Wrestling Observer Rewinder

September 29, 2003

WATCH: Goldberg vs. Triple H - Unforgiven 2003
Elsewhere on the show, the semi-main event and heavily hyped Jim Ross/Jerry Lawler vs. Coachman/Al Snow match, which has been dying on Raw, was even worse on PPV and resulted in Ross "losing his job." It was the 3rd time this year they've booked some sort of angle to try and write Jim Ross off TV so they can replace him with someone younger (in this attempt, Coachman). Crowd was dead for this too. Dudleys won the tag titles in the opening match, their 17th tag title reign. It's a record that probably would have meant something before WWE devalued all the titles. Test vs. Steiner was awful. Randy Orton vs. Shawn Michaels was the best thing on the show, and Orton hung in there with one of the greatest ever. Lita's first match back saw her look rusty and chip 2 teeth and nearly bite through her tongue. Kane vs. Shane McMahon ended with Shane coming off the top of the Unforgiven stage set in his usual big bump. And that's about it for the show.
WATCH: Shane McMahon does his usual shit
Bob Sapp's first fight in Japan since his devastating loss to Cro Cop took place and it was a television hit. Sapp defeated Stefan Gamlin, or "the white Bob Sapp" as he was dubbed, in 52 seconds. The show did one of the best ratings a K-1 show has ever done, and it was Sapp fighting a nobody. In fact, the show peaked with about 28 million people watching Sapp's fight, which would make it the most viewed MMA fight in history (unless you count the Inoki/Ali fight from 1976 as "MMA", in which case that still holds the record by a wide margin and will never be beaten). For those who thought the Sapp train was out of juice after his loss to Cro Cop, think again. After the fight, they did an angle with former heavyweight boxer Francois Botha where they had a big pull-apart brawl to set up a future match. MMA is so fucking pro wrestling.
NOAH's recent Budokan Hall show was arguably the best major show of the year in all of wrestling and set the standard for what big shows should be. The card was headlined by the interpromotional dream match of Kenta Kobashi defending against Yuji Nagata, hyped as "Mr. GHC vs. Mr. IGWP" and boy did it live up to the hype. The atmosphere was electric for it and it was an awesome match. The other biggest matches on the card were notable because they were junior heayweight title matches (singles and tag titles respectively) and both were huge selling points for the show also, and showed the viability of a strong junior division as being on par with the heavyweights. The biggest name in the company, Mitsuharu Misawa, was in an undercard match, while major names like Jun Akiyama and Yoshihiro Takayama were booked beneath the juniors as well. I won't go into all the reviews, but this KENTA kid is awfully damn good (this is the era of KENTA that all the indie guys like Danielson and Punk were taking inspiration from at the time). Anyway, the last 3 matches of this show were just banger-banger-banger.
WATCH: Kenta Kobashi vs. Yuji Nagata - NOAH 2003
Ratings are in and I usually don't cover ratings in these Rewinds because for the love of god, are we not tired of them? But for those wondering, Dave's obsession over TV ratings isn't a new phenomenon that just came into being when AEW started. He's been breaking down this shit for decades. I mention it this week because the ratings for the Lesnar/Angle ironman match tell an interesting story. Throughout the match, they lost hundreds of thousands of viewers....until the final segment, in which nearly a million people tuned back in. Moral of the story: iron man match on TV means people know exactly when it will end, so they channel surf and watch other stuff until it's time to flip back over for the last few minutes. There's a lot of belief that if they had put the match on early and simply let them go an hour without advertising ahead of time that it was an iron man match, the ratings might not have collapsed during the middle. As it is, when viewers know they can stop paying attention for a little while, they do.
IWA has held annual events called Bruiser Brody Hardcore Weekend in the past few years. Now that Invader, the man who murdered Brody, works for the company, the event is simply going to be called "Hardcore Weekend" this year. That's nice.
Executives from Ripley's Believe It Or Not were at a recent IWA show because they're looking at getting into the wrestling industry and were having talks about buying the company. These execs apparently own several TV affiliates in the U.S., hence why they might be interested. Dave says until the money actually changes hands, this means nothing.
Zero-One did a show at Korakuen Hall that featured Jun Kasai jumping off the balcony through a table onto Homicide. The table ended up cutting Kasai's leg so deep you could see the bone. And as I type these words, just two days ago, Homicide teamed with Jon Moxley against Jun Kasai and El Desperado at Korakuen Hall in another bloody spectacle (yes I originally wrote this over a year ago. I've been sitting on these Rewinds for a hot minute.)
