by Dave Meltzer
Instead of the media calling attention to just what the new rules were about such as the Octagon needing to be 40-feet in diameter (a rule added to force the event out of state because there wasn’t time to build a new octagon, not to make it safer), or doing the very small amount of research to realize the brutality of the matches don’t live up to the media hype, the imposition of mandatory boxing gloves which are impossible to wrestle in thus nullifying the most physically safe legal maneuvers in the UFC and turning it into a striking battle among some athletes whose specialty isn’t striking in many ways, based on how people had trained, actually made the fights more dangerous.
This was a commission that looked the other way the entire decade of the 80s sanctioning pro wrestling events while 90% of those involved were juiced to the gills. And I don’t even want to think about the boxing abuses they’ve looked the other way at. On the very night of the UFC show, Nevada allowed a spaced out fighter with documented recent drug problems into the ring for a world title fight and he basically suffered a nervous breakdown with the nation watching on HBO. But even if the new rules would make the event safer, this is the same thing as one week before that boxing title fight, the commission deemed that any punches to the head would be illegal based on the prospective danger, or, that the two boxers should instead fight under freestyle wrestling rules because the injury rate in freestyle wrestling is less than that of pro boxing.
Or one week before an NFL championship football game, the government ruled that because pro football has such a high injury rate, the two teams instead would be at the last minute forced to square off under baseball or soccer rules instead. That key point was ignored across the board and the commission was praised for making it safe and the promoters, who are hardly without blame, were vilified for moving out of town rather than comply with the new safer rules.
SEG officials have blamed a lot of their problems on Donald Zuckerman, promoter of the rival Extreme Fighting. It was Zuckerman and Extreme’s antics in Quebec that got the entire genre basically banned from PPV throughout Canada, a market which was actually more successful on a buy rate basis than the U.S. They blamed Zuckerman for piggy-backing on the expense they put out to get the bill passed, and then blowing it for them by running a show in Manhattan before establishing a safety record in Niagara Falls, which led to the New York Times and New York media flap and for all real purposes ruined both Niagara Falls and their attempt at their biggest show to date at the Nassau Coliseum.
If there was a positive to all the problems, it’s that the publicity may have caused an increase in the buy rate, although there is no way whatever buy rate increase would cover the costs incurred by the move. Very preliminary estimates indicated an increase from the 0.5 for Ultimate Ultimate, which would put the group still in the same league as the WWF and WCW shows in January, but with all the added costs destroying the profitability.
With the exception of a Coleman vs. Don Frye championship match which will be the main event, no matches have been finalized for the next PPV show. SEG plans on holding off a potential Coleman vs. Belfort match for quite a while. The question now is until that point, who can they put up against either to give them a competitive match? While Marco Ruas’ management has reached an agreement verbally about a potential three show deal culminating with a title match, there is no signed contract in regard to that as reported here last week. With fighters like Ruas, Belfort, Abbott, Ken Shamrock, Dan Severn and Kimo potentially available for singles matches, it’s now a matter of matching them up and putting together matches that both sides want. Shamrock wants Abbott, Severn or Belfort, but not Ruas. Abbott wants a Brazilian and claimed Vitor is too small for him and says Kimo will be too easy, but he refuses to fight Shamrock although he knocked him calling him a “sham” on the broadcast.
WWF In Your House 13: Final Four
With the exception of a hot main event that decided its new champion, the WWF’s Final Four PPV show on 2/16 in Chattanooga, TN wasn’t particularly eventful.
The show was built, more than any WWF PPV show to date, around one match. And that match delivered. Nothing on the undercard was particularly bad, but it was largely routine except for the tag title match that had some good wrestling and creative break-up spots but a totally lame finish. The crowd didn’t appear to be into most of the matches except for the main event, nor into the wrestlers as much as would be expected.
The show drew 6,399 fans paying $76,762 or a little shy of being full in the UTC Arena set up for a lesser capacity than usual, curtained off for a 7,500-seat configuration. Very preliminary estimates are that the PPV did not do well. With so much hype on the Thursday special and a lackluster line-up, basically promoted as a one-match show, it figured to do a lower than usual buy rate, but adding the final four match being to determine the new champion figured to at least pick up interest in the show when it came to impulse buys.
Instead of airing a match on the pre-game show, they spent the half-hour hyping the main event. Dok Hendrix announced all four participants’ names, and Vader and Steve Austin’s names received boos, but only half-hearted, Bret Hart’s name received a mixed half-hearted reaction and Undertaker received a substantial, but hardly overwhelming babyface pop. Austin opened doing a long interview. The point where Undertaker came out and Austin’s mic didn’t work was a planned spot, unlike some other spots both on the Superstars show earlier and later on the PPV where dead mics weren’t planned spots. As the pre-game show went on there was a match in the background between the Godwinns and the Head Bangers (won by Godwinns), although the crowd didn’t appear to be interested.
Noticeable by their absence from the international broadcast teams were Jacques Rougeau Sr. on the French team and Arturo Rivera on the Spanish team. Even more noticeably absent was Vince McMahon, as Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler handled the announcing. Apparently McMahon wanted to be backstage to make sure all the ego’s would be in check in the final four match and everyone understood what was expected of them. Ross did a solid job early, making a series of average to below average matches seem, well, average to below average. He did better than most in the tag match and he and Lawler did a very good job in building excitement into the main event.
