Wrestling Observer Rewinder

July 07, 2003

Hulk Hogan has once again left WWE, revealing the news in an interview on (where else) Bubba The Love Sponge's radio show. Hogan reportedly quit after the Smackdown tapings on 6/24 at MSG due to being unhappy with WWE creative and the Mr. America gimmick. In particular, much like many of the veterans, Hogan was upset about how scripted everything has become. He was also reportedly unhappy that more wasn't being done with the Mr. America gimmick, but up until 2 weeks ago, he was the focal point of pretty much everything, so Dave doesn't know what he's bitching about. In his last match, Hogan did the job for Big Show in a 6-man tag that was supposed to setup something with Show and Zach Gowan. There was also plans for Hogan vs. Vince to take place at the Vengeance PPV in a mask vs. hair match. Hogan had been working without a contract, basically on a handshake agreement with Vince. But the way business has been, Hogan wasn't making anywhere close to the kind of money he's been used to making for the last, I dunno, twenty years, especially compared to the WCW days. Hogan (and others) have also complained about the still-sometimes raunchy and adult nature of the programming. But Dave is surprised Hogan would leave prior to a planned PPV match with Vince that would have been a surefire good pay day. Hogan was also said been upset over his Wrestlemania payoff. Last year, he was unhappy with his WM payday and that was a much bigger show with waaaaaaay more buys and Hogan was in one of the top matches. This year, there were several main event level matches to split the purse and the WM buyrate was significantly less. So Dave thinks it may not be a coincidence that Hogan is quitting right after receiving his paycheck for this year's Mania.
On the Bubba show, Hogan talked about wanting to wrestle in Japan. He had talks with Muta's W-1 deal before he returned to WWE back in January, but W-1 hasn't done much of note lately. He has history in NJPW but the current MMA direction of the company doesn't fit him at all and Dave doubts Hogan would want to do anything with NJPW if he's not in the main event, and Japan's wrestling economy is worse than the U.S. right now so the money isn't there either. Hogan's people have reportedly already reached out to Ted Turner and to Universal Studios, who at one point a few years ago were looking into starting a promotion with Hogan as the star. Dave says these days, something like that almost certainly is not happening. Many in WWE expect him to sit out for awhile and then try to worm his way back in next year whenever all the big money PPVs start rolling around again. Take the lean summer months off, come back when business is booming, and claim credit.
This is the 3rd time in the span of a year that Hogan and Vince have had a falling out. Back in August 2002, he quit because he didn't like doing putting over Brock Lesnar. Then they were going to bring him back at Survivor Series 2002 to face Lesnar again, but just before the show, Hogan balked at doing the job and instead insisted on winning the title from Brock. Vince nixed that and that led to a bunch of shit with Big Show switching brands and Paul Heyman turning on Brock and all sorts of wacky stuff in order to save that show at the last minute. And now this is their third time. Even though Hogan quit immediately after Smackdown, it was kept quiet all week with Vince trying to talk him out of it, but Hogan not budging. So on Smackdown this week, they showed footage from after Smackdown went off the air of Hogan lifting his mask and showing the crowd his face and revealing that he was indeed Mr. America. SHOCKING!! Vince used that clip to write him off TV in kayfabe, with Vince now having the "proof" he needed of Mr. America's identity, and he fired Hogan.
WATCH: Vince McMahon fires Hulk Hogan after revealing he's Mr. America - Smackdown 2003
While we're re-living the 1980s, Roddy Piper has also been cut loose from WWE. The company put out a weird statement, acknowledging Piper's appearance on the HBO Real Sports show, and accusing him of "revealing disturbing facts about his own personal drug use." The further claimed that the decision to let him go was done to save him from himself, stating: "In view of WWE’s inability to reach agreement on a contract and to assist Piper from engaging in any self-destructive behavior, the WWE is ending any further discussion with Piper regarding a contract." Much like Hogan, Piper was working on a handshake deal and they had been trying to work out the nuts and bolts on an actual signed deal but never got there. Dave isn't surprised. The moment he saw the interview on that show, he knew Piper was done. Vince made it VERY clear in his own interview that HBO is the enemy and you don't side with the enemy against Vince. You're either with Vince or against him and Piper chose the wrong side when he decided to--hold on, let me check my notes here--be honest. Dave isn't sure if it was the ballsiest or most self-destructive interview in wrestling history, because Piper had to know he was going to get fired when he gave that interview, but says Piper has always been his own worst enemy. But no matter what WWE says, don't get it twisted: Piper wasn't fired for his drug usage. He's been open about that in the past for years. He was fired because he didn't tow the company line. Period.
