October 04, 1999
- WWF's Unforgiven PPV is in the books and it was pretty bad. Not much else of note. Mostly sluggish, bad matches. Everyone, from the wrestlers to the announcers to the production all seemed exhausted, which Dave attributes to adding Smackdown and all the increased workload that comes from that and says everyone is just tired. Triple H won his 2nd world title but still isn't really getting over as a top heel despite how hard they've been pushing him. Al Snow vs. Big Boss Man in the Kennel in a Cell match was one of the worst PPV matches of all-time. The dogs between the two cages didn't act vicious and instead spent the match barking at each other and pissing on the mats. They didn't pay any attention to either wrestler, which was the whole point of the match. Even Jim Ross on commentary was openly making fun of how bad it was. Jericho vs. X-Pac didn't click at all and Dave is baffled that Jericho didn't win or even look strong in his debut PPV match. And the 6-man main event was fun, but nothing special.
- Dave recaps the latest UFC PPV, featuring Tito Ortiz vs. Frank Shamrock in possibly the greatest fight in UFC history. After winning the fight, Shamrock announced he was vacating the light heavyweight title and leaving UFC which was pretty well known beforehand anyway. He's expected to sign a deal with a Japanese promotion soon. Dave goes into a ton more detail about the show and all the issues facing UFC right now. This is kind of a slow issue, so fuck it, here enjoy some MMA.
- WATCH: Tito Ortiz vs. Frank Shamrock - UFC 22
- Speaking of Shamrocks, Ken Shamrock suffered a neck injury that caused him to miss the Unforgiven PPV and may put his plans of returning to UFC in jeopardy. It was diagnosed as a slipped disc putting pressure on his spine. Worst case scenario, he might need surgery which would end any chances of returning to UFC, at least any time soon if not forever. The injury came from a stiff kick from Curtis Hughes (who is basically Chris Jericho's bodyguard lately). After it happened, Shamrock threw a fit backstage, refusing to wrestle until he could get an MRI done, even though WWF officials wanted him to work through it (this is the end of the road for Shamrock. He never wrestled in WWF again. In fact, he didn't wrestle again at all for more than a year after this and only did a dozen or so matches ever again so this is the end of his full-time wrestling career. But he did compete in UFC again eventually).
- The finals of NJPW's annual tag team tournament only drew a crowd of 7,000 or so people to Budokan Hall. It was the smallest crowd NJPW has drawn in that building in at least 20 years. It's basically evidence of how much the company is suffering due to a recent trend of bad matches and bad booking.
- WWF's Raw beat WCW Nitro by its biggest head-to-head margin ever, lead by a 20-minute long segment with The Rock and Mankind called "This Is Your Life" which did a mind-boggling 8.39 rating. At the same time on Nitro, a Saturn vs. Konnan match did a 1.58, meaning Raw beat Nitro in that segment by nearly 7 full points. In fact, even the Monday Night Football game took a pretty significant hit, down more than 2 full points lower than average. In more good news for WWF, Smackdown ratings increased, doing about double the Thunder rating. In fact, both Superstars and Sunday Night Heat also did higher ratings than Thunder and Live Wire came really close to beating it as well.
- WATCH: Mankind & The Rock - This Is Your Life
- Okay, let's clear up the confusion once and for all about the "This Is Your Life" segment and WWE's constant claim that it's the highest rated segment in Raw history. There's a lot of asterisks there. For starters, it's not. The highest rated segment in Raw history is actually an Austin vs. Undertaker match which did a 9.5 rating. But that match happened during the overrun at the end of the show and Nitro went off the air a few minutes before Raw did. So a lot of people switched over to catch the end of Raw and boosted that rating. But bottom line, if you remove all the qualifiers, Austin vs. Undertaker is the highest rated segment in Raw history, period. Then there's the May 10, 1999 episode of Raw. Several quarter-hour segments of that episode did higher ratings than "This Is Your Life" but again, Nitro wasn't on the air that night due to the NBA Playoffs so Raw was unopposed. "This Is Your Life" is the highest rated segment in Raw history when facing head-to-head competition from Nitro during non-overrun hours. Still impressive for sure, but there's a few caveats there.
- New Japan is doing a rematch between Shinya Hashimoto and NWA champion Naoya Ogawa next month, stemming from the now-infamous shoot incident that happened earlier this year at the Jan. 4 show. It's unknown if it will be an NWA title match though. The problem is the NJPW relationship with WCW would prevent them from doing an NWA title match on their show for political reasons. But on the same hand, with Eric Bischoff gone from WCW, nobody really knows the status of their NJPW relationship anymore.
