August 09, 2004
- So remember the little last-second blurb about how Bruno Sammartino was backstage at Raw in Pittsburgh last week? Well it's our top story this week! Turns out he was there for a couple of reasons, primarily the fact that WWE has made him a contract offer of some kind. Sammartino and Vince McMahon met for the first time in-person since the 1992 Phil Donahue episode they all appeared on, and it was a cordial conversation. Back in June, Sammartino met with Jim Ross and Jerry McDevitt to discuss a possible return. Sammartino wants to be something of a public relations ambassador for wrestling and notably, he wants to give anti-steroid speeches. WWE probably doesn't want this considering steroid use is still rampant in the company. The negotiations also revolved around publishing an autobiography and DVD set, as well as for Sammartino to host something on the forthcoming WWE 24/7 channel, plus video gaming rights, merchandising, etc. They also pitched inducting him into the WWE Hall of Fame, which Sammartino is indifferent about. It doesn't matter much to him, but he acknowledges that fans constantly ask him about it and he recognizes that other people seem to care.
- Vince asked Sammartino to hang out and watch the show, particularly the Triple H vs. Benoit ironman match, but nah. Bruno bounced before the show even started. But the meeting was cordial and discussions are still open between both sides. However, Sammartino is a little cranky about things that were were written in Ric Flair's book and allowed to be published by WWE. Not just comments about himself (which he didn't appreciate) but he was also furious about the things Flair wrote about Bret Hart and feels WWE was in the wrong for allowing it to be published. There's 2 versions of what happened backstage when they saw each other. Some people who saw the interaction said Bruno refused to shake Flair's hand and that was apparently the end of it. Bruno's version is that he saw Flair from 20 feet away, approached him, but Flair ducked out into the hallway and Bruno never saw him again the rest of the night. Or, as Dave put it last week, "Flair skedaddled."
- Dave breaks down the history of WWE/Vince vs. Bruno Sammartino over the years, and just how insane and unthinkable it is that the 2 sides are even speaking. Sammartino has had beef with the company since 1987 when he left due to the drug culture that had taken over the business, which he believes Vince allowed and encouraged. He was also upset when his son David Sammartino was fired over an incident where he punched a fan (sometimes rumored to have been a plant who was put there specifically to goad young David into a fireable offense, but that seems like a stretch). Prior to that, Bruno had sued the company for allegedly screwing him out of money he was owed, so even dating back to McMahon Sr., there's been issues. His final match in the company was, interestingly enough, the one and only time he teamed with Hulk Hogan. His last appearance on WWF TV was doing the posing routine with Hogan, a man he'd later come to despise.
- We have a loooooong breakdown of the final four in the PRIDE Grand Prix tournament. This is just a big look at the tournament, the potential matchups and the fighters and this is all deep into the MMA bubble so mooooving along....
- Obituary for Ken Timbs, a wrestler who died at 53 from heart failure. Never a major star in the U.S., although he worked the territories, but he was one of the top heels in Mexico during the 80s, doing the over the top American gimmick. Basically taking the Nikolai Volkoff Russia gimmick and reversing it. He'd wave the American flag, sing the American national anthem poorly to get heat, etc. He was the original "El Gringo Loco," a nickname that would later be adopted by many Americans coming through Mexico, most famously Art Barr and Eddie Guerrero's team. (I've heard rumor this may be El Grande Americano's father....) Dave also notes that, in recent years, Timbs spent most of his time on the internet "getting into message board wars with people" and "claiming that Dave Meltzer killed pro wrestling." Dave just mentions this, he doesn't defend himself or dwell on it.
- Early buyrates for Vengeance PPV are disappointing. If the numbers hold, the show will be down almost 40% from the Vengeance PPV held last year. It was the 3rd PPV in a 6-week span for WWE and combined, the shows did around 715k buys, which is less than the 750k for the 2 PPVs in the same time period last year. So it's hard to call the 3-in-6-weeks experiment a success.
