by Dave Meltzer
There is no question the WWF has been trying, actually for more than one year although it’s gone farther in this direction over the past several weeks, to change from being a kiddie-oriented show to appeal more to early 20s males, the group most likely to buy tickets to arena events and the group most likely to create a heated atmosphere in the buildings. It is an obvious reaction toward losing the Monday night ratings war to WCW, which actually popularized the “bad attitude” wrestlers with the NWO spray painting, pointing to their crotch and saying “Bite me.” Due to fear of potential sponsor backlash, WCW has attempted of late to differentiate itself from WWF and Eric Bischoff has ordered some of that behavior when it comes to gestures, language and phraseology to be toned down.
The Raw show airs from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. on the USA Network, and there is nothing more sexual or for that matter more violent on the Raw program than USA regularly runs during those hours on other nights of the week. There are arguments, such as were expressed during the Brian Pillman/Steve Austin gun angle, that pro wrestling looks too real to get away with the same things that occur with regularity of a violent drama or a t&a tease show, as much of the USA network’s late night programming is combination of.
However, much of the Raw show is also repeated on both Saturday and Sunday mornings, and very little has been edited out. If the WWF is going to put most of the more risqué material in the second hour War Zone show, that was a recent decision in face of the heat as the Michaels/Helmsley deal wearing nothing but their jocks was taped for the start of the first hour on 12/22. It is believed that material, along with the Goldust/Luna interviews and angles, will largely be edited off the weekend morning television shows. In different countries where television broadcast standards are different, lots of things going on Raw don’t make it to the airwaves.
This of course brings up the question of standards in pro wrestling. Please. Pro wrestling has no standards. It will exploit deaths in a war to get its top babyfaces over. It will exploit deaths of its personnel to draw a television rating the next night. It will regularly advertise matches and talent knowing full well it isn’t going to appear. To say it’ll exploit the physical health of its competitors and then chew them up and spit them out is an understatement, although in that aspect it is in no way any better or worse than any sport with any kind of an injury rate. It will exploit almost any situation if there is a possibility it’ll mean ratings or dollars.
Every business, including this one, should have standards. It just so happens in this one the standards are very low. The economic standards are that if it goes too far, its audience will constrict. In wrestling’s past, this has happened numerous times with numerous promotions, although the nature of the desensitized audience today makes it less likely than in the past. A niche group like ECW can go very far since it’s not drawing a general audience to begin with. A more mainstream group like WWF has an audience that it may turn off by going too far off the deep end.
But at this point there are no signs that is happening, even though people express the fear this direction will end up with that result. Television ratings are up. That probably can be credited in most part due to the curiosity over the Survivor Series finish and the aftermath regarding Bret Hart, but there is no evidence any of these risqué angles have resulted in any measurable number of people turning off their television sets in disgust either. Arena attendance hasn’t shown any decline, in fact overall, it is on the rise.
And the decline in the buy rate of the 12/7 PPV from the one the month before is more attributable to the television more being focused on burying a guy who wasn’t there and less on pushing the main event challenger combined with the unusual circumstances leading up to making the November main event a hot ticket, and not due to a turn-off because of the controversial nature of the angles or television behavior of some of the top stars (other than in the case of Michaels, having him spend more time getting over his past opponent than his future one in his television interviews leading to the PPV).
My feeling on parents who have kids watching is simple. When the WWF started down this path, there were parents probably caught in a squeeze with them watching something with their kids that they didn’t realize was coming. That day is over. The direction is clear, although I think the Raw show, and the second hour for sure, would best be served having a TV-M rating as opposed to TV-PG since that’s what those ratings were designed for in the first place.
I personally had a lot of qualms regarding pro wrestling when it was aimed to young children in the 80s, particularly the idea that Hulk Hogan’s name was used as a vitamin pitchman for vitamins aimed at young children when he himself attained his stardom in wrestling largely through using excessive amounts of steroids and he was hardly alone in that contradiction as the entire business was marketed to young children filled with performers where steroids had become a staple of their diet.
Then again, there are plenty of NBA players with dolls sold at Christmas and people who are close to the NBA can point out similar contradictions between public perception and reality. By the way, because somebody else does the same thing doesn’t make it any less of a contradiction. At this point if parents have a problem with the content, they need to know and after a week or two of viewing should know what it is and where it is going, and they should act appropriately. Don’t blame the producers of the movie “Scream 2” if you take your young children to the movie and they end up being scared during some of the scenes. At the same time, don’t blame the media for investigation and criticizing when standards of practice reach new lows, the shows air on weekend mornings and still have a sizable young childrens audience, and where many of the sponsors themselves aim their products toward children.
The WWF has not only opened itself up for criticism but is asking for it. They can either modify the product or decide to attempt to weather the storm, although the latter approach does have its risks. There has been no audience backlash nor any sponsor backlash at this point. But for anyone to predict what the long-term of this will or won’t bring would be foolish.