WWE was clearly vindictive and petty in their response to Piper. The statement they released on the website about Piper's release was distasteful at best and was eventually deleted from the website after much criticism. At the first house show after his release, Piper was supposed to host Piper's Pit segments with Vince. Instead, they had Bruce Prichard revive his Brother Love gimmick and said Piper wasn't there because he has "a sickness." Dave notes that "A Sickness" is the name of the chapter in Piper's book where he talks about all his dead friends in the business, and "a sickness" is also a phrase used in the HBO story.
It's been a week since the HBO story aired and WWE has seemingly chosen to ignore it, which Dave is surprised by. He expected the usual shit where Vince goes on TV and tries to rally fans against the company's enemies like he's done time and again. Piper was never mentioned and his protege Sean O'Haire wasn't booked. The stories they were working on for WWE Confidential about other wrestling deaths seem to have been scrapped, probably because Vince doesn't want to bring more attention to the crisis. And that seems to be it. HBO's moving on, Vince is moving on, and people will continue to die.
Dave admits things have changed and improved in some ways compared to the drug culture of the 80s. The schedule these days is way easier than in the 80s, which lowers the stress and drag of travel and has helped people's personal lives and divorce rates also. The rings are also safer to bump in than the 80s rings were and the company is pushing people to slow things down and work safer. But there's still contradictions. Guys are told not to do steroids and then watch as wrestlers with the biggest muscles get all the opportunities. They tell guys to work safer and then book them in ladder matches a week later. They claim there's no drug issue, but in recent years, William Regal, Eddie Guerrero, and Jeff Hardy (among others) were all sent to rehab or fired. Honestly, the rest of this article goes for a long time, with Dave going over all the wrestling death info we already know and examines parts of the episode that HBO were fair and unfair about.
So what's going on with NJPW and K-1? Well, a year ago, K-1 and its promoter Kazuyoshi Ishii were on top of the world. Now, a year later, Ishii is on trial for numerous financial mis-dealings and K-1's latest show was a freak show circus with guys like Butter Bean, Toa The Samoan Beast, some giant Brazilian dude, etc. Just a total celebrity boxing atmosphere rather than real sport. As for NJPW, we all know what Inoki has done there, sacrificing countless great wrestlers to his MMA obsession. And now, all of this has run its course and we're left with a desperate NJPW and an even more desperate K-1. So.....INTERPROMOTIONAL ANGLE TIME! Years ago, this would have been huge business. Now, Dave doesn't even think it's a good idea. Latest show saw Manabu Nakanishi get wrecked by the Samoan Beast in barely a minute and is now so injured from the fight that he can't work the next NJPW tour. Katsuyori Shibata challenged the Samoan after, only get get booed by the K-1 crowd that doesn't want to see more untrained wrestlers get their brains bashed in by MMA fighters. Multiple NJPW stars were at ringside and challenges were made and blah blah.
The Triple H vs. Kane match on Raw last week in which Kane lost his mask ended up being the highest rated segment of Raw in over a year, while the rest of the show bombed in the ratings. Which shows that fans were VERY invested in the mask stipulation and further proves Dave's point last week that they probably should have promoted this as a PPV match and made some money from it. In fact, Dave does some quick math, calculates the overall ratings increase that segment brought to the average of the overall show, factors in ad revenue, and determines WWE made approx. $16K off of hot-shotting this angle on free TV with a one-week build, which is practically nothing compared to what they would have made on PPV. Live and learn I guess.
An anti-drug campaign in Mexico featuring the wife of Mexico's president has been running throughout the country and it features Lucha star Octagón. Dave says this would be like using Scott Hall in an anti-drug PSA in America. Well okay then.
Invader 1 has joined IWA after defecting from WWC in Puerto Rico for what will likely be the final run of his career. (Lol not even close. This dude won both the IWA world title and IWA tag titles in 2022 at 76 years old). Invader is most famously known for being the guy who killed Bruiser Brody and was acquitted of the murder in a sham trial. He walked out on WWC after nearly 30 years over a dispute with Carlos Colon over the push of his son Carly. Dave recaps the Brody murder, talks about how, a few years later, Invader and Atsushi Onita did an angle in which Gonzalez allegedly stabbed Onita, as a play on the Brody murder which Dave calls one of the most disgusting angles ever. The Japanese media coverage of the angle was so negative that Onita dropped it before it went anywhere and Invader never went to Japan for the match. IWA promoter Victor Quinones was close friends with Brody and has always been iffy on bringing Invader into the company, but apparently money maters more than friendship, because he's there now.
