Wrestling Observer Flashback–02.29.88
By Scott Keith on August 29, 2016
Was shit real before? Well, it’s about to become real.
THE WAR IS ON.
– So Jim Crockett announced this past week that they will be running their own TV special in opposition to Wrestlemania IV, live on TBS at the same time. Details are scarce, but it’ll be billed as some kind of “Clash of the Champions” with Ric Flair v. Sting as the headlining match. Plus Tully & Arn defend the tag titles against Luger & Windham, and the Von Erichs will even be working the show?! (Now THAT would have been an interesting twist!)
– The WM card has been finalized, including Honky defending the IC title against Brutus Beefcake, and Dave is strongly suspecting that a title change will be happening there if not sooner as punishment for Honky’s little power play at the Main Event. Also, Robin Leach (of “Lifestyles of the RICH and Famous”) is presenting the championship belt to the winner, which Dave interprets as another strong hint that Dibiase is getting the title.
– So with 18 matches, this probably means that either they’re running super-short matches, or there’s no way this bloated mess is fitting into a 2.5 hour PPV runtime. Plus, with no specific “main event” of the show, it’s going to hurt business a lot. Any time companies have tried to make the belt bigger than the stars, they’ve failed to draw. Just look at what happened when they put the belt on Ron Garvin, for instance.
– Now, while Dave is still 100% sure that WM4 will be a success, Crockett is going to cost them a LOT of money on 3/27. While their audiences may be fundamentally different enough that it won’t kill WM’s business to the degree that Starrcade was killed off, there’s still a significant group of people who would rather watch a free show on TBS than spend $20 for a WWF PPV. Not to mention that Crockett has the advantage of building up specific grudges on their TV over the next month, whereas the WWF can only build to the tournament in general. That being said, Crockett’s product has not been exactly firing on all cylinders lately, so that might not even be an advantage.
– So Road Warrior Animal IS legitimately injured as reported last week, but it wasn’t actually in the bench press angle as Dave had been led to believe. Turns out that Animal took a samoan drop from either Warlord or Barbarian the night before in Pittsburgh and the bump went wrong, resulted in the eye injury. It smashed the orbital bone, much the same way as Choshu had his bone smashed by Maeda, and then they just worked the injury into the angle. Initial reports from the surgery were that Animal was going to lose the eye, but that turned out not to be the case. Unsurprisingly, they’re already advertising him for shows next week in Greensboro.
– Continental completed the split into two groups this week, with the new promotion to be called USA Pro Wrestling and be based out of Knoxville, whereas Continental will continue as usual out of Alabama.
– In addition to the CWA (Memphis) running on the Financial News Network, there are also talks to bring New Japan Pro Wrestling to the station as well, although odds are so slim that Dave feels bad even bringing it up.
– A legal fund has been set up to help pay for the huge bill that Al Blake has incurred defending himself from his drug charges. (Don’t everyone rush to GoFundMe all at once, now!)
– Billy Jack Hayes, as expected, will be promoting in opposition to Don Owen in Oregon, and booking himself as the top babyface in something less than a shocking twist. Haynes hasn’t actually contacted anyone in Owen’s promotion about joining up yet, but odds are good he could steal some people. Haynes had originally called Vince for help in bankrolling him, but got turned down flat. (The ridiculously-low attendance figures for this promotion would become another running joke in the Observers later on until they finally folded for good as a mercy killing later in the year.)
– Fritz Von Erich can rest easy in his hospital bed, because the Penthouse expose on the Von Erich family has been bumped back to August. Although, Dave notes, this means that by the time it comes out, they’ll have one more real tragedy, two fake tragedies, and one new fake relative introduced.
– Your Paul Heyman line of the week: He and Randy Rose are doing a promo on a TV show out of Atlanta, talking about how they want to get Tommy Rich and don’t care about the price. Rose starts pulling $1 bills out of his pocket and throwing them around to illustrate the point, and Paul quips “I see you’ve cashed Verne’s check.”
– Dave is hearing that the Bunkhouse Stampede did a 3.5% buyrate, which means they grossed about $3 million assuming $15 a shot. So not a financial disaster, but it could have been a lot better.
– Eddie Gilbert was fired by the NWA for missing a pair of TV tapings that he wasn’t actually booked on, although Dave considers it a miracle that he lasted as long as he did anyway. Missy Hyatt is already in Memphis and Eddie will be following soon after.
– And it’s time for everyone’s favorite segment: Understated Wrestling Observer Debuts! So new to the Memphis area is a prelim guy named Scotty the Body, who is getting booked like a total nothing and apparently his wrestling doesn’t warrant anything more, anyway.
– The Rock N Roll Express are hanging out in Memphis and feuding with the Midnight Rockers while they presumably try to get a job with Titan. (Man, had they turned heel and done the characters they did in the brief PG-13 feud in the 90s, they could have resurrected their career right then and there.)
