May 26, 2003
- Before we start, Dave tells a story of two WCW PPVs. One in 1999 and one in 2000, about a year apart. Each was headlined by Hogan vs. Flair. The 1999 PPV did 455k buys. The 2000 PPV only did 50k. It only took a year for WCW to absolutely cripple its vital PPV revenue stream with bad booking. Dave says WWE needs to heed those lessons because 2003 WWE is eerily similar to 1999 WCW in several ways: management that thinks they know what the fans want more than the fans themselves. Awful main events with stars that fans are openly rejecting. This month's PPV didn't even have the good undercard matches that you could at least hope for with a 1999 WCW PPV. So on and so forth. Wrestlemania suffered the consequences for it, doing a lower-than-expected buyrate significantly down from last year, and Dave doesn't have much hope for this PPV doing a good number either. Speaking of....
- Other notes from the PPV: Austin as the feel-good babyface GM character isn't a good fit. Spanky (Brian Kendrick) took a hard kick from Johnny Stamboli in the opening match. He finished it but backstage, he was in rough shape and ended up going to the hospital on a stretcher with a concussion. More backstage skits with Mr. America and Hurricane. Tag title ladder match was the best match on the show, unsurprisingly. More skits, this time Roddy Piper and Chris Jericho. Christian won the battle royal to win the newly reinstated Intercontinental title. Sean Morley returned to his old Val Venis gimmick. It was a bad battle royal. The Sable/Torrie Wilson bikini contest had all the lesbian overtones you've come to expect from this era of WWE. And then we had Mr. America vs. Roddy Piper. And after 20 years, Hulk Hogan (allegedly!) finally got a pinfall victory over Roddy Piper. It was 5 minutes, full of outside interference hijinks, and was as awful as you'd expect from these two. Triple H/Nash only went 8 minutes and ended in a DQ was just as bad, and the fans have pretty much totally rejected Nash in this position. That's basically all of note. Trash PPV.
- You know it's a slow week when one of the top stories is Dave ranting about shit. This time it's about WWE's need to invest in the future. Now that WWE is basically the only game in town and the economic windfalls of a few years ago are drying up, it would be easy for WWE to rest on its laurels and not spend money on developing new stars. Success breeds complacency. At its peak, WWE had developmental deals with UPW, IWA, HWA, and OVW, as well as lots of ties with Memphis whenever it was running. Through those, they had dozens of wrestlers under developmental contracts. Now they only have OVW, with roughly 17 people under contract. That includes Mark Henry, who has been assigned there just to keep him working to justify his contract, and Jackie Gayda, who won Tough Enough because she was hot. Several others have been there for years with seemingly no sign of leaving developmental purgatory and Dave doesn't have a lot of hope for them anyway (Nick Dinsmore, Doug Basham, Damaja, Rob Conway, Lance Cade, Orlando Jordan, Travis Tomko, Mark Jindrak, etc.) - Dave goes through most of the current OVW roster and sorta predicts how these guys will fare in WWE. And he basically nailed it on every single one of them. Some talents, sure, but not a future superstar among the whole bunch. It's too soon to tell for Matt Cappotelli and John Hennigan since they just started. Gail Kim will probably get over if she's given a shot. And then there's the one guy there who WWE seems to have pegged as their future mega star: Matt Morgan. But Dave doesn't see anything in him either, other than having a good look.
- Dave compares this to some of the names who passed through the developmental system a couple years ago, before WWE gutted it: Brock Lesnar, Haas and Benjamin, John Cena, Randy Orton, Victoria, Batista, etc. Sure, there were a bunch of people who washed out too, but the pool was much larger. These days, that couldn't happen. The budget for developmental has been slashed to the point that they would never have offered Lesnar the same money now that they did then (when he was negotiating with WCW) just to train in OVW. Guys like Cena and Orton got instant contracts back in the days when they'd take one look at somebody, see dollar signs, and sign them. But if Cena and Orton had to work their way through the indies for years just to get a shot at one of the few developmental contracts WWE offers now, would they have stuck with it? You're likely to miss out on future stars by not casting a wider net.
- So that leaves the indies to pull from. But most of the indies right now are doing styles completely different from WWE. They don't want death match CZW guys or 185-pound ROH guys doing crazy holy shit spots, and that's what the American indie system is in 2003. Aside from Tough Enough, it's been over 3 years since WWE went out and tried to mass-recruit new talent, most of whom ended up being duds. With injuries piling up and PPVs being headlined by older stars that need to get out of the way or ones who's necks are hanging on by threads, planning for the future should be WWE's priority. And it's clearly not right now.
