December 31, 2001
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- "2001 will never be looked back upon as being a great year for wrestling," so writes Dave Meltzer. And with that, we have come to the end of the Observer Rewinds.
- The issue opens with a long recap of the major stories of the past year. Throughout the world, every single professional wrestling organization did worse than the year before it. In 2000, Time Warner attempted to sell WCW for $600 million. A year later, they sold it for $2.5 million. And realistically, WCW was actually sold for a loss, because Time Warner was still on the hook for $15 million in wrestling contracts that WWF didn't pick up. And of course, ECW folded as well. A bunch of struggling start-ups began in their place and Dave doesn't seem hopeful for the long-term prospects of WWA or XWF. All in all, 2001 was the year that changed the wrestling industry forever. Anyway, Dave recaps the entire year, going month-by-month in great detail on all the top stories throughout. It's pretty much just rehashing old news, so let's keep it moving...
- Dave gives a long recap of the latest PRIDE show and man, this is shaping up to be a kinda slow issue to end the Rewinds on. The only notable wrestling related news out of the show was Antonio Inoki hyping up his New Year's Eve show, which Dave says is on the verge of falling apart because people keep pulling out and of course, IWGP champion Kazuyuji Fujita had to back out due to injury.
- Speaking of MMA, Dos Caras Jr. (Alberto Del Rio) had to pull out of a scheduled fight after suffering a shoulder injury days before. He was replaced by Mexican wrestling legend Canek, fighting at 49 years old. Canek fought with his mask on and defeated another pro wrestler in the shoot. Canek was said to look impressive, especially considering his age (eh, I dunno about all that. Judge for yourself:)
- Keiji Muto vs. Toshiaki Kawada for the AJPW Triple Crown title has been announced for February. Dave expects Kawada to win the title. The original plan, when Muto won the belt back in June, was for him to be a short-term transitional champion and drop the belt to Kawada a month later. But then Muto started having amazing MOTY quality matches and got super over. So AJPW decided to delay the Muto/Kawada match for as long as they could and now Muto's planned short transitional reign is currently going on 6 months and counting. But Dave thinks they've put off the Kawada match as long as they could (indeed, Kawada wins the title from Muto in February).
- The main event of NJPW's upcoming Jan. 4th Tokyo Dome show has been changed to Jun Akiyama vs. Yuji Nagata for the NOAH world title. Needless to say, having NJPW's biggest show of the year headlined by a title match for another promotion is pretty strange, but Fujita's injury left them with few options. As for the IWGP title, Fujita is expected to vacate it and the fate of the belt will be decided in February. There will likely be a tournament, but they aren't making any plans yet because they're waiting to see how Yuji Nagata does in his shoot fight at the New Year's Eve Inoki show (in other words, if he gets his ass beat, chances are they aren't going to put the IWGP title on him a month later).
- Inoki is hinting about coming out of retirement. Reportedly, he wants somewhere between $500K-$1 million to do a match and no word if anyone is going to pay it (apparently not, because he never did).
- Superstar Billy Graham was hospitalized all of last week due to cirrhosis of the liver due to Hepatitis C. Dave notes that Graham needs a liver transplant (he gets one in 2002).
- Hulk Hogan appeared on an episode of ESPN's Unscripted and what a mess that was. The show was hyped as Hogan revealing his true feelings about Vince McMahon and WWF and host Chris Connelly hyped up all the dirt Hogan was going to spill. Instead, Hogan showed up and pretty much kissed Vince's ass in an attempt to get himself rehired by WWF, all while Connelly looked as though he had been bamboozled. Hogan was his typical self, portraying himself as the biggest star in the business today (maybe in the past, but it's 2001 now). He also pretty much buried all of today's generation of wrestlers in general, but when specific names were brought up (Rock, Austin, Triple H, etc.) Hogan was quick to praise each of them individually. Of course, it wouldn't be a Hogan interview without some big dumb lies. He claimed his recent XWF match with Curt Hennig was only supposed to go 10 minutes but once he got in the ring, he felt so good that they ended up going for 30 minutes instead (in case you're wondering, the full unedited match was actually less than 6 minutes). He claimed that at Wrestlemania 3, Andre The Giant was 700 pounds (no) and that he "pressed Andre over his head" and slammed him in front of 94,000 people. Hogan heaped praise on Triple H, which Dave says is smart for a guy trying to get rehired because Triple H has a lot of political power backstage these days. The host tried to get Hogan to say anything negative about Vince McMahon, but Hogan wasn't biting. Talked about how steroids were legal back when he used them (they weren't) and on and on and on.
