News to Start Your Weekend 3.16.07
Posted by Nick Marsico on 03.16.2007
I'm back and I'm frustrated. Enjoy the frustration. Agree, disagree or be indifferent.
I just wanted to mention that I'm watching Ring of Honor shows in order from the beginning, and I'm up to the middle of 2004 now. Generation Next is about to form, and it's getting exciting. Joe's title run for the first year or so is pretty underwhelming, but has been picking up, especially with the Homicide feud and the formation of the Rottweilers. Also, this period is when the Embassy is just beginning. Nana made his return from a short absence and started going through a bunch of different guys to find people to make money for him. Right now they've just become officially named the Embassy, and the current iteration is Nana with the Outkast Killas and Josh Daniels. Daniels is good, but from what I've seen is basically a low-rent Benoit/Lance Storm/whoever have you type of guy. He's like a smaller Chad Collyer, even. Good wrestler, but pretty generic.
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London and Kendrick are the longest reigning tag team champions in years. I didn't do any research on who has been the closest in recent memory or who the two others in the top 4 all time are (as L&K are also the 4th longest reigning team in WWE history) but Demolition are number 1 with 478 days in a single reign. London and Kendrick have been champions for about 10 months now. There are no other teams on SmackDown really, as Deuce and Domino have fallen off the face of the Earth as have Regal and Taylor, and there's nobody else. MNM keeps showing up on SmackDown to beat them, though, which is really fucking annoying to me. MNM got squashed in a cage match on RAW by the almost accidental tag champions who don't trust each other, and got squashed after 2 other teams wrestled the champs first. Then on this week's SmackDown (spoilers, but fuck you, it's not that important), they come over and beat L&K and Ashley in a 6-man. It's cool and Paul and Brian are a long-reigning team, but it really doesn't mean shit. All of their feuds has basically been them getting shitkickings from a new team and then beating them in a fluke, then moving on and doing it over again.
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- Henry Godwin and Ray Gordy are the newest version of the Godwins tag team. They actually defeated Deuce and Domino this week in a dark match. I guess that's where D&D went.
- Tomko is one half of the NEEEEEEEW IWGP Tag Team Champions with his partner Giant Bernard, known better to most of you, I'm sure, as Prince Albert/Albert/A-Train. Bernard has been an awesome gaijin monster working for New Japan for the last few years and Tomko is much improved from his stay in WWE. They beat Nakanishi and Omori.
- The New Year's Revolution and Royal Rumble pay-per-views this year had significantly lower buyrates than the 2006 editions. NYR dropped about 120,000 buys from around 340,000 in 2006 to about 220,000 in 2007. The Rumble dropped around 80,000 from 580,000 to 500,000. That's kind of a shame, because the 2007 version of both shows were much better than they were in 2006.
- The rumors about the New Hart Foundation starting up are back again now that WSX is officially not going to continue after next week's airing of the season one finale. Apparently Teddy Hart is possibly on his way to WWE after that contract expires and may be put together with Nattie Neidhart (Jim Neidhart's daughter) and Harry Smith (Davey Boy's son). Teddy is the son of one of the females of the direct Hart family, Georgia Hart, sister of Bret, Owen, Bruce and the others, and daughter of Stu and Helen, obviously. That makes him the nephew of the two most famous Harts, Bret and Owen. And also a douchebag. Not because of his association with those people, though. He's just a douche.
- Apparently WWE feels that their talent is worth a lot more than they've been getting for appearances. Thusly, they've raised the price that places have to pay to get them to come for autograph signings double and even triple for some guys/on some occasions. It probably means that there will be less signings. I don't get the point of doing it, but whatever. I've never gone, because who cares. I'm not one of those idiots who talks about how it's a "dream come true" to meet these people. Did anybody else get douche chills hearing a couple of those guys say it was a dream come true to meet Ashley at one of her Playboy signings? Jesus Christ almighty, dude.
