News From Cook’s Corner 06.09.10

Hi, hello and welcome to News From Cook’s Corner! Steve Cook here, and I’d be lying if I said I’d had the best week of all time. On Monday I got to have a tooth pulled, and anybody who’s been through that knows that it’s not a whole heck of a lot of fun. Combine that with my Louisville Cardinals losing in extra innings to Vanderbilt and getting eliminated from the NCAA Baseball Tournament, and you have one of my worst days in a really long time. I don’t have bad days, but that was pretty close.

Tuesday was a lot better, as I took a sick day from work, chillaxed and watched the Smokey & The Bandit Trilogy. It’s your typical trilogy in that the quality drops from the beginning to the end, but still a really enjoyable way to spend a day. If you’re in a down mood and are temporarily out of wrestling DVDs to watch, I highly recommend watching movies featuring silly car chases with over-the-top characters. That’ll put a smile on your face…even if it hurts a little to do so.

Things are looking up.

I have to admit that I was surprised at how much interest the Hot 100 generated. I know that people like to talk about women and debate how attractive they are, but I didn’t quite expect the volume of feedback I received. The odds of everybody agreeing with my rankings were the same odds as it would be for anybody else…we all have different things that we find attractive. I enjoyed reading your opinions on it, and I can promise that next year’s edition will be at least twice as good as this year’s was.

I appreciate dissenting opinions, and there was one in particular that kept popping up that I think might have some merit. Layla got a lot of support from readers…even though she was in the top 30, people thought that she should be higher. When I was watching Superstars the day after the column, I saw Layla in Michelle McCool’s corner and thought “Hmmm, maybe I sold her short”. She has stepped her game up incredibly in the past few months. I think her stint on NXT mentoring Kaval alongside Michelle McCool could go a long way in improving her game even more and sending her up the chart next year. She’ll definitely be on the radar in 2011, barring any unforeseen circumstances.

Though I stand behind the rankings, I feel compelled to point out that the lady I ranked at #36 is now going by the name of Kristin Astara instead of Krissy Vaine. I guess she isn’t so vain that she probably thinks this song is about her anymore. Well, this is about her, but it isn’t a song. It’s a paragraph of a wrestling column, and you all are lucky that I don’t sing. In any event, I expect big things out of Astara through the rest of 2010 and beyond so I get the opportunity to type her name more often in the future.

And now, the fake news!

After following professional wrestling for twenty glorious years, sometimes I feel like I’ve seen everything. I’m sure many of you feel the same way. One of the complaints I’ve seen about WWE programming lately is that it’s been very predictable. Sometimes shows go by and it doesn’t seem like much of anything happened. This Monday’s Raw was like that to me. I was in quite a bit of pain after my tooth removal, and after watching the show for two hours I finally decided to hit the hay and catch up on whatever I missed on Tuesday. I was pretty certain it wouldn’t be anything too special…maybe Cena & Rey would have a really good match (hey, I thought Rey would win the poll), but odds were it’d end up with all the Fatal 4-Way people running down and causing a double-disqualification. That happens a lot.

So when I woke up the next morning and clicked onto the Internet, you can imagine my surprise when I read that the NXT Season 1 Rookies had invaded Raw, destroyed the set and beat the crap out of anybody in sight. That wasn’t on the agenda, was it? I watched the video on YouTube and couldn’t really believe what I was seeing. Is that Michael Tarver knocking out somebody with a punch? Did Justin Gabriel & Heath Slater actually beat up Jerry Lawler? Is Daniel Bryan actually trying to strangle the poor ring announcer? Man, Cena got destroyed! Did Punk try to save him?

I totally marked out for all of it, and I’m not ashamed of it. If you’re not capable of marking out for something, you probably shouldn’t be watching pro wrestling.

So, what’s on the horizon for this group? I can’t say for sure, and that’s a good thing. I can say that they were all praised backstage for their work after Monday’s show. Vince & Stephanie McMahon are apparently very high on all of them right now, as is Smackdown writer Michael Hayes.

They got a shot on Monday night, and they hit it out of the ballpark. I don’t know how it’s going to end, and of course there’s no guarantee that the rest of this angle is going to be as awesome as Monday’s attack was. The goal of it was accomplished, as I’ll certainly be watching. Hopefully I don’t need any more teeth removed.