WCW SuperBrawl VII
WCW’s SuperBrawl ‘97 from the San Francisco Cow Palace was yet another successful event both from an aesthetic as well as financial standpoint. As is typical of WCW shows, the undercard was largely one good match after another. The main event, while not a disappointment in that who expects a Hulk Hogan match to be any good, was still the worst match on the show. The big shock of this show was the Randy Savage NWO heel turn, helping Hogan beat Roddy Piper in the main event.
Hogan-Piper was another financial windfall for both the two headliners and the company. While buy rates aren’t available at press time, it likely did well, but probably not as well as their original meeting at Starrcade. Locally, from my perspective this was the single most anticipated live event in this area in the past 25 years, and that includes the legendary San Francisco Battle Royals of the 70s and the biggest Pat Patterson or Ray Stevens match.
The show sold out nearly two weeks in advance with 13,324 in the building (12,145 paying $192,000). The gate was the third highest in the history of World Championship Wrestling (behind only the Ilio DiPaolo show in Buffalo, NY and the Hogan-Savage match in Las Vegas last Halloween Havoc), although had they booked a larger building, it would have easily broken the company’s gate record. It was the largest live gate ever in Northern California. The $93,000 in merchandise sales was the second largest in company history behind only the Nitro in Chicago in January.
The number of signs brought to the show was the most I’ve ever seen and what was impressive is that it was across the board, not just for the megastars like Hogan, Piper, Hall, Nash, Sting and Flair, but significant for guys like Dean Malenko, Debra McMichael, Konnan, Rey Misterio Jr., Juventud Guerrera, Four Horsemen, etc. They did confiscate ECW signs although a few were visibl
e as the show went on. There were numerous fans with Sting face-paint, more than I’ve ever seen at a WCW show. The response was such that they’ve already planned on moving the World War III PPV in late November from the traditional Norfolk to the Oakland Coliseum Arena.
That said, the heat for the show overall was nothing impressive. The only two matches that had real good heat were Kevin Sullivan vs. Chris Benoit and Hogan vs. Piper, although the quality of the wrestling from top-to-bottom on the show was very good. It was an easy thumbs up. Not a card of the year and no matches of the year, but on a 12 match live show, eight of the matches were good and none were all that bad.
WCW Uncensored
Dennis Rodman’s first major foray into the world of pro wrestling turned into something of a publicity coup for World Championship Wrestling, probably more important than the otherwise forgettable PPV show that he debuted on.
WCW Uncensored was the typical WCW PPV show of the past year. The lines are familiar. Good undercard. Terrible main event. Booking with more holes in it than Swiss cheese. Well, in this case, the undercard wasn’t as good as most of the shows of the past year. But some of the angles were very good, actually two of them were excellent. The booking holes were large enough to fit The Giant in some of them.
And even if the show blew, and some of it did, in particular the main event, it accomplished something the best of PPV shows don’t—it got the company mainstream publicity. Not on the level of the first few WrestleManias. But more than anything WCW has done in its history. Some of it was embarrassing, such at the Atlanta Constitution, which ran a nine-paragraph preview to the PPV show in its Sunday sports section, complete with a Rodman photo, but in every reference, called the promotion he was working for the “WWF,” even to the point of saying he would be training at the WWF Power Plant in Atlanta, and that the WWF had a television show called Monday Nitro on TNT that was delivering good ratings. Very little of it was written in a positive manner, but what do you expect when you combine two well respected institutions to the general public like pro wrestling and Rodman?
But it was there, and nobody knew it better than the orchestrator, Hulk Hogan. It was Hogan’s influence on Eric Bischoff that got him to match, or exceed the WWF’s offer to Rodman for WrestleMania. And WCW scored a major moral victory, being in the Chicago Sun-Times nearly every day promoting its PPV show while WWF had WrestleMania in the same city one week later. ABC radio ran the story on its national news the next morning (well, through the 6 a.m. newscast) reporting it as Rodman wrestling and being in a tag team match with Hogan as his partner in Charleston, SC that they won, and using Tony Schiavone’s PPV commentary of his involvement.
However, most major newspapers failed to make mention of Rodman being involved in the wrestling show. Hogan made sure to surgically bind himself to Rodman’s side as much as possible at the PPV show, so when the horde of photographers, particularly shooting for every major sports paper in Japan, got their shots of Rodman wearing his NWO t-shirt, guess whose face is side-by-side. Actually the main event seemed more of a backdrop to the real story, the NWO guys posing for photos with Rodman and everyone who has power trying to get themselves hooked up with him for photo ops—which wound up being Hogan, Randy Savage, to a lesser extent Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, and of course, Roddy Piper.
