Wrestling Observer Rewinder

December 15, 2003

The Rock made a surprise return to WWE on Raw this past week, showing up to save Mick Foley from an attack by La Resistance. Rock came out, blew the roof off the arena, cut a promo on La Resistance, then beat them up. He was in the city for pre-production on "Be Cool" and told the company he wanted to come in and do something fun. (Rock making a surprise return because he's in the area just to belittle and beat up younger full-timers and then leave again? Hope he's not gonna do that off and on for the next 20 years or anything). However, it wasn't a complete spur of the moment decision though, because Rock had a new catchphrase and was wearing a new shirt to get it over.
WATCH: The Rock returns to save Mick Foley - 2003
The good news is Rock has apparently worked out a schedule with his movie commitments so that he has January and some of March open. He'll be filming "Be Cool" in February but otherwise, he's clear for Wrestlemania-season. The plan is to set up an angle in January for a match at Wrestlemania, and then he leaves again to go promote "Walking Tall" afterward (and then doesn't return for another 7 years). You may recall, the original plan a year ago when Goldberg joined WWE was for him to beat Rock and then they'd have a rematch at WM20 where Goldberg would return the favor. But then Rock's movie career exploded, Goldberg flopped, and that's definitely not the plan anymore. No word just yet on what exactly the plans are for Rock at WM20.
As expected, TNA has once again postponed plans for their big PPV with Hulk Hogan. On the show this week, they noted that Hogan had canceled all his bookings because of knee surgery and in a meeting before the show, Jarrett confirmed to talent that the PPV is once again off. They never really had an exact date or location locked down yet, just a vague idea to hold it in February, so not a huge deal. But still not a good look either. Hogan had been constantly coming up with excuses to avoid doing anything publicly with TNA and most have doubted since the beginning that he was ever going to appear. Jerry Jarrett actually flew to Tampa last week to meet with Hogan in person. Face-to-face, Hogan finally couldn't beat around the bush any longer and admitted that he wouldn't be doing the February show but assured Jarrett that he's still onboard to work with them in the future. So now they're hoping for May or June. But they also noted that the kind of surgery Hogan has can usually heal up in 4-6 weeks and it's already been a month since he got the surgery. So claiming his knee still won't be ready in another 2 months doesn't really add up. NJPW, meanwhile, is still advertising Hogan for the Jan. 4th show, but Hogan still claims he's not working it. That is expected to be a 6-figure payday for one match, so if Hogan pulls out of the NJPW show also, then maybe he really is too hurt to work (indeed, Hogan pulls out of the NJPW show).
Hogan's primary concern right now is said to be helping his 15-year-old daughter Brooke launch a music career. He recently had meetings with Disney execs, with the idea of getting her some kind of Hillary Duff deal or something. Hogan was apparently advised that he should steer clear of pro wrestling right now if he's trying to get his daughter a deal with Disney since wrestling has a pretty taudry image.
TNA seems close to a deal with WGN television network to basically buy their way onto TV at an estimated $50k-per-week. Dave does some back-of-napkin math and this seems risky. TNA is already in substantial debt and slowly getting in deeper. There's no question that they need a TV deal to ever be profitable. The current PPV model works for now, but it's not sustainable. But buying their way onto a network that has limited national coverage and does practically no national promotion is a crapshoot. Even worse, the timeslot they've been offered is 9am. As in the morning. On Saturdays. So that means west coast viewership will be non-existent. UFC has turned down similar offers because of the idea that once people see you as paid programming, it's hard to get the networks to see you as anything else. Dave lists numerous past promotions (Bill Watts' UFW, Crockett in the 80s, ECW, AWF, WOW, etc.) that have tried to pay their way onto TV before and they all ended in disaster. Dave's pretty sure this isn't a great idea.
After a big money-losing year, NJPW may be cutting as many as half of its native wrestlers. At a press conference this week, Tatsumi Fujinami noted that 40 NJPW contracts come due in January and he said only around 20 would be signed to new deals. There's also talk that this could be an angle, but AJPW cut a lot of people last year in the wake of huge losses and it wouldn't be a surprise if NJPW did indeed have to do some major cost-cutting because business is in the toilet lately.
