Wrestling Observer Rewinder

April 10, 2000

Wrestlemania 16 is in the books and Dave wasn't impressed, saying it wasn't even as good as an average episode of Raw. Not great for a show that is going to end up being the biggest money drawing event in the history of pro wrestling. Vince McMahon turned heel to allow Triple H to retain the title in the main event which Dave thought was pretty lame. Dave thinks a big problem was the length of the show. They added an extra hour, plus the live Heat pre-show which means the whole event was more than 4 hours, which is just too long for a crowd to sit in an arena and still be energetic (Wrestlemania too long? Perish the thought). Terri vs. The Kat was literally the only singles match on the card. The crowd was dead for most of the show which also didn't help. But hey, live gate of over $1.3 million (4th highest in American history), all-time merch record, and surely to be an all-timer when the buyrate comes in. Can't argue with that.
Other notes from the show: Rapper Ice-T came out with The Godfather and D-Lo, performing a song that "seemed like it was longer than the Bret Hart/Shawn Michaels Wrestlemania match." But at least Bull Buchanan looked really impressive. Bob Holly won the hardcore title battle royal in a totally botched finish that seemed to have the announcers and even Howard Finkel confused. Dave says Bob was indeed supposed to win but the finish was still fucked up somehow. Also, some glass got in Tazz's eye during the finish but luckily he didn't suffer any real injury from it and they were able to get it out backstage. Test/Albert vs. Al Snow/Steve Blackman was negative stars and even J.R. called it "bowling shoe ugly" which is of course code for "this match sucks." Trish Stratus is hot but she has no stage presence and Dave thinks she needs to be sent to MCW or OVW for a few months because she's not ready for the big time. The Hardyz/Dudleyz/E&C ladder match stole the show and Jeff Hardy in particular continues to raise the bar on dangerous stunts. The Benoit/Jericho/Angle match was nowhere near as good as you would have hoped given who was involved. And the main event lasted a good 10-15 minutes too long and when it got down to just Rock & Triple H, both men were badly exposed and couldn't carry it. Dave says the main events of the previous 2 PPVs (which Triple H was in) were light years better than this mess and considering it was the biggest show of the year, they picked a bad night to be off their games. Mick Foley's involvement in the whole thing was pretty sad. In February, Foley cut one of the best promos of his career talking about his retirement, and then had the perfect retirement match. It was the perfect note to go out on. Now, just 6 weeks later, he was dragged out of retirement for really no purpose (WM was going to do a record-setting buyrate whether he was there or not and the show was sold out months ago), didn't look to be in great shape and looked bad in the ring, may have broken his ribs by not being able to make the jump from the ring to the announce table during one spot, and then got eliminated from the match with nearly 20 minutes still left to go by yet again putting over Triple H and then leaving to a half-hearted ovation that paled in comparison to his last match. To his credit, he has openly admitted that he did this match because the money was too good to pass up, and that's his right of course. Everybody's got families to feed and bills to pay so Dave doesn't begrudge him for it. But regardless, Foley's perfect retirement has been forever tarnished by returning to participate in this shit-show. After it was over, Rock laid out Vince, Shane, and Stephanie with rock bottoms. It was Stephanie's first ever big bump in the ring and Dave says she's already a better worker than Rikishi and the Harris twins.
