The Custom Made News Report 05.04.08

Posted by Ryan Byers on 05.04.2008

Turn out the lights, the party's over.

Welcome, one and all to the Custom Made News Report for Sunday, May 4, 2008. As always, I'm Ryan, and, over the course of the next several pages, I've got plenty to talk about from the world of professional wrestling. Long-time readers of my work will want to make sure that they check out the final segment of this column. There's some stuff in there you won't want to miss out on.

All the Stuff from Stamford

All's Wellness That Ends Wellness

The oft-discussed yet questionably-enforced WWE Wellness Policy is making headlines again this weekend, as PW Insider and various other sources are reporting that the E is set to make changes to the program which they hope will prevent people from cheating their tests.


TL Hopper, who I like to imagine still controls WWE's bathrooms

Word on the street is that a "specific incident," the details of which remain unknown, prompted a new procedure for the company's testing. What are these changes, you ask? Apparently, prior to this week, collection of urine samples was allowed to take place at urinals with wrestlers placing their specimens in to a vial. The new procedures provide for significantly less privacy, as now the talent will be moved away from the urinals and under the watchful eyes of Aegis Science representatives while doing their business.

Disturbing mental images (Trevor Murdoch) aside, there's a part of me that wants to applaud this move. After all, even if this may be a bit more embarrassing for the talent, it's hard for me to not support a move that will, in theory, lead to more accurate results in a testing program to ban the sorts of substances which wrestlers have abused for decades, leading to an abnormally high number of young deaths. Yet the more cynical side of me wonders whether the potential for a positive impact on the program's effectiveness will actually be realized. The fact of the matter remains that, even if the collection process is 100% free of error, the ball is still in Aegis' court when it comes to interpreting the results and still in the WWE office's court in terms of doling out the punishments which go along with positive results. Hopefully just as much effort is going in to preventing deception at that level as there is being invested in preventing deception on the talent's end.

Khali of the Wild

For those of you wondering why he lost to the Big Show at Backlash and why he was crippled by the Undertaker's gogoplata Smackdown, the Great Khali is getting ready to take a thirty day hiatus from the rings of World Wrestling Entertainment so that he can return to his homeland of India. According to Figure Four Weekly, Khali's WWE exposure has made him in to a huge star on the Asian subcontinent, meaning that he will in all likelihood be coming home to a hero's welcome. The publication indicated that one of the primary reasons for Khali's trip is that he needs to check in with the local police department where he worked prior to breaking in to wrestling, which apparently still has him on the books as an employee. He will also take the time to film a role in a movie entitled Ramma the Savior, which is an action flick geared towards children. It was reported that Khali specifically requested that he have a heroic role in the movie so that he could be a positive role model to his young fans.

I don't know about anybody else, but I think this is a heartwarming story all around. WWE often gets a lot of flack for its treatment of its performers. Sometimes that's deserved, and sometimes it's not. However, this is a situation in which they definitely deserve credit, assuming that Khali's return isn't a requirement of a work visa or similar immigration-related law. Absent that, they're certainly under no obligation to allow him to take such a leave, and, as somebody whose work and schooling has taken him away from his family and friends for months and even years at a time, I know exactly how much these periodic jaunts home can really help to revitalize somebody's mental health. On top of that, I'm glad to see that Khali is attempting to do something positive with his celebrity by giving back to the young children of his nation. I may razz the guy from time to time for not being particularly good in the ring, but everything I've read and heard about him makes the big guy sound like he's got a heart of gold, so I wish him all of the success in the world.

Random Video Interlude

You all knew it was coming. Here is the latest SHIMMER music video, which made its debut prior to last weekend's tapings. Kudos to the phenomenal Nykk for putting this together.



To view videos that have appeared in previous editions of the Custom Made News Report, be sure to check out my new YouTube page.

SHIMMER Afterglow

As many of you already know, I took last week off from writing this column so that I could head up to the Chicago area to catch a wrestling show promoted by SHIMMER: Women Athletes, perhaps my favorite indy company currently on the scene. I had a full rundown of the show up on 411 early Monday morning, but I had a few more thoughts about the program which I didn't think were quite appropriate for a more news-based "live report" of the evening's activities. Those thoughts are here.

About a month ago I wrote a lengthy piece for this website questioning whether it was still worth my time to be a fan of professional wrestling. Ric Flair, who was one of my favorite wrestlers literally for the entire time I have been watching the sport, had just been inducted in to the WWE Hall of Fame, competed in his last match, and received an outstanding retirement ceremony the likes of which this industry will never see again. Pro wrestling is all about eliciting emotional highs from its audiences, and, at that time, I felt like nothing in the sport could ever again get me up to the level of emotion which I was feeling on those three particular evenings. In the weeks that followed, I continued to watch some wrestling, typically Raw and the TNA Impact shows that I review for this website. However, nothing seemed to be grabbing my attention as much as it would have prior to the Flair retirement ceremonies. Wrestling just didn't seem as fun as it used to be.

Of course, I'd purchased my ticket to see SHIMMER's April 26 tapings well in advance of Wrestlemania. In fact, if I recall correctly, I placed the order on January 1 of this year. I didn't want the money to go to waste, and I did need to get away for a weekend, so I decided to attend the show even though my interest in the sport had dipped a bit.