- After Raw in Greenville, SC went off the air on 5/19, the entire locker room hit the ring in an unscheduled post-show tribute to Ric Flair. The entire show was built around Flair challenging Triple H for the title and it was kind of a "Flair's final at-bat" sort of show. After going off the air, faces and heels alike all hit the ring and Flair, who was caught completely off-guard, broke down and cried. Even Vince, Shane, and Stephanie came out for it, with Vince teasing he was going to attack Flair but giving him a hug instead. Triple H then came back out, put the belt on Flair's shoulder, and raised his arm and then they all carried Flair around the ring. Fans yelled for a speech and Flair gave one, showing his appreciation and saying he was so much happier than he was during his final WCW years. Flair is expected to remain heel since this all happened off-air, but the crowd in Greenville loved it and Flair later described it as one of the biggest highlights of his career. Well that's nice.
- WATCH: post-Raw Ric Flair tribute - 2003
- Dave has done some soul-searching and has done a complete 180 on his thoughts regarding last week's WWE Confidential episode and the airing of the Elizabeth/Lex Luger 911 call. For starters, WWE replayed the segment, in edited-down form, on Smackdown this week. When they first aired the Elizabeth story on Confidential, it didn't feel quite so out of place because that show is, at its core, presented as a news show. But Smackdown is presented as entertainment. Hearing the 911 call in the context of that show was revolting in a way Dave can't put into words. Worse, on Confidential, the full segment had cutaways to Gene Okerlund explaining the circumstances in more detail, and gave a more balanced picture of the story. On Smackdown, all the Okerlund stuff was edited out. Without that additional context of Okerlund explaining things, the video package talked about Luger's arrest for domestic assault right alongside Elizabeth's death in such a way that it seemed designed to give people the impression that Luger killed her.
- Almost everyone in the business that Dave has spoken with is convinced that this has all been Vince's way of trying to get back at Luger for walking out on him back in 1995. Dave says the truth of the situation is already bad enough for Luger. There's no need to falsely make him look like a murderer on top of it. But it's said Vince has never been more pissed than he was when Luger showed up on that debut Nitro and it's a grudge he has held for years (Dave notes that Vince basically firing Luger live on Raw in 2001 when he bought WCW wasn't a joke). Anyway, after the segment replayed on Smackdown, then they spent the rest of the week hyping up the next episode of Confidential, promising to have new updates. But all they did was replay this same segment (the awful Smackdown version, without the additional context). The only additional thing was Okerlund saying that attempts to interview Luger for the story resulted in him not returning their calls. Dave is pretty damn disgusted by all of this, understandably so.
- Preliminary numbers from Backlash look to be around 300,000 which is basically the range of all the usual B-level PPVs. But this one had Goldberg's first WWE match against The Rock so, needless to say, no one is happy with the numbers. But Dave says they have no one to blame but themselves considering how badly Goldberg has been fumbled since literally day one. Before he debuted, Dave expected the PPV to do 475-500k based on the idea of a Goldberg/Rock match. After all, the Lesnar/Rock match 6 months ago did 450k and Goldberg is a bigger name than Lesnar. But as soon as Dave saw how badly the build for the match was going (Rock's dorky funny promos, Goldberg getting beaten up in Atlanta twice, Goldust putting a wig on him, etc.), this 300,000k range is right about where Dave expected. Had Goldberg never appeared on Raw before the match and if they'd saved his first appearance until the actual PPV, Dave thinks they easily would have broken 500k and probably paid for Goldberg's entire one-year contract off the money made from that one show. As a result, he estimates the awful build to the match probably cost WWE well over $1 million in PPV buys that they might have gotten if they'd just done nothing instead.
- Masahiro Chono has a torn ACL and has been told he needs to get surgery and stay out of action for several months. Instead he's booked for a tag title match at Budokan Hall in two weeks. Dave says Chono is insane.
- NOAH's Jun Akiyama is likely going to be working this year's G-1 Climax for NJPW, in return for Yuji Nagata who is currently working this month's NOAH tour. Yay friendship!
- Correction from last week: Shinsuke Nakamura is not the first NJPW rookie to get an IWGP world title match. Naoya Ogawa got a shot at Shinya Hashimoto's world title in only his 2nd pro match, while Josh Barnett also got an IWGP title shot just a couple months ago against Nagata in only his first ever pro match. And Salman Hashimikov won the IWGP title from Vader after only wrestling or 5 weeks back in 1989. But all of those people are guys who had names coming in and were already stars from other sports before arriving in NJPW. Nakamura is the first rookie to come up through the traditional training pro wrestling system ranks and get a title shot this quickly.
