December 27, 1999
- Last week's WCW Nitro ended with yet another reformation of the NWO, with Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Bret Hart, and Jeff Jarrett as the members, all holding the major WCW titles. It's led to more questions about Vince Russo as booker, which has been a polarizing issue inside and outside of WCW. His detractors point out that WCW's ratings haven't improved under his watch and in fact, last week's Nitro was the 2nd lowest rated episode of the show in years. His defenders point out that it took a good 6 months for WWF ratings to turn around and they also blame TNT's standards and practices people for standing in Russo's way. Dave doesn't buy the S&P argument, because the only things they've nixed have been irrelevant stuff. They may make Russo change a curse word in a promo, or they didn't want Jim Duggan beating up Asya in a throwaway midcard Thunder match. Shit like that. That stuff is small fries to the overall picture and has nothing to do with why the ratings aren't improving. WCW head Bill Busch is still standing by his decision to give Russo 6-months-to-a-year to try and prove himself and turn things around. It's true that WWF's ratings took months to recover, but the signs of business turning around were there long before the ratings actually started reflecting it. For what it's worth, WCW ratings WILL turn around next year when they cut the show down to 2 hours, but that's just because the 3rd hour won't be dragging the average down. Plus football season is ending soon and that will help too. Thunder is moving to Wednesdays, so it won't be getting its ass handed to it by Smackdown anymore, so those ratings should go up too. So that will look good for Russo, but it's also a total illusion and not a sign that business is actually improving. Because it's most certainly not. House show business (which was the first sign in WWF that things were turning around) is still at abysmal lows and getting worse. PPV buyrates seem to have bottomed out. They're not falling anymore, but they're not moving up either. So due to all of this stuff, Nitro's ratings will probably jump from the low 3's to the high 3s when they cut back to two hours, which looks good on paper. But unless Nitro starts doing 4.0 or higher ratings, then nothing has actually really changed. It's just the illusion that comes with dropping the 3rd hour and how that affects the average. Dave starts breaking down numbers and it gets pretty in-depth. But for those people who still defend Russo's WCW booking and point to the fact that ratings went up around this time, this is the perfect explanation about why Russo deserves zero credit for that. It was all due to programming decisions and scheduling changes, plus the end of Monday Night Football. The number of actual viewers didn't increase, even if the rating did.
- But forget about ratings, the real issue is the other numbers. Are people buying tickets to the shows? Are they buying merchandise? What are the PPV buyrates? That's where the money is made. Last week's Nitro sold 4,500 tickets. Thunder sold 1,700. Those are embarrassing numbers. Merch-sales-per-head hit an all-time low for the modern era in WCW last week. Even the people who do go to the shows aren't buying shit. Next week's Nitro is in the Houston Astrodome, which holds more than 60,000 people, and they've sold less than 6,000 tickets as of press time. And Russo has been in charge long enough now that he can't keep blaming the stagnant business on the people who ran the show before him. TV ratings take time to grow, but historically, house show business is quick to turn around at the first sign of a good angle. In 1996, before the NWO angle, business was pretty bad but the Flair/Savage angle at the time immediately sparked a 37% increase in house show business within a month. So will this new NWO angle be the one that turns things around? Maybe but Dave doesn't seem optimistic. At this point, WCW seems to be at rock bottom and Dave thinks ECW could probably give them a run for their money in most markets as far as drawing fans goes.
- Starrcade is in the books and fittingly enough, the final wrestling PPV of the century ended with yet another repeat of the Montreal Screwjob. This time the roles were reversed, with Bret Hart playing the Shawn Michaels role and Goldberg in the "got screwed" role. The finish left the show ending on a flat note. In fact, almost every match on the card ended with a screwy finish, which is basically the Russo way. Scott Hall had to pull out of his ladder match against Benoit due to last minute injury, and was replaced by Jarrett. He and Benoit had one of the best WCW matches of the year and Dave has to give credit where it's due and says Jarrett has been working his ass off to justify the push he's been getting from Russo and has been doing great work since arriving in WCW (a lot of people resent him for it, figuring he's only being pushed because he's Russo's friend and also jumped ship from WWF at about the same time). Steve Williams refused to put over Vampiro, so their match ended in DQ and Dave suspects that's probably it for Williams in WCW (yup). Madusa won the cruiserweight title from Evan Karagis, even further diminishing a title that is already meaningless. Kimona from ECW debuted as a cheerleader valet for the Varsity Club, under the name Leia Meow. Nash vs. Sid gets negative stars, as does a couple of other matches. Benoit vs. Jarrett ladder match gets 4 stars. And the Goldberg/Hart main event was decent until the stupid ending. Also, Dave notes that at one point in the match, it looked like Goldberg kicked Bret pretty hard in the head...
