News From Cook’s Corner 04.24.12

Hi, hello and welcome to News From Cook’s Corner! I’m Steve Cook, and I hope you all are having a wonderful Tuesday here on Planet Earth. It’s been a busy week in the world of wrestling, and we have all sorts of crazy stuff to talk about, including a three hour Raw on Monday night that felt like it ran about twelve. I can’t exactly say I’ve been pleased with most of the recent happenings in and out of the professional wrestling ring as of late, but it’s like I always say: things could be worse!

And usually when I say that, something worse happens. So expect something horrible to happen soon after this column gets posted.

RE: Roode wins

I started watching wrestling in 1985 with the WWF. I always say Hulk Hogan introduced me to wrestling, the British Bulldogs, Tito Santana, and Ricky Steamboat made me a fan, and Jim Crockett Promotions made me love it.

In my opinion, the money is in the chase and wrestling is at it’s best with a heel champion like Ric Flair. I think TNA did the absolute right thing with Roode winning, but Storm should eventually win the title. Think 1988 with Flair vs Luger…only this time Luger wins at Starrcade which is what should have happened.

I think it was too soon to have Storm win the title. If Storm wins, it’s the blow-off (which I think is too soon) or you have the heel chasing the champ, which does not work as well. A babyface champ needs to have a series of challengers, knocking each off, one by one, rather than a long chase by the heel.

Now you have Roode getting a backdoor win in Storm’s hometown in front of his family and friends, which only builds his heat.

If I’m booking, Roode gets one more win at Sacrifice (Bully Ray interferes) and then at Slammiversary Storm beats Roode for the title and Bully Ray steps up as the next challenger.

(After Storm celebrates and the PPV ends, film Bully Ray/Kaz/Gunner jumping him in the parking lot, which opens Impact on Thursday)

But that’s just my take. – Schmeric Schiff

I think the main problem people have with Roode retaining the title is that they’ve seen this happen in TNA time & time again and the results are always underwhelming. They don’t have faith in TNA to give the fans what they want, and the past indicates that they won’t. Will things be different now? I do like that they’re having Storm take some time off now to build to his next opportunity, which is better than just throwing him into another feud away from the title. Hopefully for his sake the fans will still support him upon his return and he won’t become a forgotten man.

Rosa Mendes looks an awful lot like Asa Akira there … – TMI

Hmmmmm. I kinda see it.

I might be wrong but isn’t Krissy Vaine the women who attacked Torrie Wilson on Smackdown and then quit the WWE a week later along with her boyfriend because he was going to be put on Raw. If so then it is her own fault she only got “a cup of coffee” with the WWE, if it was her then who knows she could of been a star in the Divas division or she could of been gone within a month or two. Also if it is true that she is a model it sounds like she would of done pretty good as a Diva. – Guest#7039

Krissy was on our podcast a few months back and admitted that she did a poor job of handling things back then, which is why her WWE run was what it was. She owns that, and she’ll never know how well she could have done as a WWE Diva. She could have been there for years as an important part of the division, or maybe she would have fizzled out after her first feud. Who knows? Fortunately for her, she’s moved on to other things and she doesn’t dwell on the past.

20 bucks that the Spike TV execs said MORE Knockouts since that is consistently the highest rated segment on Impact. – Guest#5959

They had a lot of Knockouts on last week’s show, but they were all in the same match. I will say that the 8-Knockout tag team match was better than the typical 8-Diva tag team match that WWE does, simply because it got a few more minutes.

Hey Cook, try reading house show results.Orton wasnt hurt,he’s been on every house show on this UK tour working no dq matches w/Henry and Kane. – Gary

My bad, I thought they were doing a storyline injury with him that would let him miss some time based on SmackDown.

