News From Cook's Corner 03.17.10

Posted by Steve Cook on 03.17.2010

We celebrate St. Patrick's Day, Stone Cold keys Raw domination, Bret will stick around past WrestleMania, the real La Parka returns to his birthplace & TNA got Stunned on Monday night!

Hi, hello and welcome to News From Cook's Corner! Steve Cook here, and I am just killing time until Friday night at 9:45, when the NCAA Tournament gets underway. Considering the way my Louisville Cardinals can play sometimes, it may be ending just a bit after midnight, but at least we have a berth in the Big Dance and some seasons that's enough to consider your season successful. This would be one of them.

No picture love for the Cards this week, after last week's debacle against Cincinnati they must be punished. Should they make it to the Sweet 16 I may reward them, but I'm not holding my breath.

But you're not here for my bracket picks, right? It's all about the wrestling here at the Corner, and it's been an interesting week as always. I got the new Shawn Michaels DVD over the weekend and it's already tremendous after one disc. I'm probably going to be way too harsh towards tag team matches on Superstars now, since after watching Rockers vs. Brainbusters & Rockers vs. Hart Foundation it's obvious that nothing WWE can offer in a tag team match right now is going to come close to it. It's not really their fault, but I'm probably going to take it out on them anyway. At least I'm honest about it.

Wrestling is fun, isn't it? No matter whether you like WWE, TNA, ROH, other indy promotions, lucha libre, Japanese wrestling or prefer watching the old stuff, or all of the above, there's always something for us wrestling fans to sink our teeth into. I'm not really going anywhere with this statement, I just thought it'd be nice to talk about how much fun wrestling is instead of complaining about things we don't like.

Let's get to the news…



It's St. Patrick's Day, so what better way to celebrate than bringing back the K-NOX Revolution? Sadly for fans of women's wrestling, Rebecca Knox shows no signs of returning to the wrestling business, having not wrestled since February 2008. I think she may still pop up on MySpace once in a blue moon, and Larry Csonka tells me that she's in his closet (highly unlikely, there's no room for her with all of the Mexican midget blue monkeys he keeps in there), but all indications are that we've seen the last of K-Nox in the world of wrestling. Even with limited output, I'd easily put Knox in my top two or three Irish wrestlers of all time.

Mostly because there just aren't that many. And when you take into account that Finlay's from Northern Ireland, the list gets even shorter. Perhaps my Irish readers could enlighten me so I'm not forced to deem Sheamus as the greatest Irish wrestler of all time. People say that Prince Devitt is good and likely would out-rate Sheamus, but I've never seen him wrestle. I've also never seen Danno O'Mahony wrestle, but he'd probably be at the top of the list if for no other reason that he invented the Irish whip.

Honestly, what would pro wrestling look like today without the Irish whip? That alone is reason to celebrate Ireland for its contributions to pro wrestling and get drunk. Woot!



Good news for you Euros out there (including the Irish), as Bret Hart will be appearing on WWE's European tour in April. He's set to serve as a special enforcer referee for some Chris Jericho vs. Edge World title matches, so maybe Jericho should have used his time on Raw this week to butter the Hitman up. Considering Bret's tremendous popularity across the pond, it's only natural that he would make the trip with WWE to say thanks to all of his fans there.

Vince McMahon owns a yacht called "The Sexy Bitch". I take back anything bad I've ever said about Vince McMahon.

How many people will be in the Money in the Bank match? First there were going to be eight, then they decided to make it nine to do the Drew McIntyre storyline, and then they had Michael Cole say there were going to be ten people in it. MITB is an annual clusterfrick as it is, so I'm not sure that adding more people to the match is going to help things. Don't get me wrong, I like matches that are complete messes and have lots of ladders, but ten people in one may be a little bit much.

Sgt. Slaughter has been hired by WWE to serve as an Ambassador for the company, appearing at charity events and things of that nature. This is the role that WWE wanted Ric Flair to fill after his in-ring retirement in 2008, and quite frankly given Flair's downhill slide in the last couple of years I think Sarge is a much better choice for the job.