– Another new combination of Samoans is working Memphis right now, with Samu teaming up with cousin Kokina, “who must be 360 pounds” according to Dave. (Only 360?)
– Unfortunately, the hot streak that Stampede is on came to a crashing halt because the Olympics are destroying all live sports competition in the area, and Stampede lost their building for the duration to boot. It’ll be a tough one to recover from, Dave notes. (And in fact, they never did.)
– To Continental again, where Randy Culley is skating a fine line by dressing like Smash again and calling himself “Detroit Demolition”. (Did he ever get sued over that one, I wonder?) Larry Latham, the former Moondog Spot, is also treading unwisely by calling himself “The Loondog”. (Titan must not have been able to protect the Moondog name, because pretty quickly there all kinds of Moondogs running around again in Memphis.)
– And now, it’s time once again for the return of…
– Are you ready for the Von Erich comic book? Dave sure as hell isn’t and wonders why he’s even wasting space talking about it, but apparently “The Saga of the Von Erich Warriors” will be released by Creative Ink Press. It’ll focus on the Von Erichs being taken from Earth by a race of aliens and brought to Planet Namoria to battle the evil Nefarians. (Oh god, please tell this is on Ebay and I can buy it.)
– (Ebay, you never let me down. But $20 shipping to Saskatoon? Not gonna happen.)
– The talks of the Von Erichs working the Crockett Cup seem to hinge on Crockett sending Flair for a title match with Kerry in May in exchange.
– The Fantastics will be leaving World Class to work for Crockett full-time right away.
– To the AWA, where the Rock N Roll Express are scheduled to debut on 2/20 and Dave echoes my earlier sentiments about how they should turn heel and feud with the Rockers because it would be AWESOME.
– Tom Zenk was supposed to wrestle Curt Hennig at the 2/20 tapings to begin their feud, but quit the day of the show when he found out what he was getting paid. (This actually pays off with an even FUNNIER story in a few weeks which I relayed in a previous Flashback, and here it is, reprinted from the 03/28 Flashback
– But we’re not done with the taping yet! So the other colossal fuckup sees Hennig defending the title against Wahoo, who is subbing for Tom Zenk, who quit. OK so far. However, Zenk quit before the PREVIOUS tapings even…where they were supposed to shoot the angle to set up the Hennig v. Zenk match. Which didn’t happen. However, at tapings before THOSE tapings (we’re talking two months back now), they did a series of interviews with Zenk for future shows, where he talked about beating Hennig in a non-title match (which didn’t end up happening), and then aired those interviews on TV anyway even though he quit. And then here, the announcers for the Hennig-Wahoo match talked about a phantom TV angle that also never happened, where Hennig injured Zenk in retribution for the non-title loss that never happened in the first place! I feel like I need Doc Brown to draw a timeline on the chalkboard to explain the AWA’s booking logic sometimes.
– Former UWF star Savannah Jack contracted a virus that messed up his existing heart problems so badly that he’ll now need a heart transplant to take care of it. (Although it ended his wrestling career permanently, he did live until 2012.)
– Vader is actually getting over, shockingly enough, because all his opponents in Japan go out and sell like crazy for him to put him over.
– More chaos in the AWA, as Curt Hennig was legit injured taking a big bump, and Verne is looking for any excuse to unload his big guaranteed weekly deal ($1500 a week to be exact.) So currently the AWA title is held up after a match with Greg Gagne, and Verne is making noise on TV about how Stanley Blackburn should be fired if Greg isn’t given the title permanently, comparing it to the original split of the AWA from the NWA in the 50s. Dave thinks the whole situation is nonsense and invites Curt to be the Fourth Horsemen instead because the money is better.
– Update on the World Class talks: They’ve gone cold, so forget about it.
– Crockett is getting deeper into bed with Turner, as they signed a new deal to extend the TBS contract through 1994 and another deal to put on quarterly Clash specials, plus Turner will co-produce their PPV shows.
– 2/28 at the Omni is being advertised as the first time ever that Dusty Rhodes has teamed with Ole Anderson, which of course blatantly disregards one of the most FAMOUS ANGLES IN WRESTLING HISTORY, which happened to occur at the Omni six years ago. And yet Dave isn’t surprised somehow.
– The Varsity Club has completely turned Mike Rotundo’s career around, as a clever gimmick in the right hands can turn someone into an entertaining act despite going nowhere for months previous.
– And finally, although Sting is looking better than Luger as a prospect for top babyface, Dave suspects that Sting simply won’t get the chances that Lex will, and thus will fail. Basically even if Sting does get over in this role, he thinks that Crockett will continue to push Luger anyway because no one wants to look stupid by admitting that they’ve been pushing the wrong guy as top babyface. (Hmmm…fascinating on many levels.)
ALOHA!
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