Post by hatebomb on Jan 30, 2008 4:01:36 GMT -5
Bobby Lashley is finished with WWE. We don't know the entire story yet because it's very complex, and of late Lashley has opted out of talking much about it because he has not officially been released and he wants to make sure he gets that release without any problems. This is what I know. Lashley was very upset with the handling of his girlfriend Krystal and her departure from the company several months back.
She had gotten a reputation as being difficult to work with, and in particular I believe she had ixnayed a storyline that would have put her in the Vickie Guerrero role as Edge's love interest. I know that Lashley is the one who wanted out of WWE and not vice versa, and he didn't want out to go to UFC or EliteXC or TNA or anywhere else, he just wanted out of WWE. On his website last week, he wrote: "I am sorry to everyone here but I am serious when I say I won't be back. Everyone wants to come here and hear the real story and I am telling you the real story. Circumstances which are out of my control left me no decision but to leave the WWE. I can't go into details of this now but like I said before sometimes people will hate you personally and try to destroy you which has happened here. Evil has prevailed however like I said before if you continue your struggle doors will open around these people. You have not scene the last of me so please don't stop your support. Add Bobby Lashley to the list of RECENTLY RELEASED!"
There were people who doubted that Lashley actually posted this, so he went on his message board and said if anyone didn't believe him they could PM him their number and he'd call them personally to verify it. Believe it or not, he called several people. The aspect of this that WWE does not want to talk about is that it may have had to do with an old-school "racist" mentality by some of the older agents and power brokers in the company. I put "racist" in quotation marks because, as someone who has been around this business in some form for over a decade, including in the ring and backstage, there is, dating back decades, a tendency for older wrestlers to really go heavy on the racial slurs. I don't know if any of these people are actually racist, although the odds are that some of them are.
But I have known older wrestlers who have spamntly thrown slurs around and I can tell you that they were not racist, it was just the way they were brought up on the road in the business. The point is that there are individuals in WWE who still throw slurs around, maybe not so much to people's faces but behind their backs, and a few of them when they get drunk got at it really hot and heavy. I'm told the original reason for Mark Henry being called the "Silverback" was because one of the writers was constantly referring to him as King Kong. Whether that was a racial jibe or not, who knows, but the writer in question is one of those known to throw these terms around. The belief is that the reason Krystal balked at the Edge storyline was because she was concerned that a racial element would be brought into the story, and she was vigorously against that. Shortly thereafter she was released, which did not sit well with Bobby.
I don't know if something was heard or said recently, but there is certainly a belief by some that this in some way, perhaps minor and perhaps major, played into the Lashley departure. It should be noted that Lashley was upset with a number of things for quite awhile now, and it may be a situation where a bunch of little things added up and something big may or may not have broken the camel's back. What he'll do now is anyone's guess. Had he come along a few years later he almost certainly would have gone into MMA instead of pro-wrestling. In fact, he was training at the American Kickboxing Academy in 2004, but that was before UFC exploded and so when he got the WWE offer he took it. He currently lives in Colorado and trains with the Army wrestling squads, and has also trained quite a bit in an Octagon with a friend who does MMA locally. He's a big UFC fan and would obviously be interested in giving it a shot, but unlike Brock Lesnar he doesn't have the name yet that would make such a thing financially viable at the start.
He'd have to pay for all of his own training, and even Brock has been training full-time for two years prior to his debut this Saturday. In two years, what will Lashley's name mean? He'd pretty much have to start at the bottom like anyone else for a few thousand bucks a shot and work his way up from there. Of course, there are all sorts of upstart groups, including the new YAMMA, who may want to throw big money at him, particularly if Brock destroys Mir on Saturday.
At 31 he's starting awfully late, though he does have the strong wrestling background (two-time Armed Forces champion, NAIA wrestling champion in 1997 and 1998, and a Missouri Valley College National Champion in 96, 97 and 98). TNA is obviously salivating at the chance to bring him in, but my gut tells me that would be a last-case scenario for him, although I could be wrong.