- Edge hasn't been wrestling recently due to a broken jaw he suffered during his MITB qualifying match against Rob Van Dam a couple weeks back. He's going to wrestle in the Ladder Match at WrestleMania and then will probably take a few weeks off for surgery. Jimmy Rave also broke his jaw. I've been reading that they both got hurt in matches (against RVD and Nigel McGuinness respectively), but I think they were just trying to make out but got their braces interlocked and too aggressively tried to pull apart from each other.
- WWE has announced that they will be running their first show at MSG since September 11 last year. They'll be doing an episode of RAW on August 13, two weeks before SummerSlam from the Continental Airlines Arena in New Jersey. There have also been talks of having next year's Royal Rumble PPV at the Garden.
- Daniel Rodimer, a guy who was supposed to be on TV by now getting a pretty big push, has really begun to lose favor with management, and the wrestlers apparently don't like him much either. According to reports, after agents started getting vocal to Vince McMahon about Oleg Prudius (Vladimir Kozlov) not being ready, Stephanie ended the plans for the Rodimer push, since he is much like the Russian. Big dude with a decent look and a good body – it looks like Stephanie has learned ‘well' from her father, as they both judge a guy on their first impression of his look and don't generally evaluate him from an actual talent standpoint until it's too late. Rodimer has heat with the boys in the back because a story is going around that apparently he was seen getting a massage backstage at one of the shows, and he's not even working. Oops.
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Man, everybody is just dying. 2007 has been a pretty awful year as far as celebrity and wrestler deaths. James Brown died just before 2007, passing away on Christmas 2006. Art Buchwald, famous mostly for a problem with Paramount Pictures in the late 80s over the Eddie Murphy ‘Coming to America' movie that basically ripped off a screenplay that he wrote years earlier that had been rejected. Bam Bam Bigelow died from a drug overdose after many years of having a whole lot of problems personally and physically. Doug Gentry, one of the most important men backstage with Ring of Honor, especially during their struggling times a few years back passed away in January as well.
Anna Nicole Smith died. I wrote a whole big paragraph bemoaning why she was ever famous, but halfway through I lost interest and wondered why I even cared enough to angrily rant about how she got more attention in both life and death than so many people who were so much more worthwhile in any way. Fuck her, fuck Howard K. Stern, fuck her dead son and fuck her newborn future whore baby. That's what I say.
Joe Edwards, who wrote the Archie comics, passed away, as did Hank Bauer, a guy who played for the Yankees for 10 years in the 40s and 50s and won a World Title with the Orioles in 1966. Mike Awesome committed suicide, Damien Nash and Keeley Dorsey, two young football players, also passed well before their time. Hell, Dorsey was two years younger than me, and Nash only 3 years older. Another member of the wrestling family passed, as Ray "Thunder" Stern died. Black Shadow, a Mexican wrestler, died after a long life. Bad News Brown passed on the same day this month. Boston's lead singer Brad Delp went like Mike awesome and Richard Jeni, Ernie Ladd passed on Saturday, as did aforementioned comedian Richard Jeni, another man who took himself from his family and the world this year. Finally, Arnold Skaaland passed on Tuesday.
This really has been a shitty year. A lot of these people, at least, have passed on after good, long lives, which is at least something different when you see wrestling deaths reported. Skaaland was 82, as was Alejandro Cruz (Black Shadow). Ray Stern was 74 – not very old, but a long life. Bad News Brown was only 63, but at this point, seeing a guy that any of us remember wrestling last into even his 50s is almost miraculous. Cancer took the Big Cat, but he was 68. Not an old man, and he did go before what should have been his time, but at least he wasn't in his 30s or 40s.
I felt this was all worth a mention, as I often don't spend much time noting deaths, and the sheer amount this year alone has been overwhelming. 8 wrestlers have already died this year, and it's only mid-March.
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The biggest story this week is that after months and months of ignoring the brand split, the experiment is officially over as far as PPVs are concerned. There will be no more RAW or SmackDown only shows, so now nothing will be special any more. The reasoning for this, according to them, is:
"We have seen over the past two years that WWE pay-per-views have significantly better buy rates when more than one WWE brand is involved," said Kurt Schneider, Executive Vice President, Marketing. "WrestleMania, with an average of one million buys per event over the past three years, is the perfect example. This new direction will give our fans more of what they want in every one of our pay-per-views."