- Zane Bresloff, the guy who worked promotions backstage for years for both WWF and WCW, was in a very serious car accident last week in Denver. Dave runs through all his injuries and said as of press time, he's still hospitalized and fighting for his life. A lot of fans don't know him, but within the business, Bresloff has long been one of the most powerful people running things behind the scenes, especially in WCW's biggest years. He was basically Bischoff's right-hand man and involved in event promotion from 1994-2001 until WCW closed. Prior to that, he spent 10 years in WWF doing the same gig during the Hogan boom years and was a big force behind the scenes in keeping those machines running (Dave didn't reveal it until later, but Bresloff was also one of Dave's biggest sources and he's also the guy who revealed to Dave that Wrestlemania 3's real paid attendance was 78k, not the 93k number WWE claims). Unfortunately, Bresloff doesn't end up surviving this, but we'll hear more next week.
- Those close to the Lex Luger situation believe his drug charges will be thrown out. According to his lawyer, when the police returned to his house the second time and seized all the drugs, they didn't have a warrant. They simply saw it all the first time when they came to try and save Elizabeth. Then came back later in the day like, "Oh yeah, what was up with all those steroids laying around earlier? We're going to take those and arrest you." So it's believed these charges may get tossed.
- For those curious, the process for booking in TNA right now is to give everything a 4-week build, staggered out. The original format was to spend 3 weeks building up to a big blow-off show every 4th week. But they feared that would lead to fans skipping 3 weeks of shows and only buying the one big weekly PPV per month. So now every week, they shoot big angles for one or two storylines at a time and can have the big blow-off to a different angle every week instead of doing them all at once. Makes sense.
- Of course, that plan only works if you stick to it. For the past 2 weeks, TNA didn't even bother to announce anything for the following week's show, because nothing was planned yet. After the show, Vince Russo and Glen Gilberti (what a team!) write the next show, give it to Jeff Jarrett, and he spends the remainder of the week making changes and trying to piece together whatever those lunatics came up with into a television show that has to adhere to a pro wrestling format. And, of course, much of that week is spent arguing with Russo over what needs to be cut or changed because he has no concept of pro wrestling booking or long-term storytelling.
- Also, they're building up for Jeff Jarrett vs. Glen Gilberti for the NWA title as the main event of an upcoming show, possibly the 1 year anniversary event. What kind of booker books Glen Gilberti as a credible world title main event challen.....oh.
- Mike Awesome and Perry Saturn have both been told to lose weight. But they both work regularly in Japan and the belief over there is that they love their Americans to be big beefy powerhouses, so they purposefully keep themselves huge. As a result, both are pretty awful in the ring right now, both in TNA and Japan (this is also what Jericho claimed he was doing a few years ago when he showed up in Japan with 50 extra pounds of alcoholic weight doing the Painmaker gimmick)
- Latest TNA show was down to 800 total attendance, almost entirely freebies. In fact, Dave was told by a source in the company that, "If you were to say that the advance was zero, you'd be pretty close." A lot of it is being attributed to the local fans who come to the shows every week turning on Jarrett and due to Gilberti being shoved down their throats. In particular, Gilberti was all over the 5/14 show and it led to a lot of criticism from fans. This issue of the Observer appears to be "Dunk on Gilberti Week" and I'm here for it.
- They teased a new authority figure in TNA. This would be #10 or so by now. Anyway, they teased it was DDP's best friend, "Eric from WCW." For those of you expecting it to be Eric Bischoff, go ahead and hold your breath...
- Sabu no-showed last week's TNA PPV and no one knows why. He was mentioned on commentary all night and his wife was even there at the arena. But Sabu never showed. Jerry Jarrett had been against bringing Sabu back in the first place because the last time he was there, Jarrett felt Sabu purposely botched the finish of his match because he didn't want to lose clean as he was booked. But Russo has more power now and he pushed to bring Sabu back. And, well....no-show.
- Bob Sapp did an interview recently and covered a few things. He says he did negotiate with WWF briefly in 2000 before he went to WCW and joined the Power Plant there. After WCW folded, K-1 approached him because they saw video of him in a Toughman contest against William "Refrigerator" Perry. They never intended for him to fight. They just recognized that he had an awesome look and moved well. So they signed him with the idea of loaning him out to pro wrestling companies, since he had that training from the WCW days. But none of the Japanese companies were interested in this big unproven nobody that never made it past WCW developmental. To get a return on their investment, K-1 decided to let him train to do real fighting and the rest is history.