The planned main event of NJPW's upcoming Tokyo Dome show has been canceled by Antonio Inoki. The show was supposed to be headlined by Hiroyoshi Tenzan challenging for Yoshihiro Takayama's IWGP title, but Inoki decided to scrap that and he's basically re-doing the whole card based around an angle where Inoki forms a heel group of MMA shooters to face off with NJPW's wrestlers. Inoki said they have 50k tickets to sell and Takayama/Tenzan isn't going to do it, specifically saying that Takayama could, but Tenzan isn't on that level. Dave is fucking incredulous. NJPW just spent the last several months trying to establish Tenzan as a top guy, including having him run through the best G-1 ever to earn this title shot, only for Inoki to publicly bury him like this, take away his Tokyo Dome main event, and throw him under the bus 2 weeks before the show so he can do more MMA shit. This is peak Inokism right here. Has there ever been a pro wrestling promoter that hated pro wrestling more? Tenzan's title shot will now take place next month at a Yokohama Arena show, which is a significant step down from headlining the Tokyo Dome. Anyway, the new main event of the Dome with the Inoki and NJPW teams hasn't been announced yet.
Hulk Hogan vs. Masahiro Chono is finally official for this Tokyo Dome show as well. Chono is hoping to get Hogan back for the Jan. 4th show also, but Hogan's only committed to this one show so far (doesn't happen. This match with Chono would end up being Hogan's final match ever in Japan).
You may recall a story a couple weeks back about retired NJPW wrestler Seiji Sakaguchi coming out of retirement for a match soon. Well the match took place and it was notable because Sakaguchi's son Kenji Sakaguchi is one of the biggest TV stars in the country and was at ringside. They did an angle where Shinya Makabe and Takayama kept challenging him to get in the ring and he almost did until his dad held him back. Footage of that was on basically every TV newscast in the country and, with Kenji on the covers, all the weekly wrestling magazine sales are through the roof.
The Iwate government assembly voted unanimously that Great Sasuke has to show his ID to security every time he enters the assembly chambers to conduct business, since he refuses to unmask. This is my favorite ongoing story of 2003. Sasuke is continuing to wrestle throughout Japan, working mask matches that are doing big business. Everyone keeps expecting him to lose his mask in a match (so he could stop wearing it in office) but instead he keeps winning and keeping his mask, while cashing checks and governing Japan. Love it.
Amazing Red will likely be out of action for the next year because he's finally getting knee surgery. He should have gotten it before, but he went to Japan and tried to work on a torn ACL or something and made it way worse (yeah this one ended up nearly ending his career).
ROH standout Jody Fleisch announced his retirement. He's one of the best high-flyers on the indies and had a ton of potential but injuries apparently caught up, as well as other personal reasons that led to the decision (he un-retired a year later and continues to wrestle off and on).
MLW held its War Games show that Jerry Lawler was forced to pull out of. He ended up being replaced by Sabu. Barry Windham was in the match too and was enormous. This whole thing led to Terry Funk getting the win for his team and apparently MLW is pretty much doing a carbon copy of the old ECW storyline where Funk is trying to win the title. In a weird thing, Samoa Joe was booked on the show against Mike Awesome. They have a lot of Samoans in MLW already so they had Samoa Joe work under his real name of Joe Seanoa and he lost clean to Awesome. So MLW now has footage of the ROH's dominant world champion losing clean on their TV show, which is definitely a choice.
WATCH: Highlights of Joe Seanoa vs. Mike Awesome - MLW 2003
ROH held another show in Philly and apparently someone tried to sabotage it. The day of the show, ROH booker Gabe Sapolsky received a call that the Murphy Rec Center has a capacity of 400 and that it would be enforced by the fire marshal because someone had complained. ROH has regularly been packing over 500 in there and already had more than 400 tickets sold to this show. It became such an issue that ROH officials met with the state athletic commission rep and building officials while fans were still lining up outside the venue. Officials ultimately allowed the show to go forward as planned for this night. But in the future, ROH now has to find bigger buildings because they've outgrown this one. Why sabotage you say? Not sure other than it's implied that Blue Meanie and his girlfriend, former porn star Jasmin St. Clair, who co-own rival local promotion 3PW, may have been the ones who filed the complaint, but they deny it. But that was the rumor going around at the show.
