The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '97: The Last Time WWF Was Number Two

by Dave Meltzer

  Kudo was twice whipped into the explosive barbed wire and blown up with the mini-bombs. She also took a bump onto the explosive barbed wire barricades on the open side of the ring for an even louder explosion. Tsuchiya pulled out a knife and carved up Kudo’s face. Kudo made the comeback and Tsuchiya was blown up and finally pinned for the big career finale.

  In the other key match, Onita & Masato Tanaka & Wing Kanemura (Yukihiro Kanemura) beat Funk & The Gladiator (Mike Alfonso) & Cactus Jack (which explains the Mankind suspension from Raw because of the booking here at the same time) in a Texas tornado street fight death match in 20:20 when Kanemura pinned Gladiator after coming off the top rope with a chair onto his head.

  Funk both threw a fireball at Onita and burned him with a flaming branding iron. Funk, Onita, Tanaka and Kanemura all heavily juiced. Funk and Onita brawled into the crowd with tables and chairs including Onita giving Funk a piledriver on a table. Since Kanemura got the pin, he then challenged Onita to a singles match which may be the big show headliner.

  WWF In Your House 15: A Cold Day in Hell

  Whether the WWF’s Cold Day in Hell PPV was going to be a good or a bad show was far less important than the bigger question the show would begin to answer: Does Ken Shamrock have any potential as an American style pro wrestler by World Wrestling Federation standards?

  Based on his first major match, the semi-main event on the 5/11 PPV show from the Richmond, VA Coliseum, the answer seems to be strongly in the affirmative.

  After both men worked much of the past week in Calgary under the tutelage of Bret Hart, Shamrock and Vader put together a match reminiscent of Vader’s classic Japanese matches with Nobuhiko Takada, but with a little concession to American style thrown in. They did an exceedingly stiff and more of a semi-shoot than most people would realize in what was very close to a UWF-style before fans who didn’t quite understand the meaning of a lot of what they were seeing. And because Takada is one of the great workers and pro wrestling athletes of our generation and it is totally unfair to believe Shamrock, with his limited pro wrestling experience, could walk into a new field and already be the level of performer as the elite members of that profession. But it was a good match. Better than anyone had the right to expect. Far better than many people undoubtedly going in would have feared.

  In comparison to other celebrity athletes from other sports such as Lawrence Taylor, Reggie White or Steve McMichael, Shamrock had an advantage. He was trained originally to be a pro wrestler by the likes of the late Buzz Sawyer and Nelson Royal. He did work for a few months in late 1989 and early 1990 on a small indie promotion in the Carolinas as Vincent Torelli, the Italian Stallion, even forming an occasional tag team with Ricky Steamboat, in a promotion which included the likes of The Nasty Boys, Robert Fuller and Dean Malenko. He did one tour of All Japan Pro Wrestling under the name Ken Shamrock, where, in his own words, because of lack of experience, he was totally lost.

  He wound up hooking up with Malenko and trained in submissions, not by traditional martial arts teachers, but with pro wrestlers like the Malenkos and Karl Gotch. He ended up being booked with the Universal Wrestling Federation, a worked shoot style group in Japan with the likes of Akira Maeda, Takada, Masakatsu Funaki, Minoru Suzuki, and Yoshiaki Fujiwara, under the name Wayne Shamrock (because Ken Shamrock had done a pro wrestling tour for All Japan and the promotion didn’t want him to be confused with another traditional style pro wrestler). That promotion folded just as Shamrock was getting started, and he moved to Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Gumi in 1991.

  By 1993, he was a legitimate major wrestling star in Japan, and he, Funaki and Suzuki left PWFG to form Pancrase, taking a major career risk since he had already made a name for himself as a star since Pancrase was designed to largely be a shoot sport, the closest thing to legitimate sport that the pro wrestling world had seen in generations.

