Wrestling Observer Rewinder

November 08, 2004

Our top story this week is.....MMA! Mostly about Rulon Gardner signing on to fight at PRIDE's big New Year's Eve show, plus the Fedor vs. Big Nog main event. Anyway, Rulon Gardner is the gold medal amateur wrestler who was recently negotiating with WWE and turned down a contract offer. PRIDE is trying to spin this in the press as if the sport's hottest prospect chose them over WWE, which isn't exactly the case, but sure. The WWE deal was more of a polite offer than a real effort to get him, as WWE wasn't really that interested because Gardner doesn't have the right look and would have to learn pro wrestling from the ground up anyway. Gold medal or not, they didn't really see him as the next Kurt Angle and John Laurinaitis, who is in charge of these things nowadays, isn't as interested in signing amateur wrestlers as Jim Ross was. So he was made a polite, low-ball offer that they expected him to refuse, and he did.
There's major concern within TNA that Panda Energy is losing patience with the company. Dave doesn't really elaborate, this is mostly just a lot of rehashing the problems TNA has faced in the last year or so, nothing new here. But it sounds like he just finished reading Jerry Jarrett's book about the birth of TNA and I bet that's what led Dave to write this big think-piece about the company. He notes TNA is thought to have lost more money in the last 2 years than ECW did in its entire existence, but against all odds, they're still standing. And still hemorrhaging Panda's money.
TNA wrestlers also taped appearances on FSN's popular "Best Damn Sports Show Period" and the result was unpleasant. BDSSP host Chris Rose insisted on doing an angle where he would constantly talk about pro wrestling being fake and even wore a shirt saying "Wrestling Is Fake." You can imagine how thrilled the TNA wrestlers were about this. But TNA is at the mercy of FSN and BDSSP is the crown jewel of the network. BDSSP wanted a comedy show. TNA wanted to expose their product to a new audience. Oil and water. TNA got to show off some good wrestling, in front of a sparse amusement show crowd, with FSN hosts completely mocking everything about it in between. Did I mention they had Roddy Piper for this show? You can imagine how much Piper liked all this. They had a scripted segment based on the whole wrestlers vs. hosts "wrestling is fake" stuff and Chris Rose was a guest for Piper's Pit and Piper slapped him. It was expected, but not as hard as Piper did it, and it rocked him. Piper also sprayed him with a fire extinguisher in the face in the following angle, which Rose was furious about because he hadn't agreed to it.
There's a sad story with Lex Luger. As noted last week, Luger has been reaching out to TNA for months, claiming that he's clean and wants to work. He's in bad financial shape, to the point that his car was repossessed last week. Dave estimates Luger made probably $8-10 million during his wrestling career, but in between a divorce, Elizabeth's death and his legal bills and other expenses, he's struggling. Hence why he's been working indie dates and doing shoot interviews lately. Many say, Luger hasn't really recovered from Elizabeth's death and he was hurt by the way Vince McMahon portrayed him on television as if he'd murdered her. So needless to say, WWE is probably not an option for him, and Japan isn't interested. So TNA threw him a bone and flew him into the Impact tapings last week....
....and he showed up 45 minutes late in the dreaded "no condition to perform." He had the shakes and told management he had a hurt back and hadn't slept in 3 days. They sent him back to the hotel and didn't use him at the tapings. That night after the show, sure enough, Luger was at the hotel bar hanging out with all the other wrestlers drinking and living it up. Jeff Jarrett kindly pointed out that he should probably go back to his room, which he did. The next day, TNA brought him to the aforementioned BDSSP tapings and Luger cut a very brief promo and then left before the actual show started. Needless to say, he's not expected to be welcomed back.
Randy Wear.
Taboo Tuesday was officially a total flop. The live show attendance (3,500 in an 18,000-seat arena) was the smallest crowd for a WWE PPV in history, and the buyrate wasn't much better. Early estimates are around 170,000, which is 1996 numbers. Was it the interactive element of the show that flopped? Dave liked the concept, but asking people to part with their money for a PPV without confirmed matches announced ahead of time is a risk. Was it the fact that it aired on a Tuesday? Probably didn't help, and Dave thought it was a bad idea from the beginning. But a good product will overcome all those problems. In the end, it's really the same problem as always: no one is over, everything feels stale, and fans aren't buying current stories. He also feels like WWE has flooded the market with too many PPVs and needs to cut back, especially since most of them are brand-specific which means you don't even get half the stars.
