April 28, 2003
- Our top story this week is Dave complaining about how badly WWE has already fumbled Goldberg and how there are no foolproof angles in wrestling. Before we even get to Goldberg though, we talk about how the biggest "foolproof" angles have always come from dream matches people never thought possible, usually when someone jumps promotions or one company folds or things like that. Dave runs down some of wrestling history's biggest missed opportunities arising from these situations. Akira Maeda leaving to form UWF and then returning to NJPW a couple years later, but the big Inoki vs. Maeda dream match never happened because neither would put the other over. Same with Inoki vs. Bruiser Brody, which happened, but both matches were inconclusive finishes due to politics and ended up fizzling out. Modern day, there's Hogan vs. Flair during the early-90s WWF run, but of course, they never did it (outside of house shows) and WCW ended up doing it a couple years later and doing huge business off of it. NJPW and AJPW did some stuff a couple years ago (Kawada vs. Sasaki, notably) that went well enough but nothing like it could have done. The UWFI vs. NJPW feud in the mid-90s was a monster success and famously influenced the NWO vs. WCW angle. And on and on. This all leads us to the Invasion PPV in 2001, with a horribly botched build-up, a poorly received WCW/ECW merger, and main evented by a 10-man tag match. It still did 700,000+ buys, an INSANE number. Now imagine if that show had been booked correctly and had been headlined by Goldberg vs. Rock or Austin. You're probably talking WM17-level buyrate records at that point. But alas, it's 2 years later and Goldberg vs. Rock is set to headline Backlash and it's not going to even do a fraction of what it might have done 2 years prior.
- If they had kept Goldberg off TV and saved his debut until the match itself to keep an aura of mystery around him, this match might have had a chance. But alas, he's been on WWE TV for about a month now and whooo boy. It hit rock bottom on this week's Raw in Atlanta. Goldberg. In Atlanta. And they turned him into a dorky babyface. Rock hit him with a rock bottom. Goldberg slowly chased him. Then he tried to get in his car to continue chasing him and the transmission blew. Then came out later in the show and got beat down with chair shots and made to look like a fool for the 3rd time. In WCW territory. This was peak Vince McMahon "let's get heat on the hometown babyface" booking and it was awwwwwful. By the end of the night, the fans in Goldberg's hometown were cheering Rock. Dave is absolutely baffled at how quickly they've managed to turn Goldberg into just another WWE guy. In a way, Dave wonders if those in charge of WWE aren't even more incompetent than WCW. At least when WCW was handed foolproof angles, they usually capitalized. WWE has had one can't-miss-storyline after another fall into their laps over the last few years and have fumbled them every single time because of ego or incompetency, and as a result, we're entering Year 3 of WWE's slow collapse. I could keep going, because lord knows Dave does, but this is mostly just him complaining in a very disorganized fashion. He ain't wrong though. 2003 WWE had no idea what they were doing with Goldberg or really much of anything. Floundering to try to create new stars after killing their only competition.
- And now we get an obituary for Lucha Libre legend Ray Mendoza, one of the biggest stars in its history, who died of a heart attack at 73. He's one of the most famed unmasked Luchadors of all time (along with rivals Gori Guerrero and Perro Aguayo) and probably among top 10 all time, and one of the best in-ring. Basically the Ric Flair of Lucha Libre. He had 5 sons, all of whom became wrestlers, Villanos I through V. In fact, they got their names because Mendoza played a character named Vallano in one of his most famous movies alongside El Santo. Huge star in the 60s and 70s, broke away to help form UWA which led to one of the biggest boom periouds in Mexican wrestling history and warred with CMLL, retired in the 80s and has remained a trainer and fixture on TV ever since as part of angles and in other roles. The full obituary is, of course, magnificent.
- We got a big story on all the drama with Tito Ortiz demanding more money to fight Chuck Liddell and all that fun stuff. Of course, this isn't wrestling related (although there is talk of Ortiz wanting out of his UFC contract to go to WWE, but Dave doesn't give it any real consideration), but getting up to speed on all the early days of UFC and MMA in general is a pretty fun part of this and has given me a whole new knowledge about the sport and its history that I never even planned to learn. If I ever need to farm some more of that sweet, sweet Reddit karma, I might have to start doing Rewinds over in r/MMA
- Pancrase held a press conference to announce a new off-shoot group called Pancrase Mission which will be lead by Minoru Suzuki and work in pro wrestling. The idea is for the group to work in NJPW and Pancrase president Masami Ozaki made it repeatedly clear that while the group will do worked pro wrestling, there will not be any worked matches in Pancrase. The company has long been against its active fighters working pro wrestling because they felt it detracted from the real fights they do, so this is mostly something for the ones whos fighting days are mostly done. Suzuki, since he is a founder of the company, isn't actually leaving the company and may do more shoot fights, but his primary focus going forward will now be pro wrestling (and with that, Murder Grandpa has arrived. Hide your young lions).
- More controversy on Great Sasuke serving in politics while wearing his mask. It's been ruled that he can be allowed to do so, but no one's really happy about it. Sasuke compromised and said he will design a new mask that will reveal more of his facial features. The controversy was that the mask would hide his facial expressions and reactions to things, which might be newsworthy, so this new mask will handle that. The controversy over "The Masked Senator" has been a bit of a major news story in Japan.
