Newsgroups: rec.sport.pro-wrestling From: hekunze@jeeves.uwaterloo.ca (Herb Kunze) Subject: Wrestling TidBits - 01/06 Message-ID: Sender: news@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca (USENET News System) Organization: University of Waterloo Date: Thu, 6 Jan 1994 14:39:09 GMT Lines: 181 - All Japan Women's Akira Hokuto retired as predicted at the end of the year. Sigh. Now I'm gonna have to find a new favourite "small" woman in the organization - Kyoko Inoue seems to be my obvious choice. Hokuto worked many ****+ matches throughout the year, even with a nagging knee injury (from a missed tope in the 1990 Japan Grand Prix tournament, which saw her land with her knee squarely on the guard rail - I have this on video and can't believe that she wanted to continue the match; she was supposedly slated to win the tourney), shoulder and elbow trouble (often working with those parts taped up), and a broken bone in her back (which Melzter often plainly called "working with a broken back"). Her crazy level of guts first surfaced when she suffered a broken neck in the second fall of a tag match after a tombstone piledriver off the second ropes and finished the match as booked, topes and all, even though it was apparently obvious that she had suffered a broken neck. I have never been able to find this 1988 match on video. - As already reported on the net, "Sparky" Thurman Plugg was previously known as Hollywood Bob Holly in SMW. He started with the promotion when it was still fairly young and left it around 05/92, choosing to stay with his regular job instead of going into wrestling full time even though Jim Cornette wanted to push him. As I recall, he wasn't too bad. - There's a rumour afloat that Bobby Heenen is in and Jesse Ventura is out in WCW as Ventura's contract runs to its end with Jesse not being able to reach a new agreement with the company. But there's a new twist in the story. Bobby Heenan is slated to start with WCW in two weeks. Talk is that he will debut as WCW's new commissioner (!), a role most recently rumoured to be filled by Nick Bockwinkel, because WCW has reached a new deal with Ventura to continue as colour commentator. - Meltzer reports that Kwang, who had a terrible promo-clip air on the WWF syndies is Tazmaniac. He resembles Taz from what we could see. - In my last post in mid-December, I was a little off on Madusa's ring name in the WWF. Alundra Blayze (not Alexandria Blaise) is right. I saw some of her title victory match and was amazed that Vince actually tried to promote this as a competitive athletic match and not a T&A show. Speaking of Madusa, I finally had the chance to watch my tape of WrestleMarinepiad I from 05/06/89. This show of course featured Chigusa Nagayo's retirement, but was headlined by a Lioness Asuka vs. Madusa match billed as determining the "global" ladies champion, a recognition that would be absorbed into the WWWA Title. Madusa did a lame-o interview before the match (not as bad as the other Americans on the show though). Nick Bockwinkel was brought in as special referee and did an interview before the match explaining that Asuka (who he called Akusa) was representing the world leader of women's promotions, AJW, and that Madusa was picked to represent the USA in this "global" match. It was pretty weird. Of course, Asuka won a fairly boring match. The undercard had some terrible matches on it, including Mika Takahashi & Kaoru Maeda vs. Miss Texas & Tiffany Million, a weird mix of wrestling and T&A. Tiffany has now moved on to even seedier pursuits. - Talk switches that Curt Hennig is WCW- or WWF-bound. - Barry Windham should return to WCW by February. - The WWF has Royal Rumble on 01/22/94 in Providence. The announced line-up has: - Yokozuna vs. The Undertaker for the WWF Title in a casket match - The Quebecers vs. Owen & Bret Hart for the WWF Tag Titles - Razor Ramon vs I.R.S. for the IC Title - Tatanka vs. Ludvig Borga - Royal Rumble (27 announced participants): Bret Hart, Owen Hart, Crush, Kamala, Doink, Mabel, Mo, Scott Steiner, Rick Steiner, Shawn Michaels, Diesel, Adam Bomb, Bam Bam Bigelow, Randy Savage, 1-2-3 Kid, Samu, Fatu, Bob Backlund, Greg Valentine, Rick Martel, Billy Gunn, Bart Gunn, Bastion Booger, Marty Janetty, Tatnaka, Ludvig Borga I dunno, but chances seem pretty likely that the 900-number scam, errrr, protest line, might just "sway Jack Tunney's decision" in allowing Lex Luger to participate in the Rumble match. It seems clear that the planned direction is for Luger to win the Rumble and then go over Yokozuna at WrestleMania X. Jim Cornette's interviews have certainly implied that. There is some talk, already posted here, that Undertaker will win the title and Yokozuna will turn babyface. The WWF