- The E! channel aired a show called Inside Pro Wrestling which was basically useless and offered nothing new. All the usual backyard wrestling clips, is this okay for children, interviews with all the usual WWF and WCW people on both sides giving the same canned responses. It detailed the WWF's version of the "history" of wrestling, which was the usual bullshit story about how 20 years ago, a young Vince McMahon single-handedly invented the idea of doing "stories" in wrestling and how Ted Turner bought WCW to try to destroy Vince because he has a grudge against him and all that nonsense.
- WWF was granted a temporary restraining order against Playboy magazine preventing them from publishing an Ultimate Sable issue, which has the tagline "The woman you loved as Sable in the raw" on the cover WWF successfully argued that "Sable" and "Raw" are WWF trademarks and that the cover image of Rena Mero showed her dressed as her Sable character. The injunction ruled that Playboy can't even show Sable in black clothing with the sunglasses and black gloves and all that other stuff. Additionally, any further printings of the previous Playboy issue can't refer to her as Sable so the cover text will have to be changed. The new magazine will still be coming out, but Playboy has to change the cover and re-print it, which may delay it. She will appear on the new cover in white lingerie. Other lawsuits regarding the previous Playboy issue are still pending, but there are countless instances where Playboy referred to her as Sable in the magazine and in promotional advertising when they legally weren't supposed to, and WWF is hitting them on every instance of it (man, it's kind of a miracle that WWF and Playboy continued to work together after this. WWF ended up filing, like, 3 different lawsuits against them over this Sable shit).
- Dave will be hosting a daily 2-hour pro wrestling call-in show called "Wrestling Observer Live" on the internet on the new Eyada.com website. Eyada is a live sports and entertainment site dedicated to hosting live phone-in shows, "similar to the radio, but through the internet" and allows listeners from worldwide to tune in. 6-8PM EST on Mon-Fri. Dave will be talking about wrestling, MMA, and all the latest news every day. Dave admits that there's some problems with this though. A lot of homes only have 1 phone line, and if you're listening to the show on the internet, your phone line will be tied up because this is 1999 and that's how the damn internet used to work. Dave says this is basically an experiment and it will live or die based on whether there's enough interest and people call in, and he's also worried that 2 hours of daily pro wrestling talk might be too much. But he's gonna give it a shot. Call in number is 1-877-EYADA-00 if you have a time machine and/or anything you'd like to ask Dave.
- Shawn Michaels will travel to Japan in November to be a referee for a match in FMW. In the meantime, he's still making $750,000 a year on a guaranteed contract to do nothing and WWF is trying to get out of the deal because they have no interest in using him. Speaking of Michaels, he got some heat within WWF recently after giving an interview on WWF.com where he complained about Austin not doing a clean job to Triple H at Summerslam (if you recall, the match was changed to a 3-way with Foley added, and Foley ended up winning). Shawn said Austin should have put over Triple H and basically implied that Austin screwed over Triple H and refused to put him over. Dave seems to think that's pretty rich coming from Shawn Michaels, but whatever. Anyway, WWF officials weren't happy about him saying that.
- Harley Race is in need of both neck and back surgery due to all the injuries from his 3+ decade career. Race recently said in an interview that he is a fan of Chris Benoit but wished he could talk him out of doing the diving headbutt because 15 years from now, his neck will be destroyed (sooner than that. And Benoit doesn't make it 15 years).
- Jesse Ventura is talking about suing the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada after they announced they were naming one of their rooms after him and that he used to frequent the place back when he was a Navy SEAL. Speaking of politicians, the Republican party in Pennsylvania has expressed interest in having Bruno Sammartino run for office in Pittsburgh, citing Ventura's success. Dave thinks this shit is getting out of control.
- Power Pro Wrestling house show business has been really bad. In fact, the only reason the promotion even survives is because WWF pays for many of the top stars (they're mostly all signed to developmental deals) and the TV station in Memphis pays them $1,500 weekly for the TV show.
- Mike Awesome's first matches as ECW champion have been at house shows against Rhino. Dave says Awesome's weaknesses in the ring are pretty apparent when he's facing anyone other than Masato Tanaka. Those 2 have insane chemistry together for some reason, but against anyone else, Awesome isn't nearly as impressive. But Paul Heyman has something special with Rhino and Dave predicts he'll be a star sooner than later.
- Chris Candido and Tammy Sytch returned to ECW at the latest TNN tapings and it was a mixed bag. Candido was said to be fine, but Tammy looks rough these days and has none of the presence that made her such a big star in WWF (we're a week or two away from a really interesting interview with Tammy on ECW TV).
- WCW officials met with Hulk Hogan this week and he was told that from this point forward, Goldberg will be promoted as the top star of the company and basically, he can just suck it up and deal with it. That being said, Nitro this week was still mostly built around Hogan, so who knows anymore.