WATCH: Wrestlemania 16 highlights
The odds of the XFL succeeding got a major boost this week with the announcement that NBC will become a 50% owner in the league and will broadcast games every Saturday night. WWF and NBC will split the start-up costs. Also, NBC purchased 2.3 million shares of WWF stock, meaning NBC owns about 3% of the total stock (the public owns another 17% and McMahon himself owns the other 80%). It's a shock because NBC had been discussing a similar deal with Time Warner last year, but NBC backed out because they didn't feel it was financially possible. NBC Sports head Dick Ebersol and McMahon have been friends since the 80s so that may have played a part. The games will air on Saturday nights, which are traditionally the lowest rated night of TV during the week but NBC is confident that McMahon knows how to attract viewers in the age group that they're looking to target, noting that Raw does 3x better than Monday Night Football with viewers in the 12-24 age group. Plus, The Rock giving SNL its biggest ratings in over a year helped convince them that Vince has the midas touch. Of course, WWF's success on Mondays might not translate to Saturdays because it's a lot less likely that 12-24 year olds are going to stay home on Saturday night to watch television. Plus it's still going to be minor league football compared to the NFL. This also should end speculation that the games would be worked. WWF might survive such a scandal, but NBC won't go for that shit. From here, Dave just goes on and on, talking about other failed football leagues, the various challenges that the XFL will have to overcome to be successful, and why it's still by no means a guaranteed success just because NBC has jumped on board. The odds are still heavily against it. (This section of the Observer is actually a pretty interesting read because a lot of the problems that Dave talks about are things that Vince is still going to have to deal with the 2nd time around in 2020 when the new XFL happens).
Vince Russo did an interview on WCW Live on their website full of noteworthy comments. He says he left in January right before the Souled Out PPV when Bill Busch told him that the company wanted to focus less on ratings and entertainment and more on wrestling. Russo disagreed and refused to be part of the booking committee. Russo admitted that he pitched the idea of Tank Abbott winning the WCW title at Souled Out, but Busch shot that down. Russo said he wants to bring back Konnan and Shane Douglas because he thinks they both have a lot to offer and feels Douglas especially could be a big star with WCW, and he feels they were right to stand up to Busch (which ultimately got them suspended when they didn't follow the Radicalz to WWF). There have been talks of bringing Douglas back, but it's complicated because he went online and threatened to sue the company at one point, so there's bad blood. Russo said he wanted to bring Bischoff back as a TV character months ago but got overruled. He said himself and Bischoff will be the main people in charge of booking things going forward. Russo denied making any mistakes during his first tenure as booker and blamed everything that happened on others in the company trying to undermine him. He said he wants to bring the NWO back and wants to rebuild the cruiserweight division. Russo also claimed that WWF turned things around in the ratings when DX drove a tank to WCW's show (Dave notes that Steve Austin becoming the biggest star in the world and bringing in Mike Tyson had, ya know, just a taaaaaaad more to do with it). He wants to move Thunder back to Thursdays so it can go head-to-head with Smackdown and he wants to move Nitro's time slot so that it's also going head-to-head with Raw for both hours. He blamed Jim Ross for WWF's mid-90s terrible ratings and said Ross just wanted to do announcing and didn't take his job as talent relations head seriously (Dave points out how stupid that comment is, since pretty much every single hot young star WWF has right now were people that Ross recruited). Russo also said he wants the titles to start meaning more, and Dave points out that Russo is a big part of the reason why they currently don't mean shit, saying nobody has done more to destroy the credibility of the belts in WCW than Vince Russo. He claimed that Scott Steiner's promo where he buried Ric Flair several weeks back that got Steiner suspended was the best promo of the year (Dave argues that for one, no it wasn't even close, and secondly, even if it was, are we going to start rewarding people who go against the script now?). And saving the best for last, Russo said he wants to bring Ultimate Warrior back to work an angle and match against Goldberg, saying, "In all honesty, there isn't anybody out there that wouldn't love to see a Goldberg vs. Warrior match." Dave is just aghast at the idea anyone would want to see that.
Russo also claimed that he boosted WCW's ratings from 2.5 to a 3.5 in 12 weeks. Dave spends an entire paragraph explaining why this claim is total bullshit. For starters, the "growth" in the ratings that you see can be attributed entirely to Nitro cutting back to 2 hours and due to the Monday Night Football season ending. In September, the month before Russo took over, Nitro was averaging a 3.38 doing 3-hour shows. The average for October, after Russo took over, was 3.08. So we're already trending downward in the very first month. It starts getting math-y at this point. But for instance, after the show dropped down to 2 hours, that heavily skewed the averages. So the first 2 hour show did a 3.38 rating. But if that had been a 3 hour show, with the usual Monday Night Football competition, it would have been a 2.9. So the number might look higher on paper, but in reality, they were still losing viewers, not gaining them. To be fair to Russo, the ratings for Thunder DID increase 11% after he took over initially, primarily due to Russo putting focus on it again. Nash had basically tried to kill Thunder, so when Russo came in, they started pushing Thunder as a special show again. So there's that. Problem is, they made Thunder special again by bringing in all the top stars and the increase in expenses for that dwarfed whatever small gains the show made. And of course, once people realized that Thunder still sucked, the ratings plummeted again and continued falling even further after he left. Dave gives Russo credit for at least working hard and trying to do something different. He clearly busted his ass TRYING to make WCW better, which is certainly more than Nash can say. But it didn't work and no matter how Russo tries to spin it, nearly every business aspect of the company got worse with him in charge.