The Raw guest host gimmick is now expected to last through the summer. I don't think it should end until they get Ultimate Warrior to host the show. I guess it'd have to end then because Raw would get kicked off the air after Warrior ranted about "queers" and "liberals" for 30 minutes and Impact got a 6.0 rating after everybody changed the channel from Raw.

Speaking of guest hosts, apparently Criss Angel was supposed to do something more physical on Raw last week, but it got cancelled for his own safety. If that's actually true, I don't know why he admitted it on Twitter. Wouldn't that go against his image?

I know all 411 readers are obsessive lovers or haters of Mickie James, so it's important that I report that she is planning on being back for WrestleMania.

The Maryse/Miz love storyline was expected to resume several weeks ago, since Miz has a couple of title belts now Maryse would like him. Anybody know a good place I can get some title belts on the cheap? With WrestleMania on tap that's been put on hold, so we'll have to stay tuned.

Gorgeous George Wagner will be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame this year. It's certainly a deserving honor, as George was the first major television star in a day when pro wrestling was one of network television's institutions.

Bob Uecker will be inducted into the celebrity wing of WWE Hall of Fame. The Ueck is one of my all-time favorite baseball announcers not employed by the Cincinnati Reds, mostly for his work in Major League. "Juuuust a bit outside" still gets quoted by myself at least once a baseball game. You also have to give him props for the way he sold Andre the Giant's chokehold at WrestleMania IV. Get your foot off his shoulder, Andre! Uecker better interview Big Show at WrestleMania this year, that's all I gotta say.

Next year's HOF will have a WCW flavor, which makes since because they'll be in Atlanta. With that being in mind, WWE's been in talks with Bill Goldberg recently, for the purpose of inducting him in the HOF, including him in video games and other fun things. Considering he did an interview for the Rise & Fall of WCW DVD and called Hulk Hogan a "liar" recently, Goldberg might be open to that.

Joe Doering has signed with WWE. He might not be a "star" like websites will tell you when clicking on news blurbs, but he has experience in All Japan, TNA and other promotions. I hope he's better now than he was when he wrestled in TNA in 2005, but we probably won't find out for a while because he's in FCW.

Tiffany is filling Maria's old role as Smackdown Diva baby face. Perhaps she'll fill Maria's role as King of the Cage interviewer once she's done with that. I wonder if Maria will do those interviews like she used to do them on Raw.

WWE Magazine has 26 different covers this month in honor of WrestleMania. Here's the list of people who will be featured:

Batista
Big Show
Bret Hart
Chris Jericho
Christian
CM Punk
Cody Rhodes
Drew McIntyre
Edge
Evan Bourne
Jack Swagger
John Cena
John Morrison
Kane
Kofi Kingston
MVP
Randy Orton
Rey Mysterio
R-Truth
Santino Marella
Shawn Michaels
Sheamus
Ted DiBiase
The Miz
Triple H
Undertaker

No Maryse? Child please. If you're a subscriber you'll be getting the issue with Shawn Michaels on the cover. So if you really want the Santino Marella cover you're going to have to go to the newsstand. Yes, they still have newsstands.

Another person missing from the list is Goldust, but fans of the Gilded One might get to see their favorite wrestler receiving a push for the first time in quite awhile. He's gone over Mike Knox & Dolph Ziggler at recent WWE events, and Chris Jericho was very complimentary of Goldust after their match on Superstars a couple of weeks ago. I think I've finally forgotten about Black Reign and can support a push for Goldust…but if I see a rat appear on WWE television you can forget I said anything.



TNA Impact gained a huge victory this week, as their .8 rating was enough to beat the .6 rating that WWE Raw had.

Oh, wait. That's the AM Raw rating. Crap, I always get those mixed up. Let's start again.