The WWF was hit hard on many fronts in the early 90s and the problems did not immediately affect the business side. But in the long term, its business and for that matter the entire industry, took a major tumble and the result was several years of multi-million dollar losses for both WWF and WCW (although WCW was going to lose money at that point in time no matter what the economic climate was).
The entire industry started rebounding in 1996 and this past year has been one of the most profitable in this country in many years. If the lessons of what took it down in the past are ignored, the probability is that it’ll eventually in some form go down again for the same ignoring of warning signs.
Yet, that is hardly the only controversy related to the product. Over the past week, coming in the wake of the Bret Hart fiasco in the Survivor Series finish, two of the WWF’s three remaining top stars, Steve Austin and Shawn Michaels, dropped their respective singles championships (Michaels losing the European belt and not the WWF belt) without either doing a job.
In the case of Austin, the original plan was for him to lose the title at the 12/7 PPV to Rocky Maivia. When he balked, a compromise was worked out where instead he got over his defiant anti-establishment role, Maivia got the title although the reasons clearly made no sense and Austin didn’t have to do a job. As best we can tell, there was no heat regarding what ended up happening as everyone involved in the decision making process was comfortable with the compromise, although the end result was a storyline that made no logical sense in regard to Maivia ending up with the title.
The approach Austin took, basically since the current plan is for him to win the WWF title at WrestleMania from Michaels, is that since he’s headlining Mania, he didn’t think it would be good for him to do a high-profile job to a heel who is just getting established as a top name like Maivia, even though no doubt the finish would have involved tons of outside interference. Not to mention that unlike in his p
ast, his physical limitations wouldn’t allow him to put on a great match in a losing effort.
Whether one agrees with the logic or his side of things, and it isn’t believed that he has creative control clause in his deal with Vince McMahon like Hart did, there is a logical argument that can be made if you want to take that side. Austin shouldn’t be the IC champion today. He’s unable to work lengthy singles matches and that title belt won’t make him any more of a star than not having it. The title belt will be a big help in elevating Maivia, although he would be helped that much more as a new superstar if he actually won the belt from Austin.
At the same time, the argument could be made that Austin should be protected from doing a job since he is going to headline Mania not to mention that he’s currently the hottest star in the industry. Should he wrestle Maivia with his limitations, unless they had a truck parked in the aisle again as a gimmick and had D-Lo Brown going through the windshield, they would be hard pressed to have a good match. But that line of logic hardly makes sense for the second scenario.
At the 12/11 tapings in Lowell, MA, Michaels dropped the European belt to Helmsley. It started out with the aforementioned interview where they ended up in nothing but their jocks. Sgt. Slaughter then came out and said that since Michaels hadn’t defended the European title in more than 60 days, that he was ordering a title match to be held later in the show and that Michaels’ opponent would be Helmsley. At one point, which will likely be during the first segment of the second hour, the match begins, however Owen Hart did a run-in before it ever got off the ground.
The match was then teased until the end of the show, and the two did a mock slow-motion match (imagine this, an overtly fake pro wrestling match) ending with Michaels literally laying down for Helmsley and getting up and crying mockingly about how sad he was for losing the title, and Slaughter, vowing to not be made a fool of, ordering Helmsley to defend the title against Hart on the ensuing Raw, which will air live on 12/29 from the Nassau Coliseum.
Since this scenario hasn’t completely unfolded, we’ll just look at the logic defying in it. With Michaels holding the European title (which he originally was given since he wouldn’t job for Davey Boy Smith in England but was then given it presumably to set up doing a later job in April for Smith on the second England PPV show, which obviously also is never going to happen), it created the perfect opportunity for the WWF to create a new world title contender and someone who could be put in the position vacated by Bret Hart, whether it be Dude Love, Owen Hart, Ken Shamrock, Vader or someone else. That wrestler could pin Michaels cleanly and win a title, albeit a secondary title, which would logically spin off in the wrestler holding the clean win in a title match over the WWF champion but with the WWF belt not at stake, getting a WWF title run either on PPV or at the house shows in the early part of 1998.
Instead, Michaels, to avoid doing the logical job and a time when the job would have helped business and done nothing to hurt him since he’s maintaining the theoretical top spot in the company as WWF champion, instead got the belt moved over to Helmsley, whose dropping it to any of the aforementioned wrestlers or anyone else wouldn’t carry anywhere close to the boost of them to the next level. We aren’t clear whether it was Michaels suggestion to give the belt to Helmsley so he could avoid doing the job when asked to drop it, or the promotion simply recognizing all the problems inherent in asking Michaels to do a job (when the real job they need without any compromise is the one to Austin) and coming up with the scenario as a way to get the belt onto somebody else without ruffling Michaels’ feathers at this point coming in the wake of Austin not doing a job when he was originally asked isn’t clear.
For those keeping score, that makes of Michaels’ nine championship reigns in his WWF tenure (three WWF titles, three IC titles, two tag team and one European) he’s done exactly two jobs to drop them, both in situations where it was a short known turnaround (WWF title to Sid, IC title to Marty Jannetty) until he got the respective belts back.