  Just as Pancrase was getting started, so was Ultimate Fighting in the United States. Shamrock was in the initial UFC PPV show in November of 1993, beating Patrick Smith in the first round, but being choked out by Royce Gracie in the second round. He eventually became the top star in Pancrase and its first world champion winning a tournament in late 1994, giving it up to Minoru Suzuki in 1995 as a business loss, before having a much publicized falling out with the promotion in 1996 over a contract dispute. He became one of the major stars of UFC after going to a 36:00 draw in a rematch with Gracie, and no doubt its highest-paid performer, but fell short of being the dominant superstar that due to his look and charisma, that the company hoped he would turn out to be. When SEG failed to pick up his option on his contract, he looked back at pro wrestling as a new livelihood, but this time pro wrestling of the more traditional sense.

  It came down to New Japan and the World Wrestling Federation. What could have beens are just that, but it was the WWF that wanted him more and got him. So they had another highly paid non-pro wrestler on their roster with apparently no idea whatsoever what to do with him. But this is not Chapter Two of the Mark Henry story.

  The most obvious, and most lucrative angle, the outsider angle that New Japan would have almost surely done to perfection, was blown in an immediate quest to get him on television for ratings purposes, a mistake in hindsight since there were no ratings to be gotten initially. After a few weeks of being put on television well before he or they were ready with a long-term storyline to build, the buzz was out that this was yet another in the long list of recent WWF booking failures.

  But after a few well produced video features and Shamrock himself becoming more comfortable with his position and doing live interviews good enough for pro wrestling while not compromising his character into a cartoon, there was no question the potential was there to be a star—if he could project being a star in the ring.

  Vader was both the best and worst opponent for a first encounter. The best, because of his own famous series of matches with Takada and experience at a worked shoot style, to draw from in knowledge of how to not compromise the shooter mystique of his opponent, but at the same time make it entertaining pro wrestling. The worst because it was way too soon for this match to take place. Vader should be the ultimate challenge for Shamrock months after blitzing every prelim wrestler in sight in record time. At that point, his finally being put in a position of jeopardy and his selling much of the match and coming out of the down predicament and coming out with the decisive win would have meant ten times as much. But you can only play the hand that is dealt to you.

  When ring announcer Howard Finkel announced that the next match would be the no holds barred match, the response from the nearly full house of 9,381 (7,681 paying $116,547—the largest pro wrestling gate, although far from the largest wrestling crowd, ever in the city along with another $55,000 in merchandise sales) was rather tepid. It was hardly the fever pitch one remembers in years past when a well promoted stipulation would bring a huge crowd buzz just as Finkel said a few words and the crowd registered which match was coming up. But when Shamrock came down the aisle, he got a good response, the best thus far of the show. The crowd didn’t take to him as a main event superstar, but they did see him as a star.

  The match itself was, as mentioned before, largely based on the three-match Takada-Vader series of 1993-95. But the most important thing wasn’t the moves, but how Shamrock came across. His selling was far better than expected. The crowd got with him to actually a surprising degree when he was down. His offense was believable, actually far more believable than all of the far more experienced wrestlers who worked the undercard on the same show. If you consider his experience level, he actually came across in the ring as a Japanese “natural,” one of those wrestlers that comes along every few years who in their first few matches you can already see are going to make it to the top. His style is still more suited for Japan, which in a sense is good because it breaks him from the rest of the pack and makes him unique, but bad because it requires a lot more work from the announcers to teach the crowd to register things they’ve never
been taught before such as stiff forearms and muay thai style leg kicks.

  But this was also another example of Vader as the single greatest performer of his size in the history of this industry. Exactly how good Shamrock really is at this point and really can be as an American worker may not have been fairly indicated because of who he was in the ring with.

  A decade ago, there was a strongman, gymnast, acrobatic, actor, bodybuilder who was trained in Calgary by the name of Tom Magee. He was 6-5, looks of a model, physique of an Ultimate Warrior, one of the strongest men alive, and could do cartwheels and backflips in the ring. In those days where size and physique ruled, here was a guy who was nearly as big as Hulk Hogan and ten times the athlete. He had world champion written all over him. That was, until he was put in the ring.

  One night in Rochester, NY at a WWF television taping, he had a dark match with a solid prelim wrestler who was experienced at getting good matches out of total stiffs. Magee was so impressive in that match that it became almost preordained, after the guy’s very first WWF match, that he was the next Hulk Hogan, the heir to the throne.