- There were a lot of internet rumors going around about several people being released from WCW. Dave can only confirm a few Power Plant trainees, Sick Boy, James Vandenberg, and Public Enemy. At Nitro, other people who were mentioned in the internet rumors were going around asking people if it was true and if they still had jobs, but nobody seemed to know for sure. Erik Watts and Silver King were 2 of the names that seemingly still have jobs and were backstage at Nitro, but nobody could confirm or deny the rumors, even to them. As for Randy Savage, who was also rumored to be gone, he's still under contract for a few more months but they have no plans to use him and they'll probably let his contract expire. WWF officials have strongly hinted (Jim Ross) and outright said (Vince Russo) that they have no interest in bringing him back to WWF.
- Notes from Nitro: they teased the debut of a new character that will likely be Dustin Runnels and appears to be some weird new character that seems like a cross between Goldust and Undertaker. Sid Vicious was supposed to wrestle Van Hammer, but Sid told WCW officials he couldn't wrestle because he was suffering from bad allergies, which just thrilled everyone else in the locker room. Anyway, several of the matches on the show were pretty good and Dave doesn't really trash the show too hard this week.
- Ultimo Dragon's recovery from a botched elbow surgery isn't going well and it's looking less and less likely that he'll ever be able to return to the ring. Dragon is scheduled to meet with WCW about it later this week.
- ICP is gone from WCW, at least for now, but ICP always seems to bounce back somewhere. It is apparently an issue with their contract, with WCW trying to change it from 75 dates per year up to 150 per year. With their music touring schedule, ICP couldn't commit to that many dates so they're gone. Dave thinks WCW might have intentionally pushed them out as punishment for trying to jump ship to ECW a couple weeks back. Also, there has been some controversy over a deal ICP made with WCW to promote their music (an ICP video aired on Nitro last week). They also made a deal to pass out sampler CDs at WCW shows, but that went awry on the very first night they did it, because the WCW offices got a ton of complaints from parents who were upset that these sample CDs that were handed to their kids were full of ICP's vulgar rap music. Dave is actually surprised WCW made a deal with ICP at all, given how explicit their music is and how the Turner execs are usually pretty squeamish about that sort of thing but nobody in the office is paying attention to what anyone else is doing so this kind of stuff tends to fall through the cracks.
- For what it's worth, Nitro still beats Raw in the U.K. when it comes to head-to-head viewership. Seems those U.K. folks still prefer WCW to WWF but they also spell words like "flavor" with a U, so really, what the fuck do they know?
- The condition of Gorilla Monsoon worsened this week due to complications from diabetes causing liver and kidney issues. Monsoon had a heart attack several weeks ago and has been hospitalized since (his obituary is on Friday).
- Notes from Raw: Dave has the most unintentionally hilarious line ever here: "HHH & Chyna did an interview. Bulldog came out and claimed they made a deal that if either of them won the match, they'd give the other the title shot the next day on Raw. HHH told Bulldog that he lied. I think HHH aspires to run a wrestling company some day." (Yeah, I suspect he just might). Dave thought the "This Is Your Life" segment was okay but dragged on too long and didn't seem to love it, but the monster rating pretty much guarantees that we're going to get more comedy like that.
- On Smackdown, they did an angle with Undertaker and Paul Bearer quitting the company. This was done mostly to give Undertaker time off to heal some injuries and for Bearer to lose weight.
- The Memphis mayoral election is next week and Jerry Lawler has been slowly closing the gap in the polls but it's still not looking good. Speaking of Lawler, he was indicted this week on charges from an incident earlier this year where he threw a parking ticket at an airport security lady, cursed her out, and drove away, running over her foot in the process. Lawler said the timing of the indictment, right before the election, is suspicious and denies ever running over her foot. The charge is felony reckless endangerment. If convicted, it would be interesting if he also somehow wins the election, because a convicted felon isn't allowed to run for public office in Tennessee and he could theoretically be forced out of office. Other candidates have been calling for Lawler to drop out of the race since he's now under indictment.
- The WWF's expected IPO date is 10/11 with a proposed initial offering of 10 million shares priced at between $14 and $16. It is expected that the price will be significantly higher by the time it's available to the public. Dave explains some other shit about the price going up and people within the company hoping to buy stock before it goes public and all that shit. But I don't speak stock very well.
- Taz officially signed a WWF contract last week but will finish up with ECW this year first. Dave also says former ECW valet Kimona has signed with WWF as well, but I'm pretty sure he's mistaken there. She shows up in WCW soon (yeah he corrects this later).
- Big Show was interviewed in a newspaper recently and said he weighs 470 pounds after getting liposuction earlier this year and says WWF told him to get it done because they wanted him to lose weight. He said he was 537 when he first signed with the company.
- Some guy writes in and says WCW doesn't need to copy WWF and they should find their own way. He doesn't like WWF and says "Sports Entertainment" will die a horrible death some day and it will take the industry a long time to recover from it. Still waiting, pal.