The state of New Jersey is fighting to try to regulate so-called "extreme wrestling" and this week, Vince McMahon came out in favor of the regulations. The bill introduced would ban anyone under the age of 19 from attending "extreme" wrestling shows and allow local officials to ban those types of shows completely if they so choose. But of course, the wording on the bill is pretty vague as to what constitutes "extreme" wrestling so there's a lot of legal concerns over that. The bill is worded in a way that would not affect nationally touring companies like WWF or WCW. Naturally, ECW is hoping to be excluded from the bill as well, although having Extreme in their name isn't helping their case. The whole issue started due to shows run by indie promotion Jersey All Pro Wrestling, which regularly hosts hardcore bloody death matches. ECW official Steve Karel put out a statement on ECW's website saying they want nothing to do with JAPW and don't want to be associated with them and that they should be treated the same as WWF and WCW. AP ran a story on the issue and Paul Heyman was quoted saying, "I support regulation as long as it's fair. It's a necessary evil as without it you have people who are unqualified participating and someone may drop dead in the ring. It's too dangerous in today's environment (not to have regulation). A fair commission is to the benefit of the promoter, wrestler and consumer." In the same article, Vince McMahon was quoted in an AP story about the issue, saying "Extreme wrestling is a profoundly disturbing trend which has no other objective but to cause serious injury to an opponent in an effort to annihilate them. We share the Governor's concern that young people could be exposed to such a horrible spectacle as extreme wrestling. Extreme wrestling has no relation whatsoever to World Wrestling Federation's entertainment programming and the bill differentiates it as such. At the WWF, every effort is made by the athletes--who are trained professionals, unlike the local amateurs of extreme wrestling--not to cause harm to themselves or their opponent in our ongoing weekly action adventure series." Another New Jersey-based promotion, CZW, is expected to be targeted by this new law as well.
The 4th edition of a book called Wrestling Title Histories was recently published and Dave calls it the greatest reference work ever published on pro wrestling. It's basically what the title says: a comprehensive listing of the title histories of virtually every major wrestling championship dating back to the mid-1800s up through 1999. This leads Dave on a rant about how titles don't mean anything anymore because they bounce around so often that it's not even worth keeping track. The WWF title changed hands more times in 1999 than it did in the entire decades of the 1960s and 1970s combined. In 1999, the WWF title and Intercontinental title were held by a non-wrestler (Vince) and a woman (Chyna) while the WWF women's title was held by a man (Harvey Wippleman). WCW's cruiserweight title was held by a woman and a TV writer (Madusa and Ed Ferrara) while the TV title was awarded to Jim Duggan after he found it in a trash can after Scott Hall threw it in the trash months earlier (remember, most of this is all the work of Vince "we need to make titles more important" Russo). As a result, titles have no drawing power and mean pretty much nothing anymore, but they used to be the backbone of the business. The only major titles in wrestling that mean anything these days are AJPW's Triple Crown championship and maybe WWF's World title to an extent, but even that means far less now than it ever did before. But this book is interesting for studying history. For example, in the last 10 years, only 4 people under the age of 35 (Lex Luger, Sting, The Giant, and Goldberg) have held the WCW championship. Which is, of course, the total opposite of WWF which has spent the last decade mostly putting the title on young guys like Shawn Michaels, Yokozuna, Diesel, Sid, Undertaker, Kane, Austin, Rock, Triple H, etc. Just in case you're wondering why WCW has a reputation for being a company full of old washed up has-beens.