There was a big show held this week at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis which featured Jerry Lawler and The Rock & Roll Express against Cory Maclin and The Fabulous Ones. Or, as Dave puts it, "the last big show of 1983 took place this week." Anyway, it was called Throwback III and it drew approx. 3,500 fans (same as Taboo Tuesday). This was preceded by weeks of local television building up the match, with all sorts of old school storylines, Jerry and Jeff Jarrett, Jimmy Hart, Bill Dundee, and more getting involved. Steve Keirn ended up no-showing the event (choosing to attend Bobby Heenan's birthday party instead) so they stuck 70-year-old Jackie Fargo in as his replacement. Bunch of classic Memphis spots from all the old legends sent the crowd home happy, but Dave isn't sure how much further they can push this. You can't build a viable wrestling business around these guys. They're still pushing a Lawler vs. Maclin cage match for next month but it's still not sustainable. However, it's pretty interesting that these Memphis legends, two decades after their glory years, have still drawn 3 of the biggest indie crowds of the year in 2004 and, in this case, rivaled the attendance of a WWE PPV.
Pierroth Jr. was scheduled to lose his hair in a match with Universo 2000. The match was planned and Super Luchas magazine wrote a story about it happening and published it. But then the match didn't happen. So now Super Luchas is trying to work an angle with Pierroth Jr. to explain the screw-up, with Pierroth Jr. claiming the magazine is conspiring against him and all that fun stuff (this match ends up happening a month later and Pierroth Jr. does indeed lose his hair).
A California Native American tribe has paid Jesse Ventura to star in commercials for them, criticizing governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed plan to have tribes pay taxes to the state from their casinos. It's notable because Ventura and Schwarzenegger have been friends dating back to the 80s, when they were in the movies "Predator" and "Running Man" together (roles that Schwarzenegger pulled strings to get for Ventura, Dave notes). But they apparently aren't friends anymore. In the commercial, Ventura says, "Didn't the governor promise a balanced budget without raising taxes? I guess it's OK to rip off Indians." Schwarzenegger issued a response saying, "A guy from Minneapolis is coming in here and getting involved in this. But I guess that's what you have friends for." Sounds like Arnold is feeling a little betrayed by Ventura.
This is a fun opening sentence: "For those of you losing interest in wrestling, before checking out, you really should check out ROH videos." Dave goes on to write a lengthy paragraph praising Ring of Honor for being the complete opposite of WWE (as opposed to TNA's desperate attempts to be the same thing as WWE): great Japanese-style matches, they book their world title to actually mean something with Samoa Joe feeling like a legitimate final boss, it's not an overbooked mess of ref-bumps and run-ins, the Havana Pitbulls (ROH tag champs) are probably the best tag team in the U.S. right now, guys like Bryan Danielson, Doug Williams, and Nigel McGuinness are all incorporating different technical styles that you'd never see in WWE, while guys like Jack Evans are doing some of the craziest high flying spots you'll ever see, and they even bring in big stars (Foley, Cornette, Steamboat, etc.) and use them in effective ways that get their own talent over rather than overshadow them. It's an indie, the production values aren't perfect, and it's going to have limited appeal, but if you're losing interest in the American wrestling scene, like so many people currently are, Dave feels like ROH is a total breath of fresh air. The only real negative is the delay between shows and getting them released to fans on DVD, as it's usually a couple months after each show before it's available to buy. Yeah man, these early glory days of ROH were great times. One of my best friends had all the DVDs and introduced me to all this stuff back then.
New Jack finally managed to come up with the money to bail himself out of jail this week. A few days later, the Jacksonville district attorney decided not to follow through on the charges, so New Jack is off the hook. He immediately appeared at an NWA Wildside show in Georgia and cut a promo talking about the guy he stabbed, referencing the incident as "Mass Transit 2" and adding "Everywhere I saw meat, I stuck it!" He claimed his opponent tried to stab him first and said that "the n***er only went to jail because it was a white guy who went down." I'm not sure his time behind bars reformed him much.
