Wrestling Observer Rewinder

January 13, 2003

We're opening with a big discussion of who the contenders are for Wrestler of the Year for 2002. Which means there's no major stories this week I'm guessing. Dave lists 9 potential candidates that you can make cases for. On paper, Bob Sapp seems like a surefire winner, but the voting period for the candidates cuts off at Nov. 30th and several of Sapp's major accomplishments happened in December. There's also the argument over whether Sapp and/or MMA should even count. But in 2000, Observer readers voted Kazushi Sakuraba into 4th place, and PRIDE won promotion of the year, so the precedent has been set. But do his K-1 kickboxing accomplishments count? Who's to say? In Japan, MMA fights and fighters have been cleaning up all the top pro wrestling awards in the magazines. What about The Rock? Had the hugely successful match with Hogan, some great matches with Jericho, and turned Lesnar into a made-man. But he was barely around otherwise. Does becoming a bigger mainstream star outside of wrestling count for anything towards the awards?
This continues on for a bit, with Dave breaking down the criteria: in-ring ability, drawing power, importance to their promotion, consistency, etc. and then under each, he makes cases for different wrestlers. For instance, Kurt Angle was untouchable in-ring. Since you can't count Sapp's huge December shows, Rock was the biggest draw. You can make an argument that without Keiji Muto, AJPW very likely may have collapsed and died in 2002. Kurt Angle was most consistent year-long. So on and so forth. Anyway, after examining everything, Dave has no choice but to cast his vote for Bob Sapp. His heart tells him Kurt Angle, but once you look at all the stats and criteria, it's impossible to deny Sapp. The dude barrelled through 2002 like a tornado. Dave suspects Sapp will end up burning out and become a flash in the pan sooner rather than later, but for now, he's the hottest star in the wrestling/MMA/kickboxing business and 2nd place isn't even really close.
Hey, speaking of Sapp, he headlined Antonio Inoki's annual Bom Ba Ye special on New Year's Eve. So here's the deal. Japan has an annual NYE special (Kōhaku Uta Gassen) that is always the highest rated television show of the year in Japan. Super Bowl-level viewership. Inoki's Bom Ba Ye show has been competing head-to-head with this event for the last few years. Anyway, this year's show--headlined by Bob Sapp vs. Yoshihiro Takayama--ended up being the highest rated show in history to counter-program the Kōhaku Uta Gassen show. Around 34 million people watched Sapp submit Takayama in 2 minutes, making it the most watched MMA fight in television history. Dave talks about a handful of other famous Japanese pro wrestling matches that did higher ratings, but none of them were going head-to-head against the biggest television event in Japan.
Bob Sapp vs. Yoshihiro Takayama - Inoki Bom Be Ye 2002
NJPW's annual Jan. 4th Tokyo Dome show is in the books and whooooo boy. Things ain't good. NJPW has been able to pack the Tokyo Dome every Jan. 4th for years, even during weaker times, based on tradition. But that came to a screeching halt this year. The show drew an estimated 30,000 and even that included some papering in the last few days. They still announced the crowd as 50,000 to save face but it was an absurd lie, and was easily the smallest crowd NJPW has ever drawn to the Tokyo Dome (oh, it's gonna get SO much worse before it gets better). During the show, Antonio Inoki and former booker Hisashi Shinma came out for a promo segment and they basically buried the company, saying NJPW has nothing exciting happening and vowed to bring it back to its glory days. When the show aired on TV, the network decided only to air the top 2 matches and the rest of the broadcast was a best-of-NJPW clip-show rather than the rest of the Tokyo Dome card. Because on top of being the lowest drawing Dome show in history for NJPW, it was also a completely forgettable and boring one. Dave thinks it's time to stop calling the Jan. 4 Tokyo Dome show "Japan's Wrestlemania" because K-1, PRIDE, and Inoki on his own are all doing bigger, grander events than this.
Only things worth noting from the Jan 4 show: they continued to push Shinsuke Nakamura as a rookie sensation who got the huge upset win in a tag match. Hiroyoshi Tenzan and Satoshi Kojima reunited their famous tag team for the first time since Kojima jumped to AJPW last year. Hiroshi Tanahashi (to a big pop) got involved in this match as well, attacking them after the bell. Yuji Nagata retained the IWGP title over former UFC champ Josh Barnett. In the semi-main event of the show, Yoshihiro Takayama (fresh off the Sapp loss) won a tournament final to become crowned the new NWF Heavyweight Champion.