In the latest poll results from the internet shows, they had people vote on the best and worst WM matches of all time. So in 2000, Observer readers still believed that Steamboat/Savage was the best WM match of all time (just barely beating out Shawn/Razor and Bret/Austin). On the flip side, worst WM match ever was a landslide, with Undertaker/Giant Gonzales at WM9 getting 40% of the vote.
So much for Perro Aguayo retiring, as he's already scheduled for CMLL shows for the rest of the year and may be returning to Japan to work as well. Dave's not even remotely surprised.
An FMW show in Japan was recently cancelled because it was too close to the Mt. Usu volcano which just recently erupted.
Hayabusa will be co-starring in a movie called Backyard Dogs about a kid who dreams to be a wrestler and does backyard wrestling matches before making it to the big time (Frankie Kazarian is in this too and after watching the trailer, I demand this movie be awarded a belated Oscar).
WATCH: Backyard Dogs trailer
Shawn Michaels' alleged final match took place in his TWA promotion last week against Venom. It was your basic weapons match, garbage cans, ladders, cookie sheets, etc. Michaels bladed and also did an elbow drop from the top of a ladder, which was his only real major bump. Mostly it was Venom bumping all over for Shawn for the big spots. After winning the match and the TWA championship, Shawn vacated the title (with Dave cheekily saying to add it to the list of titles Shawn has managed to avoid losing in the ring) and announced a tournament to determine a new champion.
WATCH: Shawn Michaels vs. Venom - TWA (2000)
Court TV aired a show called Wrestling With Death, talking about the dangers of wrestling and blah blah blah. Linda McMahon was interviewed and came off cold and callous. The show was okay, but dragged in parts. The highlight was Linda saying that the WWF doesn't market to children, and the host responded by pulling out a bag full of WWF toys found at Toys R Us that are clearly marketed to children and basically made Linda look like a complete fool.
At the latest Stampede Wrestling show in Canada, Harry Smith, the 14-year-old son of Davey Boy Smith, defeated a heel named T.J. Wilson. After the match, Wilson and his stable were beating on Smith when Davey Boy did a run-in to save him and it was announced that the father and son would be forming a tag team called the New British Bulldogs (here's the video. TJ Wilson would later become Tyson Kidd. And yes, that is Maura Ranallo announcing).
WATCH: TJ Wilson vs. Harry Smith - Stampede Wrestling (2000)
At an ECW house show in Norfolk, after the show was over, Sandman brought a few young ladies into the ring and it got pretty R-rated. For starters, they looked young (not necessarily underage, but maybe not old enough to be drinking either) but he poured beer all over them and then got them to take their shirts off. One of the women wasn't wearing a bra and was just parading around topless in the ring, which could be an issue because there's some Virginia state law about that sort of thing during entertainment events.
On a recent ECW show, Tajiri kept referring to Super Crazy by the name "Super Chico" leading Dave to say, "Isn't that Bryan Alvarez?" (turns out Alvarez used to wrestle under the name Super Chico.)
Nitro this week was basically just a lame duck hype show to build up to the Russo/Bischoff takeover starting next week. They hyped up both men and portrayed it as if no one had ever beaten Vince McMahon in the TV ratings until Eric Bischoff came along. Dave takes a moment to point out all the other times WWF has lost to other companies in the ratings. Through most of the 80s and into the early-90s, WCW Saturday Night was the highest rated wrestling TV show. In 1985, Mid South Wrestling was doing bigger numbers than WWF. So on and so forth. But nobody cared because until 1995, nobody paid attention to TV ratings because they didn't matter nearly as much as ticket sales and PPV buyrates. It wasn't until Nitro came along and the head-to-head war started that ratings even became a thing people cared about. WCW also occasionally did better PPV numbers than WWF in the early 90s (before Bischoff) and were much stronger with ticket sales in most southern markets. It also claimed WWF was beating WCW all the time until the NWO came along. Not true either, as the first time Nitro and Raw went head-to-head, Nitro won. And for the 10 months or so before the NWO came along, WCW was winning the ratings battle more often than not. WCW can't even get their own revisionist history right in ways that would make them look better. As for Russo, the WCW version of his story is that WWF sucked until Russo took over and single-handedly saved them and now he's back to do the same for WCW. All in all, it was a really weird show full of WCW's weird, backwards ass version of history.