- After Randy Savage tried to challenge Hogan to a match for a children's hospital charity without consulting Hogan, Savage went ahead and donated $10,000 to the hospital anyway. WWA promoter Andrew McManus held a press conference with Savage and also donated an additional $10,000 to the hospital and then announced Savage was joining WWA and that he will appear on their February PPV (Savage was scheduled to face Jeff Jarrett at that show in the main event but he no-shows and is replaced by Brian Christopher). Dave is glad they donated money to the hospital, but they pretty much just did it to promote their event. But that's a time honored tradition in wrestling. In the 90s, every time Vince McMahon got into trouble with the media about something, there would always be some highly publicized charity donation soon after. Anyway, aside from one appearance in a WCW battle royal back in early 2000, Savage hasn't made an appearance in wrestling in almost 3 years. Dave thinks it'll be interesting to see if Savage's name still means anything when it comes to drawing on PPV for a promotion without TV.
- Vader was supposed to work a match against Samoa Joe for UPW but had to pull out due to knee surgery. He's promised to work a make-up date for them when he's healed. Instead, Konnan was brought in to face Joe in the main event. Shinya Hashimoto was there as well and cut a promo issuing an open challenge for the NWA title. A bunch of UPW guys came out and Hashimoto basically laid all of them out by himself. Yuji Nagata and Don Frye were also backstage (Dave notes Nagata has been training in Los Angeles for the Inoki show). UPW is also planning to do a worked-shoot type of show in conjunction with UFC fighter Tito Ortiz.
- More on Comedy Central reportedly buying the AWA tape library. I guess there's something to this. Comedy Central is working on a pilot for a show called The Huge World of Wrestling which is basically expected to be old wrestling footage with studio commentary to make fun of it or something (this obviously never happened and WWE later bought the footage from Gagne, which leads me to believe Comedy Central didn't actually buy the library, they probably just leased rights to some footage that they never ended up using).
- Former WWF star Ahmed Johnson made his acting debut in a VH-1 television movie about the life of MC Hammer. Johnson played the role of Suge Knight, the head of Death Row Records. Dave hasn't seen it but hears Ahmed's acting ability was somehow even worse than his wrestling ability.
- Jake Roberts was booked for an indie show in England but when he showed up, there were only 32 fans in the audience. Roberts reportedly told the promoter that he has a hard enough time getting motivated to work in front of 400 people, much less 32, and walked out of the building, never to return.
- Kevin Nash is still trying to play WWF and WWA against each other. Reportedly, WWF has very little interest in Scott Hall and originally, Nash refused to go to WWF if they wouldn't bring in Hall. But he's said to have softened his stance on that and may be willing to come in alone and may also be willing to work more dates, since that's the big hurdle between he and WWF. But Dave suspects he might just be telling the WWA side this in order to get them to up their offer for him.
- In the XWF wrestling section, Dave slips in a brief story about the XFL. Nothing newsworthy or anything, just recapping some article about the XFL that was written in a sports journal magazine. But I just find it funny that Dave can't even be bothered to throw this into the WWF section and puts it under the XWF section instead because, fuck it, 2 out of 3 letters is close enough right?
- Eddie Guerrero has had talks with XWF about coming in soon, but nothing has been finalized as of press time (never happens).
- The autopsy of Russ Haas has revealed that his cause of death was a heart attack, which was suspected after the previous one he had suffered a couple months prior.
- The planned WWF brand split has once again been delayed. It was tentatively scheduled to take place on next week's Raw from Madison Square Garden, but no longer. It will likely be sometime after the Royal Rumble but no word when. As a matter of fact, Dave heard an idea for how to split the brands and he actually thinks it's a pretty decent idea. You put the entire roster in the Rumble, (which would probably be around 50 wrestlers rather than the usual 30 but whatever) and all the even numbered wrestlers end up on one side while the odd numbers end up on the other. That would add excitement to the entire Rumble match (rather than the usual long, dull spots that the match often has) and would make every entrant matter. Doing it this way would also mean they could avoid doing a draft, because if they do a draft, that means all the lower draft picks are automatically seen as jobbers. This way, it seems random and nobody is made to look like the last kid picked for a team. None of this will happen of course, but it's an idea someone mentioned to Dave and he thinks it could work (I still like this idea).