(A bit of history: this was NJPW's original main title belt prior to the creation of the IWGP championship and was held by Inoki throughout most of the 1970s. They revived the title, with the idea of making it a "shooters" title. I mention this because the NWF title will play a big role throughout most of 2003 before Nakamura retires it again in 2004. Something to keep in mind.)
One final note from the Jan. 4th show, an exact quote: "Coming out also was Masafumi Nakayama, a Japanese soccer star, who gave Inoki flowers as they noted that he’ll turn 60 on 2/20. Nakayama led the crowd in singing “Happy birthday” to Inoki, and then Inoki slapped him in the face." (I never get tired of Inoki slapping people being a thing.)
A Mexican police officer who wrestled on the side as El Maton on the Tijuana indie scene was murdered last week. Apparently the police were called to a scene and when they got there, they were ambushed by some men in trucks and shot and killed. El Maton was in trouble awhile back because he tested positive for steroids during a mandatory police drug test (I did a few minutes of cursory research on this and it appears to have been related to drug cartels).
Dave talks about some recent CMLL show with a great Shocker vs. Ultimo Guerrero match. More notably, he talks about Super Crazy working this show and Dave is astounded that this guy doesn't have a gig in the U.S. right now. Out of all the other former ECW wrestlers who still seem to be making a living wrestling in America, Super Crazy is light years ahead of all of them and even on this CMLL show, he was the standout star. Somebody needs to sign this guy up ASAP.
AJPW's upcoming WRESTLE-1 show is booked for the Tokyo Dome in less than two weeks and not a single match is announced. Bob Sapp is headlining, which is all anyone knows, but even Sapp's star-power hasn't been enough to save it. The advance ticket sales are said to be horrible. They're trying to get Ultimo Dragon for the show, but no word on that happening yet (they end up pulling together a weird ass card for this show and doing ok, but we'll get there...)
Keiji Muto has been getting booed out of the building at AJPW shows this week, due to all the media publicity regarding the front office happenings in AJPW. Muto is taking the heat for wanting to "Americanize" AJPW from its traditional style and the fans are letting him hear it.
Hiroshi Tanahashi's first match back since getting stabbed will be next month. Initially, there was some heat on Tanahashi for bringing bad publicity to NJPW (how dare he be the victim of an attempted murder!) but those feelings have softened. In fact, recognizing the mainstream publicity potential of it, Inoki is wanting to push Tanahashi as a big star in 2003.
Atsushi Onita claims he is retiring this summer after a match in Afghanistan. Dave notes that Onita has claimed he was going to retire every year since 1994 and it has become such a joke that he earned the nickname Mr. Liar. And then Japanese citizens voted and elected Mr. Liar into political office.
Random News & Notes: Observer Live radio show has moved to a new time slot and Bret Hart will be the guest on there soon talking with Bryan and Dave. Road Warriors are working on an autobiography. And a correction from last week: Dave said the Konnan match was so bad that it would be the first match not released on an ROH video. Turns out that's not true: they cut out an old Insane Clown Posse match on a previous video release.
ICP in Ring of Honor - 2002
TNA signed a TV deal with Star World, which airs shows in Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, etc. They will start airing weekly from the very first episode which means they will be 7 months behind what's airing in the U.S.
Christopher Daniels is working on a per-appearance deal with TNA right now because he has so many overseas committments. Most of the other top guys in TNA signed 1-year deals. Daniels was also offered a WWE developmental tryout recently as well.
Dave boldly predicts that Fedor Emelianenko will eventually fight and defeat Antonio Rodrigo Rogueira for the PRIDE heavyweight title (this does indeed happen a couple of months later). Dave then says, if/when that happens, the next match to make is Fedor vs. Sapp, which Dave predicts Sapp should win. And then book Sapp vs. Cro Cop and watch it set ratings records (decent plan, except 2003 is the year the wheels start to fall off the Bob Sapp train and it doesn't work out that way. Also, Fedor would have obliterated that man).
As of press time, Goldberg still has not signed with WWE, but it's close and the tentative plan is still Goldberg vs. Rock at the Wrestlemania (naaaaaah).