- Sean O’Haire was arrested on charges of assault and battery following an incident at a night club in South Carolina. O'Haire was accused of punching 2 women, shoving one to the ground, and kicking another one multiple times after she was on the ground. O'Haire told police he was acting in self-defense. He said he was in the club's VIP section when one of the women started trying to dance with him and he wasn't interested. She was offended, allegedly shoved him, and then O'Haire told the bouncer "Get this bitch away from me," at which point she and several other people began throwing punches at him (the women as well as other men). He pointed out that he's a professional fighter (he has a kickboxing background) and said if he really was assaulting those women, they'd be in the hospital. Dave notes that one of them did indeed go to the hospital afterward, soooo..... Problem is, when he was arrested, O'Haire was also in violation of a bond agreement from a prior assault charge on a different woman at a different night club. And apparently, he wasn't supposed to have contact with that woman (an ex-girlfriend it sounds like) but he tried to call her, which she reported to the police. O'Haire is well-known to local police in the Buford County where he lives. He's described as someone who's never in big trouble, but constantly in little trouble, always getting into situations that people with cooler heads should know to avoid. He has a reputation with the police for anger issues. O'Haire is scheduled to make his MMA debut in September. Dave runs through his career briefly: Power Plant in WCW, last WCW tag team champion, brief WWE run, sent back to developmental when they realized he had no idea how to work, brief run with Roddy Piper in 2003, most recently had a match with Tanahashi in NJPW and didn't impress anyone there, so he wasn't brought back, and sounds like he's been beating up women in night clubs ever since.
- A few years ago, a statue for El Santo was constructed in Tulancingo, Mexico. That statue was widely hated by locals because it was tiny and ugly. So they got rid of it and constructed a new one that is much nicer and bigger and everyone loves it (turns out this is placed outside of an El Santo Museum. Here's a link with some pics and more info:
- Lucha Libre legend Fishman is completely broke. He went on a radio show recently and gave out his home phone number and said he will sell all of his belts, masks, trophies and other wrestling memorabilia for a good price and was basically begging for money. He got divorced in the mid-90s and his wife got almost everything, and it's been hard times ever since.
- Weird happenings in Puerto Rico. WWC is currently doing a big family feud angle with the Colon family all beefing with each other. And it's......sort of a success? WWC is actually beating IWA in TV ratings in recent weeks due to the storyline. And yet, IWA is still blowing them out of the water in live attendance. So they're drawing on TV, but nobody wants to pay to see it in person yet.
- Shinya Hashimoto is scheduled to undergo long-needed shoulder surgery in September. He originally injured it last year, then re-injured in February and was told that he'll need to retire if he doesn't hurry up and get it fixed because he's making it worse by continuing to wrestle. Even with the surgery, it's still a 50/50 chance that it even fixes the issue and he'll likely be out a year or more. He's been working through the injury for fear that ZERO-1 might collapse and fold without him. Well, now they're gonna find out for sure because he can't put it off anymore. His last scheduled match is at the end of this month, on 8/31 (and little do we know at the time, but 8/31 will be Hashimoto's final match ever. He goes to get surgery and then dies of a brain aneurysm 11 months later while still recovering).
- Bob Sapp has joined the cast of "The Longest Yard" which features several other wrestlers. There was a picture going around of Sapp, Goldberg, Kevin Nash, and Steve Austin together in their uniforms and it's being pushed as a big deal in Japan that Sapp is in the movie with those guys. Sapp is also expected to be in the upcoming Jean Claude Van Damme film "Kumite." (I got curious and looked that one up. "Kumite" ended up getting canceled sometime in 2005. Van Damme's career wasn't exactly booming during these years).
- Chris Kanyon announced plans to retire following a match at the end of this month against DDP. Ever since he was released by WWE, Kanyon has spoken of wanting to get out because he couldn't trust his future to such an unstable business (he retires for about a year, then does a few indies off and on for the next several years).
- Teddy Hart has been trying to get back into ROH lately, but they aren't interested. After Hart went into business for himself at an ROH show awhile back, Gabe Sapolsky wasn't high on bringing him back, but did it anyway. But then Hart kept doing more Hart shit, no-showing events, making up lies in interviews, and just rubbing everyone the wrong way, so sounds like no ROH for him.