Title match is being billed as the Undertaker's only shot at the belt, yet UT vs. Yokozuna has headlined many house shows during the time that the Rumble match has been hyped in this manner. This year is weird since many of the competitors in the Rumble will work in other matches on the card as well. I'm sure they'll use earlier events in the tag title match and in the Tatanka vs. Borga match to build a story line for events in the Rumble. Both the Quebecers vs. Gunns and Ramon vs. Michaels pairings are being saved for the houses. In the Royal Rumble Report segments, they identify Samu & Fatu backwards. This kind of mistake in WCW would lead to a barrage of posts complaining that the promotion is in chaos. ;-) What's Kamala doing at the Rumble? You'd figure that he'd be afraid to be on a card that featured a casket match. One locel reporter says to expect hostilities to flare between Owen & Bret (what a newsflash) "when the brothers take on the champion Nasty Boys." Argh. - WCW has Clash of Champions XXVI on 01/27/93, live on WTBS. Rumoured line-up includes: - Nasty Boys vs. Maxx Payne & Cactus Jack for the WCW Tag Titles - WCW has SuperBrawl IV on 02/20/94. Rumoured line-up includes: - Ric Flair vs. Big Van Vader in a Thunderdome cage match - Brian Pillman & Sting & Dustin Rhodes vs. Steve Austin & Paul Orndorff Rick Rude - The WWF has WrestleMania X on 03/20/94 from MSG in New York. - The WWF has the King of the Ring PPV in 07/94 from Philadelphia. - Videos: I posted something about the availability of videos yesterday. If you missed it, I'll send it to you in e-mail upon request. - Stuff: I uploaded three zip files to the ftp site (128.227.55.76) that may be of interest to some of you. They are named tidbit90.zip, tidbit92.zip and tidbit93.zip, with tidbit9x.zip containing all of my tidbits posts from 199x. Unfortunately, I lost all of my posts from 1991 when my hard drive crashed at the end of that year and I was never able to retrieve them from Nick's archive server. Also, is there anybody out there that can (or knows I how can) set up a mailing list (a la rspwtape, say) that could be used as a distributor of my weekly posts by e-mail? Just thinking of the amount of work I have to do to get the list of subscribers back up to date scares me - it would be much easier if people could subscribe and unsubscribe themselves. Any help would be greatly appreciated. - Great match summary: When I've posted this type of information before, I've received a mix of good and bad feedback about it. I think it's interesting enough to post a summary for the year 1993. Just remember to take it for what it's worth. The following data is based on all **** or better matches reported in the Observer and on any additional **** or better matches I've seen. Here's the promotional breakdown at the end of 1993: Promotion 1991 1992 1993 AJ 35 35 31 AJW 34 19 41 NJ 16 23 12 SMW - 6 12 WCW 17 22 34 WWF 6 19 14 Other 20 36 35 ---------------------------------------- Total 128 160 179 And here is a list of the top 20 or so performers for 1993, according to this data (Total **** or better matches per year are broken down into a sum: listed in Observer and not seen by me + listed in Observer and seen by me + not listed in Observer but seen by me) 1991 1992 1993 Total AJ Misawa, Mitsuhara 11+6+2 = 19 5+12+0 = 17 3+13+1 = 17 53 AJ Kobashi, Kenta 7+5+1 = 13 3+13+0 = 16 4+13+0 = 17 46 AJ Kawada, Toshiaki 9+8+1 = 18 5+12+0 = 17 2+10+1 = 15 50 AJW Toyota, Manami 3+5+3 = 11 2+ 5+3 = 10 8+ 1+5 = 14 35 WCW Austin, Steve 0+0+0 = 0 5+ 1+0 = 6 9+ 5+0 = 14 20 WCW Vader, Big Van 1+0+0 = 1 1+ 2+0 = 3 9+ 2+2 = 13 17 AJW Kong, Aja 3+5+4 = 12 3+ 3+0 = 6 5+ 2+4 = 11 29 WCW Pillman, Brian 2+3+0 = 5 2+ 4+0 = 6 7+ 4+0 = 11 22 AJ Taue, Akira 10+1+2 = 13 6+ 8+0 = 14 3+ 7+1 = 11 38 WCW Steamboat, Rick 1+1+0 = 2 8+ 2+0 = 10 8+ 3+0 = 11 23 SMW Prichard, Tom 1+0+0 = 1 4+ 1+0 = 5 10+ 0+0 = 10 16 WCW Flair, Ric 2+1+0 = 3 8+ 2+0 = 10 5+ 5+0 = 10 23 AJ Kikuchi, Tsuyoshi 4+5+3 = 12 4+ 6+0 = 10 2+ 6+1 = 9 31 AJW Nakano, Bull 4+6+3 = 13 0+ 1+3 = 4 3+ 2+4 = 9 26 ECW Douglas, Shane 0+0+0 = 0 2+ 1+0 = 3 6+ 2+0 = 8 11 AJW Inoue, Kyoko 3+5+2 = 10 3+ 3+3 = 9 5+ 2+1 = 8 27 AJW Hokuto, Akira 4+5+3 = 12 0+ 2+4 = 6 4+ 2+2 = 8 26 WCW Sting 6+3+0 = 9 3+ 6+0 = 9 5+ 2+0 = 7 23 SMW Gibson, Robert 0+0+0 = 0 2+ 0+0 = 2 7+ 0+0 = 7 9 AJ Akiyama, Jun 0+0+0 = 0 0+ 2+0 = 2 3+ 3+1 = 7 9 WWF Janetty, Marty 0+1+0 = 1 3+ 0+0 = 3 6+ 1+0 = 7 11 SMW Morton, Rick 0+0+0 = 0 2+ 0+0 = 2 7+ 0+0 = 7 9 Despite the fact that I would agree with only one real exception (I just don't enjoy Akira Taue) that these were people to watch in 1993, I think we have to be careful in making conclusions based on this data. I find it useful when deciding what video stuff to trade for. Herb...