Remember last week the local Japanese assembly that was voting to ban masks for politicians in response to Great Sasuke? Well, their motion got defeated by 1 vote! The conservative members argued that wearing a mask during assembly was inappropriate and detracts from the dignity of the office, while liberal members argued that, hey, the people knew he wore a mask when they elected him. Respect the voters. In fact, Sasuke got more votes than anyone in the election. After losing on this mask ban measure, the conservative party basically said that Sasuke being elected was regrettable and said he should take his mask off out of respect for the public when conducting government business. But they can't make him so.....
The Jacksonville Coliseum was demolished last week. The arena was one of the most historic venues in wrestling. Throughout the 60s and 70s, Championship Wrestling from Florida packed thousands of fans in there every week, and every big name ever, from Lou Thesz to Kurt Angle, has come through to work shows there. Even during the WCW days, it was one of the best drawing venues that company had and hosted several PPVs.
Random news & notes: the felony charges against Steve Corino, which were covered last week, have been dropped. Paul Orndorff did a radio interview and revealed he has suffered from bi-polar disorder his entire life that have caused severe mood swings. Ole Anderson fell off the roof of his house and had to get a hip replacement because the fall broke his hip.
Notes from latest ROH show: CM Punk bled buckets in his continuing feud with Raven. AJ Styles defended the NWA title against Chris Sabin. Danny Maff challenged Samoa Joe for the ROH title and lost, but the real story is that Maff's father passed away the day prior and he came to the show anyway. He got a standing ovation during the introductions and had to fight back tears (I wasn't familiar with Maff so I went down a rabbit hole a little bit. Looks like Maff was trained by Homicide. Back in 2005, Homicide, without going into any detail, accused Maff of betraying his trust and called him a pedophile and basically had him blackballed from wrestling for years. But from what I can tell, Maff quietly started working again and he and Homicide seem to have squashed their beef and Homicide later walked back his "pedophile" comments, so who knows).
Wrestling journeyman Dr. Luther, who was a star in FMW for awhile a few years back, has announced his retirement. "Of course, we all know about wrestling retirements," Dave says. Luther has nagging knee injuries and said he doesn't want to be one of those guys hanging on and still trying to wrestle after his 40s (he'd probably make a good butler for somebody).
TNA is undergoing a total transformation. Dave doesn't have details on why yet, but they're planning to go back to an old school, traditional style of wrestling. Babyfaces, heels, and in-ring action. All this Russo shit is done. At the 6/25 taping, everyone was told absolutely no more swearing at all (compared to the week prior, when everyone cursed so much that it felt meaningless). But of course, another change was no more pre-tapes. So they did everything backstage live, which led to New Jack dropping an uncensored F-bomb on the same night everyone was told to stop cursing. Classic. As you can expect, Russo wasn't thrilled with this and he and Jarrett had quite the disagreement about it, but that's where things stand for now (none of this lasts, we'll be back to Russo nonsense soon enough, as the TNA booking drama continues).
Jeff Jarrett has reached a deal to lease the NWA name and championships for another 10 years, with the fee increasing each year. At the end of the 10 years, Jarrett will then have the option to buy the name outright.
Speaking of the 6/25 TNA show, Dave says it was one of the best shows they've done, and the tag team cage match was the best match in the history of the company. Elsewhere, the AC in the building was out so it was hot and fans weren't loving it. Erik Watts still sucks after all these years. Trinity turned heel for seemingly no reason. Main event was a disaster. Gilberti came into the match with back spasms, Raven fucked up his ankle a minute into the match, and Shane Douglas' elbow got injured. Douglas in particular looked awful. And yes, there's already talk of trying to bring in Roddy Piper.
This cage match leads Dave to tell a funny story. The most famous NWA tag title cage match ever was Steamboat & Youngblood vs. Slaughter & Kernodle back in 1983 in Greensboro. Former NWA wrestler Private Jim Nelson apparently had the match on tape and it was a classic, but he lent the tape to a friend who accidentally recoded over the finish. Arn Anderson saw the tape with the missing finish and apparently got so upset he wanted to kill the guy who taped over it. As best as Dave knows, that's the only tape of the match in existence, people have been trying to get a copy of the full thing for 20 years (pretty sure this eventually got released by WWE on the network). Anyway, it was a great cage match that finished off the angle and told a great story.
