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Post by Back to the Codyverse on Sept 27, 2024 4:15:07 GMT -5
Yes. Always good to see actual reporting from Dave Meltzer from these days
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Post by jason88cubs on Sept 27, 2024 5:20:44 GMT -5
NOV 87
--With all the Starrcade/Survivor Series coverage, there hasn’t been a lot of space to devote to the annual Japanese tag team tournaments occurring in late November/early December. New Japan will start the Japan Cup tournament on November 9, with the finals on December 7 in Osaka. There will be a round robin format with points (5 for pin or submission victory, 4 for a win via dq or countout, 2 for a draw, 0 for any kind of loss or a double dq). Last year they made it so any match that ended in a double countout had to be restarted and fought to a finish. The only foreign teams to be invited are Ron Starr & Ron Ritchie and Dick Murdoch & Scott Hall. The only other announced team is Mr. Pogo & Kendo Nagasaki. Dave figures a list of possible pairs and speculates this will be the most stacked tag team tournament in Japanese history. All Japan, meanwhile, has their Real World Tag League opening on November 21 and concluding on December 11. This will also be a round robin, but no matter how you win you get 2 points for winning, while a draw or double count out gets 1 point, and a loss or double disqualification gets 0 points. This tournament won’t have the winners go on to a championship match like New Japan’s, but the tournament looks very predictable and the moment the bracket is announced it should be easy to figure out what the finals are and make a solid prediction of the eventual champion. Foreign teams will include Stan Hansen & Terry Gordy, Bruiser Brody & Col. DeBeers, the Funks, Abdullah the Butchet & TNT, the Youngbloods, and Tom Zenk & Terminator. The Japanese teams are not definite, but PWF World Tag champs Tenryu and Hara are definite. Jimmy Snuka was supposed to team with Brody, but looks like he’ll be touring New Zealand during this period instead. Both of these tournaments are part of what is traditionally the hottest time of year for business in Japan.
--It looks like WWF and the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission could be gearing up for a fight. WWF is behind the recent movement to deregulate pro wrestling in Pennsylvania, and it looks like the commission is retaliating by decreeing that all referees and ring announcers for wrestling shows must be provided by the commission. Previously, both WWF and JCP would use commission referees, but guys like Mel Phillips and Howard Finkel would do ring announcing and referees employed by the promotions would handle main events. The October 10 WWF show at the Spectrum was not approved by the commission until October 6, and according to Linda McMahon, the commission at one point made a threat that state police would close the event if it proceeded without state sanction. The commission had denied approval to WWF with a claim that WWF “hadn’t responded to letters requesting information about television broadcast revenues” and that, upon receipt of the information they gave approval. In McMahon’s statement, she said from a WWF perspective, state regulation is simply no longer appropriate. The commission argues deregulation would turn pro wrestling into blade city and cost local jobs, and that the very nature of pro wrestling makes regulation necessary. The first show to be affected by all this was the October 24 NWA show in Philadelphia during the Ric Flair/Nikita Koloff main event. Commission referee Dick Kroll refereed his fourth match in a row during the thirty minute main event (and two of the earlier matches had gotten quite wild and necessitated he run around quite a bit) and completely screwed up the finish. Fans report he was obviously exhausted by the end of the match, which saw Koloff get disqualified for flipping Flair over the top ropes. Kroll raised Nikita’s hand three times while telling ringside officials that Flair was the winner, which may not sound that bad on paper but fans say it was pretty awful in person.
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The top rumor in wrestling is the possible merger or buyout of AWA and Memphis. Negotiations have taken place that, if concluded, would give Jerry Jarrett control of the ESPN tv slot, which would probably be the best news in the western hemisphere for a lot of fans. No verified reports have come in yet that any deal has been completed, though.
Dave expects to have to wait another week for the full story, but basically UWF is on life support as a circuit and the Crocketts are about ready to pull the plug. They may keep the name around for unification matches, but Dave believes we are no more than a few weeks out from the termination of the circuit as even a semi-separate entity. Most of the low-card UWF guys were let go effective the first week of November, though there are conflicting reports on names right now. What Dave does know is that all the prelim guys, with the possible exception of Road Warrior Animal’s brother Terminator, will be gone by Starrcade. Eddie Gilbert is out as booker, but remains as a wrestler. Expect more names gone soon.