- Dave is way behind but he just saw the tapes of the first 2 shows from MLW that took place well over 6 months ago. Very ECW feel, with Joey Styles doing commentary and taping at Manhattan Center. Dead crowd, mostly empty building. Satoshi Kojima won the title and Terry Funk bit Tammy Sytch's ass while covered in blood and that's about the only notable bits.
- The power structure in TNA is ever-changing. As of right now, Jerry Jarrett is pretty much out of the picture when it comes to booking the shows, while Vince Russo is doing most of it. The big clash came with Jerry wanting to filter Russo's ideas and Jeff Jarrett being stuck in the middle. Russo allegedly kept threatening to quit if he was overruled and Jerry finally said, fuck it and pulled out completely. He's decided to let Russo have enough rope to hang himself with. Most believe this will end up with Russo having most of the power in the company, since he's still fighting for it while Jerry seems ready to give up, and the Carter family folks seem to like Russo. Raven is apparently helping Russo with the booking right now as well.
- Latest TNA show was one of the best they've done, highlighted by Amazing Red & Jerry Lynn winning the NWA tag titles from Elix Skipper & Christopher Daniels in a 4-star match. Crowd was 1,250 fans but looks to have been about 90% free tickets so not exactly doing huge ticket sales. They've started letting paid ticket holders get in first so they get the best seats. Hot crowd. Mike Awesome and Justin Credible debuted. Awesome got a concussion about a minute in and barely got through a terrible match with Saturn. There were constant insults about "rasslin" and southern accents because Russo loves to knock southern wrestling fans and what they like. AJ Styles ended up with 9 stitches in his head after the street fight and basically lost clean to Glen Gilberti. Makes no sense given Styles is in the title picture, but word is it was his punishment for publicly criticizing Russo's booking (particularly the bit a couple weeks back when Lollipop's shirt was torn off). If you're gonna bitch about tits on Russo's show, he's going to make you put over Disco Inferno. And finally, Dave says TNA has done "a 10x better job" of building up the Raven vs. Jarrett title match than WWE has of building up Rock vs. Goldberg. "Now it seems like I’m making fun of the Jarrett-Raven build-up saying it’s only ten times better than a negative number, which actually would be a ten times larger negative number, which isn’t what I meant." This fuckin' guy. <3
- Random TNA notes: If you recall, Percy Pringle, formerly known as Paul Bearer, debuted in TNA awhile back and seemingly teasing some big future plans. Well, he hasn't heard anything from the company about bringing him back since then. They seem to have no plans for him after all. Apparently no plans for Vader to return either, as he's debuting for Chono's WJ promotion in Japan soon. And indie promoter Scott D'Amore was hired this week as an agent and TV producer. Wonder how that ends up working out for him?
- Jeff Hardy was officially fired on 4/21, to the surprise of no one. He had been removed from house shows and suspended the previous week. Prior to that, they had tried to work on a compromise with him, in which he could work less dates and have more time to focus on his passions. He'd asked for his release twice before so he could dedicate himself to music but was turned down. In recent media appearances, he apparently said some negative things about the company and he's looked terrible in the ring for awhile now. (Dave doesn't mention it here, but the final straw was Jeff refusing to go to rehab so they fired him. But he's been subtly hinting at Jeff's drug problem for about a year at this point so it's not like it was a secret).
- Contrary to reports, Sting has not yet signed a deal with WWE, although others have said it's almost a done deal. Others are saying not quite (obviously didn't happen but Sting later revealed that he indeed was very close to signing in 2003 and the first idea pitched was for him to debut at the end of WM19 and confront Steve Austin. Deal fell apart and it never happened and Austin ended up retiring anyway, but Sting has confirmed it was extremely close to happening around this time).
- Triple H and Stephanie McMahon are planning to get married (for real) in October. "Looking back, when we write the final history of the business, this will be even bigger than it sounds today," Dave writes. He wasn't wrong. Twenty years later and look at things now.
- Notes from 4/21 Raw: they had the "5 Minute White Boy Challenge" which was an excuse for Rodney Mack to beat up a nameless white boy. Lita (still injured) returned and announced she planned to be back in the ring in a couple months, but then Eric Bischoff came out, sleazily harassed her, then fired her when she wouldn't sleep with him. 2003 WWE was certainly a time. Rock performed another concert and brought out Gillberg in a really funny bit. This whole segment was great until the end. Goldberg came out and murdered everyone in his way....until Rock laid him out with a rock bottom and then all the dumb stuff mentioned earlier. And main event was, of course, all the Kliq shit with Shawn, Nash, and Triple H.
- WATCH: Rock concert - Raw 2003
- More on WWE dropping the Goldberg ball. Because they decided to have Rock wait a week to accept his challenge, it caused a delay in the planned promotional push for the match (can't send out advertising materials and start running commercials advertising the match if it hasn't been booked on TV yet). Also, they tried to get some press with all the big talk shows, but got turned down by all the Lenos and Lettermans, so instead, they've managed to secure some tie-in with the Jimmy Kimmel Show and that was only because one of the talent bookers for Kimmel used to be on the WWE creative team and pulled strings. The mainstream doesn't want anything to do with WWE these days.
- Bill DeMott and Nathan Jones got into a bit of an argument backstage and had to be separated at a house show. They had wrestled earlier in the night and DeMott apparently felt Jones wasn't listening to him in the match. There's a lot of frustration with Jones from everyone, feeling like he hasn't shown any desire to get better but he's protected because Vince loves how goddamn big he is.