Jerry Tuite, best known from his tenure in WCW as The Wall, was found dead in his hotel room in Japan after working a tour for AJPW. He was only 36 and Dave makes it clear that he's getting real goddamn tired of this pattern. Tuite had major drug problems in the past, including a bad heroin addiction that nearly killed him in 2001. Word is he had cleaned himself up after going to rehab but had started to slip into bad habits again during his time in Japan. Despite being out of the American eye, he was doing better in AJPW and even with their money issues, he was making more money there than he had in his entire career as part of the top heel faction. He was scheduled to fly home on the day he died but when D-Lo Brown and Bull Buchanan went to his hotel room to get him, he didn't answer. Hotel management entered the room and they found him dead from an apparent heart attack. Japanese newspapers reported that he was cremated almost immediately, which sounds strange, but if true would mean no toxicology tests were done so the true cause may never be known. Dave runs through his career, mostly the WCW run. After WWE bought the company, his contract was bought by WWE but they quickly released him when they learned how bad his drug problems were. They also found some criminal convictions in his background checks that they hadn't been aware of previously and that WCW evidently never knew or cared about. After his rehab stint, WWE brought him back for some tryout matches but they didn't go well. He went to TNA for a minute under the name Malice and then to AJPW.
New Year's Eve in Japan this year is looking to be one of the biggest and most competitive nights in the history of Japanese television, with 4 major events competing. Three MMA cards and the other event is Kōhaku, which is an annual music/variety show featuring tons of big celebrities and is usually the highest rated broadcast of the year. But not this time! With K-1 doing the Bobb Sapp vs. Akebono match, everyone else is just fighting for second. In particular though, let's look at Antonio Inoki's show. NTV network is backing Inoki and looking to help him bankroll a shoot promotion to compete with PRIDE. The plan is to run several prime time events through the year. Inoki also announced both Mirko Cro Cop and Fedor Emelianenko for his New Year's show, at which point PRIDE argued that they have Fedor under contract. Inoki responded by releasing a photo to the media of Fedor in an Inoki t-shirt signing his contract to appear at Inoki's show. Fedor's argument is that his PRIDE deal was signed by the management team he was with, but he's no longer with that team and says he was misled by his old management. Cro Cop is a free agent but still very tied in with PRIDE and Inoki is apparently going after others as well. There's a belief that Inoki and NTV are basically trying to raid PRIDE and are throwing unreal money around (ala WCW in the 90s). PRIDE is threatening to sue Inoki over it so we'll see how this all plays out in the coming weeks. (As mentioned a couple weeks ago, there ends up being a lot of drama here, with contracts, lawsuits, Yakuza threats, etc. I'd love to know this whole story in detail some day).
Inoki's show is also scheduled to have more NJPW wrestlers facing MMA fighters in shoot fights. Yoshihiro Takayama, Josh Barnett, Kazunari Murakami, Kazuyuki Fujita, and Shinsuke Nakamura are all fighting on the card, with rumors that Nakamura might be the opponent for Fedor (nah, poor Yuji Nagata ends up being Fedor's victim instead and Nakamura ends up fighting on the competing K-1 card somehow).
Shinsuke Nakamura captured the IWGP championship in a shocking upset win over Hiroyoshi Tenzan last week and in doing so, he's one of the youngest major world champions in history. The move was done to shake up the struggling promotion and was a fairly spur of the moment decision. Nakamura has only been a pro wrestler for barely a year and considering how strongly NJPW pushed Tenzan to build up to his title win, having him lose it a month later like this stunned everyone. But with Inoki planning to put Nakamura on his New Year's Eve show, the thought is that he wanted the IWGP championship represented on the show and may be doing a champion vs. champion match with Fedor (since he's still officially the PRIDE heavyweight champion). Again, Dave is pretty sure this is a bad idea. As for Nakamura winning the title, it's a case of NJPW hoping the belt makes the star instead of the other way around. Nakamura is a promising rookie, but he's in no way ready for this spot. But because of his MMA skills, Inoki loves him and as a result, Nakamura has basically had a rocket strapped to him since day one. Now here he is. World champion only 15 months into his career and he's defending against Yoshihiro Takayama (NWF champion) in a unification match at the Tokyo Dome next month.
WATCH: Shinsuke Nakamura wins IWGP title from Hiroyoshi Tenzan - 2003
AAA's Antonio Pena has been talking to TNA about trying to run their big Hogan PPV in Mexico. Pena (probably correctly) believes that Hogan on the card would make the show an instant sellout in any large arena there and that would make TNA look major league. Of course, he'd also want a bunch of AAA people all over the show and Dave doesn't think this has a chance of happening.
