From: hekunze@jeeves.uwaterloo.ca (Herb Kunze) Subject: Wrestling TidBits - 05/11 Date: 1995/05/12 Message-ID: X-Deja-AN: 102426165 sender: news@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca (USENET News System) organization: University of Waterloo newsgroups: rec.sport.pro-wrestling - The WWF has "In Your House" on 05/14/95. This is the first of the cheaper and shorter WWF PPVs. Line-up has: - Diesel vs. Psycho Sid for the WWF Title - Smoking Gunns vs. Yokozuna & Owen Hart for the WWF Tag Titles - Bret Hart vs. Hakushi - Bret Hart vs. Jerry Lawler - Adam Bomb vs. Mabel (KoTR qualifier) - Razor Ramon vs. Jeff Jarrett & Roadie in a handicap match The final match used to have Ramon teamed up with 1-2-3 Kid, Sean Waltman. There's lots of talk that Waltman's career may be over after he suffered a neck injury in a practice run of the above tag match. If he does return to the ring, it will be a few months down the road; in the interim he would be able to work a managerial spot, but wouldn't be able to take bumps. While we're on injuries, there's some worry that Diesel's knee injury may require substantial time off. Without that time off, the fear is that Diesel's ability may become severely limited. No sarcasm intended. - WCW has Slamboree on 05/21/95. Tenative line-up includes: - Hulk Hogan & Randy Savage (with Renegade) vs. Vader & Ric Flair (with Arn Anderson) - Sting vs. Big Bubba Rogers - Kevin Sullivan vs. The Man With No Name (Butcher) - Nasty Boys vs. Harlem Heat for the WCW Tag Titles - Great Muta vs. Paul Orndorff for the IWGP Title - Arn Anderson vs. Alex Wright for the TV Title (30 minute time limit) *- Wahoo McDaniel vs. Dick Murdoch - I don't think I missed any discussion about it in the newsgroup, since it at least wasn't mentioned explicitly in any subjects that I skipped, but the Observer's letter page this past week was strange, with letter writers all criticizing ECW fans who chanted "Fuck Sabu!" and Dave Meltzer offering a somewhat placid defence for Paul E. Dangerously's handling of the situation (Sabu no-showing the Three-Way Dance). From England, "I'm sure those fans by now realized how foolishly they acted. The trouble with a lot of Americans is that they take everything for granted and don't realize a good thing." From Illinois, "Sabu is better off in New Japan" and "[Paul's action] was both a classless and unintelligent act." And from an hour's drive away in Burlington, Ontario, strongest of all, "[The fans] once again demonstrated a total lack of class in starting up a fuck Sabu chant. [...] The ridiculous chant was in the fine tradition of the `Flair is Dead' chant at previous shows. It portrays the ECW Arena crowd as the moronic buffoons they really are." In response, Meltzer defended Dangerously's action, pointing out that, as Paul has said, he has to keep control of the locker room - morale would plummet if one guy can get away with missing dates. In response to the criticisms of the fans, Meltzer only offered, "The crowd had a right to be disappointed on that night." It's sort of curiously interesting to see what opinions people off the net (I didn't recognize the names at all, so at best they are lurkers on the net) have formed. - WCW's US Title Tournament looks like this so far: Sting --\ /-- Randy Savage |--Sting Savage--| Arn Anderson --/ \ / \-- Butcher |--Sting Savage--| Johnny B. Badd --\ / \ / \ /-- Steve Austin |--Paul \ / Steve--| Paul Orndorff --/ \ / \-- Jim Duggan |-- Final --| Meng --\ / \ /-- Ric Flair |--Meng / \ Flair--| Marcus Bagwell --/ \ / \ / \-- Patriot |--Meng Flair--| Brian Pillman --\ / \ /-- Alex Wright |--Pillman Alex--| Bunkhouse Buck --/ \-- Big Bubba Rogers It appears that they'll do the predictable thing and have Flair vs. Savage turn into a no contest, leaving a Sting vs. Meng final for the Bash PPV. - WCW has the Great American Bash on 06/18/95. Tentative line-up includes: - No Hulk Hogan - Randy Savage vs. Ric Flair - Steiners vs. Nasty Boys for the WCW Tag Titles *- Sting vs. Meng for the US Title (tourney final) - Diamond Dallas Page vs. Dave Sullivan *- Jim Duggan vs. Kamala *- Arn Anderson vs. Renegade for the TV Title *- Brian Pillman vs. Alex Wright To my mind, there are three promising matches in the above line-up and several that could be worse than abysmal. The Pillman vs. Wright match could be a pleasant surprise. Not only are they bringing Kamala into the mix, they'll even bring his one-time WWF manager, King Curtis Iaukea, with him. Hogan's absence brings the price tag for this show down $3 to $24.95. - The WWF has King of the Ring on 06/25/95. - The next UFC is slated for 07/14/95. This show will feature a Dan Severn vs. Ken Shamrock "superfight." - WCW has another PPV on 07/16/95. This is the show that will take place on a beach with free admission. Tentative line-up includes: *- Hulk Hogan vs. Vader for the WCW Title in a cage match - The WWF has SummerSlam on 08/28/95. There is much speculation that Lawrence Taylor will figure into the card and there's even some crazed talk that the WWF will take William "The Refrigerator" Perry up on his desire to become a pro-wrestler. Speculation has a threesome of LT, Perry, and a face Bam Bam Bigelow taking on Ted DiBiase's corporation. There's a less scary prospect of LT working as Bigelow's corner man for the night. - Interview: Here's the second installment of an interview with Jim Cornette from Wrestling Perspective (P.O. Box 401, Camillus, NY, 12031-0401, USA; possibly still $1.50 per monthly issue), another great interview sheet that attempts to fill John Clark's shoes. The interview was conducted on 07/20/93 and will give you an idea of the quality of the newsletter. WP: What do you think needs improving and what are the promotion's strong points? JC: Our strong point is definitely the content of our TV. It doesn't look like