Uh… no. See, the reason those shows get bigger buyrates is because when the time comes to start building for them, WWE pays a little bit more attention to building up matches for the shows. Further than that, it's pretty obvious that there will be more fan interest when the big names from all of the shows are on PPV. Why? Because those are the guys who have been given a chance to make names of themselves. They're the guys who have been pushed over the years, they're the guys who have built a reputation, so the fans care about them. There are very few people, outside of Vince himself and a couple of his ‘yes' men, that were around when the majority of those guys made their names that are around and on the writing team right now. Shawn Michaels, Undertaker, Kane, Edge, Benoit, the Hardyz, Ric Flair, Triple H, Steve Austin, Booker T, Rey Mysterio. Those are the big stars in WWE that all made their names and were very popular well, well, well, well before the current crop of writers on the creative team joined WWE.
The problem is laziness. The creative team, instead of trying to do anything to create any interest in the current product, just uses the name guys in order to get the rubes who have been watching the company for years to pay. Hey, nobody bought that RAW PPV with a Triple H match, an Edge match and 6 matches with guys like the Highlanders and Chris Masters. You know what the problem is? The Undertaker and Rey Mysterio weren't on the show! How about giving the Highlanders an interesting angle? Give these people storylines, put them in feuds, give the fans a reason to care about them. If you do that, then, magically, you won't be seeing a problem with low buyrates. The ridiculousness of the statement in that press release just gets me so fucking frustrated and angry. These people are being paid, and no doubt paid enough money that they are living very comfortably, and instead of doing their jobs and making that pay worthwhile, they just rely on the work of others and blame their problems on anybody but themselves.
I could expand on this, and I got in a big argument with a couple other people elsewhere earlier this week about it, but that's the general point. It's just fucking not a necessary step they're taking, and either they don't realize that this is a problem or they do and they just don't care because they're lazy fucks. If anybody has a different opinion on this – I know there are people that like the brands being together and who are happy about this announcement – then send me an email and we can discuss it. It'll be fun.
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- There's more I can go on about, but it's just frustrating. I hate that the ‘Battle of the Billionaires' angle is getting so much time every week on every show. People say that since it's a big media thing, it's good that it's getting so much air time, but to me that's the reason it doesn't need much. Donald Trump is a huge star outside of the wrestling world, and people will talk about this angle even if the whole thing gets 5 minutes or air time a week. It doesn't have to be the main focus. Vince is a huge heel with the fans as it is, so they don't have to do the stuff they're doing, because he doesn't have to ‘get more over' with anybody. This whole deal gets an inordinate amount of time.
- I hate the way they did the gauntlet series with HBK and Cena. It made all three teams they faced look like shit. They looked like a bunch of jobbers.
- I actually like the Kane/Khali angle. It won't be a good match, but the way they're going about building up to the mess at WrestleMania is actually quite well done.
- JBL is returning to the ring next week to wrestle Shawn Michaels. Awesome.
- Randy Orton continually proves that he's very far behind where he should be at this point in his career as a wrestler. When given time to have a match, he doesn't know what to do with himself. He's game to keep up pretty well with a guy who can carry him, but he can't even come close to carrying a match with a guy who needs it. Kennedy, whose push to this point is quite similar to Orton's, can already carry a match with a guy who needs it. Orton just can't hack it. His match with Lashley was pretty good up until about the 10 minute point, but once it started running longer than that, he had no idea what to do, and it started to just suck. Lashley's green, and he needs somebody to carry him. Orton's not the guy to do it, because he's just in the beginning stages of getting yellow.
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That's it, I'm done here for the week. Check out Ari's Column of Honor and find RocketBusta Radio and listen to it every Saturday night at 8. Hell, read Ari's column Saturday afternoon and then listen to me talk in the evening.