--Numerous departures from Memphis: Brickhouse Brown, Don Pass, Pat Tanaka, Paul Diamond, The Nasty Boys, and Tracy Smothers. Brown and the Nasty Boys were expected. Brown got heat, but couldn’t translate that into drawing power. Meanwhile, Dave says the “Nasty Boys wrestled more like Nasty Girls.” Smothers had been planning to leave for a while to go to Alabama and re-form his team with Steve Armstrong (who just left Alabama). Tanaka had a disagreement with management. No idea what happened with Bass and Diamond, but Diamond and Tanaka could make a promotion some good money as a mid-card tag team.
--No confirmation, but rumors are flying that Wrestlemania IV will be at the Superdome in New Orleans. Guess McMahon isn’t afraid of a challenge, considering New Orleans is where Orndorff and Hogan only drew 2,000 in the midst of their feud where they were selling out everywhere else.
--The Midnight Rockers are gone from Alabama. They had a pretty good non-title win against the Russians (then-AWA Tag Champions) and were apparently being set up for a series of tag title matches, but that seems to have fallen through (plus the Rockers are gone anyway). One thing that bugs Dave is that every Rockers tv match has Gordon Solie bringing up an “interesting story” about Shawn Michaels’ background, but never completing the story because “we don’t have time to go into it here.” Every time, either the action picks up or a guest commentator interrupts, and Gordon never returns to the point. This past week, he made it just a little farther and now we know the story is from when Shawn was three years old, but now that the Rockers are gone we’ll never know what it was.
--Strike Force have won the WWF Tag Titles. They won the belts at the October 27 Superstars taping, beating the Hart Foundation, and the match is planned to air on November 7. Neidhart submitted to a Boston Crab, and referee Joey Marella botched the finish by calling for the bell too quickly and made the hold look unbelievable as the finish.
--WWF has changed up the card for Survivor Series a bit. Don Muraco replaces Billy Graham on team Hogan (they did an injury angle for Graham), while Jake Roberts takes his place on team Savage, and Ricky Steamboat replaces Junkyard Dog on team Savage. Team Hogan is now Hogan/Muraco/Bigelow/Patera/Orndorff and Team Savage is now Savage/Roberts/Steamboat/Beefcake/Duggan. Word is they don’t plan to use Graham as a wrestler anymore, but what role he will transition into is unclear.
--Ted DiBiase blew his knee out last weekend. Dave’s last update on the situation is that Ted was scheduled for knee surgery on October 30. Return time from arthroscopic knee surgery is generally a few weeks, but given DiBiase has a bunch of matches opposite Hogan in less than two weeks, Dave expects Ted will make it back early and wrestle those shows.
--All the wrestlers Dave mentioned last issue who had left Memphis are back, except Tracy Smothers. Dave has no idea what’s going on. The Nasty Boys are back and have face paint like the Road Warriors and “studded glove outfits” like Demolition. Tanaka and Diamond are babyfaces and feuding with Don Bass, Brickhouse Brown, and Carl Fergie. Dave’s at a complete loss, as Tanaka and Diamond had been announced for Central States as heels and Davee had heard reports last week that Tanaka was talking with other promotions.
--WWF has announced a really interesting show for the Meadowlands in response to Crockett’s November 25 Nassau Coliseum show. The main event will be an old-timers battle royal featuring announced names Lou Thesz (71), Gene Kiniski (60), Pat O’Connor (61), Killer Kowalski (61), Edouard Carpentier (61), Bobo Brazil (63), Nick Bockwinkel (52), Al Costello (65), Tony Garea (41), Chief Jay Strongbow (59), Pedro Morales (45), Pat Patterson (46), Blackjack Lanza (52), and Arnold Skaaland (62). They’ll also have a battle royal with their regular guys, and Ted DiBiase vs. Ricky Steamboat and Strike Force vs. the Islanders.
