The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '97: The Last Time WWF Was Number Two

by Dave Meltzer

  The event sold out weeks in advance in the 6,000-seat Louisville Gardens, with 4,963 paying $82,228 and another $44,184 in merchandise. Probably the most memorable thing on the show was the angle where Steve Austin gave Jim Ross a stone cold stunner. The first ever match of Undertaker vs. Shawn Michaels was notable for yet another world-class performance by Michaels. The fact Bret Hart beat Patriot in the WWF title match should have surprised nobody, but the near burial of Patriot, just a few weeks after arriving in the WWF, was. The Head Bangers winning the WWF tag team title in the Fatal Four way, which given the workrate was an appropriate name for the match, was a surprise, although the finish, where Austin giving Owen Hart a stone cold stunner causing his duo with Davey Boy Smith to lose, shouldn’t have been.

  The next attempt to push the minis from Mexico highlighted their ability to do spots, but the attempt to turn them into 1960s “mighty midgets” doing the Sky Low Low and Fuzzy Cupid spots were woefully outdated. The triangle match was a strong worst match of the year candidate. There really isn’t much to say about Brian Christopher vs. Scott Putski since due to Putski’s injury early on, the match was stopped well before it had gotten going. Brian Pillman vs. Goldust was the beginning of what appears to be a very long soap operaish angle, and to their credit, their match was a lot better than their first meeting at SummerSlam.

  50 Years of Funk

  The other legendary Texas wrestling family, the Funks, had a celebration and an ending of an era as well on 9/11 in Amarillo at the Fairgrounds Coliseum.

  It was billed as 50 years of Funk—as Dory Funk Sr. came from Indiana to Texas in 1947 and eventually became the biggest wrestling star and owner of the territory based in Amarillo until his death in 1973. It was also billed as the final match for Terry Funk in his home town where he started wrestling in 1965. Terry and Vicki Funk promoted the show, combining talent from the WWF, ECW, FMW and JD for a card that will air on Japanese cable television. The main event, Terry Funk against Bret Hart, was also taped for a movie, tentatively titled “Beyond the Mat,” a documentary to be produced by Barry (“Nutty Professor”) Blaustein in conjunction with Ron Howard and with two of the ECW matches scheduled to air on the television show this week.

  The show drew nearly a full house of 3,800. The highlight, even more than the live crowd that responded well to nearly every match, no matter how good or bad the quality was, was a ceremony before the Funk-Hart match. After Hiromichi Fuyuki, who Funk will wrestle for the old NWA Texas heavyweight title on 9/28 at Kawasaki Baseball Stadium, came out to issue a challenge, all the ECW wrestlers on the show along with Paul Heyman, Dory Funk, and Terry’s wife and family got in the ring. Heyman gave Funk much deserved credit for helping take ECW to the level it has reached and presented him with a replica ECW world heavyweight title belt which he said was for being the lifetime ECW champion. Hart, who was accompanied to the ring by father Stu and brothers Ross and Bruce, then said that he believed Terry Funk was the single greatest wrestler in the history of the business and mentioned that as a kid he spent a lot of time living with both Dory and Terry and he thought that Amarillo wrestling was the greatest wrestling that there ever was.

  Among the people backstage who weren’t part of the live show included Taka Michinoku, Sam Houston and Grizzly Smith. The show was promoted locally off six weeks of ECW television, that aired past midnight on the NBC affiliate. The crowd there recognized and reacted to the ECW wrestlers, although only Sandman got a great pop coming out. It appears that Heyman and Funk will try to promote another show in Amarillo in early 1998 which would be a total ECW card.

  WCW Fall Brawl

  WCW’s PPV show of the week, Fall Brawl on 9/14 from the Lawrence Joel Coliseum in Winston-Salem, NC, was the typical WCW offering. A strong undercard with the match quality in the so-so range after the mid-point. The general reports were favorable, but not enthusiastically so. In this case, the main event that the show was built around, War Games, was among the worst War Games ever as a match, but the ending and post-match were among the most dramatic.