I'm glad that I did, because this show may have saved my love of wrestling.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say that last weekend's show got me to experience the same intensity of emotion or even that elicited the same feelings that the Flair weekend did. However, what it did do was take me back to a simpler time and remind me of exactly what is fun about professional wrestling. Were there any matches on the card which will be in contention for top honors in the Wrestling Observer's end of the year awards? No. Were there any Hulk Hogan or Rock level superstars? Of course not. What the 250 or so fans crammed in to that tiny Eagle's Club did get, though, was professional wrestling being presented in a manner that has otherwise all but died out in the United States. This wasn't WWE, in which spectacle is king and all other is secondary. This wasn't TNA, in which the company throws as many half-cocked "innovative concepts" as possible at the wall to see which of them might stick. This wasn't ROH, in which logic has largely been abandoned for as many huge MOVES~! as possible with fans as a result forming unrealistic expectations of what wrestlers should put their bodies through.

What the SHIMMER fans actually got was a series of straightfoward, decently thought out matches presented as though professional wrestling is an honest-to-goodness sport, with the overriding goal of the individuals in the ring being ascension up the card and to the company's championship. Almost every match had a logical beginning, middle, and end, with none of them featuring wrestlers hitting moves just for the sake of hitting moves. Everything made sense. Just as importantly, the vast majority of the performers had clearly defined and easy to understand characters which they were masters of conveying to the audience despite the fact that they received next to no time on a microphone. This was the sort of professional wrestling that I grew up with, it's the sort of pro wrestling that I still enjoy the most to this day, and it's the sort of professional wrestling which I'm glad a company like SHIMMER is aiming to preserve. A lot of people think of it simply as "that women's promotion," but the fact of the matter is that the gender of the performers is one of the last things that strikes me about its product. If men were being booked in the exact same way and having the exact same matches, I would still love the shows, as they take me back to an era which the rest of the wrestling world has largely forgotten.

The other thing which I was reminded of during the tapings is just how much fun it is to be a part of a live crowd, particularly in a smaller, more intimate venue. It's gotten to the point where the crowds at SHIMMER are comprised in large part of regulars, some of whom are from the Chicago area, some of whom fly in from the east coast, some of whom who come in from the south, and a few of whom even make it over from the United Kingdom. Though I haven't met most of these people face-to-face and don't know them as human beings, I think it's fun that I now know virtually all of them as professional wrestling fans. I know which guys are going to bring in plush flowers to hand off to Daizee Haze, I know the couple of people that I can expect completely idiotic comments out of, and I know the folks who are going to start up the most amusing chants. (Even if their favorite target, Portia Perez, was sadly absent.) It's getting to the point where I feel like we're some kind of odd, dysfunctional family, most of whom don't even know each other by name and many of whom probably aren't paying near the level of attention that I am to the behavior of the other fans.

It's not just the pseudo-family atmosphere that made being a part of this crowd fun, though. In some ways it felt like a family, yet in other ways it felt like being a part of this crowd was being a part of a larger organism. When I say that, I don't mean that the reaction of every fan in attendance to every spot on the show was identical. However, the overall mood of the crowd was very much a creature unto itself, constantly reacting, growing, evolving, and changing. A lot of people use the phrase "They're trying to be a part of the show" in a derogatory way and direct it to those audience members who act like jackasses in an attempt to get themselves over. What those fans fail to realize is that the audience actually is part of a show, and it's part of a show in a positive way. After all, without the audience, the wrestlers have nothing from which to draw a reaction, and, aside from their opponents, they have very little to react to. Being part of a show as part of the collective known as "the live audience" generates a high in me the likes of which I get in few other places, and I'm glad that SHIMMER was able to remind me of that fact.

Accordingly, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who was involved with the show for producing a fine product and a hell of a fun time. To the wrestlers, to the office staff, to the ticket takers, to my fellow fans, to the organization that provides the venue, to the production crew, to the photographers, and to Michael Anthony's Pizzeria and Bar, thank you. Last weekend, you all gave up a little bit of your time – and in the case of the performers, your bodies – and it all helped to remind me of why I fell in love with professional wrestling some fifteen years ago.

Signing Off

It's ironic that I'm writing the next sentence immediately after a segment in which I discussed how much I love professional wrestling, but I'm afraid that I'm going to have to write it anyway:

After four years, I am leaving 411mania.

That's not a joke, not a gag, and not a work. I prefer not to have too many details about my personal life interjected in to these columns, but I will say that, since January 1, there have been a lot of changes in the life of Ryan Byers. All of these changes have been positive ones, as they've allowed me to begin upon a career path which I've wanted to follow for as long as I can remember. They've also allowed me to help others make legitimate, positive changes in their own lives. I'm thrilled with how things have developed for me professionally over the past several months, and my professional satisfaction has resulted in a level of personal happiness which I've felt at no other point in my life.

The only negative consequence of these changes is that the resulting time crunch means that I will have to give up my post here on the website. It's not something I necessarily enjoy doing given how much fun I've had writing for 411 over the last several years, but it is something which I have to do in order to pursue goals that, in the long run, will be even more fulfilling.

If I attempted to list everybody who I need to thank for giving me this opportunity, I'd surely forget at least one important individual. As such, I'm not even going to try to compile a list. Just let it be known that, if I interacted with you at any point in my capacity as a writer for this site, I probably got a kick out of it . . . even if you were just writing in to call me stupid, gay, fat, or some combination of the three.

This will be the last edition of the Custom Made News Report. A replacement has already been lined up for the Sunday news slot, and he or she will be beginning next week. As of this writing, nobody has stepped up to take over the TNA Impact review, so I will keep cranking out Craters until that spot is filled. (And, no, we're not taking applications from outside the current staff . . . at least not yet.) I do have an open invitation to continue to participate in the site's big features even once my regular duties cease. Whether I will actually accept that invitation remains to be seen. I'm going to play that one by ear.

So, once again, thank you all for what has been a great run. My only hope is that future generations of 411 writers can enjoy themselves as much as I have.