the WWF show, but at the same point, everyone I've talked to universally, whether they're in or out of the business, says, "Jesus Christ, you guys have got the best TV in wrestling." I think our talent has been a strong point and our live shows are always good. We just don't have stinky shows. Those are our strong points. The points that need to be fixed are partially beyond our control, but at least we know what they are. We need a couple more strong TV markets. The whole wrestling business, it's hard to get strong TV markets. We need that. Basically, we need to draw more fans (laughs). WP: If I'm the General Manager of a television station, particularly given the state of the wrestling business and the falling numbers, with the exception of Monday Night Raw, how do you convince me to run Smoky Mountain in my market? JC: I'm glad you asked that question because a lot of people say, "How do you convince people to run your show instead of WCW or WWF?" That ain't hard. I'm being serious. If they're going to run a wrestling show, they're more likely to run ours more than anyone else's. Just because we say, "Look, we not only are going to be coming into the area once a month with live events, we're going to advertise on your station when we do it. We have our wrestlers available for co-promotions with your kids club or anything they have that's going on with a particular station in the market. We've got our ratings in other markets to prove that people watch the show. We will be a more locally oriented program. We'll even tape television in your viewing area, which nobody else is doing in these markets." We're the only syndicated television program that tapes anywhere in east Tennessee. The only other one is the country dance thing they've got on the Nashville Network. The last time eastern Kentucky saw a taping was when the tube was being invented. But the problem is, number one, with the glut of syndicated programming going over to all the Fox stations because the networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, have taken up so much time on their affiliates that all the syndicated programs, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Kung Fu: The Next Generation, Brady Bunch: Next Generation. Everything goes to the Fox station and they're jammed. Then you've got infomercials. The Pocket Fisherman, the Ronco Record Selector and the Goddamn Miracle Varnish Remover paying these stations $1,500, $2,000 a week just to run this infomercial. They get that money in hand, they don't have to do any work for it and they use it to buy Cheers. The only thing is all of the TV stations know, and some will admit it, they drive the viewers away in droves. You've got to get a Program Director or a Sales Manager that doesn't have to like wrestling, but has to not, not like wrestling and you've got to get one that says, "Hey, I want people to watch the station and we'll sell advertising and it will be a good local tie-in thing." Basically, that's how you do it. WP: At the same time, do you have to live down the reputation WCW and the WWF had with these stations? JC: It was harder at first because we were just going in saying this is what we're going to do. Now it's not as hard and they don't look at you so cross-eyed because now you're saying this is what we are doing in these other places. WP: What is your average rating in your markets? JC: It's hard to say. In Knoxville, the WWF show does a 2 rating and a 9 share, I think. We're on the same station. They're on from 10 to 11, we're on from 11 to 12. We do a 3 rating and a 12, 13 share. WCW here is on the CBS station Saturdays at noon and we do the same number they do. We're on the Fox station Sunday mornings at 11 o'clock. When WCW was up against us in the Tri-Cities, Johnson City, Briston, Kingsport, they were on the Fox station, we're on the NBC station. We did a 2 rating and a 10 share and they did hash marks. That was after we'd been on like six months. In the February book, we did a 4 rating and a 20 share and this was Sundays at 11 o'clock in the morning on the NBC station. The second place show did a 1 rating and a 7 share. So they've moved us to Saturdays at noon now on that station. They moved us two weeks before the May books and we tied for first place in the time slot after being there two weeks. Up in eastern Kentucky, we're number one in the time slot. We did a 3 rating and a 13 share against Saturday Night Live in Beckley, West Virginia. We're either the number one show in the time slot or close to it at all stations. We out rate every other wrestling program that's on in competition with us in any of our markets. At least that shows that there's interest there and the people that are going to watch wrestling are watching our show. WP: What about camera cutbacks? JC: It's real simple. When business went in the toilet for everybody back in April and May, we started taking in less money, as did everybody else. WCW's average house was like $4,500 in the month of May. Ours was a little bit less than that. But at the same token, we don't spend $40,000 on our house show. We were taking in less money and the TV production, which we've had a daggum good TV show for a long time, was one of our major expenses . We sat and looked at it and said, "Jesus Christ, we need to cut back on this until we work on some sponsorship deals that we're working on to help try to pay for part of the production costs." We found that we could save an incredible amount of money by going to a two-camera setup instead of the four cameras and losing tbe slo-mo. Basically what we've done is go from four cameras to two cameras and we lost our slo-mo replay. Slo-mo isn't what sells tickets, although it does make a nicer looking show. We did several of those in December. We had to cancel one taping because we couldn't get