  The show drew a sellout 11,939 (11,024 paid) with a $213,330 gate, slightly more than last year’s War Games in the same building but a much higher gross with the increase in ticket prices. In all the WCW print advertising in the market, they listed Hulk Hogan as appearing on the show which is blatant false advertising because it was known months in advance that he was skipping this show. The general belief as to why the teams in War Games weren’t announced until the day before the show is only partly the typical lack of organization, but also because the way the Nitro hype was going, to make people think that perhaps Hogan and Sting would be on opposite sides until the announcement of the complete line-up of Team WCW six days before the show.

  Because of an angle during the show that involved Larry Zbyszko, he was brought in to do color instead of Dusty Rhodes, which turned out to be a major plus. The booking was top-notch in that the matches that needed controversial finishes for storyline reasons had them, and the waters weren’t muddied underneath to where it seemed like screw-job city because everything underneath was a clean finish.

  WWF One Night Only

  The World Wrestling Federation ran its first ever PPV show primarily for the British market on 9/20 before a sellout crowd of 11,000 fans at the NEC Arena in Birmingham, England. The show aired live in the United Kingdom, on tape delay on PPV in Canada, and has been released for the U.S. market on home video.

  Our reports indicated it was a very good show, with the final three matches being the highlight of the show, headlined by Shawn Michaels winning the European title from Davey Boy Smith in a match that Smith dedicated to his sister, Traci, who came out to the ring with him and is suffering from bone cancer. The basic idea for this title change, making Michaels the first ever “Grand Slam” champion (WWF, IC, WWF tag team and European) in company history, appears to build up a second PPV for the United Kingdom, likely coming from Smith’s home town of Manchester, England, sometime in the spring of 1998.

  It was the same promotional gimmick used by the WWF last year to build up the Royal Rumble PPV where Shawn Michaels regained the WWF title in his home town of San Antonio. The fact Michaels was given the title in the wake of the incident in Muncie, IN where he was swearing (nicely edited off television), calling out Undertaker who wasn’t there, and running around in biker shorts and “stuffing” his crotch makes one wonder just how much Vince McMahon really didn’t know about the incident before hand.

  Throwing all that out, from a pure business perspective, this is a viable tried-and-true wrestling angle, with a heartbreaking loss by the top babyface (in that market) to set up a return. If the Michaels deal wasn’t an angle, which is something I’d be skeptical of at this point, than the WWF is stupid to put a belt on Michaels in the state he’s in, not to mention his track record of how many times coming up with excuses and reasons to never drop back belts he’s given.

  For WWF in England, the first PPV show was expected to do well based on the novelty of it being the first non-boxing event ever on PPV in that country, but it becomes less and less of a novelty with each successive show. Rather than “waste” having your largest expected audience with a blow-off, you use the largest audience to do a major angle to try and keep it for the next show. But it doesn’t appear that this title change was planned more than a week in advance unless the communication within the company has broken down, because on Raw two days after the switch, there were localized promos all over the country running for matches in October talking about Bulldog’s matches as being European title matches.

  WWF In Your House 18: Badd Blood

  Under the cloud of the death of Pillman, WWF ran its Badd Blood PPV show on 10/5 in St. Louis at the Kiel Center. The show drew a legitimate sellout of 21,151 fans (17,404 paying $212,550; $101,155 in merchandise). It would have been the second largest crowd in the long and storied history of St. Louis wrestling, trailing the famous Strangler Lewis vs. Jim Londos stadium match in 1934 that drew 35,
000.

  I really can’t give a fair assessment of the show. It appeared that none of the matches were any good except the main event, which was a strong candidate for match of the year. I’d give the show a thumbs in the middle, but it’s hard to really give you any feelings on the show.

  WCW Halloween Havoc

  In an era where fan behavior at wrestling has led to problems often more than weekly at wrestling matches, WCW decided to encourage the problem with a lame fan out of the audience angle as the closing scene in its Halloween Havoc PPV show.

  Havoc on 10/26 from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, which will hold a short-lived title as the largest grossing wrestling event in WCW history, was the typical WCW PPV fare. Good undercard matches and a weak finish. In this case, more exaggerated than usual.

