September 04, 2000
- WWF's Summerslam is in the books and it was a fantastic show that raised the bar with crazy stunts. There was the show-stealing TLC match between Edge & Christian/Hardyz/Dudleyz that was full of insane bumps (remember, this is the first ever TLC match). Shane McMahon also took a crazy bump off the TitanTron (and Steve Blackman followed with an elbow drop). Dave worries about all the backyard wrestler type kids trying to copy all this dangerous stuff, because it's a given that it will happen. But backyard wrestlers don't have crash pads, doctors on site, and other safety precautions the way WWF does. Obviously, you can't legislate stupidity, but WWF is the industry leader and when someone dies jumping off a ladder from their roof through a table, people are going to point the finger of blame at them and use things like this show as an example. Dave just feels like the bar on crazy stunts is beginning to be raised too high. Anyway, the show was sold out and because of higher ticket prices, it was the 7th highest gate in the history of American pro wrestling and the first time they've done a gate of over $1 million for something other than Wrestlemania. The show was main evented by a Rock/Triple H/Kurt Angle three-way match that saw Angle get legitimately knocked loopy early in the match on a table bump when the announce table broke before it was supposed to. After the match, Angle couldn't remember anything that happened after the botched spot and he was taken to the hospital and kept overnight for observation. (Yeah, if you've never seen this, Angle is MASSIVELY concussed. He's so clearly out of it. Angle later said that when Stephanie came out for the end of the match, and they were outside the ring, Stephanie kept having to lead him through spots. "Throw him against the stairs. Okay now grab his leg. Okay, now do this..." He was absolutely GONE. Knowing what we know now about concussions, it's scary to watch.)
- WATCH: The Rock vs. Triple H vs. Kurt Angle - Summerslam 2000
- Other notes from Summerslam: there was an ad during the show for a place called Vinnie's Restaurant in Raleigh, NC where the show was. That restaurant was actually started by one of Vince McMahon's close childhood friends and is actually named in honor of Vince (he helped originally finance the place), so that's why that was plugged during the show (the place still exists, but Vince's friend sold it to new owners way back in 2002). Chyna won the IC title by pinning Trish Stratus. Don't ask. Jericho/Benoit in a 2-out-of-3 falls match was good but rushed and was missing something. Dave predicts the TLC match will get a lot of votes for match of the year. Kat vs. Terri in a stink face match was what you'd expect, but Dave notes that Al Snow managed to grab a handful of both women's asses at points during the match. Undertaker vs. Kane never really got going and that whole storyline was thrown together at the last minute anyway after Big Show got pulled from the card. And Rock retained the WWF title in a match that was built around the Triple H/Angle/Stephanie love triangle. Fortunately, the match was already booked to have Angle disappear for a large part of it after the table bump, which is fortunate since he really did need that extra 15 minutes or so to halfway recover after being knocked loopy. When Angle was being carted out on the stretcher, Triple H went after him and was supposed to tip over the stretcher and beat Angle up some more. But by that point, they all kinda realized that Angle was seriously hurt so Triple H improvised and didn't really do anything to him other than hit him with a few worked punches while he waited for Rock to come interrupt and then they took Angle backstage.
- The latest PRIDE event is in the book and it featured Ken Shamrock losing his fight and Kazushi Sakuraba defeating Renzo Gracie, which is the 3rd Gracie family member in a row to lose to Sakuraba (he'll end up adding a 4th, Ryan, to that list in a few months). Shamrock's loss came at the hands of NJPW wrestler Kazuyuki Fujita. Shamrock was dominating the fight but his corner threw the towel in after about 6+ minutes when Shamrock seemed to start suffering heart attack symptoms and went pale. He ended up being okay after the fight and refused to talk about it with the press. It was said to be incredibly hot in the arena, over 100 degrees and probably even hotter under the lights and fighting. In the other big fight, Renzo Gracie suffered a dislocated elbow when he refused to tap out to Sakuraba and the referee stopped it. It was a close fight and Renzo is widely considered the best of the Gracie family, and he was gracious in defeat, which the other Gracies have not been. There was a bunch of wrestlers working the show and a seemingly worked wrestling-style angle to set up a future Naoya Ogawa/Masaaki Satake fight. Speaking of, Satake's victory over Kazunari Mirakami came across as suspicious to some and considering Antonio Inoki was one of the producers of the show and Satake's win set up the Ogawa angle, there was some suspicion that this fight may have been worked.