Notes from Raw: Dave thinks Victoria's entrance music is really good. Fuck yeah it is. Scott Steiner/Triple H posedown was brutally long. Ended up bringing some UPW indie plants out of the crowd (the future Mike Knox being the only notable name)
Notes from Smackdown: They're pushing lots of new people, which is good, but the segments were mostly awful. They hinted that Undertaker may be going back to his old gimmick (and on the website, they even changed his hometown location from Houston back to Death Valley, further fueling the rumors) but Dave is told that's not the plan. He thinks Undertaker going back to that gimmick would turn him into a nostalgia act (boy did that turn out to be wrong. Undertaker ended up having the best years of his career in the mid/late-00s). Eddie Guerrero has gotten rid of his mullet and Dave thinks he looks like just another guy now. Eh, it works out okay for him. Dawn Marie and Al Wilson had their wedding, in their underwear. They even had Al Wilson stick something in his tighty whiteys so it would look like he had an erection the whole time. Again, Dave hates this angle. Matt Hardy absolutely KILLED Brock Lesnar with a chairshot and busted him open hardway. (Matt has talked about this before. He accidentally caught Brock with the edge of the chair and busted him up. And they had to go work a match with each other a few minutes afterwards for a taped show the following week. Brock was pissed and Matt was basically scared to death. Said they worked the match and Brock was stiff but safe and didn't really try to get revenge even though he was clearly angry).
The Rock made a surprise appearance at a house show in Anaheim, saving Booker T from a heel beatdown. He got a big pop of course, but lots of boos and sellout chants as well. Hmmm, I wonder if Rock would make a good heel in 2003....
Hulk Hogan has been doing interviews and saying that the wrestling industry needs to clean up its act if he's going to return. Ah yes, 4 years after peak Attitude Era, Hogan is now clutching his pearls over how he can explain segments like Torrie Wilson and Dawn Marie to his (does the math) teenage son. Don't worry Hulk, I'm pretty sure your 13-year-old son has already figured out how he feels about Torrie and Dawn Marie. Maybe work on responsible driving lessons instead.
Kurt Angle is said to be in pretty rough shape physically and there's concern about him at the Royal Rumble. Everyone expects him to work the show, but there's high expectations for an Angle vs. Benoit title match and question of whether Angle will be healthy enough to pull it off (fret not: they manage to have a classic and then some).
Vince McMahon and Bret Hart had their first face-to-face meeting since Owen Hart's funeral in 1999 this week at Vince's condo in Boca Raton, FL. The meeting was put together through an intermediary to try and bring the two sides together again. Hart has been working on his autobiography and Vince allowed Bret access to WWE-owned photos. Both sides have stopped burying each other publicly and WWE is very interested in getting him back in the fold and putting him on TV for a one-off appearance, but nothing has been agreed upon and Bret won't be making any TV appearances anytime soon as he's still recovering from his stroke.
Dave is pretty sure there's nothing to rumors of Eric Bischoff taking over booking for Raw. While he gets along well, Bischoff doesn't really associate much with many people in the company and is still given somewhat of a cold shoulder by some. He's basically an actor who comes in, does his lines, and that's it. As for people who do have booking control, Brian Gewertz is still the head writer of Raw and Dave is amazed by it since he has a ton of heat from people who think he doesn't understand what makes pro wrestling work and only see him as a good comedy writer.
Dave covers a recent newspaper article about WWE referee Tim White. Talks about how White was hired by WWE specifically because he didn't know anything about wrestling. “I told him I had never been to a wrestling event before, and surprisingly, that’s what he was looking for," White said. He was hired originally to sell merch at the arenas and work on the ring crew. Later on, he essentially became Andre the Giant's caretaker and the two became best friends. White started as a referee in 1992 and ended up having to retire from that gig after his shoulder was legitimately injured in last year's Triple H vs. Jericho Hell in a Cell match (and as I type this, Tim White just passed away less than 2 weeks ago. RIP to an unsung backstage legend and reportedly all-around awesome guy).
Nathan Jones is expected to end up on Smackdown, because Vince smells money in a potential Brock Lesnar vs. Nathan Jones match. However, Paul Heyman and others aren't nearly as excited by that prospect, because Vince only cares about the look. And everyone else can see that, so far, Nathan Jones kinda sucks a lot at this whole wrestling thing. But he's Vince's chosen pet project right now, so he's going to come out of the gate with a big push.
Sigh. Here, y'all decipher this shit: "Here’s the latest Shawn Stasiak insanity. After Stasiak canceled a radio interview with Jason Barrett of “No Holds Barred radio,” claiming he didn’t want to get any heat because he was heading back to WWE, he then did an interview with Chris Yandek, where he claimed that there was an imposter Stasiak who was posing as him giving interviews. He claimed he was attending Chiropractic college and has no interest in returning to WWE. Barrett, when asked to write a retraction since it was a fake Stasiak he had supposedly spoken with, then noted that the person who set up the interview they did with Stasiak was Yandek, who gave him his phone number and e-mail and that clearly it was him they talked with and told them he was going back to WWE. It should be noted that Stasiak has guested on Barrett’s radio show in the past. Yandek, after Barrett released the story about Stasiak going back to WWE (which was never the case, I guess he just didn’t want to do the interview), sent an e-mail to Barrett saying he should have never released that information, and in the e-mail, Yandek wrote to Barrett “He is on his way back to the company and didn’t want to take heat I suppose for doing an interview with your show, which happens.” Yandek the next day came up with the story about the imposter Stasiak, and did what he claimed was an interview with the real Stasiak, etc."