In the excuse category, there was one career ending knee injury, there was one walking out after a fight claiming unsafe working conditions, there was a break-up of a team rather than dropping a tag title, there was one quitting the promotion, there was one stemming from a concussion in an out of the ring skirmish and there was this most creative one of all. That makes him either the most clever or the least professional champion of our era, not to mention arguably the most talented to keep getting titles with his track record.
Even though the end result is the same, there is an obvious huge distinction in where the problems lie in the process that led to the end result of this specific instance. Not to mention the environment all these things is leading to, and the four DQ endings on the last PPV for a promotion that for most of this year has attempted to run mainly clean finishes but in recent months has become nothing but run-in DQs in the top matches, seems to indicate that problem is getting even more out of hand.
37 – WWF and UFC Working Together
DECEMBER 15
The world of NHB and traditional style pro wrestling again came closer together with a working agreement between the UFC and WWF that resulted in the announcement by the former of a Ken Shamrock vs. Nobuhiko Takada match, the first NHB match-up between huge name pro wrestlers, on its 12/21 PPV show from the Yokohama Arena.
And even stranger than the alliance between reality fighting and the historical masters of fiction is whether or not this match will actually take place. Shamrock, with the approval of the WWF, signed for the match on 12/4, and SEG officially released it on its web site the next day. However, this news was strangely never announced by the Japanese group that is running the local promotion for the show, nor did the WWF say anything about the match either on the 12/7 PPV show, in which Shamrock was in the main event, or its live Raw show the next night, despite an apparent agreement with SEG to push the match.
The word is that WWF is planning to tape a feature of Shamrock training for the Takada match and insert it into the 12/15 Raw show, and use it to plug the UFC PPV on 12/21, although by ignoring the match completely on 12/7 and 12/8, it shows that the WWF is at best going to mention the match but not make a big deal of the match. The WWF will also have the rights to use the match after the fact on its television should it desire to do so. And the weirdest of all was at the Kingdom house show on 12/8, reporters there talked with Takada, who once again claimed, as he has publicly in the past, that he is suffering from a variety of injuries and wouldn’t even be able to start training until the new year and claimed that he had never agreed nor would he be doing the UFC show.
As of press time, the situation regarding whether that match will take place or if Shamrock will appear on the show, perhaps against another opponent, are unclear.
The deal to get Shamrock to appear actually started several weeks back. SEG made the WWF an offer believed to be in the $100,000 range for Shamrock to appear on the show, and WWF turned it down flat because they had major plans for Shamrock and didn’t want to risk either his health or his reputation in an environment where they weren’t in complete control.
After that point, there were negotiations between SEG and WWF to secure Leon White (Vader) for the show, being that Vader was a huge drawing card in Japan as a pro wrestler with New Japan and UWFI (a worked shoot group) and a lot of wrestling fans believe he’s tougher due to his size than people who train specifically for real fighting. WWF may have considered White, but eventually turned down that proposal with the feeling that due to their own roster being depleted with injuries, they didn’t want to risk White’s health since he was in their plans as well.
Although there were reports elsewhere putting the fact there were talks involving these two together and that their first match in Japan for FMW was booked in the manner it was specifically to build up a rematch, at no point was it ever considered having a shoot or a worked match with Shamrock vs. Vader on the UFC PPV show. Also, it has been made clear that at no point was SEG interested in ha
ving any pro wrestlers, no matter how big their names, do the show in any kind of a worked situation.
The talks largely were dormant until word came from Japan that Takada would only do the show if his opponent would be Shamrock. With ticket sales for the live event slow due to not having a big name Japanese draw, it was felt imperative to get Takada to do the show. SEG more than doubled the offer to the WWF for Shamrock at that point, at which point the WWF became very interested. It is believed the money offer is actually largely coming from SEG’s Japanese partners, a group headed by a Mr. Sakata with money backing from Tsutya Video, a Blockbuster-like chain in Japan.
After a few days of negotiating and the price changing upwards once again to where it would be by far the biggest payoff in the history of UFC, and among the biggest for a pro wrestler or NHB fighter for one match in history (Rickson Gracie reportedly earned more for his Tokyo Dome match with Takada, and it isn’t in the range of Hogan’s major PPV payoffs), Shamrock signed the deal. The contract terms it is believed give Shamrock veto power over choice of a new opponent in the event of a late substitution. In the past, Shamrock had expressed interest in fighting either Vitor Belfort (who doesn’t have a signed opponent at press time for the show) or Tank Abbott (who is scheduled at press time to appear in a tournament), but whether he’d want to do so with only one week of training is another question.
From a business standpoint, if correctly promoted, Takada-Shamrock should have a lot of curiosity and some box office impact in Japan, although with it going in “cold” (no storyline build-up) and not much time to get the pub out, not to mention no major office with weekly television to promote the match, it is by no means enough to guarantee a huge crowd at Yokohama Arena by itself.