--WWF] A fan rushed One Man Gang in Rochester, New York on October 27. His name is Joseph D’Aquisto, and he tried to take Gang down with a double leg. They wound up rolling around on the mat for a moment before 15 security guards dragged him away, and he was fined $50 for disturbing the peace. The guy apparently wanted to be a pro wrestler and was listed at 6’7” and 310 lbs, but WWF had rebuffed him. And thus you have the Observer debut of future WCW wrestler Roadblock, who will have his first pro match on October 28, 1987 if Wikipedia is to be believed.
--Speaking of main events, Dave says it’s almost a certainty at this point that Hogan and Andre will main event Wrestlemania IV. Bigelow simply didn’t make the giant impact they wanted, so any thought of him vs. Hogan is out the window. Of course, it doesn’t help that WWF has made it practically impossible for anyone to make a giant impact.
--Jim Crockett Promotions announced this weekend that they would start their closed-circuit airings of Starrcade at 8 pm Eastern, putting them head to head with Survivor Series. The live show in Chicago will still be starting at 4 pm due to commitments with pay=per-view companies, but Crockett doesn’t want to go down without a fight. Pushing Starrcade to a 3-hour tape delay for closed-circuit should prevent the show from being a suicidally low take at the box office, as it will now be positioned for the best time on the best night of the year for getting wrestling fans into theaters. Starrcade, as it stands, should at least be a minor success now. If not for WWF’s interference, this should be the most successful Starrcade in history, owing to the greater strength of Crockett’s tv network now covering nearly the whole country and pushing out the show to more than twice as many cities as ever before. That said, and WWF aside, there are other reasons it won’t be as successful: the card isn’t being built to the same heights as previous years and crowd enthusiasm has dropped a lot since the summer. WWF looks on the surface to be the main factor, but they really only are affected in that their big national ppv debut is now pushed back to January 24, 1988. They won’t make the money they would have on ppv now for this Starrcade, but that wasn’t an option in previous Starrcades and those were considered successes. Survivor Series might capture some fans from Starrcade, but that will only be a small percentage who actually can. PPV is in its infancy, and only seven percent of homes in the US can even get Survivor Series. The two companies draw from very different audiences as well, so overall there’s not a huge competition between them in terms of ppv. The success of Starrcade this year can thus be measured on its own merits. It would be more successful if it could be on ppv nationwide and at a good time slot, sure, but that’s an extenuating circumstance and not a main factor to consider in determining the show’s success. The show’s success ought to be determined on what it can get out of its card and the hype for it on tv, and thus what it can pull at the gate. Last year’s Starrcade grossed nearly a million dollars, with roughly $650,000 of that coming from the live spots in Greensboro and Atlanta. This year’s show will have less than 10,000 seats available in Chicago, meaning a sellout will gross roughly $200,000, and that means lots of ground to make up before the show can be called any kind of success.
--WWF has finalized the Survivor Series card. The Billy Graham injury angle aired, and the teams for the women’s match have been finalized as Sherri Marte;/Glamour Girls/Dawn Marie/Donna Christanello vs. Moolah/Jumping Bomb Angels/Velvet McIntyre/Rockin’ Robin.
--The Saturday Night’s Main Event with the Randy Savage face turn did a 9.7 rating and a 30 share. On November 11 they’re taping a new one to air the Saturday after Survivor Series, and another will be taped on December 7 for January 2. Both of those shows are planned to have Hogan vs. Bundy, with Andre in Bundy’s corner. Andre is going to wrestle (Dave thinks wrestle “isn’t the correct adjective to use”, which is the exact same grammatical flub Kevin Nash would later make famous with the word play) a few matches before the end of the year. He’s scheduled to team with Rick Rude vs. Hogan and Orndorff on December 12.
--UWF is done. Most of the major wrestlers are sticking around Crockett, and Ron Simmons is the only UWF guy who got any kind of push out of the November 2 Power Pro tapings.
--Shane Douglas is back with Crockett. He was given notice and asked if he could leave early to go to school in Pennsylvania, then got told the notice was a mistake and they wanted him back.
--WWF put the Strike Force title win on this week’s shows and are also putting on big matches for the next few weeks because of November Sweeps. Basically, they want to look good and draw big viewership for ad purposes, since these shows will help determine advertising rates for the next few months.