Among the tentative plans for WrestleMania, and I can guarantee that this will probably change 100 times: Cena vs. Hunter for the title, which means the plan right now is for Cena to win the belt from Orton at No Way Out. I have also heard it may end up a three-way with Orton, Cena and Hunter.
Either way, the chances of Hunter not fighting for the belt at WrestleMania appear to be about zero. It's said he has been politicking like crazy ever since Sunday night; Edge vs. Undertaker for the belts and the Mania streak, which has been the plan pretty much forever. They're doing TWO Elimination Chambers at No Way Out, so obviously Taker wins the other;
Flair vs. Kennedy, MVP vs. Matt Hardy for the US Title, which has been the plan forever; the remaining big stars (Hardy, Orton if he's not in the title match, etc.) in Money in the Bank; and something involving Vince and Finlay, though not necessarily a singles match. I have also heard Vince vs. Foley, Foley vs. Shane, or Finlay & Foley vs. Vince & Shane.
ECW writer David Lagana, who had been with the company for years and was at one point the head writer of Smackdown, was fired this past week. This had been something in the works for probably around two years or so. Stephanie fired him while he was on vacation and sent a one sentence terse e-mail to all the other writers saying that he had been terminated. It was said to be very cold unlike most e-mails where they at least put over the contributions of a dude who is leaving the company.
The gist of the story is that Stephanie believed that Lagana was responsible for leaking creative and management information to newsletters and websites. They had been watching him closely for years but could never prove it. The beginning of the end for him took place in May of 2006 during a creative meeting. The meetings take place at the building prior to TVs and PPVs, and the way it works is everyone gets together in a room with desks and such, very similar to a classroom layout.
Vince, Kevin Dunn, Steph and the lead writers are at the front of the class and all the low-level writers and agents sit at the desks. The writers go over the show and they do a read-through of the script, and then Vince makes all his comments/changes, etc. The agents also give their advice. So Lagana was sitting there at one of the desks on his laptop, and he usually sat in such a position where nobody could see his screen. But on this particular day there were people that could see his screen, and allegedly he was seen sending an e-mail with creative info to one of the major wrestling websites.
Nobody said anything at the moment, but after the meeting Stephanie was approached and told the entire story. She immediately confronted him and almost fired him on the spot, but he insisted he was innocent and managed to get off the hook. The key was, he was the tech guy in the company, where if anyone had a problem they went to him and he took care of it. He was very computer savvy and was able to permanently delete e-mails, likely hide IPs, whatever. The next week, however, he was immediately demoted from Smackdown to ECW. The picture that was painted was that it was a positive move, but it wasn't and he knew it.
He was working under Paul Heyman, who he'd known dating back to ECW. Still, he wasn't head writer and would basically just type up the scripts that Paul recited to him. Life got tough for him as he had a bad reputation from the Smackdown days of speaking down to the wrestlers (whether justified or not, that's what people believed), and people would make fun of him for his look (a dead ringer for the dude on Blue's Clues) and his voice ("Dr. Evil from Austin Powers").
Worse, when the Paul/Vince split went down he expected to be moved up to the head writer position of ECW but instead they moved Dusty into that spot. People said his confidence really started to erode at that point and things got really bad over the holidays. There were a great number of leaks, including stories about the viral campaign for Jericho and Mr. Kennedy being planned to be Vince's illegitimate son (and I should note, I got neither story from Lagana).
Stephanie blew a gasket and had a meeting with the agents saying there were to be absolutely no leaks and if you were discovered revealing information you would be fired on the spot. Without saying so directly, she said she thought she had a pretty good idea who was responsible and even looked directly at Lagana when saying it. That same afternoon, all the writers got laptop upgrades (everyone has a WWE-purchased laptop and Internet phone). The laptops, as it turned out, had shadowing software. Very shortly afterwards, Lagana was fired. The belief among the rest of the crew was that Steph had been feeding him false info on very specific information to see if it would get out, and it did.