- UPW ran a show in Anaheim and, among the various names there, was Chyna. She arrived with porn star friend Tabitha Stevens and was openly talking backstage about her plans to sell a sex tape with Sean Waltman. For some reason, they let Chyna and her band perform some songs and the crowd quickly turned on that after only 1 song so she stopped midway through the 2nd song before it got worse.
- Rikishi has no interest in going to TNA. When he was released from WWE a few weeks ago, he was told they will bring him back eventually, so long as he doesn't go to TNA (WWE never brings him back and he eventually goes to TNA in 2007 for a minute).
- K-1 is negotiating with Mike Tyson again, following Tyson's knockout loss to Danny Williams. Given the embarrassing nature of the loss to a virtual unknown, Tyson's big money boxing future is in jeopardy and K-1 knows now is the time to strike (still never happened. Tyson would only box one more time before retiring and never fought for K-1).
- Meanwhile, Danny Williams, the boxer who just beat Mike Tyson, is a huge wrestling fan. He tried to get into WWE last year and they weren't interested. Now he's interested in capitalizing on his Tyson-win fame to try and do an angle with WWE. In particular, he pitched a Legend Killer vs. Legend Killer angle he wants to do with Randy Orton, but Dave doesn't see that happening. Beating Tyson didn't really make Williams into a star, it just led to a bunch of people clowning on Tyson for losing to a nobody. This ain't the same Mike Tyson that Buster Douglas knocked out.
- Lots of mainstream publicity about Brock Lesnar signing with the Minnesota Vikings. ESPN covered it on all their shows and Lesnar did some interviews. He was asked about the pay cut he's expecting to take (he made around $1.5 million a year guaranteed in WWE, plus merch and other payoffs. In the NFL, where he's likely to end up on the practice squad, he miiiiight make $85k. In response, Lesnar said, "Money's just money. It doesn't make you happy. I've been on both spectrums, a poor dairy farmer in Webster, South Dakota, and I've been a millionaire. One doesn't make you happier than the other." It's been reported that Lesnar might have to play next season in the NFL Europe league to gain experience, which he says he's willing to do (turns out he was NOT willing to do that, but we'll get there). He said he regretted ever going to WWE, to which Dave responds, "three years ago, he told me it was the greatest job in the world." Brock said the travel and fame were too much, and Dave points out the obvious: trying to be an NFL player isn't the best way to avoid fame and celebrity. Lesnar said football fans are a lot more polite than wrestling fans, after being swarmed by autograph seekers at training camp. He said football makes him feel like a competitor again, a feeling he lost when he was doing "entertainment" the last few years. He revealed that Vince McMahon tried to talk Lesnar into doing a big WWE-sponsored press conference to hype up his NFL attempt, but Lesnar wanted no part of it because nobody would take him seriously then, and he wanted to be free from WWE and their publicity stunts.
- Lesnar also apologized for the anti-gay comments he made in an ESPN interview a few months ago. "I'm sorry for my statement. I'm sorry for anybody's feelings getting hurt," he said. Not much of an apology there, Brock. The story behind this is, during the interview, a woman approached Lesnar (in front of the reporter) and told him that her male friend thinks he's cute. Brock responded with "a curse-laden outburst" and after she was gone, turned to the reporter and said, "I don’t like gays. Write that down in your little notebook. I don’t like gays." Well, the reporter did indeed write that down in his little notebook and it ended up in the story and here we are.
- Notes from 8/2 Raw: best Raw in a long time. William Regal cut a hell of a promo challenging Triple H. The Divas Search segments were bad, but not nearly as bad as they have been. Orton talked about his plans to beat Benoit at SummerSlam to become the youngest world champion ever, so of course, Dave pokes holes in this by noting Lou Thesz and Kerry Von Erich were both younger when they won their first world titles. Stacy Keibler managed Rosey this week, for no apparent reason other than to get her out at ringside doing cartwheels in a short skirt so they could replay it. Triple H used a sledgehammer on Regal and Dave wishes he would pick a more realistic gimmick. If you hit someone with a sledgehammer in real life, you'll kill them and it kinda makes it hard to suspend disbelief in a pro wrestling angle (I feel the same way about the stupid screwdriver that keeps popping up in Don Callis angles, or the scissors Richochet uses. May as well just bring a gun or machete. Some things shouldn't be "wrestling" weapons. But let me get off my soapbox). It was a good angle and got great heat, but ya know. And the main event of Evolution vs. Jericho/Edge/Benoit was fantastic and one of the best Raw matches in months. He notes again that Batista has continued to improve by leaps and bounds.