Joanie Laurer (Chyna) will be appearing on the new season of VH-1's "The Surreal Life" starting in January (and this is where we truly begin to see Chyna's downfall).
Jake Roberts no-showed his scheduled court date in England on animal abuse charges from last year. Roberts is alleged to have starved a python snake to death when he was living with his girlfriend. They still live together in England and Jake (looking more like 68 than 48, Dave says) is still regularly working indie dates there.
Pennsylvania indie promotion Chikara Pro Wrestling had what they claimed was the longest match in history. It started as a falls count anywhere match on their show the previous night and ended it at their show the next night, claiming an official match time of 23 hours and 36 minutes (this would be Lance Steel vs. Darkness Crabtree and Cagematch has the match time listed as 1416:00. Bonus fun fact: both Claudio Castagnoli and Eddie Kingston worked this show).
Scott Hall and Kevin Nash are expected to win the NWA tag titles soon after joining TNA. Part of the deal to get America's Most Wanted to re-sign was the promise that they would win the belts soon and they were given the impression that they would beat Hall and Nash for them. Dave isn't holding his breath for that happening, and even if it does, Hall and Nash are experts at losing matches while making sure their opponent still doesn't get over. (this never happened because Hall and Nash never won those belts. But while researching, I did see that the tag titles changed hands THIRTEEN TIMES in 2004 alone.)
The World Wildlife Fund vs. WWE legal battles continue. WWE already got spanked and had to change their name in 2002 and now the wrangling is over damages. The Wildlife Fund requested something like $90 million in damages and punitive fees and of course, WWE is fighting that. A court is expected to hear both sides and there's a whole process going on here that may get settled out of court. But if not, then a judge will likely determine what WWE is required to pay. And the judge in this case has NOT been kind to WWE throughout this whole ordeal, seemingly offended by how blatantly WWE violated their original agreement in the first place, and he seems intent on punishing them.
Survivor Series is supposed to have a traditional 4-vs-4 elimination match with Triple H's team against Orton's team. Turns out Triple H has been pushing to make this a War Games match, which has never been done in WWE. But Triple H grew up as a fan of NWA wrestling and wants to do it now that WWE owns the rights to it. But Vince, who holds a grudge against any concept he didn't create, immediately shot down the idea. So now it's just an elimination match and the winning team gets to be in charge of Raw for the next 4 weeks. Sure, that's way more exciting...
WWE released Test, A-Train, and Billy Gunn this week. In the case of Gunn, he passed out at an airport a few weeks back and was sent to rehab before they decided to simply cut him loose. Dave could see him landing in TNA, although he'd have to come up with a new name because WWE owns "Billy Gunn" and "Mr. Ass." Meanwhile, A-Train has been out injured for awhile now and they had no ideas for him when he came back. Dave thinks he'd be good in Japan as a monster foreign heel (indeed, that's what the next 7 years will be for him).
Test is the most interesting one. He just recently underwent neck surgery and was expected to be out for about a year and was just starting rehab to recover. Dave thinks this sets a dangerous precedent. Test got hurt in their ring, got the surgery with their blessing by the doctors they sent him to, and for them to fire him right after surgery while he's still recovering is the kind of thing people file lawsuits over. Typically, WWE has always taken care of guys who get injured on their watch, all the way through the recovery process, so this is unusual. Test was said to be furious, understandably so.
Notes from 10/28 Smackdown: Tough Enough continues to feel like the male version of the Diva Search. They showed footage of a backstage incident of Big Show shoving Daniel Puder against the lockers, which was kind of a real thing. The Tough Enough guys were basically told no matter what happens, don't get into a fight or you'll be sent home. Then they released them into the locker room to be hazed and harassed by the wrestlers. Dave was amused listening to Big Show tell them they need to pay their dues, which Dave thinks is pretty funny since Big Show won the world title from Hulk Hogan in his very first match in WCW, but whatever. He'd love to see Big Show run the obstacle courses these guys had to complete to make it to the final 8. In fact, all these calisthenics and endurance exercises that they're making the Tough Enough contestants do has nothing to do with wrestling and, quite frankly, 98% of the current WWE roster probably wouldn't be able to complete any of these challenges either.