- Vince Russo appeared on the WCW Live internet show and lashed out at his critics and blamed WCW's standards and practices people for the fact that ratings haven't improved. Russo claimed that everything he's done in WCW so far was in order to put the pieces in place for the NWO revival that happened on Nitro last week and now everything will start improving. He pointed out several things that S&P wouldn't allow him to do (they wouldn't let Roddy Piper call Ronda Singh "fat", wouldn't let Ed Ferrara make fun of Jim Ross' Bells Palsy, etc. Dave says none of those things would make an iota of difference in the ratings). Russo said he was promised leeway when he was hired but now S&P interferes. He lashed out a bunch of critics by name, particularly against Dave himself, and began calling him names. Dave shrugs it off and thinks Russo seems desperate. Russo admitted that he gauges success by internet feedback (Dave says maybe he should gauge it by ratings numbers, ticket sales, and PPV buyrates instead). Russo talked about bringing Lenny & Lodi back as a tag team called Standards & Practices and making them nerdy pencil pushers. He also talked about bringing Ultimate Warrior back and spoke of wanting to bring in Bruno Sammartino as a traditionalist who hates what WCW is becoming and turning that into an angle. Dave says no one in WCW has contacted Sammartino so no idea where that's coming from. Also said he wants to bring back Randy Savage and that he plans for Jarrett to be a main event star for WCW in 2000. He also said that if he was to quit or get fired by WCW, he would never return to WWF because he could never work for Vince McMahon for another day ever again (spoiler: he does, briefly. And to this day he admits he still texts Vince ideas and is trying to angle his way back into the company. Anyway, I really wish I could find audio of this).
- The E! network aired an episode of True Hollywood Story about Hulk Hogan. Dave says it surprisingly was fairly accurate. Covered his early life, glossed over his time in Japan, AWA, WWF, WCW, etc. While it was mostly accurate, it did try to imply a bunch of bullshit. Like when Hogan got fired from WWF for doing Rocky 3, it acted as if he was lost, struggling to get by, career might be over, yada yada. In reality, he was still making huge money in Japan and was already a huge name. Basically a lot of the dishonest stuff was mostly just trying to portray Hogan's rise to the top as more difficult than it was. Plus the same ol' nonsense about how nobody knew if Andre was going to agree to do the job at WM3, or that Andre had never been body slammed before or that he weighed 600 pounds at the time, etc. It also mostly ignored his role in the steroid scandal of the early 90s. But everything else was basically true.
- Nitro the night after Starrcade was bad news, being the lowest rated post-PPV Nitro since Russo took over. The show also made news due to language, with the word "shit" being used several times, uncensored. WCW of course claims it was all an accident and needless to say, Dave isn't entirely buying it. The following day, WCW released a press release saying the following:
- At the most recent Michinoku Pro show, Great Sasuke announced that he wants to do a third Super J Cup tournament in April. There have been 2 previous Super J Cups before. The first in NJPW was won by Chris Benoit and the second was put together by WAR and won by Jushin Liger. Those 2 one-night tournaments were arguably 2 of the best professional wrestling shows of the decade. So needless to say, expectations will be high for this one.
- 20/20 aired a story on people training to be professional wrestlers and Dave says it was really good and surprisingly accurate. It mostly focused on Les Thatcher's training school as well as the WCW Power Plant and admitted that wrestling is fake but showed how difficult it still is. The main people featured in the piece were Shark Boy (who was later released by WCW after training at the Power Plant), Nigel McGuinness (who came from England to train with Thatcher and showed a great attitude and enthusiasm, but is small), and Craig Zelner (never amounted to anything in wrestling, dabbled in MMA for a bit). They showed them cutting promos and working matches at small shows, and Dave says McGuinness was better than a lot of the pros already.