  Of course, Tom Magee never made it in pro wrestling. He had no charisma, and he couldn’t translate his athletic gifts into making a match. He never had another match one-tenth as good as the match he had in Rochester. About five years later, the wrestling world had changed once again. The guy put on the throne was the solid prelim wrestler. Bret Hart. The moral of the story is you can only take first impressions for what they are. First impressions.

  Cold Day in Hell was just another Sunday afternoon PPV show that will largely be forgotten by the end of the week. Shamrock-Vader and the main event, Undertaker vs. Steve Austin, were good matches. The undercard was as lackluster as ever. The show generally lacked heat. The finishes were clean. The outside interference was kept to a minimum so that the one point it was used for storyline (Brian Pillman ringing the bell so Steve Austin couldn’t pin Undertaker) added to the show rather than resulted in the feeling of just another screw-job. But it’s more and more clear that the WWF is a company that has one tremendous feud on top, and even that one is getting overexposed, and very little depth otherwise. And the undercard performers who should have decent matches on paper somehow seem to get worse by the month.

  This hasn’t been confirmed, but I believe neither Vince McMahon nor Jim Cornette attended the show due to personal situations. On the broadcast which Jim Ross did with Jerry Lawler, they said that Rose Anderson (a close family friend that McMahon’s kids would refer to as “Aunt Rose”) had passed away the previous night and Cornette’s girlfriend came down with what they at first thought was appendicitis although turned out to be something less serious.

  WCW Slamboree

  After the longest ring absence of his career, a full eight months after surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff suffered in a Japanese match against Kensuke Sasaki, Ric Flair, the greatest wrestling performer of his and probably anyone else’s time returned to the ring at age 48 on his home turf, the Charlotte Independence Arena for Slamboree on 5/18.

  The show, almost universally well received, saw Flair and local football hero and last year’s NFL sack leader Kevin Greene of the Carolina Panthers and long-time Flair wrestling rival Roddy Piper from the so-called glory days of Mid Atlantic Championship wrestling face Scott Hall & Kevin Nash & Syxx in a match probably more interesting for its behind-the-scenes political ramifications than for anything that took place in the ring.

  There had been numerous ideas for the main event, including Flair and Greene, two of the city’s biggest sports heroes, on opposites side of the ring due to last year’s Steve McMichael-Greene angle figuring McMichael, as a Horseman, should team with Flair and Greene, who was turned on by McMichael and screwed with by Flair in his last appearance, be with a babyface team.

  Ideas changed by the moment, and it wound up with Flair & Piper & Greene against the NWO, but when Hulk Hogan decided his movie commitments wouldn’t allow him to do the date (or whatever his real reason may have been), Hall & Nash suggested Syxx, an idea Flair and Piper balked at, which led to words being said and some interviews on television on both sides that didn’t go anywhere close to how they were scripted. In recent weeks, both sides had gotten on the same page and whatever has been said the past few weeks was all business and not ego, at least as much as that’s possible in a business fueled by out of control egos.

  Piper, who has creative control of all his angles, attempted to pull out of the match, which led to a booking concession and eventually to Hall, Nash and Syxx agreeing to do a three-way job finish which popped the crowd locally beyond belief. In return, Hall & Nash theoretically get their win back in Moline, IL on 6/15, where Flair and Piper get to do their angle and the two legends of the past generation and long-time friends get to work together and do their thing without worrying much about wrestlers who either have no respect for what they’ve accomplished in this business, or wrestlers who look at things based on what people can do today as opposed to what they may have done in another place on another day. Of course that latter attitude is forgetting that it is something that can all be thrown out the window when it comes to judging certain individuals.

  Flair’s return drew a sellout of 9,643 paid and $167,705, the second largest gate in the long and storied history of Charlotte wrestling (a 1985 outdoor stadium match between Flair and Nikita Koloff that drew 27,000 fans remains the all-time record). Merchandise sales topped $100,000, among the largest in company history.