Yep..Midnight Rose is the guy who wrote the WrestleCrap books, does a podcast as well. The OCW group that my friend runs brings in guys from the “Heyman Era” of ECW, you gots Angel Medina, and Thomas “The Inchworm” Rodman from ECW from BWO. You gotta look up Midnight Rose from 4/7/12 when he gets attacked after he’s eliminated from the Battle Royal when a heckler attacks him with cans of shaving cream. Hell, OCW even has their own ‘sign guy’ called Shopping Cart Todd, with CPR dummy and hardcore weapons n all. Gotta love the indies stuff. The dude who runs it, Mike ‘The Mic’ Ortega is a hardworking guy, and I think that’s why I tend to flock to these, and I identify with these smaller groups. Not that it in anyway diminishes my admiration for WWE or TNA. Maybe that’s why I had such a sour taste after Desmond Wolfe/Nigel McGuinness was gone from TNA..who knows. – LitasRevenge

I think one thing that a lot of people (or at least the people that comment on 411 articles) don’t realize is that you can be a fan of more than just one wrestling promotion. You can watch both WWE & TNA and have an appreciation for things that each company does. The same goes for the indies. There are a lot of good indies out there where people work hard to entertain their fans. Unfortunately, there are some bad seeds out there that make everybody else look bad, and we’ll be talking about one of those bad seeds a bit later in the column.

Who would have thought a wrestler named Cheech was going to have issuses at the border? – Andre the Midget

He was traveling with a guy that calls himself Bobby Fish, so there were all sorts of name-based stereotypes going on there. OK, Bobby Fish isn’t a mafia character in storyline, but he probably should be. It’s been a few years since the major promotions had mafia storylines, right? If nothing else I hope he’s talking about making his opponents sleep with the fishes.

And now, the fake news!

Zack Ryder apologized to his fans for what he feels was a poor edition of the Z True Long Island Story last week. He said that WWE took out the best two minutes of the show, and it would have been one of the best shows if not for that. He also said that WWE took out the best two minutes of his match with Kane on Monday night, where he was supposed to get some offense on the big guy.

Ryder’s in a weird place right now. He’s obviously doing better than he was this time last year when he was lucky to get matches on Superstars, but they obviously don’t see him as much more than enhancement talent that can sell some merchandise. It’s tough to see who he can have a feud with…based on the events of the past few months he probably should have had one with Kane, but Kane has demolished Ryder in all of their meetings and that issue isn’t seen as an issue anymore. A feud with Eve doesn’t seem to be in the offering anymore either. He even told his Twitter followers not to call Eve a hoski anymore, with the reason being that he didn’t want to be associated with her. Something tells me that means that WWE doesn’t want Eve associated with him. Without Kane or Eve in the picture, I guess the best thing for Ryder to do right now would be to hook with with John Cena again and get beat up by Brock Lesnar & Lord Tensai.

I think Ryder is trying to recapture his magic from last year by once again painting WWE as the bad guy that’s holding him down. The question is if the fans will buy into it now since he’s gotten a US title run & loads of merchandise. It’ll be a tougher sell for Ryder, but he’s shown that he has the persistence to keep himself in the news & get himself over with people when nobody else thinks that he can. I wouldn’t bet against him

Mark Madden insists that Paul Heyman is helping Brock Lesnar with his promos despite denials by Heyman on Twitter. camera. Madden claims that Heyman isn’t admitting it because he isn’t getting paid to do it. Go ahead and fill in your joke on Paul Heyman & money here. I will say that Monday’s performance by Brock puts Madden’s theory into question.

Christian is scheduled to return to television this week, as he’ll be appearing on the SmackDown tapings Tuesday. Christian has been off TV (except for his HOF induction of Edge) since the Raw before WrestleMania when he was beaten down by CM Punk & taken out of the Johnny vs. Teddy WrestleMania match. Christian was not ready to return at that time, but he did appear on some of the European shows last week and seems good to go now.

His return to SmackDown adds another top heel to the SD roster. Alberto Del Rio was moved to SmackDown last week, and the reasoning according to backstage sources is that the show needs more heels. I happen to think the show needs more faces and that’s why the ratings have been struggling lately. Sheamus is supposed to be the top face on the show, but he’s getting booed against Daniel Bryan on most shows lately. Then there’s Randy Orton, Big Show and not a whole heck of a lot else after that. Add to that the fact that the young heels coming out of FCW are going to SD, and it makes you wonder just who the heck is going to wrestle all of these people.