- ECW put on 2 shows at Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC this week and many were calling it the greatest weekend in the history of ECW with 2 of the best shows the company has ever put on. The events even got front page coverage on the next day's NY Daily News. The two shows consisted of 5 hours of TV tapings, which will be the final shows for ECW on TNN, and it ended with Cyrus "cancelling" ECW on TNN. At the first show, Mikey Whipwreck and Tajiri won the tournament to crown new tag champions but lost them at the next show. Kid Kash became TV champion. Dawn Marie returned as Steve Corino's manager (who also came out with Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan, and he got involved as well). But it wasn't all good. Psicosis faced Tony DeVito in a match that was such a styles clash and so bad that it reportedly won't make television. But several other matches were great. It ended with Cyrus cancelling ECW, which brought out Paul Heyman and he laid out Cyrus, only to have Rhino put Heyman through a table and a huge brawl broke out (yeah this whole angle is great and the crowd is nuclear).
- WATCH: Cyrus cancels ECW on TNN
- Regarding the actual, real cancellation of ECW, there's a lot of hope that they will end up on USA and there's still a lot of talk about it being a 2-hour show on Saturday nights, although nothing has been finalized yet. The plan for a new 2-hour show would be for it to have a heavy focus on good in-ring matches (I love how Heyman was already beginning to toy with the idea of changing ECW into the type of promotion that ROH would later become. Paul Heyman seems to always be a few years ahead of the curve on where wrestling is going). USA is still appealing the Raw decision so that's one of the major hold-ups to them striking a deal with ECW.
- Must be a slow week because, with the 2000 Summer Olympics approaching, Dave decides to take a look at some of the Olympic athletes who have transitioned into pro wrestling or MMA or vice versa. I feel like we just did this a few months ago but this is waaaaaaaaay more in-depth, dating back to 1906. Man, I'm sure this is interesting to read, but fuck that. It's lunch time for me anyway. I think I'm going to go to Subway. I'll let y'all know how it goes when I get back.
- I'm back. Lunch was fine. Got the foot long spicy Italian with lettuce, cucumbers, banana peppers, salt & pepper and sweet onion sauce. My sandwich artist put just a little too much sauce on there, but it was fine. I sat in my car and tried to read a book while I ate, but my wife kept texting me. Like, c'mon, of course I want to order pizza tonight. Are we going to have this conversation every time? Why would I want salad? Plants and carrots and shit? Am I a bunny? DO I LOOK LIKE A BUNNY TO YOU, SAMANTHA? HUH, DO I? REAL PEOPLE DON'T EAT FOLIAGE! And by this point, my wife was crying and was like "Stop yelling! What do you want from me?!" And I said, "I want about tree fiddy." Now it was around this time that she realized that I wasn't really her husband. I was 7 stories tall and was actually a crustacean from the Paleozoic era. "Dammit Nessie!" she exclaimed. That goddamn Loch Ness monster had gotten her again. "Dammit Monstah, I ain't givin' you no tree fiddy!" she yelled at me as I swam away.
- Dave talks about the death of Andy Hug, a kickboxer in Japan who died suddenly from acute leukemia, to the shock of the entire country and Switzerland where he was a national hero. His funeral in Tokyo attracted over 12,000 people making it one of the biggest funerals ever for a professional athlete in Japan (second only to Giant Baba's funeral in 1999). Hug wasn't just a kickboxer, he was a mainstream celebrity in Japan, appearing in lots of TV commercials and was often courted for movie roles which he turned down to focus on fighting. His death was a total surprise, even to him, as he was admitted to the hospital only 6 days earlier because he felt like something was wrong. Then a few days later, he put out a statement saying he was in the fight for his life and vowing to return. Then 24 hours later, he went into a coma, was put on life support and never woke up.