There was also an incident a few weeks ago where Brian Gewirtz went into Lagana's office and sticking out of his laptop bag were a bunch of newsletters. Lagana tried to hide them but failed, then claimed that he wasn't actually reading them but they kept showing up because his subscription was yet to run out and he'd just happened to pick his mail up from home. Gewirtz then made snide remarks over the next several days about how he wasn't surprised that news kept getting leaked. Michael Hayes, who hates newsletters and websites, also began to really bury him right and left, apparently in a really demoralizing manner.
The level of paranoia in the company is truly astounding. Not sure if Stephanie realizes that people have home computers, home phones, private cell phones, pay phones, stamps and paper, etc. Still, because of the misinformation deal, writers are likely to be more leery about what information they share for the foreseeable future.
Regarding his loss to Chavo, clean loss to Edge a few days later in the big revenge match, and elimination by Chavo in the Rumble, we're told that Punk is in the dog house of late. The story is that he isn't listening to the agents and his house show matches are considered "indy level sloppy". He's botched a lot of stuff and the agents claim he comes to the back and laughs about it. There also may have been another political issue of some sort recently involving hitting on the wrong person.
American Gladiators goes to 90 minutes on February 4th
Nick Hogan had a pretrial hearing this week and the judge waived his right to a speedy trial. He's back in court on February 6th.
There are casting calls for the next season of Gladiators all this week and next week throughout America.
New announcer Mike Adamle, besides being part of the original season of American Gladiators, worked at WBBM in Chicago for four years and was said to be, and I quote, "TERRIBLE live." He was so bad that radio disc jockey Steve Dahl would encourage fans to tune in to see him mess up, and they actually had several compilation tapes of his smurf-ups on newscasts.
Torrie is still out with a back problem. She told Yahoo that she'd just gotten four big shots in her back for a nerve block. "I've got two herniated discs and a bulging disc. And that's just me. I'm just a girl that doesn't wrestle half the amount that the guys wrestle. Some people's bodies take it better than others. I guess I'm just a little more fragile than most people".
Apolo (German Figueroa), who signed recently with WWE, is in jail for a month after missing a court hearing in Puerto Rico regarding his domestic abuse case with wife Habana (who also works as a valet). This is a grand level of stupidity because both sides had agreed to dismiss the case and all Apolo had to do was show up to court. But he'd missed a few court dates and this one set the judge off, so he ordered him imprisoned until the next court date on February 25th.
credit: F4W Newsletter.
She had gotten a reputation as being difficult to work with, and in particular I believe she had ixnayed a storyline that would have put her in the Vickie Guerrero role as Edge's love interest. I know that Lashley is the one who wanted out of WWE and not vice versa, and he didn't want out to go to UFC or EliteXC or TNA or anywhere else, he just wanted out of WWE. On his website last week, he wrote: "I am sorry to everyone here but I am serious when I say I won't be back. Everyone wants to come here and hear the real story and I am telling you the real story. Circumstances which are out of my control left me no decision but to leave the WWE. I can't go into details of this now but like I said before sometimes people will hate you personally and try to destroy you which has happened here. Evil has prevailed however like I said before if you continue your struggle doors will open around these people. You have not scene the last of me so please don't stop your support. Add Bobby Lashley to the list of RECENTLY RELEASED!"
There were people who doubted that Lashley actually posted this, so he went on his message board and said if anyone didn't believe him they could PM him their number and he'd call them personally to verify it. Believe it or not, he called several people. The aspect of this that WWE does not want to talk about is that it may have had to do with an old-school "racist" mentality by some of the older agents and power brokers in the company. I put "racist" in quotation marks because, as someone who has been around this business in some form for over a decade, including in the ring and backstage, there is, dating back decades, a tendency for older wrestlers to really go heavy on the racial slurs. I don't know if any of these people are actually racist, although the odds are that some of them are.
But I have known older wrestlers who have spamntly thrown slurs around and I can tell you that they were not racist, it was just the way they were brought up on the road in the business. The point is that there are individuals in WWE who still throw slurs around, maybe not so much to people's faces but behind their backs, and a few of them when they get drunk got at it really hot and heavy. I'm told the original reason for Mark Henry being called the "Silverback" was because one of the writers was constantly referring to him as King Kong. Whether that was a racial jibe or not, who knows, but the writer in question is one of those known to throw these terms around. The belief is that the reason Krystal balked at the Edge storyline was because she was concerned that a racial element would be brought into the story, and she was vigorously against that. Shortly thereafter she was released, which did not sit well with Bobby.