Billy Kidman won the cruiserweight title from The Artist at a Baltimore house show and lost it back to him the next night at a Pittsburgh house show. Neither title change was ever acknowledged on TV (all the titles get vacated next week anyway when WCW reboots).
Bret Hart was on TSN's Off The Record and said he doesn't have any animosity towards Davey Boy Smith for going back to the WWF, but said he does have a problem with Smith publicly saying that McMahon shouldn't be held responsible in any way for Owen Hart's death. Considering Smith threatened to sue over the back injury he suffered in WCW, he thinks it's kind of hypocritical for him to not think Vince has some responsibility. He also spoke about meeting with Vince when he came to Calgary for Owen's funeral. He said that when they talked, they didn't really discuss Owen's death because of the legal issues (both sides knew at the time that there were going to be lawsuits coming out of this) so that's why Bret didn't talk to Vince about Owen. But then a few weeks later, Vince went on TV and claimed Bret didn't care about Owen because he never talked about him during their conversation. Bret was pretty pissed about that because he says Vince knew that Bret couldn't talk to him about Owen because of the pending lawsuit. When the host asked if Bret would ever go back to WWF and how you should never say never, Bret responded saying "absolutely never."
Eric Bischoff did an interview with the Observer website (wait a second, I thought Bischoff neeeeever used to talk to that hack Meltzer back in these days...) and talked about how WCW can't go to the same extreme lengths that WWF went to because they can't do anything to embarrass Ted Turner. He said that he and Russo plan to basically blow up WCW and start from scratch next week and that they are going to change directions in a way no one expects. The rumors Dave has heard are that basically, they're just gonna pretend 1999 didn't happen and plan for a Goldberg/Scott Steiner feud. Also during the interview, Bischoff was asked about Scott Hall's status and said that is in Brad Siegel's hands. Speaking of...
Scott Hall reportedly had neck surgery last week due to injuries allegedly suffered at SuperBrawl, although that's not for certain. Only one friend of Hall's has told Dave that he had surgery. Hall's other friends that Dave has spoken to know nothing about it and it seems like mostly nobody has even heard from Hall lately and nobody knows what he's up to.
WCW announcer Mark Madden does a sports talk radio show in Pittsburgh when he's not doing wrestling. Anyway, in a recent Pittsburgh newspaper poll, Madden was recently voted "best reason to kill your radio."
In the UK, there was a lot of media coverage and even a segment on a BBC news show in regards to WCW engaging in false advertisement. Their recent tour heavily advertised Goldberg and Sting, but of course, neither was there. Instead, fans got to see the Harris Twins vs. The Mamalukes as the main event. As you can imagine, fans weren't thrilled and there's a lot of stories about fans wanting refunds and filing complaints with the venues.
Various WCW notes: they still sell Rey Mysterio and Psicosis masks at the merch table, even though both men have long ago lost their masks. Shane Helms needs reconstructive nose surgery from an injury he suffered but he's trying not to miss any TV time so he's working through it while wearing a protective face mask.
There's interest in bringing in Marc Mero and Rena Mero (formerly Sable). Marc is legally free and could show up in WCW right now if he wanted but Rena is still locked into her WWF non-compete clause for another 18 months (WCW won't exist in 18 months).
There are people in WCW who are worried about an incident that took place at last week's spring break Nitro and are hoping it doesn't get out to the public. So here's Dave to tell us about it! Anyway, some WCW people apparently unofficially sponsored and organized a wet t-shirt contest with about 15 women participating. By the end of it, every single one of them was totally topless and most were bottomless as well. There were a good 500+ people gathered around watching, many with cameras, and at least one wrestler was on stage helping to remove clothing from the women. Needless to say, WCW is hoping none of this footage surfaces (I don't think it ever does, but if I'm not mistaken, I think we find out later that Buff Bagwell was the wrestler).
