Wrestling Observer Flashback–03.28.88

‘Twas the week before Wrestlemania, and all through the WON

No big news items were stirring, not even a one!

The TV was tuned to TBS with great care,

Because soon Sting would wrestle Ric Flair.

(By the way, I got 90% through this issue and then realized I already had done this one as my second-ever Flashback months ago. D’OH! So here’s the much better version of that)

– No news is good news, unless you’re Dave Meltzer with 8 pages to fill and NOTHING going on. Correction, almost nothing, as there’s secret negotiations that might lead to the biggest story of the year. But other than that, nothing.

– So for those keeping track, this is where Dave officially goes on the “Wrestlemania is gonna bomb because no one cares about the tournament” train, as he’s noticed that interest in the show is WAY down this year compared to the predecessors. (Unscientific observation from my wrestling-obsessed grade 8 class at the time: I would agree with that. This was NOT a big show compared to WM3 and in fact everyone was mostly bummed that we couldn’t see the Clash. In fact, we got all these commercials during Worldwide Wrestling building up the Clash, but everyone around my school, including some teachers, were like “What channel is TBS?” Cable TV was actually not even a thing in Canada until a couple of years after that, in fact.) Even so, Dave thinks that the worst case scenario is still a $19 million gross, so that’s OK.

– To Oregon for the other big(gish) news of the week, as Billy Jack is finally ready to start his outlaw promotion in opposition to Don Owen. Haynes is trying to sign up lots of talent and at the very least seems willing to make a go of it.

– The big angle on Pro Wrestling This Week proved to be Paul E. Dangerously being the guy doing the “hostile takeover”, which will lead to Joe Pedicino and Gordon Solie getting fired the week of Wrestlemania. (No happy payoff for this angle, as the show was cancelled and they really WERE fired!)

– In Japan, Dump Matsumoto’s retirement special drew a monster 13 rating, which is second only to the Main Event for wrestling ratings this year.

– In syndicated ratings news, arch-rivals GLOW and POWW have actually joined forces as one syndicated package, which is artificially driving up their rankings quite high. (That would explain why KCPQ in Washington suddenly started showing POWW as a part of their late night wrestling block around this time.)

– Dave doesn’t have numbers for Saturday Night’s Main Event yet, but obviously they weren’t record highs because WWF would have already sent out a press release bragging about it.

– The horrible, horrible show “Learning the Ropes” did well at the NATPE TV convention and will be syndicated this fall, hopefully as a part of Jim Crockett’s network of shows.

– In Dave’s “WWF folk be like this, and NWA folk be like this…” comparison of the week, the Duggan v. Andre angle from last week might be have to be scrapped because Andre accidentally busted Duggan’s mouth open hardway and there was blood all over the place. Plans are to possibly reshoot the angle in a few days. Were this Crockett’s show, Dave notes, they would be doing cartwheels of excitement to get that much blood on TV so the could blame it on an “accident”.

– Vince has asked the Killer Bees to turn heel, although most people believe that it was a different pair of guys under the masks who did the angle with Hogan in Philly last week.

– Demolition has been doing clean jobs to the Rougeaus all over the place, so they’re a lock to get the tag titles based on the WWF’s ass-backwards booking philosophy.

– Dan Spivey has quit and will be headed to Puerto Rico.

– Dave warns us that a weightlifting feud between Dino Bravo and Ken Patera is coming up, and we’re likely all holding out breath in anticipation of it.

– Weirdness in Oregon, as Curt Hennig had previously done a disputed finish with the Grappler in PNW, resulting the AWA World title being “held up”, but only in the one state. Oddly, it was also held up in Minnesota because of the Greg Gagne feud at the same time, so it’s almost like they’re really disorganized or something. Anyway, Hennig returned to settle the dispute, but has a back injury at this point, so they did a match with the Assassin v. The Grappler instead to decide the belt, and Assassin won, so Hennig is the undisputed champion again. Dave continues rolling his eyes at the AWA in general.

– In Stampede, Bruce Hart and Brian Pillman have been throwing shade “the two clowns calling themselves Bad Company”, a reference to Tanaka & Diamond in the AWA. (This was all leading to the Canadian version doing a showdown with them in the AWA, which then fell through and then completely forgotten about.)

– To World Class, where their big “Star Wars” show in Fort Worth only drew 2500, headlined by a dud between Gordy and Kerry Von Erich that ended with a Dusty Finish after 20 minutes of both guys laying around and stalling.

– Terry Gordy had been promising a mystery partner against Kerry & Kevin for a show in Dallas, with the intention being Lance Von Erich as the payoff, but he no-showed and you’ll never guess who took his place. Go on, take a shot, it’s too shocking.

– Wait, what? No, it was Black Bart. Get your shit together, meme.

– Regardless, World Class continues to advertise the imminent return of Lance Von Erich to the territory, presumably as a heel. Lance was also scheduled to wrestle Al Perez on the Kerry/Gordy show, but both Lance and Perez no-showed, so that went nowhere. (Lance as the embittered ex-Von Erich who blackmails his “family” with all the dirty laundry would have been EPIC, but too far ahead of its time, I’d think.)