- Notes from 7/29 Smackdown: JBL's political campaign segments were funny and will probably turn him babyface if he keeps it up. Vince is a huge fans of them due to his hatred of politicians. Otherwise, not much of note. Pretty middling show that did little to build SummerSlam. Or as Dave puts it, "There was nothing to hate on the show, but it couldn’t have been that good because I got a lot of reading done."
- This story is hilarious. A San Francisco newspaper ran a story about "neuro-marketing" being done by movie studios, in which they use brain scanning technology to evaluate what movie viewers respond to. One of the things that they noted was that women secretly responded to The Rock. "We showed a trailer for Rundown. A lot of females didn’t want to admit (in writing) that he was intriguing. He’s got this wrestling past, so maybe it’s not socially acceptable (for general public women) to say that they’re attracted to this guy. But they gave off very powerful brain responses."
- Stacy Keibler got some heat at a weekend house show. She got to the building and they asked her on the spur of the moment to go do a meet-and-greet. She refused, saying she had just arrived after a long drive and no one had told her about it beforehand. Dave defends Stacy here, saying that the women in WWE are there for their looks and while most of these wrestling fan neckbeards don't realize it, these beautiful women don't just roll out of bed looking like glamorous supermodels. It takes time to get ready for public appearances like that and springing shit like this on her right as she arrives at the venue after driving all day to get there isn't really fair.
- In reviewing the recent OVW tapings, Dave decides to talk about the creation of the 5-star ratings scale. Jim Cornette and a fella named Norm Dooley used to rate matches on a 1-4 star scale, the way movies were rated in the newspapers. But then in 1981, they saw a Jerry Lawler/Terry Funk match that was so much better than any of the other 4-star matches they'd ever seen that they broke the scale and gave it 5-stars. And that's why Dave uses the 5-star scale now. And that's his defense every time someone cries about him going over 5, pointing out that the "scale" was broken first in 1981 by Cornette of all people. I'm sure Cornette has his own version of this story, but I didn't bother to look it up because few things in wrestling fandom are dumber to me than the incessant crying over how many times one man presses his asterisk key for a fake wrestling match. TV ratings discourse might be the only thing worse.
- Hey speaking of Jimothy Cornette, there was an amateur wrestling event at the Davis Arena in Louisville that was attended by many of the OVW wrestlers, heels and babyfaces alike. Perhaps you can see where this is going. Anyway, Matt Morgan (heel) and Alexis Laree (babyface) were socializing at the hot dog stand and Cornette blew a gasket. Davis Arena is where OVW films and there were plenty of people there who also attend the OVW shows. Cornette didn't like that the wrestlers were there in the first place, feeling there should be separation from the fans and wrestlers and they shouldn't be sitting in the crowd like all the other normies at any event. Much less having heels and faces seen chatting. Particularly Morgan, who is OVW's top star and he doesn't want his top star to be seen acting like a regular guy with a social life in public (funny that Alexis Laree becomes a bigger star than Morgan ever did).
- Paul Bearer wrote a post on his website about his battle with obesity. He talked about WWE helping to pay for his gastric bypass surgery that he got in November. After surgery, he developed heart problems and on 3 different occasions early this year, his heart had to be shocked back into a regular rhythm. By the time he made his return appearance at Wrestlemania, he had dropped 129 pounds since the surgery and has lost an additional 71 since then. He still hopes to drop another 75 in the future. He also developed gall bladder issues (a common issue with gastric bypass patients) which resulted in the angle that led to him being taken off TV (aka literally murdered by the somehow-still-a-babyface Undertaker).