- News out of XPW in California: former ECW and WCW valet Chastity worked the show and was scheduled to feud with Missy Hyatt. But Hyatt has since quit the company after getting into a backstage argument with Nicole Bass, who was upset that Hyatt was wearing the same white shirt/denim shorts look. Speaking of Bass, her sexual harassment lawsuit against the WWF has a court date next month. She's also releasing a series of sexual domination videos.
- Minoru Suzuki had his first MMA fight in a year, in his hometown of Yokohama. Suzuki proved to still be a big draw for casual fans, and brought in a big crowd and was by far the biggest star of the show. Didn't matter. He still got wrecked in the first round. Ha! What a pussy, am I right you guys? Guys? Hello? Oh sh--
- Chris Candido, Tammy Sytch, and Axl Rotten were all officially fired by ECW this week. Word is the locker room at a recent ECW house show was so unprofessional to the point of embarrassment with all the out of control drug use. Heyman wasn't at the show, but after getting reports on it, he made the decision to fire those 3 (all of whom were already on the bubble of being fired several times before anyway). It's clear to anyone who watches that Rotten and Sytch especially are just shells of what they once were as performers. Candido less so, but he's still fallen hard. Dave praises Heyman for being the only promoter in the big 3 right now who is apparently willing to do something about the drug issues in wrestling, while those sorts of things continue to go unpunished in WWF or WCW. Although for what it's worth, he says that while most people in the locker room agreed with the decision to fire those 3, they also pointed out that there are other stars on the roster who have even worse drug problems, but they're bigger stars and Heyman hasn't done anything about them.
- New Jack didn't work ECW's recent shows in Tennessee because he has an outstanding warrant in the state.
- Bill Goldberg was injured doing an angle on this week's Thunder where he was looking for Vince Russo in the parking lot and ended up punching out a limo window. The glass cut into his arm and he bled like crazy. As of press time, he has feeling in his fingers and hand, which is a good sign. Apparently the glass cut deeply into his tricep and he lost a massive amount of blood before getting to the hospital (more details next week but spoiler: it's not good news).
- In regards to the earlier rumor of Bruno Sammartino working with WCW, Dave has apparently spoken to Bruno and while nobody from WCW has reached out to him, Bruno is willing to listen to offers. If the money is right and he isn't portrayed in a negative light, he says he'd be willing to work an angle and even a match for WCW, although he would want it to be a big tag match or something so he wouldn't have to take many bumps. The idea would be a legends group (Bruno, Larry Zbyszko, etc. against the NWO guys most likely). Bruno hasn't wrestled since 1987 and is on record as saying he felt his 85-87 return was a mistake that he only did to help his son's career after retiring in 1981. He has been extremely critical of the wrestling business ever since then and he's aware of how hypocritical it would look if he came back to work for WCW, given the way it's booked these days under Russo. But he says if the angle is to his liking, he's willing to take the flak from people.
- Notes from Nitro: the show drew about 9,000 fans, but only 4,500 of them or so were paid, the rest were comps. I only mention this because it's actually like that every week. I just haven't been mentioning it. But every WCW show, from house shows to TV to PPVs...thousands of free tickets are given away every week and they still never come close to selling out these arenas. They had a backstage segment full of words like "smarks, smart marks, shooting" etc. while Vince Russo openly talked about being the person who booked the Montreal Screwjob (not true, of course). Basically, the whole show is more of the same from Russo. 3 hours of insider references, worked shoots, openly acknowledging that everything you see is fake except for all the guys going against the script, a million angles with no continuity all thrown against the wall, etc.
- Useless wrestling trivia: "when Ric Flair was growing up in Edina, MN, he used to work as a paper boy. One of the people he delivered papers for was Mad Dog Vachon."