  The Rey Misterio Jr. vs. Eddie Guerrero mask vs. cruiserweight title, won by Misterio Jr., in a finish apparently not finalized until just minutes before the show started, was arguably the single best match on a WCW PPV show dating back more than six years to the prime of Ric Flair and the February 24, 1991 War Games match from Phoenix. Because of sentimental and memorable reasons, some may compare it with the Jushin Liger vs. Brian Pillman match in 1992, but this match was clearly due to the sport advancing over five years, of a higher quality if both were judged by the same standards. Ultimo Dragon vs. Yuji Nagata opened with an excellent match as well.

  But the show had its disasters, including but not limited to Hulk Hogan vs. Roddy Piper, Steve McMichael vs. Alex Wright and Disco Inferno vs. Jacquelyn, which had better work than the aforementioned two but from a logic standpoint came off as a vindictive company trying to punish a wrestler for reasons having nothing to do with putting on a good show. Even with the bad being exceedingly bad, no show with a match the caliber of the Misterio Jr. match and backed up with three other good matches on the card could get a thumbs down from me.

  The show drew a legitimate sellout of 12,457 fans, with 10,138 paying $297,508 and another $102,340 in merchandise sales. The live gate was the all-time record for WCW, breaking the Boston Nitro record set earlier in the year, but its a record that has already been topped by the advance for the 11/23 World War III PPV in Auburn Hills, MI.

  There really wasn’t much to say about the show other then the new cage used for the first time in the Hulk Hogan vs. Roddy Piper match looked to legitimately be about 20 feet high, which would make it as high a cage as wrestling has ever seen. The typical pro wrestling “15 foot cage” is eight feet high, and the monstrous cage used by AAA in Los Angeles noted for the spectacular dive by Mascarita Sagrada onto Jake Roberts, was probably no more than 12 feet.

  As awesome as the height of the cage was, it was incredible that Randy Savage, just weeks before his 45th birthday and coming off a serious ankle injury just a few months ago, did a leap off the top of the cage to set up the finish of the Hogan-Piper match. The fact that he actually missed Hogan, who he was supposed to hit to set up Piper’s sleeper hold finish, can be forgiven for the combination of guts and insanity it took to even consider doing such a move.

  It was largely like watching two PPVs in some way. The first three matches, largely with wrestlers who learned their trade in other countries and announced by Mike Tenay, were the beginnings of an excellent show. Starting with match four, it was among the worst PPV shows in years with only the Savage vs. Diamond Dallas Page match as a saving grace.

  After the match was over and the NWO group of Hogan, Savage and Eric Bischoff had Piper handcuffed to the cage as if they were going to crucify him, a plant fan with Sting make-up hopped the advance in an incredibly lame attempt at a shoot angle. The fan got away from one of the fake Stings (who appeared to be Bobby Walker) and ended up being attacked by Savage and Hogan, with Hogan throwing his lame work punches that weren’t even hitting the guy as the cameras focused on that, and security stood there and did nothing and as the fan was pulled from the cage as the show went off the air.

  Last year, when fans began throwing garbage at the NWO during PPV shows, it created a ripple effect to where fans thought buying a ticket to live shows gave them the license to hurl garbage at the wrestlers when the show was over. While no wrestlers have been seriously injured by this trend, fans at arenas have been hit and cut with bottles. One of the draws of Nitro itself, along with the PPV shows, Raw and ECW tapings, is for fans themselves to get on television with their antics and signs and get their five seconds of fame. There is nothing wrong with this trend so long as nobody gets hurt and perhaps, so long as fan behavior doesn’t reach the stage of being lewd. But when it is glorified that a fan hits the ring to attack the heels, in the atmosphere we’re in now, you can guarantee it’ll happen again.

  It’s already happened a few times on Nitro. It’s just been lucky so far that the fans have been people who small referees are able to snatch. Some day a guy the size of Roadblock (who actually got into the pro wrestling business based on an incident where he took down and was beating up One Man Gang—he was actually trying to get at Hogan but Gang was a closer target) will be the one wanting to impress his friends, or a drunk college football lineman on a dare from his teammates, and on live television, the situation could be dangerous, not only with the guy ruining a match or perhaps popping a wrestler, but a wrestler perhaps having to protect himself and breaking his hand in the process, and if nobody who runs wrestling today has figured it out yet, the injury rate in this business is alarming enough to begin with.