WWE and IWA had apparently come to an agreement for Ric Flair to come work a major show there in January. The angle for it was supposed to kick off this week with Ray Gonzalez attacking and injuring David Flair. But the whole thing fell apart when David Flair abruptly quit the company and left Puerto Rico without warning. He claimed the working conditions were inhumane. As a result, WWE officials called IWA back and told them Ric Flair would no longer be coming. IWA officials are furious at David Flair over this because they said he was treated the same as everyone else and, in fact, other wrestlers were even told to take it easy on him in the ring. And despite his limited ability, they pushed him as a top star because of his name. And he still quit. They're also upset at Ric for pulling out of the show the way he did and not being professional and honoring his commitment. Dave says WWE didn't want Ric doing this in the first place and only planned to allow it because he insisted that he wanted to but that all fell apart when David quit. (And that was pretty much the end of David Flair's full-time wrestling career. He would spend the next several years working a handful of indie dates off and on, but this moment here is when he pretty much gave up on the business as being a real career).
WWC tag team Thunder & Lightning are maybe jumping to IWA. Thunder wants to stay with WWC, but Lightning wants to go. IWA isn't willing to match their WWC contracts, but WWC is having trouble even meeting payroll, so they may end up jumping anyway. I really would love to see a full, well-produced documentary going in-depth on the IWA vs. WWC wars. Probably one of the more interesting promotional wars in wrestling history that's never really been covered in much detail. Two promotions spending years in an intense war confined to one small island. I bet the behind the scenes happenings going on there were unbelievable.
Zero-One and PRIDE officially announced a joint show for Jan. 4th, which will be competing against NJPW's Tokyo Dome show. They are billing it as a joint venture called HUSTLE and the card will feature Bill Goldberg, Dos Caras and his son Dos Caras Jr. (Del Rio), Dusty Rhodes, Don Frye, and others. This is start of what is planned to be several shows under the HUSTLE banner but it really just seems like another attempt at the WRESTLE-1 idea that was tried last year that ended in disastrous attendance and horrible TV ratings. Goldberg is rumored to be appearing at PRIDE's New Year's Eve show to do an angle to set up his appearance (HUSTLE ends up sticking around for about 5 years and is basically a Japanese attempt at doing a wacky "sports entertainment" promotion similar to WWE).
AJPW's latest Budokan Hall show was by far the smallest crowd the company has ever drawn in that building. It was announced at 10k but was closer to 5k in reality. The show ended with a big angle to set up some AJPW vs. Zero-One matches and if it seems like Zero-One is getting all the big matches and seemingly calling the shots in this angle, it's because they are. Zero-One apparently loaned AJPW "significant money" recently to keep it afloat and as a result, they kinda have all the leverage right now.
Speaking of, Keiji Muto is going to be working on NJPW's Tokyo Dome show on Jan. 4th. Meanwhile, several other AJPW wrestlers are going to be working the competing HUSTLE show that we talked about earlier. Zero-One is pretty pissed at Muto about it because, again, they loaned AJPW money to keep them alive and now the president of AJPW is working on a competing show. But Muto does what's best for Muto and NJPW offered him a very high profile match (Sapp/Muto vs. Chono/Hogan) and so he wants to do that instead (as noted, Hogan ends up not doing this and his spot gets taken by Tenzan).
There was some big social event to mark the 40th anniversary of Rikidozan's death. Many people were in attendance and, specifically, Antonio Inoki gave a speech that pissed everyone off. The gist of it was basically that Rikidozan gave everyone in Japan the great sport of pro wrestling and that he would be ashamed to see what it has become. Needless to say, most of the wrestlers blame Inoki for what it's become.
MLW was scheduled to debut in Philadelphia next month, so ROH scheduled a competing show and also pressured many of their stars not to work MLW's show with "us or them" ultimatums. As a result, MLW decided fuck it and simply canceled the show in Philly and ended up moving it back to Florida where they've been running instead. "Well, that was one of the shortest territorial wars on record," Dave quips.
NFL player Clinton Portis had a crazy 5-touchdown game for the Broncos last week and afterwards, he was shown wearing a replica of the WCW big gold belt. He was later asked about it and said it was given to him as a gift by his friend, rapper Pastor Troy (I have now recapped 13 years of Observers and seeing a fuckin' Pastor Troy mention get dropped in here has to be the wildest thing I've read yet. I haven't thought about that dude since "Vice Versa." Also, if you google image search Pastor Troy, almost every picture is of him carrying around that belt. He's worn it on multiple album covers. He's basically turned "carrying a WWE belt around" into his entire gimmick).