I don't know if something was heard or said recently, but there is certainly a belief by some that this in some way, perhaps minor and perhaps major, played into the Lashley departure. It should be noted that Lashley was upset with a number of things for quite awhile now, and it may be a situation where a bunch of little things added up and something big may or may not have broken the camel's back. What he'll do now is anyone's guess. Had he come along a few years later he almost certainly would have gone into MMA instead of pro-wrestling. In fact, he was training at the American Kickboxing Academy in 2004, but that was before UFC exploded and so when he got the WWE offer he took it. He currently lives in Colorado and trains with the Army wrestling squads, and has also trained quite a bit in an Octagon with a friend who does MMA locally. He's a big UFC fan and would obviously be interested in giving it a shot, but unlike Brock Lesnar he doesn't have the name yet that would make such a thing financially viable at the start.
He'd have to pay for all of his own training, and even Brock has been training full-time for two years prior to his debut this Saturday. In two years, what will Lashley's name mean? He'd pretty much have to start at the bottom like anyone else for a few thousand bucks a shot and work his way up from there. Of course, there are all sorts of upstart groups, including the new YAMMA, who may want to throw big money at him, particularly if Brock destroys Mir on Saturday.
At 31 he's starting awfully late, though he does have the strong wrestling background (two-time Armed Forces champion, NAIA wrestling champion in 1997 and 1998, and a Missouri Valley College National Champion in 96, 97 and 98). TNA is obviously salivating at the chance to bring him in, but my gut tells me that would be a last-case scenario for him, although I could be wrong.
Among the tentative plans for WrestleMania, and I can guarantee that this will probably change 100 times: Cena vs. Hunter for the title, which means the plan right now is for Cena to win the belt from Orton at No Way Out. I have also heard it may end up a three-way with Orton, Cena and Hunter.
Either way, the chances of Hunter not fighting for the belt at WrestleMania appear to be about zero. It's said he has been politicking like crazy ever since Sunday night; Edge vs. Undertaker for the belts and the Mania streak, which has been the plan pretty much forever. They're doing TWO Elimination Chambers at No Way Out, so obviously Taker wins the other;
Flair vs. Kennedy, MVP vs. Matt Hardy for the US Title, which has been the plan forever; the remaining big stars (Hardy, Orton if he's not in the title match, etc.) in Money in the Bank; and something involving Vince and Finlay, though not necessarily a singles match. I have also heard Vince vs. Foley, Foley vs. Shane, or Finlay & Foley vs. Vince & Shane.
ECW writer David Lagana, who had been with the company for years and was at one point the head writer of Smackdown, was fired this past week. This had been something in the works for probably around two years or so. Stephanie fired him while he was on vacation and sent a one sentence terse e-mail to all the other writers saying that he had been terminated. It was said to be very cold unlike most e-mails where they at least put over the contributions of a dude who is leaving the company.
The gist of the story is that Stephanie believed that Lagana was responsible for leaking creative and management information to newsletters and websites. They had been watching him closely for years but could never prove it. The beginning of the end for him took place in May of 2006 during a creative meeting. The meetings take place at the building prior to TVs and PPVs, and the way it works is everyone gets together in a room with desks and such, very similar to a classroom layout.
Vince, Kevin Dunn, Steph and the lead writers are at the front of the class and all the low-level writers and agents sit at the desks. The writers go over the show and they do a read-through of the script, and then Vince makes all his comments/changes, etc. The agents also give their advice. So Lagana was sitting there at one of the desks on his laptop, and he usually sat in such a position where nobody could see his screen. But on this particular day there were people that could see his screen, and allegedly he was seen sending an e-mail with creative info to one of the major wrestling websites.
