Patterson, and Mel Phillips all "resigning." Patterson, of course, later returned. Several other people later came out of the woodwork with accusations against Garvin and Patterson saying they would often attempt to extort sexual favors from wrestlers in exchange for being better promoted. Most notably wrestler Barry O (Randy Orton's uncle) claimed Garvin made sure he was never pushed in WWF because he turned down Garvin's advances.
A fan threw a chair in the ring at a WWC show in Puerto Rico and it hit wrestler El Texano in the eye and seriously injured him. There's concern that he may never regain vision in the eye (not sure if he did or not, but he kept wrestling for a few years after so I assume he recovered).
Mitsuharu Misawa returned to the ring after taking off the last 3 months to recover from injuries. He worked a tag match and, afterwards he admitted that his knees were still giving him trouble and said he was only about 60% healthy but felt the company needed him to return because the last 2 tours have been the most disastrous ever for AJPW without him.
Koko B. Ware reportedly suffered a stroke a couple of weeks ago but is recovering from it nicely and should be fine.
NBC is planning to air a TV special called "Secrets of Pro Wrestling Exposed" in November that will go head-to-head with an episode of WWF's Sunday Night Heat. It will feature wrestlers wearing masks to protect their identities (it actually ended up being called "Exposed! Pro Wrestling's Greatest Secrets" and becomes a little bit of a big deal. But we'll get there). Speaking of networks, Fox is reportedly seriously interested about getting in on all this pro wrestling business that's so hot right now.
Dave attended an indie show over the weekend and says everyone is raving about this Christopher Daniels guy who wrestles under the name Fallen Angel. He's had a few WWF tryouts and was apparently pretty awesome in those also, but WWF doesn't have any interest in signing guys his size right now since they've all but abandoned their light heavyweight division.
ECW's last PPV did about 15% less buys than the previous show, which can likely be attributed to going up against the debut of WWF's Sunday Night Heat. It's almost a certainty that ECW will move future PPV start times up 1 hour to avoid going against that show in the future.
Just gonna quote this one: "New Jack had an operation on his testicles and will be out about another month."
For those curious about the surgeries Tammy Sytch is getting, one is to have her nose fixed. She broke it years ago as a high school cheerleader and never got it fixed properly. And the other surgery is to replace her breast implants due to medical issues with the previous ones.
Terry Funk is reportedly interested in returning to ECW. He recently finished up with WWF, telling them he wanted to leave so he could heal up some injuries and focus on making movies, but that may have just been a lie to get out of the company since he was basically being jobbed out and now he is already looking to get back in the ring (not really. He only wrestles 4 indie shows for the next year or so before eventually re-surfacing in WCW in early-2000).
A new guy named Big Sal Graziano debuted in ECW and was billed at 550 pounds and looks every bit of it. He jobbed twice to Spike Dudley in his first matches. Paul Heyman reportedly likes him because he has a good attitude and had no problem losing to Spike who he outweighs by several hundred pounds (he eventually joins the F.B.I.)
As is becoming tradition, Dave shits all over Nitro in his recap. Some notes: Bischoff did a worked-shoot promo talking about being the booker and not letting Warrior into WCW and said he ran out Johnny B. Badd and Vader. He also referenced Eddie Guerrero's comments and was holding a pencil, the universal "booker" symbol. Dave talks about how Kevin Sullivan and Pillman already did this angle. Wolfpac guys came out and cut the same promo they cut every week. Roddy Piper tried out some jokes during his promo but it was awful and painful to watch. Lex Luger vs. Brian Adams was "so boring that if you look up boring in your computer dictionary, they'll be playing round-the-clock tapes of this match." I'm not sure Dave knows how dictionaries work.
WCW injury report: no lie, Dave literally lists 21 different wrestlers in WCW dealing with injuries. Most of them are missing shows and a couple (Mysterio and Rocco Rock) will require surgery and be out for months. The whole locker room is pretty beat up.
On the WWF side, former ECW tag team The Pitbulls worked a match against the Headbangers at the Shotgun Saturday Night tapings and looked bad.
On Raw, they started an angle with Edge and Gangrel. Dave says the plan is to start a storyline with them similar to Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview With The Vampire.
The Brawl For All tournament finally came to an end this week, with Bart Gunn knocking out Bradshaw in 42 seconds. For winning, Gunn legit received $75,000 while Bradshaw got $25,000 for coming in second. Dave expects Gunn will probably get some kind of push from this. Speaking of, turns out Godfather was pretty badly injured in his Brawl For All match and will be out a couple of months with a broken foot and torn hamstring and knee ligaments. All told, Dave thinks the Brawl For All idea didn't work. It was an interesting idea but the ratings weren't through the roof and considering how many guys came out of it injured, it's probably not something they should try again.
Al Snow was supposed to re-re-debut on Raw and they even passed out fake mannequin heads to the crowd in order to get the same effect ECW does with his entrance. But for whatever reason, they ended up scrapping it at the last minute and Snow never came out.
On the WWF hotline, Jim Ross ripped into Tony Schiavone and Eric Bischoff due to the way they tried to spoil the recent main event of Raw the week before. Ross also said that Schiavone isn't that great of an announcer and that both of them have to do what their bosses tell them. But he said his boss (Vince McMahon) was a great announcer while Schiavone's boss would never be any good ("My dad can beat up your dad!" basically).
Kurt Angle reportedly did really good in his training camp and they even had him work a couple of matches at a local indie that they send developmental guys to. Dory Funk in his corner. Angle got over as a babyface and won his matches and it looks like he'll be signed.
Just for shits and giggles, here's an Edge vs. Christian match from that same show:
Andrew Martin suffered a broken finger during training and had to have surgery to get a pin put in it, but he came back a few days later and worked some of the developmental shows also.
Ted Annis (Teddy Hart) was sent home from training camp after a series of disciplinary problems, including an incident where he got into a public argument at the hotel and was late for practice 3 times (yeah that sounds about right).
Vince McMahon was quoted in an interview this week heavily praising Ric Flair. If the judge ends up ruling in his favor and Flair is able to get out of his WCW contract, WWF definitely has a strong interest in bringing him in. But both companies have a lot of money to throw around right now so Flair would likely end up going wherever will pay him the best. Word is he's still leaning toward returning to WCW once all this legal mess gets cleared up.
Toy company Jakks Pacific grossed $800,000 during the 2nd quarter of 1998 based only on WWF toys alone. WWF has really put this company on the map in the toy business and their action figures are among the top 5 best-selling in the toy industry.
The same story also featured Vince McMahon going on about how Ted Turner has a vendetta against him over the whole Black Saturday deal back in the 80s, so Turner went out and bought his own company (WCW) to destroy Vince. Eric Bischoff's response to that: "I meet with Ted Turner probably for about five minutes a year; that's Ted's involvement in WCW. But Vince likes to portray to the media that there is a big grudge match going on between him and Ted. I kind of think if Vince were to walk into Ted Turner's office, someone would have to remind Ted who Vince is." (Here is a re-enactment of what that meeting might be like). The article talked about how WWF was winning the ratings war now because WCW diluted the product by adding Thunder. Dave thinks there may be some truth to that and it sounds good, but the real reason is simply that Raw has consistently been the better show for a long time now. And finally, Vince talked about how much happier he was with the USA Network now due to the new ownership and claims former USA head Kay Koplovitz wouldn't have allowed WWF to go in this new direction and had been a pain in the ass over the years before when he tried to push the envelope.