Former ECW Chilly Willy was recently awarded a purple heart medal after being wounded while serving in Iraq. He enlisted in the military after ECW folded in 2001.
Jim Duggan is selling the old WCW Television title belt on eBay. It's the same belt that Duggan "won" by finding it in the garbage can during those fun Russo days of WCW 2000. The belt was scrapped a few months later and Duggan was the final recognized champion and still has the physical belt. As of press time, the bidding is up to $2,125 (seems to have gotten lost after this. To this day, no one has found this belt. They even had something on that WWE Hidden Treasures show about Booker T trying to find it, but no luck. Probably still sitting in a box in some eBayer's attic somewhere).
TNA is trying out a video-on-demand experiment on their website. For $6.95, you can watch any of the company's shows. You have a time limit of 6 hours to watch the show before it locks again, to prevent password sharing. Ah, the early internet...
Nathan Jones went AWOL on the WWE during their tour in Australia. Jones told people he was quitting WWE and quitting the wrestling business entirely and then no-showed the event. He is from Australia and had been there doing a lot of promotional work and was expected to be rolled out in front of the crowd as a huge babyface, but nope. He apparently didn't fly back to the U.S. with everyone else either. Reportedly his fiance in America has flown to Australia to be there with him as well. Sounds like he used the WWE opportunity to fly back home and then decided "I ain't going back." For what it's worth, no one was surprised. Since he arrived in WWE, people have been saying they didn't think he'd be able to mentally handle the gig. He apparently complained about the schedule from day one and since he also never really developed any wrestling skills and got over-pushed early, he had a lot of heat. Dave feels like WWE didn't do him any favors by putting him in positions he was nowhere near ready for and letting him sink, but that's a tale as old as time with Vince and big guys (yeah that's pretty much it for him. He wrestles 3 more matches for an indie company in 2005 and then it's a wrap).
At the Smackdown tapings this week, they were in San Diego which is Rey Mysterio's hometown and he was easily the big draw and the crowd was rabid for him. So of course, he lost to Lesnar by tap out in the main event, because "HEAT, BROTHER!" After the show went off the air, they did have a big thing for Mysterio with his family and everyone in the ring. Tito Ortiz was also there and got in the ring with them. As a joke, Ortiz tried to press-slam one of his friends that was in his entourage and nearly dropped him on his head in the ring.
Stacy Keibler reportedly turned down a huge money offer to pose nude for Playboy in the upcoming March 2004 issue. Sable has been hinting for weeks about something with Playboy and both she and Torrie Wilson were pulled from recent shows for "a modeling gig." The current belief is that it will be Torrie and Sable together in the magazine, but they tried to get Stacy first. Worth noting that both Trish Stratus and Lita have turned down the offer in the past as well.
For at least 6 months now, every time John Cena gets someone down and starts punching them, Michael Cole has been calling it "pound and ground" and Dave is begging for someone in the company to please correct him.
The Larry Zbyszko lawsuit against WWE and Chris Jericho over the name "Living Legend" is still ongoing. Bruno Sammartino is expected to go for a deposition in the case this week.
There has been talk about reviving the WWE Hall of Fame in conjunction with the 20th Wrestlemania next year. Dave could see them doing that as a way to mend fences with Bret Hart. The WWE HOF hasn't been active since 1996 and without Sammartino, Bob Backlund, and Billy Graham, it can't be considered much of a Hall of Fame anyway. And as of press time, none of the above have been contacted about it. Dave does know of one legend who was apparently given an unofficial heads up from someone in WWE to be ready for it (judging by the names inducted in 2004 and cross referencing Dave's known contacts around that time, I'm assuming that would be Bobby Heenan).
Kevin Nash did an interview saying he'd only re-sign with WWE if the money is right. He also hinted that he might go work in Japan. Dave says that unless Nash is willing to do shoot fights, there's not a whole lot of money to be made in Japan these days either. He also claimed Scott Hall is sober now, which Dave hopes is true. But every time someone says that, two weeks later, he ends up arrested again.
During the tour of Australia, Ric Flair learned what the word "wanker" means. He'd been there several times but had apparently never heard it before. So when the crowd started chanting wanker at Heyman, Flair was laughing so hard he couldn't do his promo.