Andy Leavine, the winner of Tough Enough Season 1, has been released by WWE. Leavine had been working in FCW under the name “Kevin Hackman”, and reports coming out of Florida had been that he wasn’t improving a whole heck of a lot during his time there. Andy winning the Tough Enough contract was a surprise to most people, as Luke Robinson became the favorite to win after Martin Casaus was eliminated with an injury. It seemed like he won the competition because WWE liked his “family guy” story and he was nicer to people than Luke was. And the fact that he was 6’5 & 270 probably helped too. Andy may have been a nice guy, but his lack of improvement combined with failing a Wellness test pretty much sealed his fate with WWE.

CM Punk will be singing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” at the Chicago Cubs game on May 8. Considering the best renditions of the song were done by a drunk Harry Caray, I don’t really have high hopes for this.

Curt Hawkins & Tyler Reks were fired by William Regal on last week’s edition of NXT. They are trying to get people on Twitter to help them get re-hired by tweeting about them during Raw. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened, the only question was if WWE would book it or some wrestler that had been wished well in their future endeavors would get their followers to tweet about them during Raw. It seems to be the best way to get WWE management’s attention these days.

For some reason Sean Hayes became a huge topic of discussion in our comment section the last couple of weeks. Some were shocked & appalled that I didn’t mention him as part of the Three Stooges when they appeared on Raw. I didn’t mention him because he was in character, and I only mentioned Will Sasso because of his previous wrestling appearances. I didn’t want to talk about the Stooges too much anyway because I had no interest in what they were doing. This became an issue for some of his fans, and they weren’t any happier when I made fun of the situation last week and other commenters talked about how they didn’t know or care about him.

With all of this in mind, I found it really amusing when Hayes went on Conan O’Brien’s show and talked about how embarrassed he was to be on Raw. He said that he would never attend another WWE event and disassociated himself from the product. I wonder how the Sean Hayes fans (or the one Sean Hayes fan that posts multiple comments about how great he is) will take this news. Will they turn against him? Will they be self-hating wrestling fans that don’t blame him for trashing a show that they watch every single week? Or will they say that he would have a better time in TNA? I eagerly await their reaction to Mr. Hayes’ outburst.

Me, I think they wasted their time putting the Three Stooges on and should have gotten some Hunger Games people on the show. I would have especially enjoyed an appearance from Jennifer Lawrence, a striking young beauty who happens to be a Louisville Cardinals fan. I bet she would have had a classier response to being on a WWE show than Hayes did.

-Yup, I only mentioned Jennifer Lawrence there so I’d have an excuse to use a picture of her. What about it?

-Three hour Raw tonight! Bad news: Less time to work on the rest of the column. Good news: More filler in this section to make up for lack of other stuff.

-Teddy Long & John Cena come out to do the contract signing, but Big Johnny tells them that they’ll do it later under Brock’s terms.

-Johnny has Teddy tell Cena to leave the ring. So Teddy tells Cena to leave, and Teddy leaves the ring while Cena stays. I think they’re confused.

-Edge comes out to tell John Cena to wake up. Cena looks like he needs to hit the snooze button a couple more times.

-Jericho’s jacket is so freaking awesome.

-Yes King, Jericho wants to hear the boos. It’s part of what makes him great.

-Kofi & Jericho have good chemistry. Not surprising since Kofi grew up watching Jericho and cites him as his inspiration for getting into wrestling. Jericho loves people that love him.

-Nice Codebreaker followed by an old-school Liontamer. Good times!

-Jericho runs down CM Punk’s family and promises to prove that he’s the best in the world at whatever he does. Well, he’s got until sometime before SummerSlam.

-Jericho is also trying to take Triple H’s “Cerebral Assassin” nickname. Well, he does have like ninety nicknames so he wouldn’t miss it that much.

-Hornswoggle just tweeted that he & Brodus Clay are getting ready to get funky. How did we ever find out what wrestlers were thinking before Twitter came along?

-Brock’s still coming for a fight.

-Jericho got Punk a liquor basket! How come nobody’s ever gotten me a liquor basket? I need better friends & relatives.