Randy Savage didn't have a good night on Sept. 17th. His rap concert debut performance was scheduled for a club near St. Petersburg. Well, that's prime Bubba The Love Sponge territory, brother! Hogan's best friend went on his radio show and made it his mission to ruin Savage's concert, encouraging listeners to attend and harass Savage. Despite the venue trying to keep hecklers out and only legit fans in, well.....there's more hecklers than there are fans of Randy "The Rapper" Savage. They got in. Savage was trying to lip-sync his lyrics while the crowd booed him unmercifully and the CD kept skipping. Eventually he slammed the mic down and stormed out after 3 songs.
Other fun notes from this story: Bubba has been on his radio show saying tons of hateful stuff about Savage, accusing him of drug use and saying he couldn't get Elizabeth pregnant and that's why she left him and threatening to run him out of Florida. Meanwhile, on the Savage side of things, remember Crush (aka Brian Adams from Kronik)? He's retired from wrestling now, living off a Lloyds of London insurance payout (god bless the wrestlers that got those) and he works as Savage's bodyguard now.
Jeff and Jerry Jarrett met with Hulk Hogan for several hours last week to try and put together a deal for Hogan to join TNA. Hogan isn't cheap and Dave has a hard time believing we're going to see Hulk Hogan wrestling at the Nashville Fairgrounds anytime soon. He thinks this meeting may have just been Hogan trying to leverage a return to WWE in time for Wrestlemania 20. Furthermore, if Hogan comes in, that means Russo has to go. Although sources tell Dave that he may be gone soon regardless.
Dutch Mantel is now a booker in TNA, making twice what IWA was paying him. Plus, IWA business is down from its peak of the last year and Dutch saw the writing on the wall. When you look at things over the last 2 years, Dutch is without question the most successful booker, given the circumstances, in all of wrestling. With a small budget and limited talent pool, he turned IWA into the hottest thing in Puerto Rico and made it one of the few wrestling companies in the world that is profitable (and they were in deep debt when he took over). Many within IWA credit Dutch the most with the meteoric rise of the company. He will still work as a part-time consultant for IWA but his full-time duties now are TNA. This also doesn't bode well for Russo's future.
Almost all the wrestlers in TNA have now signed 2-year contracts (one year guaranteed with an option for TNA to pick up a 2nd year). Shane Douglas and Juventud Guerrera haven't yet but both are expected to. Konan hasn't signed either but he still has several months on his current deal, so they got time to work out something. Apparently Rey Mysterio has been pushing for WWE to sign Konan though. Anyway, the point of all this is that TNA finally has some stability and has a roster locked in for at least 2 years so they can start actually building a company instead of running from week-to-week with whoever isn't booked elsewhere.
Notes from this week's TNA show: Raven lost the hair vs. hair match to Shane Douglas (due to interference by a debuting Vampiro) and he got shaved bald. Actually, he got damn near scalped. The razor they used dug into his scalp and cut his head to shreds because Jim Mitchell was holding the clippers wrong or something. Backstage after the show, Raven was furious and had to be restrained after he took a swing at Mitchell and vowed he'd never work with Mitchell again. As for the match itself, it was awful and Douglas got so gassed that he ended up vomiting in the ring, which was pleasant. Elsewhere on the show, former WWE star Jamal of 3 Minute Warning (later Umaga) debuted as Ekmo Fatu. Roddy Piper returned to the company and cut a rambling promo that made no goddamn sense and went everywhere and served no purpose and led to some dumb angle with Russo. (Not a lot of good videos of this on YouTube that I can find of Raven's scalping but TNA shared a clip of it on Musk's hellscape of an app awhile back).
WATCH: Jim Mitchell scalps Raven - TNA 2003
Notes from 9/18 Smackdown: John Cena's line in his rap about John Ritter's death was censored. And of course, the much hyped iron man match main event aired. Dave gives it 4.25 stars and says it was probably better live than on television. Commercials made it disjointed, plus neither guy was 100% and it showed at times. As far as WWE matches go, Dave ranks it #3 so far this year (behind Angle/Benoit at Rumble and Angle/Lesnar at WM19, although he puts Angle/Undertaker from Smackdown on the list too. Note that Kurt Angle is the common denominator in every one of those). And the only other note is that Alexis Laree debuted as an extra at the poker table during an APA segment with Bradshaw.