- Speaking of, following Hug's death, NJPW star Shinya Hashimoto announced that he's coming back, and they tied it into Hug's death, with Hashimoto saying that about the moment Hug died is when he decided he needed to return and he went to the dojo where Hug used to train to talk about why he was inspired to come back and whatnot. Dave thinks turning Hug's death into an angle for Hashimoto's return is pretty tasteless.
- Raw was moved back 2 hours due to the U.S. Open tennis tournament this week and so it aired from 11pm-1am EST. And it still did an incredible 4.93 rating, which is bonkers for that late of a time slot. It also still destroyed Nitro, which aired unopposed in its normal time slot and still couldn't come close to touching Raw. As for this week's Thunder, it did a near record low 1.89 rating which is the 2nd lowest in the history of the show, although to be fair, it was going head-to-head against the finale of Survivor which did the highest rating of any show on television this year aside from the Super Bowl. So the good news is, there's a valid excuse for the low rating. It was a terrible show, but at least nobody saw it, so that's also good news in its own way.
- Atsushi Onita appeared at the latest AJPW show in an angle and had an exchange in the ring with Motoko Baba and Masa Fuchi. It's all leading to Onita's return to AJPW, because they're still desperately trying to bring in anyone that will keep them from collapsing.
- Fox News ran a segment on backyard wrestling focusing on a kid in Chicago who broke his neck after taking a tombstone wrong. The kid's mom was on the show and so was Mick Foley, telling kids that sending the WWF a tape of you doing backyard wrestling isn't going to even get you looked at, much less signed. Dave says that's all well and good, but the reality is, half the people in WWF probably started out wrestling with their friends in their backyards. Foley's history is well known, jumping off his roof and shit. The Hardyz, Shane Helms, Shannon Moore and that whole group trained themselves in a ring they bought when they were teenagers in their yard. And Dave is willing to bet that the vast majority of guys who get into the business in the next decade or so will probably have started that way also. It's not safe and kids definitely need to be careful and stop doing this shit, but the reality is, they won't. They're kids. It's the same as NBA players who grow up playing basketball in their driveway or NFL players started out playing football with no helmets or pads in their backyard with their friends. That's just the nature of sports and wrestling isn't all that different.
- Tajiri had to return to Japan for the next month for legal issues regarding his visa. ECW is hoping to have all the visa stuff worked out so that both Tajiri and Super Crazy can return for the Oct. PPV.
- Speaking of PPVs, ECW really loves the Hammerstein Ballroom and everyone in the company feels like it's the perfect building for ECW. It's likely they will hold a PPV there soon (the final 2 PPVs in ECW history take place there as well as the first 2 PPVs of the new WWECW a few years later).
- Neither ECW or XPW have filed lawsuits against each other over the incident that took place at the Heat Wave PPV, so that seems to be mostly a dead issue right now (yeah, it never went past this. XPW kept talking shit for awhile, but that was the end of the "feud". ECW was too busy trying not to die).
- Notes from Nitro: they held the show in a smaller arena that only holds 5,000 so it was actually close to full (still not sold out) but it made for a much better atmosphere than all the 3/4 empty arenas WCW has been performing in. He calls Tygress vs. Paisley vs. Major Gunns "the worst 20 seconds in the history of sports entertainment." Mike Awesome is now doing a retro 70s gimmick just in case he wasn't dead enough in this company. Nash cut a promo saying he was going to "eat a little Korean," which was apparently a reference to Nitro Girl Chae, who he is dating. Konnan returned to action, way sooner than he should have after his recent tricep surgery. Dave talks about how WCW cuts people's paychecks in half if they're out injured too long and how it just leads to worse injuries because people are returning before they're ready and get injured again. Dave knows that some guys in the company have a habit of milking injuries so they can stay home and collect a check, but Konnan had a very real surgery and they know that. So anyway, he's back. They did a big thing with Russo threatening to fire Goldberg, completely forgetting the fact that just 2 weeks ago on Nitro, the big storyline was about how Russo couldn't fire Goldberg because of some clause in his contract. But hey, who cares about plot holes? They had an angle where ICP and Vampiro destroyed the big screen over the entrance way. For a company that is frantically cutting costs everywhere, Dave questions the logic in destroying an expensive piece of the set for an angle no one cares about. Bret Hart came back and blamed the Montreal Screwjob on Russo, because we're still booking angles about that 3 years later. Hart then attacked Goldberg in a good angle, blaming him for ending his career. Dave thinks it was a great angle but the problem is it makes people want to see Goldberg vs. Bret Hart and, well, that's clearly not happening, so again.....why?