-Did CM Drunk save a bottle for himself? Hmmm.

-R-Truth gets Lord Tensai. Who did he piss off?

-I wait for the day where Tensai Time will be as popular as Tebow Time. I’ll be waiting a long time, but still.

-The Yeses come back for Tensai head butts in the corner.

-A Mist Claw assisted STO ends it. R-Truth was 40.

-My first guess was 33, which would have put him at like 20 during his first WWF run. I have no idea what I was thinking on that one.

-I miss the dramatic music they used to play during Kane’s promos. They made them more…dramatic.

-Randy Orton kidnaps Paul Bearer and rolls him into the freezer. Kane laughs it off and says the devil is his real father. To be fair, Paul Bearer has been murdered multiple times now and he always seems to come back from it. If he survived a box of cement and a fall off the arena through some tables, a freezer ain’t gonna do anything.

-Great, a homicidal maniac’s running through the crowd. This has “lawsuit” written all over it.

-Alex Riley’s stooging off CM Drunk! He tells Jericho that Punk kept a bottle, they go to his locker room, peek in and see Punk drinking out of a cup! You know what that means!

-Didn’t Alberto Del Rio just get traded to SmackDown? Worst brand extension ever!

-Holy crap, a Great Khali sign. I didn’t know Small lived in Detroit!

-At least now they have a storyline reason for why Khali is slower than molasses.

-I enjoy Cody joining forces with Alberto & Ricardo. Lots of awesomeness there.

-Cody uses the figure four on Show! I swear we’ve had a discussion about him using a submission finisher before. Perhaps now is the time.

-No it isn’t, as Show wins via choke slam.

-Your Extreme Rules Pre-Show Match: Santino Marella defending the US Title against The Miz. Man, Miz can’t even make PPV now. If I liked him at all I’d feel sorry for him.

-They have a policy against wrestlers drinking before matches? Stone Cold never would have made it in this era.

-Also, Eve Torres is better to look at than David Otunga, but her explanations of the law aren’t as amusing.

-Brock smashes Josh Mathews! Good times.

-An unfortunate situation? Come on Cole, you were laughing your ass off during commercial.

-Josh gets taken off on a stretcher. Time for a new SD announcer, or will we just get Cole & Booker?

-Never mind that, Nikki Bella is stretching! Good Lord.

-Eve makes Nikki vs. Beth a lumberjill match. Is that Maxine bringing up the rear? NXT has been good to her.

-If the Bellas are leaving, it’s a shame they didn’t buy their recent ring attire a couple of years ago.

-Yikes, hope Beth didn’t just blow out her knee on that one.

-Seems to be the ankle.

-New Divas Champion! Nikki Bella wins it…hey wait a minute, when is Kharma scheduled back? Holy continuity, Batman! Bellas gonna die.

-CM Punk proves he isn’t drunk by doing a poor job of playing one.

-Stripping the man of the championship for faking being drunk is a pretty steep punishment, isn’t it?

-Did Punk say “WWF Universe” and they muted it? HAW!

-Has anybody in the history of the alphabet ever recited it backwards? That’s a good question.

-You know, with my bad foot I couldn’t walk a straight line like that even if I was sober. This field sobriety test is totally unfair and it’s a good thing I drink at home.

-Punk mixed up S & T. Hand the title to Jericho!

-Sheamus vs. Mark Henry…with D-Bry as the referee! YES YES YES YES YES YES

-D-Bry actually dresses like a referee, complete with black pants. Todd Sinclair taught him well.

-D-Bry screws Sheamus, but made the cardinal sin of taking his referee shirt off.

-YES LOCK!

-The crowd joins with the Yeses, but we’ll pretend that didn’t happen.

-Matt Striker is really hoping that he doesn’t get added to the list of announcer brutality while interviewing Sheamus. I wonder if the people that kidnapped him on NXT got any punishment. Oh wait, I think they got fired or something. Something tells me Brock won’t be getting fired.

-Zack & Santino take on the Usos. Odds on Rosa & Zack’s previous relationship being mentioned?

-Ryder’s still popular with the folks. At least his chants are anyway.