Anyway, back to TNA: they had an impromptu cage match between D-Lo Brown and AJ Styles for the title that went 5 minutes and ended with a DQ due to Russo interference. Dave is baffled how something like this makes it onto the air immediately following a different, perfectly booked cage match. Now this dumb shit, ending in a DQ no less, completely kills the gimmick of the cage match that they just established. And Dave says people in TNA know this because he got one call after another from people in TNA who were bitching to him about it. But titles in TNA can change hands via DQ, so then they had to claim it was a non-title match because someone forgot that.
Joey Styles turned down the gig to do a "TNA Talk" segment so forget Dave ever mentioned that last week. You're imagining things.
All of the WWE senior management team got promotions this week. Well, sorta. They all still do the same jobs, just got fancier titles. For example, Jim Ross went from Vice President of Talent Relations to Executive Vice President of Talent Relations. Stephanie McMahon is now Executive Vice President of Creative. Kevin Dunn EVP of Television Production, etc. Basically, everyone got "executive" added to their title. An email went out to the whole company about it and there were a lot of people jokingly asking why Stephanie got promoted when creative is so bad right now.
The plan for Summerslam is still Triple H vs. Goldberg for the WWE title. The discussions of Triple H vs. Foley apparently weren't all that serious. The company is still frustrated with Goldberg, as they're continuing to push him to work house shows. But his contract calls for very limited dates and Goldberg ain't budging. WWE's idea seems to be that getting Goldberg working longer matches on house shows would help him improve and start working more "WWE-style matches" and would get him over more. WWE continues to not understand Goldberg AT ALL. But that's okay because if you've watched TV the last couple weeks, you'll notice he's been a lot more like the Goldberg of old. That's because Goldberg DOES know what makes Goldberg work. Turns out ol' Goldy has some creative control over his character in his contract. He's only flexed his creative control once, on the Raw prior to Bad Blood when he got Vince to change a few things. But after Linda McMahon's comments on the stockholders call where she called him disappointing, Goldberg went to Vince and basically said, "Let me do the character that I know fucking works." So they're trying it his way for now. The last 2 weeks of Raw with Goldberg have largely been him booking himself and it's clearly working. But will they stick with it? (No. The answer is no.)
Notes from 6/26 Smackdown: the Vince/Stephanie dynamic is creepy and getting creepier by the week. Brock Lesnar re-injured his rib, which has never really healed and has been a problem for 8 months and is becoming a chronic issue. And that's about it. The rest is Dave just shitting over a lot of bad booking.
Notes from 6/30 Raw: bad show, like the dying days of Nitro. Angles up and down the show that made no sense. No Foley. No Austin (prior commitment, but "food poisoning" was someone's dumb idea of a joke to explain his absence). No Michaels or Nash. Lance Storm "boring" angle continues. Goldberg came out to murder Rodney Mack and was in and out of the show in 2 minutes, never to be seen again. Gail Kim debuted, winning a battle royal to win the women's title in her first match. Dave doesn't get it. They spent weeks building up Jazz/Ivory, only to have a total unknown come in and win it. Meanwhile, Ivory and Jazz both seemed to get injured in this battle royal. Stacy teamed with Scott Steiner and got beat by Jericho and Test. Yup. They also kept talking about how horrible Test was for beating up Mae Young last week, forgetting that Austin gave her a stunner the day before, but no one cares about that. Rico did the Adrian Street gimmick and it died with the crowd. Randy Orton's diamond cutter is now called the RKO. "Sounds more like a record label," Dave says. There was a bunch of backstage stuff to retroactively explain why RVD wanted Kane to lose his mask or some nonsense. Kane came out at the end of the show, bald, no more black burn-paint on his face. "There goes about 6 years worth of storylines." Dave thinks he looks like Bull from Night Court, which is a fucking FANTASTIC reference and I don't think I'll ever look at Kane the same. And after turning heel last week, he seemingly turned babyface again by choke slamming Bischoff to end the show, as they're seemingly making this up as they go along.