Notes from 11/1 Raw: This show is notable for what didn't happen. Back in 2000, when Raw took place the night before the election, WWE (through Lawler and Ross on commentary) spent the entire broadcast basically campaigning for George W. Bush and urging people to go vote Republican. Well, it's 4 years later, we're on the eve of another Presidential election and this time, WWE wisely chose to keep quiet. There was no mention on commentary about it, no effort to urge fans to vote for Bush over Kerry or anything like that. WWE Diva Search loser Maria Kanellis debuted as a backstage announcer. Randy Orton's team for the Survivor Series main event was announced and the crowd booed when they heard Maven's name, which is proof that you can't job a guy out on Sunday Night Heat for a year and then stick him into a PPV main event out of the blue and expect fans to like it. Snitsky's involvement in that match was booed as well, as fans don't see either of them as belonging in the mix with Triple H, Orton, Benoit, etc. Simon Dean debuted on television with his new gimmick (he's been doing house shows for awhile). Dave thinks the gimmick is doomed to be a curtain jerker comedy gimmick, but he does a great job with it. Muhammad Hassan also debuted via vignette and they seem to be trying to get him over as a babyface to start. He's talking about being an American of Arabic descent and talking about how hard it's been for people like him since 9/11 because he's treated unfairly despite being an American. Interesting way to debut him, and Dave's curious to see where it goes. La Resistance regained the tag titles when Edge refused to tag in and help Benoit. Dave says you could see that coming from a mile away because they never even changed the name plates on the tag titles. They've still had the La Resistance names the entire 2 weeks that Benoit/Edge held them. Trish cut a great promo on Lita saying she ruins lives, and then talks about how she used to manage Essa Rios, but no one has heard from him in years. Then she managed the Hardyz and now Jeff is gone. And then she guest starred on the show "Dark Angel" and it got canceled. Matt Hardy and Kane both injured now. Basically blaming Lita for all of it, and Dave loved this up until Trish had to say some line about Lita losing her baby, and now Dave is annoyed all over again.
Notes from 11/2 Smackdown tapings for next week: they appear to be breaking up the Bashams and Dave notes those 2 had a great feud against each other in OVW before Vince decided to make them partners on the main roster. So a feud with them could be good (nah, never happens. The team doesn't even split until they get drafted to separate shows 6 months from now and they never had a feud with each other in WWE). For this week's Tough Enough segment, they had all the guys (earlier in the day) participate in a legitimate eating contest (won by Ryan "Future Ryback" Reeves) and then surprised them by having them do a bunch of running exercises immediately after, which naturally caused several of them to puke up all the food they just ate. Then a few of the guys had to sorta wrestle Kurt Angle. This apparently led to Daniel Puder being called into the ring by Angle and sounds like this might have gone weirdly, but Dave doesn't have any details yet (oh we're definitely gonna have more on this next week and basically the rest of the year).
WWE is planning to hold a 1-hour "Tough Enough" special on UPN in the coming weeks to show a lot of athletic drills and things like that. The idea is to show fans who the most athletic guys are so they aren't just voting on celebrity and internet popularity. In other words, they don't want Mike The Miz to win. People in the company don't watch WWE and don't realize that he's recognizable to a lot of their audience and in unofficial online polls, he's blowing away the rest of the competition. But when standing alongside the rest of the contestants, Mike The Miz is the smallest and least impressive looking of the bunch and this is 2004 WWE, so that's basically the most important thing to Vince. They've told him to stop "imitating the Rock" and Dave notes that doing Rock-imitations is basically his entire wrestling character. Anyway, whoever wins gets the big contract but WWE apparently plans to sign anyone who shows potential to developmental contracts so at least a few of these guys are gonna get signed even if they lose. Dave thinks Daniel Rodimer and Daniel Puder have the best chances to get the WWE machine behind them and win.
At the recent Halloween night house show, they had a women's battle royal where all the women dressed in costumes. Funny spot was Molly Holly coming out dressed as her WCW gimmick "Miss Madness." She had the blond hair (wig), the same blue dress, and even the same pageant sash that said "1999" on it. Dave thinks WCW in 1999 is a pretty fitting description of WWE these days.