the truck for the date that we needed so we just did it like this. Dave Meltzer called me and said, "Man, those last two weeks shows were some of the best I've seen so far." People are looking at what's in the daggum thing. The TV stations look at the production because they don't know anything about wrestling. When we're trying to sell a TV station, we sure show them one of the good shows. WP: But in your mind it's like a handheld camera at a Steamboat-Flair match is still going to show they're working well. JC: Yeah. We have one floor camera and one play-by-play camera With our four camera setup, we had two floor cameras, a play-by-play and one camera at the set. Now we have a floor camera one instead of two, a play-by-play camera and the set camera goes back and doubles as the floor camera. Basically it hasn't been cutdown that much. Not using that production truck we save a lot of money and like I said, we're working on some sponsorship deals and a couple of other things to augment our production costs and then we'll go back to the truck and try to strike a happy medium. That's basically the situation. It's all economics and when you can get something tbat's almost as good for about half of the money, the way that the whole business is these days, you do it for the short term and save the bucks. WP: Why don't we shift gears a bit and talk about something Smoky Mountain is becoming known for: heavy blood and violence that you don't see in other promotions? JC: (laughs) Everybody talks about heavy blood and gosh, let's see when was the last time, there may have been one or two little exceptions, but the Kevin Sullivan thing was the last time we had blood on television and that was at the March taping. Ricky Morton bled a couple of times last week at our house shows and Jimmy Del Rey did once. We don't have a lot of blood compared with what all the promotions used to. We have more than anybody does today. That's one of the things that makes people excited about a wrestling match and when it's called for. We don't have guys going out there going, "Okay, we've got to have a bunch of blood tonight." One of the hottest things we got going now is the Armstrongs against me and the Bodies. It doesn't need blood, or at least not at this point. The Dirty White Boy and Tracey Smothers had some blood because they were having some chain matches. How can you have a chain match without having blood? So it's whatever the situation calls for, but when was the last time WCW had a chain match? When was the last time the WWF had the Rage in the Cage? So we don't do it just for the sake of doing it. We do it because the people watching the match go, "Something's missing here." If it needs it, we have it. As far as heavy violence, Jesus Christ, it's professional wrestling and the people here in east Tennessee, they want to see somebody get hit over the head with a chair. They were brought up on Ron Wright for Christ sakes. In those days, they didn't use the blade. That was ridiculous because people could tell. They busted each other open. In Tennessee, it's a whole different thing 'cause who still draws a house in Memphis? Jackie Fargo. He's a legend. When you go around in Memphis and you ask people, professional wrestling, name four. They're going to say Jerry Lawler first, Jackie Fargo, Tojo Yamamoto and Jerry Jarrett. The average people, not the ones that go to the matches every week, but your average guy on the street. We've gone to TV stations here in east Tennessee, we've gone to businesses. The names that they taLk about, that people that haven't followed wrestling in a while, are Ron Wright, Whitey Caldwell, the Fullers and Bob Armstrong. When I went to get the handcuffs for our Rage in the Cage, these people never went to a wrestling match, but they said, "What's old Ron Wright doing?" Once you're over here and once you're a main event guy, they remember you forever. The one good thing is luckily enough in Tennessee, we can still drag these guys out. The Mongolian Stomper. Nobody thinks he's 57 years old. They think he's the meanest man in the world. WP: And they still think Bob Armstrong can kick the crap out of him. JC: And he can. That's the thing. Bob looks better than anybody. So the deal is with them brought up on that style of wrestling around here, you can't give them Marcus Bagwell cause they'll fart at him. These hillbillies will beat the fuck out of Marcus Bagwell. I'm not knocking Marcus but that's just the way it is. They can see better fights for free going out on Saturday night than they can by going to WCW matches. In eastern Kentucky for Christ sake, (laughs) Ron Wright has so much heat. He has a scrapbook with pictures of the airplane he had that they burned. They beat him back to the airport and burned his single-engine plane that he used to fly around. He's been stabbed with hawk bills and cut with knives and been shot at. These people are serious. If they don't see somebody get hit with a chair and busting them open with a chain and shit like that, they think, "Well fuck, these guys are all a bunch of pussies." - Booking Prediction Tourney: The "In Your House" ballot was posted on Monday and completed ballots have been streaming in at a good rate. I'll try to get results out quickly, but no promises. Look for the ballot for WCW's Slamboree after this weekend. - WWW: This post is presented weekly, presumably with some short delay, on Mark Long's r.s.p-w home page on the Web. That page contains a lot of interesting wrestling info, so give it a try at: http://www.luc.edu/~mlong/wrestling.html - Videos: I have posted something about the availability of videos. If you missed it, I'll send it to you in e-mail upon request. It appears that the istrain.health.ufl.edu ftp site has been wiped clean up r.s.p-w stuff and nobody knows what's going on. Herb...