- It appears the Road Warriors will not be getting a WWE contract. If you saw last week, they worked the match on Raw and got jobbed out in 3 minutes by RVD & Kane, something that was unthinkable for that team once upon a time. Those close to Vince feel this was his way of either testing them or getting revenge for all the times they (meaning Hawk) have burned him before. And Hawk did them no favors by taking 2 finishers, kicking out right at the 3-count, and then getting right back to his feet and no-selling it, which irritated everybody. So no job for them.
- Kurt Angle is expected to return to TV on the 6/5 episode of Smackdown. No word yet if he will be a heel or face when he does. As mentioned before, there's a lot of back and forth behind the scenes on this. One idea is to turn Benoit/Rhyno heel and have Angle and Lesnar team up as faces against them, while continuing to tease a rematch for next year's Wrestlemania while they feud with other heel teams. The other idea is to bring him back as a heel and jump right back into Angle vs. Lesnar again.
- Notes from 5/19 Raw: the show was built around Triple H being forced to wrestle a former world champion but he was allowed to pick. So he picked Ric Flair since that's his buddy and hey, old man Flair can't beat him, right? The show-long story was that Triple H expected Flair to lay down for him while everyone else got in Flair's ear and tried to remind him, "Hey....you're Ric fucking Flair. This is a world title match. Don't lay down for this guy. This is your chance." It was a pretty great storyline for the show and, as mentioned earlier, Flair was the biggest babyface in town that night. Elsewhere, ol' Christian finally got a haircut and Dave says he looks like Ian Zeiring from 90210 now. That's pretty much the only notable stuff. Flair and Triple H was awesome and the crowd was super into it. A really special end to an otherwise middling show.
- Notes from 5/22 Smackdown tapings: Bill DeMott is back to the Hugh Morrus gimmick. During the Velocity tapings, he got on the mic to tell the crowd a joke and asked, "Who are the 3 most famous guys to get shot in the back of the head?" The answer was Lincoln, Kennedy, and the guy sitting in front of Pee Wee Herman at the theater. Well okay then. Most of the show was built around the Mr. America/Vince/Zach Gowan stuff. Mr. America lost a match by count-out so now he has to take a lie detector test next week. Dave has lots of ideas for questions to ask him.
- Dave goes on a bit of a rant about Rey Mysterio's big return to Smackdown last week. Popular babyface Mysterio, who was injured by big nasty heel Big Show a little while back, has returned to seek his revenge! Just kidding. Mysterio cut a promo acting like he was scared to death of Big Show and didn't want to have a match with him and then said he just wants to challenge for the cruiserweight title. Then Big Show came and grabbed a terrified Rey and carried him to the ring like a child to beat him up, only for him to be saved by Brock Lesnar like a big brother rescuing his younger sibling from a school bully. Dave isn't sure they could have made Mysterio look any worse if they tried. A lot of people Dave talked to compared this return to Goldberg's WWE debut, in that both were totally fumbled right from the start. True, but Goldberg was a huge money program, whereas WWE had already established Rey as an undercard guy before this, so nowhere near as big a deal here. But still totally stupid booking.
- Remember a few weeks ago on Smackdown when the FBI members used a forklift to block the door and trap Brock Lesnar in the locker room? Well, during the filming of that, when Brock was trying to break the wall down, a chunk came loose from the makeshift wall they had constructed and it hit Bruce Prichard right by the eye and broke his orbital bone and he's having some difficulty still from that, especially related to traveling on airplanes right after it happened. In somewhat related news, Prichard apparently had some less-than-nice things to say about Lex Luger that ended up being edited out of the Confidential episode. How bad did it have to be to get edited out of that hit piece?
- It was thought that Regal's illness over the last few months might have been career-ending. Now he's expected to be back, but no one is sure when. So in the meantime, Triple H is pushing to make Regal an agent (respect to Triple H, he's been looking out for his boy since 2003).
- Nathan Jones reportedly tried to quit a few days back, out of general frustration with everything. John Laurinaitis talked him out of it (for now. He'll be gone by the end of the year).
- Steve Austin has done interviews recently where he confirms he is retired from the ring, though he has said there's a possibility he may do one more match at Wrestlemania 20 (or 38, who's to say).
- Carly Colon debuted at the WWE TV tapings this week in dark matches and did well and is expected to get an offer (yup, he's headed to OVW soon to become Carlito, resident Playstaion aficionado).