--WWF taped Saturday Night’s Main Event for November 28 in Seattle on November 11. They sold out 16,000 at the Seattle Center Arena, and Jesse Ventura did color instead of Heenan. The matches don’t sound that hot, unfortunately. Probable airing matches include Ted DiBiase over Hillbilly Jim in three minutes with a clothesline. The heat it did get came from Ted insulting Brian Bosworth and getting the crowd behind Bosworth more than they were for Hogan later in the night. Randy Savage beat Bret Hart in what’s said to be the best match on the card, a 15 minute match full of Bret working the ankle and Savage making the comeback after the commercial to win with a small package. Bam Bam pinned Hercules. This match had a double countout at three minutes, then after the commercial they restarted the match and Bigelow pinned Herc with a slingshot. Harley Race and Jim Duggan went to a disqualification of some kind (some confusion over the exact result), with Duggan not looking great. Bundy beat Hogan via countout and Hogan has now suffered his first national tv loss since becoming the big star. Andre did some interference and got sent away, and Heenan eventually held Hogan’s leg to keep him out of the ring. Word is only Hogan and Savage’s matches had any heat, so they’ll definitely need to sweeten the sound. The next Saturday Night’s Main Event will be taped December 7 for a January 2 air date, with a Hogan/Bundy rematch headlining.
--TV ratings are down a lot for Crockett, and that’s worse news than the recent bad houses and unrest among some of the bigger name talent. Neilsen’s weekly syndication reports of the top 15 syndicated networks saw Crockett drop out of the listings entirely very quick. The Wrestling Network had consistently been holding around number 7 and peaked at number 4, and now it’s out of the top 15 and even behind number 14-ranked All-Star Wrestling Network (which includes POWW, Pro Wrestling This Week, and AWA). Crockett’s package is on 200 stations, while All-Star’s package hits a combined 123 stations, so having fewer viewers than them has to be a bit of an embarrassment. All told, the ratings for Crockett’s package have dropped about 40% in two months, all leading up to their biggest show of the year and November sweeps. The timing could not be worse, and Crockett had bought UWF primarily to improve the tv network. The results speak for themselves, though and it’s clear Crockett will lose affiliates if the ratings don’t make a big turnaround. Crockett’s got affiliates in every major market except Boston, so that should illustrate the state of the numbers. WWF probably earns $13-15 million per year off television, and buying UWF was Crockett’s gambit to be getting into that level of business. But viewers are sending a clear message, and tv ratings are the most important barometer in this day and age for determining public interest in a promotion. Live gates being down can be explained by a lot of things (unwanted matches, bad economy, competition, etc.), but if tv ratings are down it says people are turned off by the product itself. With all current plans, nothing can be done until after Thanksgiving, because Starrcade is already planned and it’s too late to throw out a last-minute big angle. Unless a lot of things happen that bring fans back into the arenas, though, 1988 could be a rough year for Crockett (that it will be). Dave hopes they don’t look at Starrcade and their show at Nassau Coliseum, which should both do well, and think they’ve just solved things.
--AWA also has bad news, which includes lots of shows being canceled. As of Dave’s most recent report, only two shows are booked for December, which is traditionally one of the best months for wrestling in the midwest, so something is really wrong. The wrestlers who don’t have weekly guarantees are going to be hit real hard and won’t be able to survive the month. Lots of stories about guys quitting, coming back, quitting, and whatnot. Tommy Rich is gone, D.J. Peterson has given notice, Steve DiSalvo left after one night, Jerry Blackwell is gone, and there are three more uncertain (one of which is probably Ray Stevens, who is scheduled for WWF’s old timers’ battle royal). The San Francisco show on Saturday should answer some of the questions on who’s staying and who’s going. Some are talking about coming in, but that won’t be until 1988 at least, as it looks like there’s no money to be made in December. The big story for AWA on that front, and it makes sense for both, is that the Midnight Rockers are negotiating a return in January. Guess January being when hell freezes over was obvious in hindsight, as that’s when they were supposed to return.
--[Oregon] Steve Doll and Scott Peterson won the Pacific Northwest tag titles on November 7. They’re dressing like the Midnight Rockers and calling themselves the Southern Rockers now.
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