- Johnny Ace is said to be impressing people backstage in WCW with booking and production meetings. Oh, speaking of, Ace and Kevin Nash got into a heated argument backstage at Nitro. A lot of wrestlers have been fined in the last few weeks for being late and its believed the fines were Ace's idea. So Nash confronted him about it and it turned into such a heated argument that it almost got physical.
- Scott Steiner suffered an orbital bone injury during the brawl on Nitro last week when Goldberg accidentally potatoed him.
- Jeff Jarrett said in an interview that he would have stayed in WWF if the offer was right and said that Russo going to WCW didn't play a big part in his decision. But he said he felt the WWF's offer made by Jim Ross was insulting. He also said that he was pissed at Steve Austin because he took stunners from Austin several times on TV but when it was time for Austin to work an angle with Jarrett, he refused.
- Dave explains the story of Jacques Rougeau quitting WCW recently and it's just a big bunch of mess about Rougeau wanting to be a bigger part of the Team Canada angle with Lance Storm and Bret Hart, but he was only offered a per-night deal and then Russo tried to book him to job to The Cat. Rougeau felt WCW only saw him as a jobber and he wants to be more than that, so he quit.
- They revealed the names for the 8 XFL teams at a press conference, and Dave uses this opportunity to point out the obvious wrestling connections. The NY/NJ Hitmen (Bret), Orlando Rage, Memphis Maniax, San Jose Demons ("my god, they named a team after Dale Torborg!"), Los Angeles Extreme (ECW), Las Vegas Outlaws ("oh you didn't know?"), Chicago Enforcers (Double A), and Birmingham Thunderbolts (Thunderbolt Patterson). Fun fact: the Birmingham team was originally going to be called The Blast but when rumors of the name leaked out, some people in Birmingham thought it might be seen as a reference to the infamous 1963 Birmingham church bombing and were advised against it. As for the Hitmen team, the Calgary Flames franchise in Canada owns a minor league hockey team called the Calgary Hitmen (and in fact, Bret Hart was once a partial owner of the team) and they're said to be exploring their legal options against the XFL, arguing that they have a trademark for the Hitmen name. Dave thinks the team logos are all pretty cool, but WWF excels at marketing, so he's not surprised.
- Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler had a tryout to be XFL announcers and apparently did very well, but it's unknown if they'll get the gig. NBC is said to be uncomfortable with having them do the announcing since they want to at least kinda separate this whole thing from wrestling because the connection automatically makes people suspicious of the games. Dave says with NBC being 50% owner, there's no chance the games will be worked because NBC won't allow that type of scandal, but people will be suspicious anyway.
- Raven's ECW contract has expired and he has signed a deal with WWF, so that's finally official. No word on when he'll debut.
- Jim Ross sent a memo out to all the wrestlers and reassured everyone that WWF has had no meetings with any WCW wrestlers. He said the company is happy with the locker room they have, with little drama and everyone is cohesive and working together and they don't want to do anything to damage that morale, such as bringing in all the locker room cancers from WCW. That being said, both Steve Austin and Triple H have expressed interest in wanting to work with DDP, but unless he gets a release, WWF won't even talk to him.
- The current plan for the next few weeks is to heavily hype the return of Steve Austin to TV on the first episode of Raw on TNN. He may also get involved at this month's Unforgiven PPV now that he's physically able to deliver stunners. WWF has set up a ring at Austin's home in Texas and are sending wrestlers down there to work with him and get him back into ring shape. The October PPV is expected to be his first match back.