-Santino & Zack win, theoretically earning a tag team title shot at some point. Santino could be a double champion! Hell, if he brings Santina back and wins the Divas title he could be a Triple Crown Champion! God I’m happy nobody in WWE reads this column and has access to my horrible ideas.

-Josh Mathews is getting more TV time out of this than anything ever. He deserved it for that passive-aggressive crack while Brock was leaving.

-Kane finally shows up at the freezer, pulls Paul Bearer out, then rolls him back in. Paul must not be very popular backstage, you’d think somebody else would have gotten him out by now.

-Abraham Washington riles up Epico & Primo.

-Taco Bell sponsors the Funkasaurus match!

-Did they dance the entire commercial? Poor Brodus is gonna be so blown up…

-Dolph wants him some Hornswoggle. At this rate, Horny might be the only guy on the roster Dolph can beat.

-Is Vickie wearing a curtain? Not that I’m complaining.

-Naomi & Cameron’s flexibility is much appreciated. Much.

-Is there anybody in TNA that Brock didn’t beat at some point? It’s been a rough night for those guys.

-Cole says he’s going to interview Randy Orton on SmackDown. OK, so Booker T will be calling part of the show by himself after Orton kills Cole. Can’t wait!

-Brock wants to talk business with Big Johnny since Cena doesn’t have the *something* to come out. This might not end well for Big Johnny.

-I hope Brock asks for ice cream bars. Or at least Coors Light.

-I think these “changes” Brock wants in his contract are already in his real contract.

-They’re finding a way to get people to not like Brock. Let him talk for hours at a time.

-Well, it’s 11:09, so obviously it’s time for Cena to show up. Seems like a couple of years have passed since Edge gave him that pep talk.

-“This is a real feeling that you’re feeling, because I can feel it.”

-Holy hell Brock, find a new word! Enough with feelings, they don’t belong in pro wrestling anyway! Get this man a damn thesaurus.

-The table gets turned over, but no punches are thrown. And that was like 25 minutes of my life that I will never get back. Holy cow, I can’t think of a worse closing segment for Raw heading into a PPV event. Cena vs. Lesnar really should draw many many buys, but after that pile of crap…geez, I don’t know about this. Not a good go-home show for Extreme Rules, and quite frankly this show had no reason to be three hours long.

-This show was originally going to be the Draft, but that got put on hold because the last person who cared about the brand extension stopped caring. OK, it really doesn’t matter if somebody’s on Raw or SmackDown anymore because the same guy runs both shows, but at least it would have given this show some sort of a purpose. This was just three hours of stuff that occasionally mentioned there was a PPV on Sunday and didn’t do much of anything to make people want to buy it.

-Not good.

Hulk Hogan has figured out the cure to all the problems facing Impact Wrestling! Well, 75% of them anyway. One of his followers on Twitter asked him about the show going live every week, and Hogan said they would need more money to do it, he’s been banging that drum for two years, and that going live would solve 75% of the problems. He went on to say that he was coming up with a new idea that would take wrestling into a new era past the Attitude/New World Order, and he wants to flush it out before he drops the bomb.

OK, he didn’t mean it in that revolting of a fashion. Sickos.

Would Impact going live be cool? Sure! Live wrestling shows are inherently better than taped wrestling shows. As good as SmackDown can be, it doesn’t quite have the same feeling of Raw, where anything (theoretically) can happen. I would be cool with watching a live episode of Impact every week and maybe it’d translate to better television as well. But is going live the answer to all of the problems facing the company? Absolutely not. Previous live Impacts have had mixed results…the first couple of shows got a boost in the ratings, but later editions did not.

This is nothing new for TNA. They’re always saying that they’re one move away from really competing with WWE. When they first got onto Spike, they said that they’d compete with WWE if they were on in prime time. Once they went to prime time, they said that they’d compete with WWE if they had two hours. Once they were in prime time with two hours, they said that they’d compete with WWE if they were on a different night. Then they wanted to be live once in awhile, and they wanted to tape the show somewhere other than the Impact Zone. None of these things made too much of a difference, and they even ran back to Thursday nights with their tail between their legs.