Notes from 9/22 Raw: the announcing (Coach and Al Snow) was awful and this whole announcers storyline is just the drizzling shits. Lita & Trish vs. Molly Holly & Gail Kim was Lita's first real match back and she wasn't very good. Dave notes that she was never really that great anyway, aside from being able to do some cool high spots, but the other women have improved so much while Lita was gone that she looked way out of place by comparison. Kane (in his wrestling gear) went to the hospital to beat up Shane. There were some wounded war vets from Walter Reed Military Hospital in the front row and Dave thought that was a nice gesture. Until they had La Resistance come out and do their anti-American schtick on them and turned it into a way to exploit injured soldiers. The showed a Rock promo from the premiere of his movie and this was interesting. It came off almost like a quasi-retirement speech, with Rock saying he hoped to come back but also saying that if he never got another chance, he wanted to thank the fans and Vince and all that. It's clear that Rock realizes his in-ring career is very likely coming to an end. He's also dropped a ton of muscle weight. Jericho vs. Goldberg was the main event and Jericho did everything Triple H should have done at the PPV to make this match good and get Goldberg over. Jericho has pretty much become the co-hightlight and co-star of Raw alongside Steve Austin in recent weeks.
Notes from next week's Smackdown tapings: the only real notable thing was the setup for a Vince McMahon vs. Stephanie McMahon "I Quit" match at the upcoming PPV. That is only 6 days before Stephanie's wedding so Dave expects some sort of angle to write her off TV for a few weeks.
Kurt Angle was off this past weekend to be with his family after the death of his older sister LeAnne, who passed away at 43 from heart problems. Angle has been part of campaigns for angina awareness because the issue runs in his family and had just done an interview about that hours before finding out his sister had passed (reminder, for a long time, people thought her death was heart related. I think it was years later when Angle finally revealed it was a drug overdose).
Speaking of Angle, he said in that same interview that he would love to wrestle Bret Hart because everyone says Bret was the best wrestler of the 20th century and that people claim Angle is the best of the 21st century. This wasn't an accident, as apparently WWE is trying to coax Bret back into the WWE fold and have apparently put rumors out that they're in negotiations. Dave (who is very clearly in contact with Bret) says that the stroke Hart suffered was extremely serious and they should probably not waste their time on any dream match scenarios involving him. His career is over. He also notes that Hart didn't love the idea that there was a story floating around that he's in negotiations to do anything with WWE. He's not and clearly doesn't want people thinking he is.
Triple H had a bachelor party after the Smackdown tapings in Raleigh, NC on 9/16. A lot of the Raw wrestlers could have gone home the day before but chose to stay on the road an extra day to attend. Although Dave notes, many only did so because they felt it was the politically smart thing to do. Well, how did this party go? The guest of honor, Triple H, showed up waaaaay late (like 1:40am) alongside Ric Flair and Vince. And Vince paid a bar tab in advance ($40,000!!) so everyone got shitfaced on Vince's dime. Apparently, fuckin' Jonny Fairplay from Survivor was t here somehow and Sean O'Haire tried to get him kicked out over some past beef, but Matt Hardy stepped in and overruled and Fairplay was allowed to stay. In another incident, Bradshaw started fucking with Sylvan Grenier and "was slapping him around" until Shane McMahon stepped in and broke it up (Grenier has spoken about this before here and you won't be surprised to learn JBL was and has always been a bullying dipshit).
Bob Bowman, the CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, joined WWE's board of directors this week. I only mention this because about 10 years after this, MLB Advanced Media would be the infrastructure on which the WWE Network was built when it launched in 2014. So....pretty important addition right here in the long-term history of WWE.
Despite being the highest rated show on UPN, Smackdown is the fourth lowest when it comes to advertising costs on network television. For comparison, the WB network has its Thursday night lineup of comedy shows and it pulls in significantly more ad money despite only getting half as many viewers as Smackdown. Same story as always: even though wrestling gets great ratings and has millions of fans, sponsors see wrestling fans as poor rednecks without disposable income, so they don't waste big money advertising to them.
John Cena's father is working as an announcer for Massachusetts based indie promotion Chaotic Wrestling, under the name Johnny Fabulous.