Notes from 7/1 Smackdown tapings: apparently there's some sort of backstage segment with Angle and Lesnar eating milk and cookies and chumming it up and being goofy. Dave loved Three Stooges as a kid, but he doesn't think Moe vs. Curly would draw at Madison Square Garden and thinks WWE probably oughta re-evaluate how they're booking these two. The US title tournament continues, not so you'd know it. Although matches are happening for 3 weeks now, not a single tournament bracket to be seen. So I guess they're just making that up as they go too. John Cena cut such a good promo that the crowd turned on Billy Gunn. Haas & Benjamin regained the tag titles and Eddie Guerrero turned heel and Zach Gowan teamed with Stephanie McMahon against Big Show and, as expected, Gowan blew people's minds when they saw what he could do with one leg.
WWE has re-signed John Heidenreich to a developmental deal. He was signed once before, then cut for budget reasons, went to Zero-1 in Japan to work, then came back and rejoined OVW on his own, driving 10 hours in each direction for the shows, which earned him a lot of points with management. From what Dave has seen of him in OVW and Japan, he isn't anything special as a worker, but he's shown more drive and determination than most do and he's glad the guy is getting a second chance.
For years, Mark Madden had been slated to ghostwrite Ric Flair's autobiography. The project was held up a bunch of times because WWE had to buy the rights from the original publisher and all that. Anyway, this week, Madden got a call from a writer named Keith Elliot Greenberg who wanted to interview Madden for this Flair book WWE hired him to write. This was the first time Madden found out that he's apparently no longer writing the book (he ends up being listed on the cover as "edited by" and rest assured, this turns into a mess next year).
Nova suffered a torn PCL after being dropped by Mark Jindrak and Lance Cade during an OVW match and will be out for 4 months. It works out though because he was just suspended for 1 of those months. During the recent Six Flags show (OVW holds events at Six Flags theme parks), Nova cut a promo calling people "jerkoffs" and "fat son of a bitch" and, well, it's a family theme park. Can't do that, so he's suspended and injured.
Carly Colon is pushing to use the name Carlos Colon (like his father) because in this part of America, people seem to think Carly is a girl's name. How about we just settle on Carlito?
Torrie Wilson's getting married soon to Billy Kidman and her bachelorette party happened this week at the Palms Hotel in Vegas. Basically all the fellow divas spent the weekend partying in Vegas until they had to return to work.
Chris Nowinski was at all the house shows but only at ringside. He was replaced in matches due to a concussion and is scheduled to have an MRI done this week (yeah, this dude's already wrestled his last match).
Gene Okerlund managed to slip in a small tribute to Zane Bresloff into the end of this week's episode of WWE Confidential. Okerlund and Bresloff were close friends.
Buff Bagwell called up WWE this week looking to get back in. John Lauranitis told him they were interested but didn't have a spot for him right now (which is wrestling code for "We're not interested.") Dave says Bagwell still hasn't realized after all these years that you need more than a good body and he was apparently flabbergasted that WWE still doesn't want him.
Crash Holly was officially released by WWE. He had been on the bubble forever and hasn't been used in ages other than a thing about a month ago where they put him with Matt Hardy for a minute and then forgot about it (we'll be hearing a lot more about Crash before the end of the year, sadly).
Jim Ross did an interview recently and talked about his relationship with Steve Austin and bringing him back to the company. "My personal relationship with Stone Cold, and I’d be the fist to admit it, has probably been a conflict of interest. I should not have those personal feelings about any talent in my role as head of talent, but it just happened that we’re buddies and we’ve developed a friendship," Ross said. He talked about how he and Austin didn't talk to each other for several months after Austin walked out. Ross finally wrote Austin a letter saying, "I'm here if you need me" and they reconnected and talked for several hours and that broke the ice and mended their friendship. JR put Austin and Vince back together in a room to talk out their issues and that's how things got fixed for him to return.
Booker T's girlfriend Sharmell blew out her knee awhile back training in OVW and was later released. She has no interest in getting back into wrestling and is currently helping to run a record store that I guess Booker T owns in Houston.
Lots of letters about the HBO Real Sports situation with Vince, with most people saying it made them embarrassed to be wrestling fans. Dave responds to one of them and talks about how the HBO people also interviewed him for the piece and says the HBO interviewer was the single most prepared journalist Dave has ever spoken to and knew the whole story about wrestler deaths from front to back in detail. Dave says he knew what was going to happen when they interviewed Vince and even warned people that Vince wasn't going to like this. He thinks WWE should have put someone other than Vince out there, someone who can handle the pressure without self-destructing in front of the camera. Vince's temper tantrum took an already horrible story and made WWE look 10x worse than they would have otherwise.