TNA Impact gained a huge victory this week, as somehow they managed to get a .8 rating with a taped show going against a live WWE Raw with Stone Cold Steve Austin that got a 3.7 rating. Huh, I thought Austin would have brought Raw's numbers up a bit more, but maybe people were scared off by Austin getting bleeped by the censor. How do you bleep Stone Cold? Jeez, what are they gonna do next, piss on the flag?

Then again, considering Raw had its best viewer numbers since August of last year for the first hour and January of this year for the second hour, I doubt WWE is complaining too much. Heck, they might demand that Impact add a third hour.

For a point of reference, this was the lowest rated regular episode of Impact since 2006. Yes, 2006. That was back when the show was airing at 11:00 on Thursday nights, going against the local news and Sportscenter.

We're still early into the "Impact on Monday" experiment, but so far it's really tough to claim that this strategy is working for TNA. Unless you consider getting lower ratings for your TV show and kind of saving face when a replay of the show on Thursday nearly equals the Monday airing a good thing. Me, I wouldn't, but I realize that people have different standards by which they judge these things.

This week's show was a disaster ratings-wise, which doesn't surprise me because, indeed, it was a taped show. Raw's taped shows always did worse against Nitro than their live shows did. I don't think they usually did 20% worse, but they still trended lower. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who says everything has to be live or I won't watch it, but when I'm forced to make a choice between a live wrestling show and a taped wrestling show, I usually pick the live one. Why? Because I can log on to 411 and see what happened on the taped show. I don't know what's going to happen on a live show, so that interests me more. Not everybody in the world is like this, but I'm probably not alone. I saw parts of Impact and some of it kept me watching for a while, but this week Raw caught more of my attention span. On Week 1 it was Impact. So by my rating system, Raw & Impact are tied 1-1. I'm sure TNA execs will be thrilled by that…though I imagine they'd be happy to hear any good news right now.

They kind of got good news last week, when as I previously mentioned, the replay of their Monday show that aired on Thursday got a rating almost equal to the Monday airing. Since I don't think most people would have watched the show twice (there's just too much on television, Internet and outside to spend your time watching Impact twice in one week), it seems obvious that a lot of people decided to watch it on Thursday instead of Monday. Bad news for those folks though…there will be no Thursday replay this week and probably not any other week. I think TNA would be well served to have a replay somewhere on Spike's schedule, but that's up to the network.

A troubling trend for Impact's ratings that has always been there and has followed it to Monday nights is the decline in viewership throughout the show. It's not uncommon for Impact's main event to be the lowest rated segment of the show…but let's be realistic, what will most people watch given a choice between AJ Styles vs. Jeff Hardy and the Bret/Vince/Austin contract signing? I love AJ, but I'll pick Bret/Vince/Austin every time without a thought.

The highest rated segment on this week's show featured Angelina Love vs. Daffney & Hulk Hogan doing an interview. I'm sure they're already selling themselves on that all being due to Hulk and having nothing to do with those damn chicks.

With all of these negative vibes coming out, it would be irresponsible for me to yell that the sky is falling and that TNA needs to abort their mission. I'm sure plenty of people within TNA are doing just that, and I know plenty of you are doing it as well. Whether this thing is going to be ultimately successful or not, TNA has made their bed and now they have to lie in it. They wanted to play with the big boys, and now they have to prove that they can do more than just play.

I think the main problem that TNA has faced since 2002 is that just when you think that they have a vision for what they see themselves doing as a professional wrestling company, they completely change it. Patience is a virtue, and if you read the various face book & twitter postings of TNA's bigwigs you'd think that they might have some.

Call me a skeptic, but past events tell me that they don't. So expect lots of changes coming out of Orlando soon, some for the best and some for the worst.

Jeff Hardy's trial is supposed to start today. Once there's a result I may discuss it, until then I'll refrain from comment. I'll just say that it probably wasn't smart to have Ric Flair talk about Hardy being high on television two days before the trial. Then again, if anybody believes what Ric Flair has to say they probably shouldn't be allowed on a jury, or allowed out in public.

