F4W WWE news and notes
Test is history. WWE sources state that he actually “failed a few tests” and was nearly fired for it in January, but they kept him on to try to help make Lashley. Vince really soured on him during the RVD vs. Lashley vs. Test match on ECW TV where Lashley was supposed to get over huge and instead Test and RVD had to get all their crap in and the match was an utter disaster. Vince figured after the Lashley thing ended, Test just didn’t bring much to the table. He was also in a minor car accident last week and the cops made him take a sobriety test. At least he passed that one.
WWE is doing an 11-day, 22-date European tour in April. Yes, two shows per day for 11 days. They are doing well. OK, the business is doing well, the guys are going to be hurting bad at the end of this run. Has to be a hell of a fun time, though, just to be able to experience such a run. Raw will be taped April 16th and Smackdown on April 17th in Milan, Itlay, and they’ve also got two TV tapings in England. They’re also hitting Germany, Austria, Wales, France and England.
The March 5th Saturday Night’s Main Event from Phoenix is off the books. Although the ratings for the last two specials tanked, NBC had actually approached WWE about doing another show and putting it in prime time. I figured after the first two ratings, the next one would air at like 2:00 AM or something after Saturday Night Live.
WWE acquiesced, but later talked their way out of the date and it will take place in June instead. The feeling was that they need to put all their promotional push behind WrestleMania and not get sidetracked building up a free show on NBC that would ultimately deliver about the same number of viewers as a good Raw.
Mistico was scheduled to get a WWE tryout the night we went to press at the Smackdown tapings in San Jose. What is interesting is that the impetus for the latest round of interest in Mistico (there was interest last year, and in fact the Juniors division was conceived to be for him, but it quickly got derailed) stemmed from his winning Wrestler of the Year in the Observer annual awards, and Dave Meltzer of course lives in San Jose and will be at the show.
Basically, people cannot believe that the wrestler of the year is this man Mistico, and they’re bringing him in to see what he’s got. Now before the conspiracy theories begin that the idea is to make him look like a fool on a WWE show in front of Dave Meltzer, I can tell you that the idea of having the tryout in San Jose was made on the Mexican side and not the WWE side. Obviously, he has a lot working against him. CMLL does not want him to go. Well, the office doesn’t. The guys are split, because he’s so hot that he single-handedly helps increase their payoffs by drawing thousands of people to the shows, but on the other hand they’re not high on the office thwarting his efforts to go make his name elsewhere (in fact, the CMLL office alerted border patrol over the weekend to watch out for him and not let him into the country, which is way up there on the insanity scale).
All future plans, including the mask vs. hair match with Perro Aguayo Jr. scheduled for next month, are off the books until a decision is made following the dark match. We talked about the general issues he’d face if he signed with the company last week, but the short-term issues are that the ring ropes are made of rope and not cable, thus making it much harder to do his trademark flying moves, and more importantly the ring is the size of a football field. Now I’m sure given all the places he’s worked in Mexico he’s worked in some crapty rings with real ropes before, but the size of the ring may really throw him off.
Plus, the reality is that he’s never worked “WWE style” in his life, they’re going to want him to, and there are very few guys on the roster that he’ll be able to have his style of match with. Maybe he’ll pull it off, I don’t know. If nothing else, he’s going to be making more money one way or another because WWE would pay him a ton more than he’s making now, and CMLL has offered him a much larger percentage of his payoffs if he stays. I don’t know the exact figures, but the cost of booking him to other promoters around Mexico is in the thousands, and CMLL pays him a few hundred bucks per shot.
He’s doing so many shots, though, including four shows per Sunday most weeks, that he’s making good money and is said to enjoy the schedule and being able to live close to his family. There are also the myriad WWE questions such as whether he’ll be able to wear his mask, whether they’ll allow him to use the name Mistico (doubtful, which of course makes importing him for the Hispanic crowd a strange decision), who he’d work with, etc. His tryout will have a major impact on North American wrestling in 2007, one way or another.
Marine was number three in DVD rentals this week behind The Departed and Flags of our Fathers.
Read another article about Chris Nowinski and his work on concussions. He’s written a book about the subject which was featured in the New York Times last month. His argument is that one of the biggest mistakes in sports is to allow a person to go back out on the playing field after they’ve suffered a concussion, which goes against what a lot of coaches have believed for decades. He argues that while a person may “be fine” after a “ding”,
the reality is that they’re doing damage to their brain, and in case of multiple or repeated concussions severe damage, that will affect them for the rest of their life. “The great majority of head traumas that occur on the football fields of this country occur to the approximately 1.25 million high school players who play football,” he said. “And then the most serious of them all have to do with cognitive or thought processes, where individuals may have periods of amnesia or they may have difficulty learning new tasks or remember new tasks.
If you play through it you’re just going to make it worse. You’re not just going to risk your season, you might risk your career. You might risk your life.” The Times article noted that Nowinski, upon hearing about the suicide death of football star Andre Waters in November at the age of 44, asked the family for permission to examine his brain. It was determined that Waters, who had suffered multiple concussions throughout his career, many of this he played through, had brain tissue that had “degenerated into that of an 85-year-old man with similar characteristics as those of early-stage Alzheimer’s victims”. Dr. Bennet Omalu of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading expert in forensic pathology, said “although he planned further investigation,
the depression that family members recalled Mr. Waters exhibiting in his final years was almost certainly exacerbated, if not caused, by the state of his brain — and that if he had lived, within 10 or 15 years ‘Andre Waters would have been fully incapacitated.’” Nowinski said he dealt with a number of issues himself, including depression, and that his goal was to educate people to the risks of playing with head injuries.
WWE.com did a Where Are They Now? on Kevin Sullivan. The article said that he retired several years back, “perhaps fueled by his inability to conquer Hulkamania”. He said: “Wrestling is a young man’s sport. I knew my time had passed, and that it was time to move on.” He’s currently running Froggy’s Fitness in Tavernier, the largest gym in the Florida Keys. He’s got some side businesses and is also working on an indy film called CARD SUBJECT TO CHANGE.
It also said he spent time once a month at his second home on Whidbey Island, which is right around here. “I’m in the 8th and the 49th parallel,” he said. “I have a place up there that’s right on the beach. It’s a nice place to kick back and relax.” He said he had a lot of great experiences, but didn’t miss wrestling anymore.
No Way Out, Raw and Smackdown all sold out last week. Raw, Smackdown and ECW were also the top-rated shows of the week on their respective networks for the second week in a row.
Ace Steele is in the process of moving to Atlanta, so he’ll be doing Deep South for awhile. Flash Funk is sitting at home collecting a big paycheck to do nothing because they currently have no ideas for him. It’s good work if you can get it.
Sylvester Terkay has your traditional 90-day no-compete.
USA Network goes to HD later this year, but WWE is expected to hold out as long as humanly possible. As noted many times, there are concerns that people won’t look as good when you can see them in HD, that punches and such that miss by several inches will be even more obvious, etc. In an interview with Multichannel News, Bonnie Hammer of USA and Sci-Fi said they were “trying to shoot [World Wrestling Entertainment] in HD. That’s kind of challenging. Does a punch hit or does it just go by? You see everything in HD. You’ve got to be very careful”.
Ric Flair turned 58 on February 25. He told one newspaper, as it regarded his in-ring wrestling: “To me, I’d like to wrestle for another year. I’d like to walk away with my head held high and know that I had the most illustrious career of anybody alive, in the history of our business. And I think I already have that.” What’s funny is that in the same article he also said: “[Wrestling is] a way of life for me. As long as I can do it, as they want me to do it, I’m gonna continue to.”
credit:F4W Newsletter
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