  Was it a success? By the standards that made Hulk Hogan the greatest wrestler of all-time, it was. Oh, Hogan isn’t the greatest wrestler of all-time? By the standards that made Ric Flair the greatest wrestler of all-time, the reality of being 48 has turned him into a regional version of Hulk Hogan. Hey, there are worst criticisms than being compared with the biggest money maker the sport has. Although none worse to a fan of Flair, comparing him to Flair’s fans’ symbolic Antichrist.

  But standards of people as to what constitutes great change depending on who is their favorite at the moment. To call the reaction to the match great would be fair. To call the match great would be cheapening the standard set by every great match Flair had over the previous 20 years. The match on this day in this building was going to be great to the audience live and on PPV so long as Flair didn’t break his leg and won at the end. And so it was, by that standard. If it was any other six guys doing the exact same match, people would recognize that the only real wrestling in the entire match was provided by Syxx.

  In some ways this wasn’t all that different from all those Hulk Hogan vs. John Studd and King Kong Bundy matches in Hogan’s prime, in that the fans live thought they were good matches so long as Hogan didn’t break his leg when he fell down from that legdrop and won at the end, not to say this match was THAT bad. When Flair talked about Dick the Bruiser in St. Louis in his mid-50s, he was talking about a fan reality.

  In Charlotte, or anywhere in the Carolinas, Flair will still be the biggest draw and most popular star if he chooses to be, in the year 2003, even if he becomes Dick the Bruiser in terms of ring ability. A PPV main event against Hogan for the title, despite the cringes that sound has for many within the company, is still probably the biggest money match the company could put on with the exception of Hogan vs. Sting.

  You may say Flair’s interviews are out of touch or out of style. But they were still better than Bruiser or Crusher’s were when they were drawing big money and a hell of a lot less mobile at an older age. Hey, Sinatra can still draw money today, and in this business, Flair is Sinatra. A bigger star today, as long as he works in small doses, than he was in the day he really was the best.

  This show, as with most WCW PPV events, had a strong undercard. Nothing off the charts, but most matches were as good if not better than they figured to be on paper. It also featured easily the worst match of this or many other years, the Steve McMichael-Reggie White fiasco. Terry Taylor, who trained McMichael and Greene for their match wi
th Flair & Arn Anderson last summer, pulled off a miracle. Well, maybe it wasn’t a miracle because of the Divine intervention on the other side of the ring. But lightning didn’t strike a second time in a different place. White may have put on the single worst performance on a major PPV show since the legends of grown-up Danny Partridge and Peter Brady in a dark match in Chicago. But the match did garner the expected media publicity for WCW, with coverage that night on both CNN and ESPN’s sports reports and in the 5/19 USA Today.

  WWF King of the Ring

  The World Wrestling Federation’s fifth annual King of the Ring PPV show had an interesting plot irony.

  Hunter Hearst Helmsley was scheduled to win the King of the Ring last year but, largely due to punishment from an incident in Madison Square Garden, wasn’t even on the card, having been eliminated in a television preliminary tournament match. Fast forward to this year and Helmsley was eliminated in a television preliminary match, but due to an injury to Vader and several changes in plans, Helmsley was not only put back in the tournament, but given the crown on 6/9 at the Providence Civic Center.

  King of the Ring would have to be described as a show that ended up being far better in actuality than it looked on paper. On paper, the tournament didn’t look interesting and the only match on the show that appeared to be potentially memorable was Shawn Michaels vs. Steve Austin. Instead it was a solid, although unspectacular show.

  Initial plans were for Helmsley to be a first round loser to Ahmed Johnson, as, in fact, he was in their Raw is War match on 5/12 in Newark, DE. After a convoluted explanation necessitated by the injury to Vader making him unable to wrestle Crush on 5/19 in Mobile, Helmsley was put back in the tournament and beat Crush to advance into the tournament. Based on television commercials taped weeks in advance, the final four in the original plans were to be Ahmed Johnson vs. Vader and Goldust vs. Savio Vega, so as it turned out, only Johnson of the originally planned final four were even there.