Of course, Chris Jericho is taking credit for Wade Barrett leading the NXT people in the attack on the twitter box, saying “Congrats to Wade Barrett for taking charge and making an impact, just as I told him too…” It’ll be interesting to see where the WWE superstars come out on this whole thing. I can understand Punk being against it, since he spent his time on the show hating it. Guys like Jericho & William Regal will probably be supportive.

Steve Austin tweeted that the ending of Raw reminded him of the time he got attacked by twenty-three great white sharks while swimming in the ocean. Yeah, that’s kind of what it looked like. Not sure if I totally buy that Austin “had to sew an arm and one of (his) hands back on”…wouldn’t somebody have reported that somewhere? Then again, it seems like the best stories are always the ones nobody hears about until long after the fact.

Quinton “Rampage” Jackson was pretty excited after his appearance on Raw on Monday. He said that he’d been down the past week or so (some media interviews for his movie didn’t go very well), but being backstage at Raw made him feel like a kid again. He had good things to say about everybody he worked with and said he wants to come back and power bomb people. Once his UFC career ends, I think Rampage Jackson would be pretty great in the sports entertainment business. He’s got the look, he’s got the athletic ability, and he can do interviews. There isn’t much else that you need. He’s 31 years old, which is amazing to me because I remember watching him in PRIDE back in 2001-02. MMA guys generally don’t appear in major promotions when they’re in their early twenties, so I always figured he was older. I figure Rampage’s future plans will be where the money is, which is the smart thing to do.

Some people pointed out that the term “UFC” wasn’t used on Raw. The ending of Raw surprised me, the term “UFC” not being used on Raw didn’t.

It seems that Survivor Series will be returning in 2010 after all. As you likely recall, Vince McMahon announced earlier this year that there would be no more Survivor Series after poor buyrates the past couple of years. On Monday’s Raw in Miami, it was announced that tickets for the Survivor Series (which will be taking place in Miami) will be going on sale on June 11th. Obviously somebody changed their mind. No complaints from me, especially if we see more Survivor Series style matches than usual since they‘re big on the gimmick matches on PPV now. It was the original “gimmick PPV” long before Hell in a Cell, Elimination Chamber, Breaking Point & others were ever thought of.

Edge had an interview with the Asheville Citizen-Times where he said that he might only be wrestling for two more years. With his terrible injury history it does sound believable that the Rated-R Superstar wouldn’t have much time left…but we all know that wrestling and retirement don’t exactly go together. We’ll have to wait and see.

Ted DiBiase Jr. tweeted about getting pulled over for a speeding ticket over the weekend. He said that the police officer engaged him in a wrestling conversation for fifteen minutes, but still didn’t rip up the ticket. Of course he didn’t, Teddy…you’re a heel! If you’d done that long-rumored face turn when your movie came out, maybe you would have gotten off. Though, when I think about it, it kind of ruins kayfabe when you hear that DiBiase’s driving himself around. Isn’t that why Virgil’s there?

Speaking of Twitter, WWE is trying to get all of their Superstars to use the tweet box, but any talk about the sports entertainment needs to be in character. See, this is why I’m not taking all of this Matt Hardy/Twitter news very seriously. I’ve seen nothing on there that isn’t something his “character” would say. Some of you get wound up way too easily.

Drew McIntyre might not be the Chosen One these days. The Wrestling Observer reports that he’s fallen out of favor with upper management. Apparently McIntyre’s initial “undefeated” push was supposed to lead him to the World Championship, but that was nipped in the bud and Jack Swagger got that spot instead. I’m not really sold on that push leading to a successful title reign, but it would explain why Swagger was all of a sudden pushed to the top. At this point in time Swagger is better than McIntyre in pretty much every aspect of the game, so I can’t really argue with that decision.

Sources say that Drew fell out of favor for two main reasons…he’s “high-maintenance”, and he wasn’t as over as they thought he would be with his push. I for one thought his push was pretty poorly handled, so I wouldn’t blame that on McIntyre. I do think that Drew needs some more seasoning before getting the big push, so maybe a feud with Matt Hardy isn’t the worst thing in the world for him.

Upper management may be souring on McIntyre, but they’re warming up to CM Punk. Vince McMahon is high on his work these days, and his effort in getting the crowd back into his match with Rey Mysterio at Over the Limit after an awkward blood stoppage was appreciated by those backstage. It’ll be interesting to see Internet wrestling fans turn against Punk once it becomes official that he’s Vince McMahon’s pet project.

In news that I found out in the Smackdown comment thread, a pre-taped segment featuring Team LayCool smack talking Kelly Kelly & Tiffany about getting rid of them just like they did Mickie James & Beth Phoenix was removed. I guess somebody decided that LayCool shouldn’t be getting rid of any more Divas.