Nobody said anything at the moment, but after the meeting Stephanie was approached and told the entire story. She immediately confronted him and almost fired him on the spot, but he insisted he was innocent and managed to get off the hook. The key was, he was the tech guy in the company, where if anyone had a problem they went to him and he took care of it. He was very computer savvy and was able to permanently delete e-mails, likely hide IPs, whatever. The next week, however, he was immediately demoted from Smackdown to ECW. The picture that was painted was that it was a positive move, but it wasn't and he knew it.
He was working under Paul Heyman, who he'd known dating back to ECW. Still, he wasn't head writer and would basically just type up the scripts that Paul recited to him. Life got tough for him as he had a bad reputation from the Smackdown days of speaking down to the wrestlers (whether justified or not, that's what people believed), and people would make fun of him for his look (a dead ringer for the dude on Blue's Clues) and his voice ("Dr. Evil from Austin Powers").
Worse, when the Paul/Vince split went down he expected to be moved up to the head writer position of ECW but instead they moved Dusty into that spot. People said his confidence really started to erode at that point and things got really bad over the holidays. There were a great number of leaks, including stories about the viral campaign for Jericho and Mr. Kennedy being planned to be Vince's illegitimate son (and I should note, I got neither story from Lagana).
Stephanie blew a gasket and had a meeting with the agents saying there were to be absolutely no leaks and if you were discovered revealing information you would be fired on the spot. Without saying so directly, she said she thought she had a pretty good idea who was responsible and even looked directly at Lagana when saying it. That same afternoon, all the writers got laptop upgrades (everyone has a WWE-purchased laptop and Internet phone). The laptops, as it turned out, had shadowing software. Very shortly afterwards, Lagana was fired. The belief among the rest of the crew was that Steph had been feeding him false info on very specific information to see if it would get out, and it did.
There was also an incident a few weeks ago where Brian Gewirtz went into Lagana's office and sticking out of his laptop bag were a bunch of newsletters. Lagana tried to hide them but failed, then claimed that he wasn't actually reading them but they kept showing up because his subscription was yet to run out and he'd just happened to pick his mail up from home. Gewirtz then made snide remarks over the next several days about how he wasn't surprised that news kept getting leaked. Michael Hayes, who hates newsletters and websites, also began to really bury him right and left, apparently in a really demoralizing manner.
The level of paranoia in the company is truly astounding. Not sure if Stephanie realizes that people have home computers, home phones, private cell phones, pay phones, stamps and paper, etc. Still, because of the misinformation deal, writers are likely to be more leery about what information they share for the foreseeable future.
Regarding his loss to Chavo, clean loss to Edge a few days later in the big revenge match, and elimination by Chavo in the Rumble, we're told that Punk is in the dog house of late. The story is that he isn't listening to the agents and his house show matches are considered "indy level sloppy". He's botched a lot of stuff and the agents claim he comes to the back and laughs about it. There also may have been another political issue of some sort recently involving hitting on the wrong person.
American Gladiators goes to 90 minutes on February 4th
Nick Hogan had a pretrial hearing this week and the judge waived his right to a speedy trial. He's back in court on February 6th.
There are casting calls for the next season of Gladiators all this week and next week throughout America.
New announcer Mike Adamle, besides being part of the original season of American Gladiators, worked at WBBM in Chicago for four years and was said to be, and I quote, "TERRIBLE live." He was so bad that radio disc jockey Steve Dahl would encourage fans to tune in to see him mess up, and they actually had several compilation tapes of his smurf-ups on newscasts.
Torrie is still out with a back problem. She told Yahoo that she'd just gotten four big shots in her back for a nerve block. "I've got two herniated discs and a bulging disc. And that's just me. I'm just a girl that doesn't wrestle half the amount that the guys wrestle. Some people's bodies take it better than others. I guess I'm just a little more fragile than most people".
Apolo (German Figueroa), who signed recently with WWE, is in jail for a month after missing a court hearing in Puerto Rico regarding his domestic abuse case with wife Habana (who also works as a valet). This is a grand level of stupidity because both sides had agreed to dismiss the case and all Apolo had to do was show up to court. But he'd missed a few court dates and this one set the judge off, so he ordered him imprisoned until the next court date on February 25th.
credit: F4W Newsletter.