Work will finally begin on Ric Flair's autobiography soon. Before he returned to WWE last year, Flair had signed his own deal with a publishing company for the book. But when he got to WWE, Vince McMahon wanted to have the book published under their deal with a different publishing company. So they've basically spent the last year trying to sort this out. Which is unfortunate because the more the business continues to plummet, the less success the book will have. Books from Mick Foley, Rock, etc. all came out at the height of wrestling's boom period and did huge business. If Flair could have put this book out last year, it would have likely sold a lot more than it inevitably will.
Shawn Michaels is pushing to do a match with Ric Flair at Wrestlemania 19 this year, but it's unlikely to happen because Flair has been marginalized so much as a character over the past year that they don't feel like they can rehab him in time and build up Flair vs. Michaels as a big time match that fans would care about (yeah, Flair was basically being booked as a joke during this time. Thankfully, when we got this match 5 years later, it meant a LOT more than it would have in 2003).
Injury Report: Big Show is dealing with some serious back pain that he was trying to hide. But he reportedly needed help getting out of his airplane seat last week and had to admit the injury. Scotty 2 Hotty has been out since last year and is expected back this summer after having a lot of major neck surgery (he ended up coming back in October).
There's a lot of heat on Matt Hardy. Dave isn't sure of the details, but in particularly, Fit Finlay and John Laurinaitis have been vocally against his push. Paul Heyman, who came up with Matt's current gimmick, is trying to save him (it's so obvious that Heyman was a Dave-source for years).
Triple H has been outspoken about both the Tough Enough and Confidential shows doing more harm than good for the company. In particular, he thinks pulling back the curtain so much makes it more difficult to get over as an old-school heel. Dave kinda agrees, noting that the Confidential episode on Brock Lesnar before Summerslam definitely put him over as a real life babyface when he was supposed to be a killer heel. Or portraying Rico as a heel on TV while running the segment on Confidential showing him as a heroic ex-police officer. This stuff could work if they aired the segments in times that make kayfabe sense and Triple H doesn't seem to enjoy that these shows are out there blatantly breaking kayfabe. Dave doesn't think it's a huge deal and the financial gains of these shows to the company's bottom line are surely more important to Vince than the minor headache of "protecting kayfabe" in the year 2003, but he can see the point.
On Velocity, Ernest "The Cat" Miller is still doing commentary and this week, he made a comment saying any martial artist would beat a pro wrestler in a real fight. Aside from this being a stupid comment for the commentator of a pro wrestling show to say on said show, it allows Dave to share a story from WCW. Years ago, Bischoff was negotiating to bring in Don Frye. During one of their meetings, Ernest Miller started saying the same stuff, basically how he could take anyone in UFC because of his (legitimate) karate background. Frye argued that UFC fighters have a whole mix of other skills aside from karate and if they got Miller down, he'd be in trouble. Miller kept talking so much shit that Frye got pissed and nearly got into a fight with him over it. The fight never turned physical, but it led to Bischoff deciding not to bring in Frye.
Spanky and Chris Nowinski are both in OVW getting some of that WWE seasoning sprinkled on them so they can "learn how to work." Both of them are also kind of in the dog house. As for Nowinski, it's believed he has a ton of potential as a promo, but has a long way to go before he's any good in the ring. And as for Spanky, you may be surprised to hear this, but Jim Cornette hates how he wrestles.
Jim Ross will no longer be publishing his Ross Report on the WWE website. Among the reasons, Vince was not a fan of the shoot aspect of it, in which Ross would often say things like wishing certain wrestlers were pushed more. Vince didn't appreciate Jim Ross publicly going against whatever the company line is at any given time.
Jerry Lawler "revealed" in his book that he and Andy Kaufman's feud was all a work. Lawler was suprised by all the news coverage this "revelation" got, since the movie Man on the Moon with Jim Carrey came out 4 years ago and it was acknowledged in the film. He thought the secret was already out. But media outlets have been blowing up his phone, with CNN interviewing him about it under the story "wrestler breaks his 20 year silence."
When covering house show news, Dave says John Cena could become a major player. Dave doesn't like his rapping gimmick, but it got over and the crowd reacted big to him and management has noticed. Yeah, he does okay for himself.