WWE filed a trademark on the term “WWE All-Stars”, which will be the theme for a videogame that THQ is working on. It’ll feature past and present WWE Superstars…I think all of them currently do this, but I’d expect this one to have a more nostalgic feel to it.

The October 1st episode of Smackdown will be airing live from Oklahoma City. It will be the show’s first episode on SyFy…oddly enough, October 1st was supposed to be the date of a WWE Supershow in New Orleans. I guess this is Oklahoma City’s revenge for not being allowed to keep the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets after letting them play there the season after Katrina.

I’d think they’d be happy with getting the Thunder from Seattle, but who knows. Never cross a Sooner, by gawd.

The Jeff Hardy legal situation is as ridiculous as ever. There were reports earlier this week that three out of the four charges against Hardy had been dropped. A listing on the North Carolina Court System’s website seems to correspond with this as it lists Hardy’s July 6 trial being over one count: conspiracy to traffic opium. However, District Attorney Maureen Kruger told a North Carolina newspaper that none of the charges against Hardy had been dropped as of yet. I remain convinced that if they actually had something really good on Hardy, this matter would have been taken care of by now. Stay tuned, I guess. For what it’s worth, the trafficking opium charge is a serious felony, despite earlier reports that it was less serious than the other charges.

We talked about Hamada’s tenuous status with TNA in this column a couple of weeks ago…it’s being reported that she was on the verge of being released a little while back, but they chose to keep her around due to a lack of female wrestlers on the roster. With Tara/Victoria’s departure & Daffney & Angelina Love recently getting injured, this is true. But I don’t think I’ve seen Hamada’s name pop up in any results lately, which makes one assume they’re keeping her around in case they have a Knockout Battle Royal.

As it is, people were scratching their heads backstage when they heard about this because Hamada’s considered the best worker in the Knockout Division. You know, these people backstage presumably work for TNA, and some of them have worked for WWE before, so you would think that they know by now that things like that don’t matter to mainstream wrestling promotions.

In other Knockout news, many people are not too thrilled with the decision to bring in Rosie Lottalove. Whether she injured Daffney or Daffney injured herself in that tryout match, I think most of us can agree that the Rosie gimmick is simply brutal. Unless you’re one of those people who yearn for the days of Bertha Faye (decent enough worker, horrible gimmick), I don’t see the appeal. Her other indy gimmicks included “biker chick” and “baseball chick”, both of which I think would be more interesting. Oh well. She is very green and there isn’t a short supply of women on the indy circuit with more experience that could fill that role.

She does have two things working in her favor though: She was trained by Team 3-D, and she’s not as expensive. 3-D students are gaining favor with TNA management because they’re based in Orlando and will work cheaper than outside talent. Sometimes when you don’t allocate money intelligently, you have to make sacrifices in other aspects of the promotion. The Knockout Division seems to be falling victim to this.

It isn’t all bad news for the Knockouts though. Sara Del Rey will be appearing at a TNA house show in Asbury Park, New Jersey on July 3rd, competing against a Knockout in what one would have to assume would be a tryout match. I’m a huge fan of Del Rey’s work and she would be just what the doctor ordered for TNA’s Knockout Division right now. Here’s hoping things work out for her in a financially viable way.

TNA injury news: Expect D’Angelo Dinero to be back in action in 1-2 months, after he recovers from a labral tear in his shoulder. Angelina Love was back working house shows over the weekend and should be part of the next TV tapings.

Long-time Cook’s Corner favorite Dr. Wagner Jr. won the AAA Mega Championship from Electroshock at TripleMania this past Sunday. It was the second straight year that TripleMania has featured Wagner winning the championship…you could say he’s to AAA what Sting is to TNA. Well, 2010 Wagner’s better than 2010 Sting and AAA is the top Mexican promotion in the Mexican TV ratings, so there’s a bit of a difference.

(I specified “Mexican promotion” because WWE is far ahead of them and any other lucha promotion in TV ratings. It’s not even close right now, which is a cause of much concern among the lucha promotions these days.)