Mr. Anderson had the letters "WWLSD" on his wrist tape on Impact this week. What does that mean? Apparently it means What Would Lance Storm Do. Storm has been a consistent critic of TNA for quite some time and had some harsh statements about Anderson's character recently. It also may mean "We Want LSD", which was a phrase heard quite often backstage at the last Impact tapings.

Former TNA wrestler Andy Douglas retired last weekend after wrestling former Naturals tag team partner Chase Stevens at an indy show in Nashville, Tennessee. As far as I can tell, nothing brought on the retirement other than he could make more money doing something else. That's a little less depressing than most wrestling retirements, and the show Douglas retired at drew 800 fans. That would be more than four times the number of people that attended the EVOLVE show. I wish Southern promotions were as good at getting their information out there as the Northeast promotions are…but then again the Northeast panders to people with Internet access and the Southern promoters don't waste time with that because many wrestling fans down there don't have a computer.

Heck, Mississippi just got Internet access two years ago. That's right, I live in Kentucky and I'm making fun of other states for being unsophisticated. How about that?



AAA had their annual Rey de Reyes show last Friday, featuring a tournament to crown the 2010 Rey de Reyes, appearances by TNA's Mr. Anderson & Hernandez, a new AAA champion being crowned and other various happenings, but the biggest news coming out of the show has to be the return to AAA of L.A. Park. Park, who WCW fans will fondly remember as La Parka, hadn't been seen in an AAA ring for thirteen and a half years and had been involved in legal disputes with the promotion for nearly as long. AAA claimed ownership of the "La Parka" gimmick after Park left the promotion to compete full-time with WCW, and he wrestled all over Mexico using the L.A. Park name and the famous skeleton outfit. AAA, for their part, put another wrestler in the La Parka outfit and gave him credit for all of the character's accomplishments in the past. They had a similar situation with Nicho el Millionario, better known to U.S. fans as Psicosis, but Nicho eventually gave up the gimmick and the outfit and has worked for AAA since WCW's closing when he wasn't busy being a Mexicool.

As a guy who loved La Parka in WCW and hasn't been a huge fan of the guy ripping him off in AAA, here's hoping that L.A. Park kicks ass and takes names.

The NWA has a new heavyweight champion in the form of Adam Pearce, who beat Blue Demon Jr. & Phil Shatter (who?) in a three-way in Charlotte to win the title last weekend. Demon had defeated Pearce for the title back in October 2008, holding the belt for a total of 505 days. Back in the old days long title reigns meant you were a great champion. In 2010, it means that nobody remembers you have the title belt.

I think the most damning thing about Demon's title reign was that he was given the title to expand the NWA's presence in Mexico. 505 days later, and I'm pretty sure the NWA's presence in Mexico is even fainter than it was before Blue Demon had the title. His reign wasn't as useless as Dan Severn's impossibly long reign in the mid-90s, but it has to be pretty close on the list. Heck, even Pearce's reign with the title before Demon had it resulted in some matches on ROH shows.

It's been a tough couple of weeks for wrestling legends of the Southeast, as three wrestlers who spent quite a bit of time there have passed away recently. The first was Angelo Poffo, who is most recognizable to modern-day wrestling fans as the father of Randy "Macho Man" Savage & Lanny "The Genius" Poffo. He was also known for heading up International Championship Wrestling, a rebel territory based in Lexington, KY that ran in southeastern Kentucky and areas in Tennessee that were under the jurisdiction of Jerry Jarrett's CWA territory. The rivalry between the two promotions is still talked about today in the area, and resulted in the attendance record for wrestling at Rupp Arena when Savage took on Jerry Lawler at a CWA show after ICW folded. He has been cited as one of the cheapest people in the history of pro wrestling, and from all indications his sons have followed in his footsteps when it comes to saving their money. Oh, and he also did 6,033 sit-ups in one sitting, setting the U.S. Navy's record for sit-ups at the time. He died on March 4 at the age of 84.