Notes from Raw: they've paired Chyna together with Eddie Guerrero but they're not doing Eddie any favors in the way they're portraying it. Chyna has been wearing huge heels and the camera shoots them from a low angle and it makes Eddie look like a dwarf next to her. Dave says Guerrero is showing so much charisma and personality lately that he's probably gonna get over anyway but Dave doesn't think this is helping people take him seriously and it's clear they're intentionally doing it to emphasize the size difference. Also during the show, they kept pushing that Pete Rose should be in the baseball hall of fame. "Maybe they'll induct him into the WWF Hall of Fame as a publicity stunt," Dave jokes, 4 years before that actually happens.
Dave attended the most recent Smackdown tapings and has notes from seeing it in person. Jericho carried Viscera to his best match ever. Lillian Garcia sang the National Anthem and Dave says she has a great singing voice and the crowd popped big for her and she seemed genuinely happy to be getting such a big crowd response. It played into the storyline later in the show when McMahon forced her to sing and then basically told her she was marginal and could be replaced, which got big heat because the crowd loved Lillian on this night. At one point, Vince came out a second time and redid parts of his promo from earlier in the show because he apparently forgot a line, so that'll be edited in and fixed in post-production.
There's a couple of new wrestlers who are starting out at the OVW developmental territory. The first is Shelton Benjamin (who Dave mistakenly calls a former All-American football player at North Carolina State, obviously confusing him with someone else) and a former bodybuilder named David Nelson (that dude never became anything).
The Guardian newspaper had a listing of the 50 most powerful people in sports. Vince McMahon was listed at #39, ahead of names like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Rupert Murdoch was #1 and Ted Turner was #5. The Ted Turner listing talked about his ownership of the Braves, Hawks, Thrashers, etc. but never mentioned WCW.
WWF and video game company THQ are working on a WWF online game that will be specifically marketed to the internet (don't think that ever happened but the WWF No Mercy came out later that year for N64 and WWF Royal Rumble was released the same year for Dreamcast and arcade in Europe and Japan).
Kurt Angle was interviewed recently and praised MMA, calling it one of his favorite sports and saying he would like to wrestle against guys like Mark Kerr and Mark Coleman, and particularly praised Kerr's amateur wrestling. Angle and Kerr faced each other in the 1995 Olympic trials and he said that if Kerr had more of a work ethic, Kerr probably would have beaten him. Angle said he would fight in MMA if the money was right. Angle also said Ken Shamrock and Steve Blackman are the toughest guys in the WWF and said he thinks Chris Benoit, Chris Jericho, and Christian would have all been great amateur wrestlers if they had pursued it when they were younger.
Someone writes in trashing Vince Russo, because during a recent interview, Russo said that WWF's ratings haven't improved since he left. The letter writer says, yeah but they haven't dropped since he left either. Dave responds and notes that, actually the ratings HAVE gone up since Russo left. In his final month with WWF, Raw was averaging a 6.17 and Smackdown was averaging a 4.13. In the most recent month, Raw averaged 6.45 and Smackdown a 4.80. But, to be fair, Dave says, much of that increase is probably due to outside factors. Monday Night Football is off the air and Nitro cut back to 2 hours, both of which helped Raw's rating. And Thunder got moved to a different night, so Smackdown is no longer going head-to-head with that. So that probably is why the ratings went up but, regardless of the reason, Russo is wrong when he says the WWF's ratings haven't increased. In fact, to be honest, WWF never even missed a beat when he quit and it quite frankly didn't seem to hurt them at all.
Someone else writes in criticizing ECW and Paul Heyman over the recent New Jack/Vic Grimes spot that nearly got New Jack killed. He says that Heyman doesn't care about his wrestlers and is perfectly happy to watch them go out there and destroy their bodies with insane stunts so ECW can make a buck. He says Heyman is no better than a pimp who allows his whores to work without condoms so they can earn more money for him and says someone is going to end up dying in an ECW ring because Heyman "and his henchmen" are courting injury and death.