– The Freebird internal feud continues as Buddy gave a delusional interview where he talked about how he was singing with Michael Hayes at the concert, with the idea being that he was actually super-drunk and ruined the show by “accidentally” hitting Hayes with a guitar while swinging at Kerry Von Erich. Gordy is the poor guy caught in the middle between the Buddy Roberts/Iceman side and the Hayes/Von Erichs side, as Buddy constantly lies to Terry about how he wasn’t drunk at all while using him for his own purposes.

– Oh, in case you were worried, the 5/20 Texas Stadium show will in fact be the David and Mike Von Erich Memorial Parade of Champions. (Heaven needed a champion…and also someone to set up the ring, apparently.)

– Despite the excellent Freebirds storyline, they’re running a limited amount of shows and the gates are low, so the money problems continue.

– To New Japan, where the Pirates (Billy Gaspar and Gary Gaspar, aka Bob Orton and Tyler Mane) are getting a huge push as a heel tag team. “Billy” is actually doing main events with Inoki a a single, oddly enough.

– Big Bubba Rogers, while waiting out his Crockett contract, got a nice payday out of Baba and will work All Japan shows until he can officially sign with the WWF in May.

– Also, apparently Baba is planning on some kind of match between Jumbo Tsuruta and Tenryu to unify their singles title into one World title.

– Proto-Russo at the last All Japan show, with a weird match with Tenryu & Hara v. Hansen & Gordy. Basically at one point Tenryu hits Hansen with a head kick that lands “too hard” and Stan collapses to the mat, apparently knocked out for real. Gordy storms the ring and tosses the other guys out and they brawl outside while Hansen “recovers”, and then Stan wakes up and goes bezerker on the Japanese team before grabbing the house mic and yelling “No one potatoes me!” A lot of people were fooled into thinking it was a shoot, but it was actually Baba spoofing the Maeda-Choshu incident and trying to generate some press of his own.

– SPOILER ALERT: They did more tapings for post-Wrestlemania, and Ted Dibiase did a bunch of squashes without the belt, so Savage is 100% winning. Plus now the Associated Press has picked up on the accidental leak via the Elizabeth photo in WWF magazine and Titan is REALLY embarrassed about it.

– Further, just to really mess with Dave, Strike Force worked a pair of squashes during the tapings and had the tag belts for both.

– Since Dibiase’s run as Andre’s manager made him seem too weak to be a top guy, they’re moving Andre back with Bobby Heenan after Wrestlemania so Ted can be his own wrestler again.

– Wrestlemania has a lot of poor advances on closed circuit and they’re just cancelling the shows at those locations. However in typical “glass half full” Vince-ness, he’s now claiming that he meant to do that because PPV is the future and closed circuit is dying. (He’s not wrong.)

– In the AWA, Diamond and Tanaka in fact won the tag team titles from the Rockers on 3/19 at the TV taping.

– Dave notes that the company is such a mess right now that he could write a full page just on the screwups this week alone.

– A notable no-show was Adrian Adonis, healing up from his ankle injury but definitely done with the AWA and trying desperately to get back to the WWF. Also Robert Gibson no-showed, so they just used Ricky Morton as a single because he works cheaper.

– They were also supposed to bring in some new manager from Florida named “Dallas Diamond Page” but he no-showed as well. Speaking of managers, the Big K has been already fired from managerial duties and will just do “Big K’s Corner” as a replacement for the Danger Zone, which Dave notes is like getting rid of Takada and hiring Baron Von Raschke instead.

– Verne is so desperate for challengers to Madusa (who has literally nothing to do and is managing Curt Hennig in the meantime) that he has sunk to working with GLOW and bringing in some of their girls.

– Madusa, by the way, was walking around with her arm in a sling due to an “injury”, which Dave notes is carny for “cosmetic surgery” which will be very obvious when she returns.

– So at this point, I now realize that I ALREADY DID THIS ISSUE at the beginning of my run, albeit much much shorter. So here’s the epic Rocky Mountain Thunder and Hennig/Zenk stories from that writeup:

– OK, so Greg Boyd was a football player who wanted to get into wrestling, and they came up with the gimmick name of Rocky Mountain Thunder for him. However, he immediately changed his mind and no-showed the taping, but they had the gear and graphics all ready for him and Verne is of course crazy cheap. So they grab this other jobber who was working the show and stick the gimmick on him instead because why waste the money? The guy is TERRIBLE and looks like a young 911 with 1/4 of the talent, and in his first squash he nearly kills some other poor bastard by dropping him on a body vice attempt and nearly breaking his neck. Verne LOVES the guy, however, and immediately demands that he switch to a babyface for his second squash match of the night. Thankfully he was gone soon after, although not before working the Taping From Hell attended by Meltzer in May, where he came out with a flag, a 2×4 and a bag at the same time, leading to Dave to question whether he was trying to be Sgt Slaughter, Jim Duggan or Jake Roberts.

– 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.

– And finally, Ted Turner and Jim Crockett are getting deeper into bed together, as Crockett has a Flair v. Luger match planned as the main event for the Great American Bash PPV in July and Turner is going to attempt to get the show cleared in as many markets as possible.