Sandy Scott, who had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, died last Thursday at 75 years of age. Scott worked behind the scenes for many years with Jim Crockett Promotions, World Championship Wrestling and Smoky Mountain Wrestling, and in the ring he was most known as one half of "The Flying Scotts" with his brother George. They were raised in Canada and started out in Stampede Wrestling, but Sandy remained in the Mid-Atlantic area many years after their successful run there and made his home in Virginia.

"Corsica Joe", known to his friends and family as Francois Miquet, passed away on Sunday at the age of 90. Alongside "Corsica Jean", Miquet was a five time co-holder of the Tennessee version of the NWA tag team championship during the late 1950s and a two time co-holder of the Georgia tag team titles during the mid 1960s. He was a fixture in the Tennessee area for many years and appeared at legends ceremonies throughout the South during the last two decades, even appearing at NWA: TNA's first PPV telecast in 2002. He was married to fellow professional wrestler Sara Lee, who was also a mainstay in the Tennessee area during her lengthy career. They were married for 46 years, up until Lee's death in 2008...I'd imagine that would have to be a record for wrestling marriages.

Bad news for the EVOLVE promotion, as attendance for their show last Saturday was extremely diminished due to flooding in the Rahway, New Jersey area and a WXW/CZW doubleheader taking place in Philadelphia on the same day. I've seen reports from 100 to 130, which while good by IWA Mid-South standards isn't good enough to stay in business for very long when you're bringing in name talent. I'm sure Sapolsky & company will come up with something, but things haven't gotten off to a fantastic start.

Ring of Honor cancelled a show they were going to have in Edison, New Jersey. However, they will be having a show in Louisville, Kentucky. So the way I see it, they're moving up in the world.
ROH on HDNet announcer Mike Hogewood revealed last week that he had suffered a stroke last July, but didn't make it public because he was afraid of losing work. Fortunately, the Hog fully recovered in early September and has been back at work full-time ever since, doing sportscasting for the Atlantic Coast Conference in addition to his duties with ROH. We here at the Corner are huge fans of Hogewood, as his style reminds us of our favorite old-time wrestling announcers. I wouldn't say Hog's as good at calling a wrestling match as Bob Caudle or Lance Russell, but he's the closest thing we've got to those legends right now.

A couple of weeks back Hog actually called the Diamond Dust move by its name, which shocked the heck out of me. Guy's been doing his homework and it shows in his improvement since the HDNet show started. He slapped that stroke down just like he slaps those porpoises every week.



The Rs featured my quarterly complaining about half of Superstars being a recap show. I don't expect this to change, but reserve the right to complain whenever I please.

Buy or Sell featured the Forum's favorite writer of all time taking on one of their least favorites.

Smackdown has a new recapper, and since this opens up my Friday night schedule at just the right time I hope you show him plenty of respeck.

Jim Grimm returns with some Forgotten Favorites. I guess his column could qualify as one.

Meehan presents more WrestleMania numbers than anybody could possibly need.

Gerretsen compares DEATH HAZE~! to Chyna. I would say that Del Rey's booking in 2007-08 ROH was pretty comparable to Chyna's 1999 in the WWF (they both alternated from face to heel depending on who they were associated with or what they were doing during a single show), but other than that I wouldn't dare blaspheme the good names of Daizee & Sara.

JT went to WrestleMania. He tried to get me to go back when WM was in Detroit, but I literally had no money at the time. I was so broke that at Christmas all I could give people was glances.

Eubanks is done with TNA because it took RVD like five seconds to beat Sting. Five! That's a long time, man. He also cited Shannon Moore only being #1 contender for the X division title instead of the World title as a reason for not watching the show. I could be making all of this up.

Possibly.

AJ Grey posts Katy Perry pics, and I link to them. That's how it works around here.

Well, that's all we have time for this week! The distinguished JP Prag is in tomorrow, and I'll be back next week with more News From Cook's Corner! Until then…