It appears from media reports that Rodman’s deal with WCW is that this show was the angle to build for a match on 7/13 in Daytona Beach, FL for the Bash at the Beach PPV. There will only be one match, according to media reports, on the two-show deal, unlike a three-show deal we had speculated on last week. When the Bulls season ends, Rodman will get a few weeks of training in at the Power Plant so they can hopefully choreograph his match well enough to be acceptable, much as they did last summer with the debut match of Kevin Greene and Steve McMichael. The only money figure running around Chicago is that Rodman received $2 million for the deal, but I’d suspect that figure is close to double what the real number is.
The show largely got a mixed response, with many of the thumbs up specifically saying they thought the show was saved by the angle that ended the show, where Sting finally attacked the entire NWO, dropping them all on the back of their heads with Scorpion death drops (a much cooler name for the same move than slop drop), including, just as the show went off the air, Hogan himself. Sting got a thunderous pop, as he should have since they spent six months building up to that moment, and he soaked it in while the credits ran. And true to form of keeping their storylines consistent, the final name in the credits was the WCW Senior Vice President—Eric Bischoff. You mean he really wasn’t suspended in real life? Next thing you’re gonna tell me is that Kevin Sullivan isn’t really doing Jacquelyn.
Uncensored on 3/23 drew 9,295 (7,640 paying $101,184) fans to the North Charleston, SC Coliseum—or 360 shy of a sellout although there were points where the box office was closed and it was sold out for the moment until they opened more seats up. With the exception of future of the Stinger and the Worm, probably the biggest question on the minds of people who viewed the show was—if I was as incompetent at my job as Dusty Rhodes is at his, how long would I last?
Rhodes, whose announcing has gotten progressively worse, if that’s even possible, was well past the point of unbearable. He ruins it completely for Tony Schiavone, who really appears to be trying to catch up in a rapidly changing world that Rhodes wants to single-handedly drag back to 1975. The fact that Bobby Heenan has been living off his name and reputation for the past year only makes things worse for Schiavone for having to carry 600 plus pounds of dead weight through all these endless hours of television every month. And people wonder why he has a bad neck.
Not that he was perfect, as he kept speculating about who WCW would get to replace Rick Steiner, and when there was nobody, it only left the audience with an empty feeling as the main event started, thinking WCW was a bunch of wimpy putzes once again. Don’t even get me started on Mike Tenay. Or Scott Steiner. Or Rey Misterio Jr.
WWF WrestleMania 13
There may be a PPV show almost every week, but there is still one name that stands above the rest—WrestleMania.
That is largely based on history—it was the first PPV pro wrestling show ever—it was the second show in history to be closed-circuited (a now dead part of wrestling history) on a national basis and it was the show that in many ways saved and paved the ways for what would happen in the pro wrestling industry for the rest of the 1980s. And it is still, and has been, the biggest money pro wrestling show in North America every year it has been in existence.
But the 1980s are long gone. Seven years in pro wrestling, the way it moves and changes with such rapidity, are like dog years, 49 years in some other worlds. And this year’s WrestleMania, going in, seemed to have the least interest ever. It was expected to be a one match show. And fortunately for the name WrestleMania, the one match delivered to match of the year caliber.
WrestleMania showed WWF doesn’t have the depth of talent as WCW, but we all knew that. And they sunk to WCW levels for a main event by putting Undertaker in with Sid, ending with Undertaker capturing the WWF title for a second time—the fifth WWF title change already in 1997.
But Bret Hart and Steve Austin more than saved the show with a match phenomenal in workrate, intensity, and telling a story, resulting in the expected double turn—Austin to being the loner but top babyface in the promotion; Hart to being the promotion’s top heel. With the aid of the blade, tremendous announcing and Hart’s performance, Austin’s face turn couldn’t have been structured any better. Hart’s performance in doing three run-ins during the Sid vs. Undertaker title match nearly saved that match as well. And by backing off from Ken Shamrock after the match with Austin, Hart established Shamrock immediately as a force to be reckoned with down the line.
Continuing in the new rougher, more violent and more hardcore image the WWF is attempting to present, the WWF has, in these times of cable censorship, become the World Apology Federation. Faarooq making racial
remarks about Ahmed Johnson that would cause him to be practically lynched if it was a white wrestler making the same remarks, is within the bounds as long as we apologize after.
Despite the long-standing policy regarding blood, graphic blood on the second straight PPV, including a close-up shot of the pool of blood in the ring after the match which was a cause of concern the next morning within the cable world, is okay to show in close-ups and as a key part of a storyline because we’ll simply apologize. Usage of all the weapons, including the striking with billy clubs—the same things that would get ECW booted from PPV—is okay, we’ll just apologize afterwards. We didn’t have any swearing, because that was last week’s attempted shock and it would be hard to apologize twice for the same thing without the apologies coming off as hollow as they truly seem to be. And how about them putting that black wig on Tony Atlas’ head and calling him Chyna? Oh, that wasn’t Tony Atlas in a sports bra. Have you ever seen them both at the same time. “Politically Incorrect, and Damn sure going to apologize about it.”
This is not meant as a complaint about blood. It was a part of this business since the 40s. When not overdone and turned into an expected cliché, it is often good for business. Certainly in the Hart-Austin match, the blood wasn’t used for the sake of providing blood alone, but as part of telling the story of the match and did enhance the drama of the match.