- Paul Bearer was backstage at the WCW Thunder taping 2 weeks ago in Mobile, AL. Nothing to read into it, he lives in the area and was apparently just visiting friends.
- Eric Bischoff is said to be interested in returning to WCW as Hulk Hogan's manager.
- Triple H is still expected to win the WWF title from the Big Show in the next couple of weeks, as soon as his knee heals up enough for him to return to the ring.
- Vince McMahon and Chris Jericho reportedly got into a backstage argument at Smackdown 2 weeks ago. Basically, the gist of it as far as Dave has heard is that McMahon criticized Jericho's ring work, and Jericho didn't back down and instead argued his case at Vince. But contrary to rumors, he was never unprofessional and neither man was screaming at each other or anything. There's been criticism of Jericho for getting over as a face when he's supposed to be a heel (specifically, he's been getting cheered in matches against Chyna), but that's just the nature of being as good as he is and being booked in stupid storylines. There's been a lot of reports that the usual suspects (basically the DX guys, like Triple H) have gotten into Vince's ear and argued that Jericho isn't as good as he's hyped up to be and that he's not a main event guy. Reportedly a lot of this heat on Jericho stems from him accidentally potatoing Chyna during one of their matches. On Smackdown recently, Triple H made a joke during the show about a homeless guy not being able to work, "just like Jericho." Anyway, Jericho spoke with Triple H and Chyna and reportedly apologized for accidentally hurting Chyna and now he's booked to work with X-Pac for the foreseeable future because Vince wants X-Pac to teach Jericho how to work. There were also rumors that Vince offered Jericho a release from his contract. Jim Ross denied it on the hotline but others have insisted that it's true. Regardless, true or not, he's staying. Dave's take on this is that there's certain people in WWF who feel threatened by Jericho because he's got the skills and charisma to be a top star and there's only so many spots on top. (Jericho wrote about all this in his book but essentially, yeah, Dave has most of it correct: Jericho accidentally gave Chyna a black eye and Triple H basically buried him to Vince afterwards, which led to Jericho being held down and treated like a midcard loser during his first year or two in WWF. He and Triple H didn't get along for years due to it. Jericho was arguably the first--though by far not the last--major victim of Paranoid Triple H. Younger fans might not remember it as vividly because we all love Papa H now due to NXT. But he was kind of a dick who hurt a lot of people's careers during the early-00s).
- IWA in Puerto Rico ran a couple of shows featuring a lot of talent on loan from the WWF, including Undertaker making his return to the ring for the first time since September. Taker was supposed to be in a singles match but he's still not fully healed from his groin injury and has put on some weight, so it ended up being turned into a tag match with him and Viscera vs. Godfather and Kane. He was still really limited and didn't do much of anything in the match. As of now, the plan is still for him to return to action in WWF at the Rumble (nope, he's still gonna be out for another 5 months). Undertaker was the main drawing star and had committed to doing the shows months ago, which is why he still went and did them, but he's in no shape to be wrestling yet. (I can't find video of this match anywhere, but I'm curious what gimmick he used. Depending on which it is, this match would either be the final appearance of Deadman Taker until 2004 or the first ever appearance of Biker Taker).
- A 21-year-old student at Shawn Michaels' wrestling school suffered a serious neck and head injury on a botched back drop and was in critical condition in the hospital as of press time. Michaels has no insurance and is currently covering the hospital bills himself and flew in family members in. He's also expecting to get sued over it inevitably and with the bills mounting, Michaels has told people he may have to return to the ring to pay for it (I assume we find more info about this in future issues because there's no name or extra details here yet and I can't find much info elsewhere).
- Various WWF notes: D-Lo Brown's contract still has 14 months on it, so forget rumors of him going to WCW. Steve Austin is getting married to Debra soon and is planning to return to wrestling as soon as his neck heals after his surgery. Jerry Lawler and Miss Kitty missed the TV tapings last week because they coincided with the Hollywood premier for Man on the Moon with Jim Carrey (which is getting great reviews). Ken Shamrock still wants to return to MMA in 2000. And when Taz debuts, his name will be spelled Tazz because Time Warner owns the trademark on "Taz." And WWF stock hit an all-time low this week.