Now Hogan’s throwing it out there that they want to be live every week. Needless to say, people within TNA aren’t too happy. They’d like to be live every week too, but they know that it wouldn’t solve all of their problems. It wouldn’t fix the booking. It wouldn’t make the company rely less on older wrestlers & family members of people with power in the company. Making the show live wouldn’t draw in new viewers, unless the show became something that new viewers wanted to watch.

To borrow an old phrase, Hogan’s putting the cart before the horse. They need to make the Impact television show as good as it possibly can be while taped. Then, when there’s more demand for it and the company‘s in a good enough place financially, do it live. People aren’t going to tune into a wrestling TV show just because its live.

I mean, TNA has live PPVs every month and nobody watches those.

Pictures of Hogan’s sex tape leaked online on Monday, and if you could figure out who he was with you have better vision than I do. I was pleased that the pictures were real blurry and I didn’t see anything that would make my dinner come up.

Speaking of things that have been constantly happening in TNA for the ten years they have been in existence, Dixie Carter is promising big surprises for Slammiversary. It’s been a few weeks since she was hyping some sort of a surprise, so this is to be expected.

Whether or not there are surprises coming at Slammiversary, some changes to the Impact Wrestling show have already been announced. Once a month, TNA will have an Open Fight Night where anybody on the roster can challenge anybody else to a match and it has to be accepted. The night will also feature a segment called the Gut Check, where a non-TNA wrestler will be given an opportunity to earn a TNA contract. They will have a match with a TNA wrestler, be evaluated by three judges and the judges will decide whether the wrestler earns a contract or not. I think it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. I talked about it on the 411 on Wrestling with Ron Gamble & Larry Csonka, and they both basically said that it sounds interesting, but they don’t trust TNA to make it work. Some will say that isn’t fair, but it’s often best to take a wait and see attitude with these folks. Maybe it’ll turn out great and we’ll see a bunch of awesome people show up on Impact. Maybe they’ll bring in a bunch of jabronis. We don’t know yet.

I do think it’s a good idea for TNA to have a monthly TV show that they build towards in addition to the PPV. They’ve built to certain episodes of Impact in the past and have had good results with it, so maybe this will help their ratings.

Kazarian donated the hair that he had cut recently to Locks For Love. This is a great organization that provides wigs for children with severe conditions that cause hair loss, like cancer treatment & burn trauma. Our buddy Trent Howell has donated his hair to Locks For Love in the past and plans on doing so again this summer. If I had hair I’d consider doing the same.

The first season of Ring Ka King finished airing on Colors TV in India last weekend. Ratings for the series are said to have been consistent and have pleased the people at Colors. There has been no word on whether or not there will be a Season 2, which usually isn’t a good sign in wrestling, but Jeff Jarrett’s constantly tweeting about it so I don’t think they’ve given up on it.

The Super Smash Brothers won Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s DDT 4 tag team tournament over the weekend. For those of you unfamiliar with Player Uno & Stupefied (which is probably a good bit of you), they’re a pretty fun tag team based on video games. So if you like wrestling and you like video games, you would likely enjoy their work. If you don’t like wrestling or video games…well, I’m not sure why you’re here. Here’s a YouTube video on them that has a bunch of cool flips and stuff. The music is questionable, but what the heck.

They started out in the IWS promotion up in Canada and have previously spent time in CHIKARA & ROH. They came to PWG in September 2011, and obviously they’ve impressed enough people there to get a push. This isn’t exactly surprising since PWG ownership spends most of their time between shows playing video games. Their size will make it tough to get into the major promotions, but they should have a good run on the indies with these characters. Also, Wikipedia informs me that they have real jobs. That’s always a good thing.

Matt Hardy’s court hearing regarding his various arrests from last year has been delayed until next month. Anybody else feeling a sense of déjà vu here?