- The Hardyz and Lita have been taken off TV, which is why they were pretty much beaten like jobbers and buried by Undertaker on TV last week. In particular, there's been issues with Jeff Hardy lately, which came to a head when he no-showed a house show in San Jose a couple weeks ago. Jeff has also been late for a few shows lately and his in-ring work has been below par (Dave says, given all the insane, career-shortening bumps he's taken over the years, it's surprising it took this long). After the Jeff vs. Matt angle flopped, Vince McMahon called all 3 of them into a meeting and said he was taking them off TV for awhile to give them a chance to breathe and go away for awhile so fans will miss them a little bit. They're still expected to work house shows for now, but no TV. Dave says there's always a shelf-life to certain acts and the Hardyz have been floundering for awhile, particularly after Triple H cut Jeff's momentum off at the knees and Lita got treated like a jobber by Chyna before she left. If this was still the territory days, it would be time for them to move on and go to a new territory but alas, that's no longer an option (they're only off TV for a few weeks. They work the Rumble at the end of January and then disappear from TV for another month before returning to TV full-time in February. Together as a tag team again, with no mention of the fact that they were supposedly split up the last time we saw them. Anyway, yeah from all reports, this is around the time Jeff's personal issues first really started to show. He eventually gets fired from WWE in 2003 for refusing to go to rehab).
- Notes from Raw: the show was pre-taped since it was on Christmas Eve. Billy Gunn and Chuck Palumbo are basically doing a "Dude, Where's My Car?" gimmick with a slightly gay twist. Dave thinks Palumbo looks ridiculous with bleached blonde hair and says Billy Gunn looked like Stan Lane "in need of charisma bypass surgery." Arn Anderson made an on-screen return in a backstage skit. Tough Enough winner Maven worked a match with Booker T and got a big pop and actually showed more in-ring skill than half the people on the show, but that's a pretty low bar because this was a bad episode for wrestling. The show was in Miami and Rock came out wearing a Miami Hurricanes jersey (he played football for them in college) and he got a monstrous reaction for that. Otherwise, not much to this show.
- Earthquake/John Tenta got a try-out match at the latest Smackdown tapings. He's 38 and word is he looked really slow (he has a couple of tryout matches during this period, but he doesn't get hired).
- On the Sunday Night Heat tapings, they had Billy Gunn beat Albert. As mentioned, Gunn and Palumbo are doing a gay gimmick now and during the match, Albert actually called Palumbo a "little f*ggot" which Dave seems pretty disgusted by. Yikes.
- WWF has booked a few shows in Asia for March, including one in Japan for the first time in 7 years. Dave notes that WWF does have a television deal in Japan, but it only does about half the ratings that NOAH does and maybe 1/3 of what NJPW does, and all three shows are in similar time slots. So WWF is just really not that popular there. Regardless, if they bring both Rock and Austin, Dave suspects they'll still do pretty well.
- There was another incident with Perry Saturn beating up a jobber, but this time it may have been deserved. It was a match with Saturn against a guy named Brian Gamble. During the match, Gamble stopped selling and started telling Saturn that this was his hometown and he had to win the match and couldn't look weak. So he started refusing to go off his feet and on two different occasions, he double crossed Saturn on planned spots and kicked him in the head instead of doing what they were planning. At this point, Saturn kicked Gamble's face in, forced him onto the mat, and put his submission on him. Gamble refused to tap and wouldn't cooperate, so Saturn had to really cinch the move in and twist his arm and finally, Gamble tapped. Backstage, people could tell something was wrong and when Gamble came back and they asked what happened, he said he didn't want to look weak and lose in front of all his friends and family who were there. Naturally, Vince McMahon was furious. Afterwards, both men were being checked by the trainer and they almost got into another altercation. Saturn mentioned the incident a couple years ago with jobber Mike Bell (look it up if you're not familiar) and told Gamble that he's lucky he didn't beat the shit out of him the same way he did Bell. Saturn was almost fired over the Bell incident and that's why he was hesitant to beat the shit out of Gamble, even though this time, the jobber actually deserved it. Gamble responded that Saturn was the lucky one because he would have beaten the shit out of him instead. Some people got between them and Gamble was then thrown out of the building and Dave doesn't expect we'll ever be seeing him again (nope).
- There have been talks between WWF and Rey Mysterio but nothing really agreed to yet. Obviously, Mysterio's size works against him in WWF and as far as his career prospects, it's probably not the best place for him to be, unless WWF decides to start seriously pushing smaller guys. And Dave doesn't see that happening. But money-wise, WWF is pretty much the only game in town and he'll make a lot more money there than he would in Mexico or working indies.
- And with that.......the Observer Rewind is in the books. I have a lot more to say though, so if you'll indulge me one last time, please follow me to THIS LINK.
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