The finish of the main event of the show left a bad taste in most peoples’ mouths and confused everybody else, which usually isn’t how you want to end your biggest show of the year. They went with LA Par-K vs. La Parka Jr. as the main event, which was a good idea on two fronts:

1. It was the most compelling feud to the audience
2. The horrible booking would have made the crowd turn on the rest of the show

Well, they could have avoided number two if they wanted to, but they didn’t. I think most people expected something of a non-finish to this match, as there’s a lot more that can be done with this feud that can lead to more money being made. But pulling the old Dusty Finish out of the hat isn’t the way that any wrestling promotion should go. At least, that’s what they originally did. I’ll try to explain this…after a long brawl, L.A. Par-K defeated La Parka Jr. with the help of Los Perros del Mal, a well-known wrestling faction led by Perro Aguayo Jr. that’s promoted their own shows ever since leaving CMLL and is now invading AAA. Par-K had been working with them before and during his newest stint with AAA, so it’s no surprise that they’d aid him.

The new faction comes in and raises hell in the main event of the biggest show of the year. That’s a pretty good way to debut some new antagonists. At least, until after the concert after the match, when the promoter comes out and tells the fans still there (apparently many left during the concert) that the Box y Lucha commission declared that the match was a no-contest due to the interference of Los Perros. Then the next day on their website, they said that LA Par-K indeed won the match and is now La Parka. So on Tuesday Par-K said that he will still be using the LA Par-K name since he proved his point that he was the better La Parka and now Junior will have to find something else to call himself. (Cubs Fan says that AAA still owns the La Parka name, so it’s likely that Par-K will use “La Parka” in AAA and “LA Par-K” when he appears for other promotions)

And people think TNA’s booking is confusing.

It doesn’t help matters that they’re trying to portray Parka Jr. as the babyface when the fans in most of their cities seem to be solidly behind Par-K, the original La Parka that you may remember from WCW & ECW. I think something like this happened when Coca-Cola tried to promote New Coke over Coca-Cola Classic. People are naturally going to support the original over the successor, unless the successor is a hundred times better than the original. It’s hard to find a lucha libre expert who would tell you that La Parka Jr. is better than LA Par-K in any aspect of wrestling. Especially since LA Par-K does things like this:

Drew McIntyre should take notes from LA Par-K on how to punch unruly ringsiders.

In other lucha news, Mark Jindrak’s Masked Warriors group had its first MTV2 taping on Sunday. Interestingly enough, the second-most recognizable name to many of you on the card was none other than Rellik, which is “killer” spelled backwards. Sorry, I think there’s a law that you have to say that. The show is scheduled to debut on July 17 on MTV2.

Maury High, who wrestled as Rocket Monroe in the Southeast, passed away over the weekend. He was the storyline brother of Sputnik Monroe, who was one of the more famous figures in Memphis wrestling history. High also worked some in the AWA. I haven’t seen him work, but those who have speak well of his ability.

Ted DiBiase Sr. had surgery on a pinched nerve in his neck over the weekend, forcing him to miss a convention in Atlanta. He expects to be back on the convention circuit this weekend. DiBiase had to retire from active competition due to a neck injury back in 1993, so this is certainly nothing new for him. I, for one, wouldn’t want to become accustomed to neck pain. I’d like to see Ted Sr. & Virgil interact on WWE television one of these days.

I invaded Wrestler of the Week so I could get Wagner some points. When most of your staff is biased against Mexicans, you have to do things like this sometimes.

Csonka analyzes Raw. I think the final segment should have got a million billion stars, but I doubt Larry could type that many *s.

Ari illustrates why I don’t tell many people about my exploits in Internet wrestling writing. It’s hard enough to explain to some poor souls why you’re a wrestling fan, let alone why you spend hours upon hours writing about it for the consumption of the masses. I know a few people who’d have me committed for such a thing.

Campbell reviews the YouShoot with Jim Cornette. I hear he’s got some big fans over at lesser wrestling websites. Good for him!

Eubanks previews Season 2 of NXT. He says he never heard Kaval speak before last week. That means that he never really lived before last week.

Ford recaps an AIW show. I get stuff from them in e-mail a lot and it sounds like a pretty decent indy, but Northern Ohio’s a bit of a haul for me in these economic times. If you like CHIKARA guys and Johnny Gargano and live up there, it sounds like it’d be right up your alley.

Hubbard ranks guys that should be in the WWE Hall of Fame. I think I’m the only person on the Internet who thinks that Bruno Sammartino isn’t bitter. There are a lot of people from my past I don’t want to associate with. I’m still a pretty happy guy most of the time. If Bruno doesn’t want to be recognized in something he doesn’t think is important, I don’t know why you’d hold that against him.

The Rs feature the usual real Superstars talk.

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