Remember the GLOW show I mentioned some weeks ago in this column? Turns out that ended up being a complete and utter mess. Greg DeMarco did a good job of covering the debacle in his column and on the 411 on Wrestling, which involved several wrestlers not being paid for their work, miserable promotion leading to less than twenty people attending the show, and several promises made by the promoter not being kept.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens a lot in indy wrestling. There are tons of good promoters out there that want to put on good shows for their fans and live up to the promises they make wrestlers that come in to work for them. But, there are also tons of bad promoters like Eric Rolphe Nyenhuis that try to run wrestling shows and have no idea what they’re doing. Once their show doesn’t draw a dime because they did nothing to promote it other than rent a building and make a couple of posts on the Internet, they end up with a bunch of angry wrestlers wondering where their money is, where the catering they were promised was, why the makeup artist was the promoter’s girlfriend, and where they’re going to spend the night because there’s no hotel room for them to stay in like they were promised.

It’s not right when this sort of thing happens to any wrestler, but I admit this hits somewhat close to home for me since a couple of the ladies involved have appeared on various 411 podcasts. Once you kind of sort of get to know some of these people, it makes the bad things that happen to them more difficult to swallow. Buggy’s obviously an integral part of the things Greg does on this website. Taeler Hendrix was kind enough to appear on both of our shows, with her appearance on the 411 on Wrestling being the first time she appeared on a radio show/podcast type of thing. (If you think I brag too much about this now, just wait until she gets to the big time.) I don’t know either of them outside of random chats & e-mails, but they seem like really good people. Screwing over people like that, whether or not you planned on doing so, isn’t good business. Hopefully this Eric fellow enjoyed being a promoter, because I don’t see much of that happening in his future. He’ll have as much luck finding people to work for him as I have finding attractive single women that are willing to talk to me. He already had a bad reputation on the West Coast, and it’s not going to get any better after this.

With any luck at all, this whole thing will be nothing more than a footnote in the careers of the folks that got screwed here, and they‘ll move on to bigger & better things. I know Taeler especially got hosed in this deal since she’s not a West Coast person and she ended up flying to and back from Las Vegas on her own dime having received nothing that she was promised for doing the show. She trusted somebody that she shouldn’t have for a chance at fame & fortune. It sucks, but she’ll learn from the experience and be more cautious about the types of people she takes bookings from. She’s got a good heel angle going in OVW that’ll turn some heads, and I would be very surprised if we don’t see her on national television very soon. If TNA doesn’t have her in one of those Gut Check matches that we’ll be seeing OVW people in, there’s really no hope for them as a promotion.

I hope that this whole thing serves as a cautionary tale to the young indy wrestlers out there that have had the good fortune of never being stiffed by a promoter. It can happen to anybody, so keep your guard up.

The 411 on Wrestling returned Friday night! Larry Csonka & I talked about the latest & greatest wrestling news and generally had good times. Check it out!

Fact or Fiction featured Greg DeMarco & Jack Stevenson talking about Lord Tensai & Garett Bischoff. I’m not a huge fan of either Tensai or Bischoff, but I wouldn’t mind seeing them in a match with each other.

Frame presents this week’s edition of the Sammich. Sometimes I wish I’d named the column the “Wrestling Sammich” or the “Rasslin Sando”. Both of these names are more amusing to me.

Weyer pays homage to Chief Jay Strongbow.

Sarnecky reviews ECW Barely Legal, which is still one of the most fondly remembered PPV events of all time. Those were exciting times.

Speaking of exciting times (How do ya like that segue, Trent?), Renken talks about how Jerry Lawler became the King of Memphis. If you’re not reading William’s historical pieces that go up the same day the Corner does, you should be.

Make sure to check out the MMA Zone on Wednesday for the finals of the MMA Fact or Fiction Tournament of Great Significance! I won the first one, who will win the second one? And why am I plugging it even though I was eliminated from the tournament already? My Twitter & Facebook peeps know the answer. Also, check out mancavethoughts.com later this week for another podcast featuring your humble correspondent. I’ll be getting my NFL Draft & Cincinnati Reds talk on, so make sure you all check it out!

Well, that’s all we have time for this week! Nick Marsico will be in tomorrow with the Wed Wi, and I’ll be back next week with more News From Cook’s Corner! Until then, check out what I now consider the greatest website ever.