  Very preliminary buy rate estimates are almost through the roof with very serious belief that this show could be the best buy rate of the year, which is saying something because it went in with nowhere near the media publicity of the Rodman show and didn’t involve any non-wrestling talent, which again shows that to the general public, putting Hogan and Piper in a cage because of their name value, despite them both being washed up in the ring, still means more than anything else, just as putting Hogan and Flair together again in a program will still mean big business.

  There were a lot of fans who left the matches before the Hogan-Piper match started, and fans were leaving in droves during the post-match angle while Piper was still getting annihilated. Another bad sign is that one of the reasons Hogan-Piper has such little heat was because fans were waiting for Sting to do a run-in at the end since they used his name and teased it in the interviews earlier in the show and were looking around for it, and left even more disappointed when the real Sting never showed up.

  WWF Survivor Series

  In the wake of all that insanity came the show itself, on 11/9 at the Molson Center in Montreal. Survivor Series live drew a sellout crowd of 20,593 (18,101 paying an all-time province record $447,284).

  The show, when it was over, was overshadowed by the finish of the main event and the aftermath. Before the show had even started, it was guaranteed the show would be upstaged by the main event, both the quality of which and the backstage maneuvering, negotiating, professionalism and ultimately threat of double-crossing rather than anything that took place underneath.

  As it was, it was the same broken record. The lack of talent depth in the WWF was made even more glaring in a show format that requires so many wrestlers to work the show. Even more glaring was that the problem seems to be in the picking of talent. Historically, the WWF has always been known as a “big-man” territory. In the 80s that served them in good stead because they were controlling the fan base into the idea that the steroid look was superior, and then continued to parade out an assembly line of guys who weren’t generally very good workers, but provided the fans with what they wanted.

  In the 90s, for numerous reasons, mainly media and government pressure, things had to change, which is where Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels, talented mid-card performers that were generally considered in the 80s as not to have any main event potential due to their size, got their shot at superstardom. But even in those days, WWF still marketed successfully some marginally talented and even untalented big men to the top of its cards.<
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  If you look at the undercards of WWF vs. WCW, in WCW you are filled with small men who wow the crowds with matches that get over. WWF has the same big men doing an outdated style of plodding brawling that gets no heat on the big shows, and generally Michaels and/or Steve Austin or Hart are there at the end to save the show. WCW still has the terrible main event matches, but it can’t be argued with the results of the buy rates and that is those terrible over-40 wrestlers that work on top draw the casual fans through their name recognition.

  But for every Kane, which is a gimmick that seems to be hitting it big, you have far too many Crushes, Interrogators, Brian Lees, Justin Hawk Bradshaws and Kama Mustafas who are all huge men with no fan appeal, or men like Faarooq and Ahmed Johnson with little ability in the ring and some, but not overwhelming, fan appeal. The wrestlers in first two matches on this show were a lot worse than I see locally with independent wrestlers with little experience. And the wrestlers they are scouting on the independent scene are close to Brian Lees than to Shawn Michaels’, both in terms of size and talent, if you get my drift.

  It’s hard for me to understand, because the concept of when everyone in the ring is 6’5”, that there are no big men in the ring who can get away with slow moving and a lack of action, but when everyone in the ring is 5’9”, than a 6’3” wrestler can get away with doing big-man spots and still have a good match because size in the ring is all illusion based on who one is in the ring with.

  Yet we saw two horrible matches with a bunch of 6’5” guys, and no smaller, faster guys because with the exception of Taka Michinoku, the promotion has lagged to the point they are way behind the eight-ball so to speak. The political situation isn’t entirely the company’s fault based on who they have to deal with and WCW trying to corner the market, in making deals to shore up their depth by adding the new dimension, but the weaknesses have never been more glaring than the first few matches on this show.