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 Real quick before we get cracking. -There’s a brand new LOW BLOW! With everything that’s gone on the last week I couldn’t keep my damn mouth shut about it all anymore. So in this we have multiple topics: Austin, the Scott Hall interview, and even a word or two about the Ultimate Warrior’s latest hilarity. You can catch it at THE RING POST (where a new Tom Zenk is on the way, and new Annie is there already) and WRESTLING OUTLAWS (linked on Wrestling Observer, 1Bob, and Torch last week. Matt kicks ass). -The following shill comes out of gratitude to Sabotage for all his work last week, and as a way to announce the grand return of ZT to Lethal: Go HERE to help make their dream of inflicting the world with their movie a reality. What do you MEAN you need a plot or some assurance the money won’t be spent on crack and autographed naked pictures of Fred Durst? YOU GET YOUR NAME IN THE CREDITS!! SELL YOUR KIDNEY NOW! And if you notice, that is on the FILM SPIES server, where DWELLER is set to make his debut any day now. -LETHAL INJECTION is the home of TRL, and that’s just phase one. The Future IS X-Rated. Anything else? Oh, of course! -LETHAL LOVES PHANTASMO! And DOCTOR ANVIL too. Alrighty, then. Been itchin’ to get back to this board in a regular capacity, and I avoided all spoilers and people discussing this show last night. Going into this with no predispositions so let’s shoot through the first hour real quick then get to big news. WWE VELOCITY 6/15/02 Mick Foley calls the action as “Robot Wars” comes to a close. How fucking sad is it that “Battle Bots” has more televised competition than Vince right now? OPENING GRAPHICS! PYRO! CROWD OF IDIOTS! Michael Cole informs us that It’s been a controversial and emotional week in the WWE. He must be referring to Brian Hebner’s debut… putting the wheels in motion for when he screws Blade Hart ten years from now. Al Snow has the week off, so Tazz is handling the color commentary. The rumors you heard about Al getting upset at the company’s direction and flying home early were… well, OK there were no rumors about that. Al’s dignity level lies somewhere just below the people who stand on the side of the road holding up signs for fast food restaurants in chicken outfits. Tonight our main event is Bob Holly vs. Kurt Angle. Tazz hopes that Hardcore can finally get that stupid wig off the Olympic hero. OK, it may be impossible to watch SmackDown sober these days, but I KNOW I didn’t hallucinate Hogan doing that already. We’re kicking things off with a Tag Title match. The Boy Band music plays and down come Billy and Chuck, along with their “special friend” Rico. Their opponent is Mark Henry, who apparently ate his partner. Never mind… his partner is Randy Orton. These guys did WHAT to earn a title shot? Win some tournament in Brazil? Billy sports a shiner from Triple H’s sledgehammer. Chuck is unable to get any offense in against the world’s strongest man then Randy Orton does lots of dropkicks. He goes to the well once too often and soon finds himself the victim of both the heels. They discuss Brian Hebner’s missed call on Lance Storm. Tazz speculates that screwing Canadians is in his bloodline (as an aside to that match, back when WWF was proving they were cool now, they had ended the bullshit about denying wrestler’s pasts. During the match where the Thrill Seekers united, only a couple of weeks after their past mentioned on TE2, Tazz speculated that the reason that Jericho and Storm worked so well together as a tag team were because THEY WERE BOTH CANADIAN! Unfreakingbelievable). Don’t forget, after this is CONFIDENTIAL with the story of Stone Cold leaving. Every time they shill that I get a little closer to fast-forwarding right past this rot to get there. Henry comes back in and cleans house on the gaybees. Mark goes for the gorilla slam victory but drops Chuck to go after Rico (no “World’s SMARTEST Man” titles in his foreseeable future… not that he was in contention before that or anything), and gets superkicked and “fame-assered” as a result. Remember when the WWF had the strongest tag team roster in the history of wrestling? Commercials Oh, goody… we go from Chuck and Billy to Rikishi. What the fuck? Is THIS GUY doing the booking for Velocity now? Judging by the comments Cole and Tazz make about the Samoan’s ass, I’d say the answer is a resounding “yes”. Albert is his opponent. It’s official; there will be no WWE float in the next St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I’d recap this match, but I like chicks. Rikishi dances in fast-forward, so we’ll assume he’s the winner. UP NEXT: We look at what Vince’s victory of Ric Flair means to the brand extension. OOH!! OOH!! Pick me! I know! It means it was the DUMBEST IDEA THE COMPANY HAS HAD THIS SIDE OF HIRING THE NWO!! Now give me my damn gold star. Commercials Tazz and Cole wonder aloud what is going to happen to all the shows now that Vince runs everything again. Poor Flair, two weeks ago he was half owner of everything… since then he’s become Stone Cold’s lackey, and then lost his show. Forget Russo… when did they hire BISCHOFF to handle these storylines. Montage of what happened last Monday. Flair says he was ready to take losing to Austin like a man, but then Steve didn’t show up. Vince comes out and calls him “the sorriest excuse for an owner he’s ever seen in his life”. On the other side of the country, Rob Black celebrates the loss of this dubious title. Vince blames Ric for RAW turning to shit (because different creative teams handle the two shows… and because SmackDown has been week and out the hottest show on television the last few months). Vince proposes a match between the two… NO HOLDS BARRED… for both companies. This, of course, is so he can brag to himself about how he out-dirtied the “dirtiest player in the game”. Make no mistake, when he beats Hogan in the retirement match it WILL be with a “McMahon Leg Drop”. To the match… Flair bleeds of course. I don’t think he even has to cut anymore; he just raises his eyebrows and the crimson flows. He gets Vince in the figure four and Arn comes in. AMAZINGLY he doesn’t turn on Ric, but taunts Vinnie until Brock Lesner comes down and shoos him away. He then DVD’s Flair and Mister MacMahon owns it all again. Back to live action… old piano music starts playing. What the fuck is… YES!!!!!! IT’S MAE!!!! Moolah and the mother of the hand come down to the ring and the announcers give them a standing “O”. Moolah’s book comes out in August, which should be quite a read. The women’s wrestling division is chock full of amazing tales most people don’t know about. Mae Young is lady Jeebus. UP NEXT: Nidia in “tramp” character. And to think, this year MTV gave them TWO women to find spots for. Commercials WE INTURRUPT THIS RECAP FOR A BREAKING NEWS STORY: ”Former” WWE superstar Steve Austin is still considered “at large” today by the San Antonio, Texas Police Department after a domestic disturbance early Saturday morning. According to several reports, Austin left the area and has been on the run ever since his wife Debra called 911. Some reports have stated that she had a black eye at the scene. This news has been confirmed by many different respectable news outlets (and 1wrestling). In a related story: Steve “Mongo” McMichael will give you a hand-job for the last bite of that sandwich you’re eating. Montage of the situation with Hurricane and his Stalker, ending with him getting de-masked by Nidia and Jamie Noble on SmackDown. It’s official, Thursday was NOT a good night to be any kind of Hurricane (HA!! RED WINGS RULE YOUR ASS MOTHER FUCKERS!!) Out comes Nidia and Jamie. Man she’s working the slut gimmick. Right now every rat in America is jealous of her. He’s taking on FUNAKI!! OH, me rikee. INDEED!! Man, poor Funaki, he’s total “enhancement talent” in a day when those aren’t supposed to exist anymore. His big offense is the surprise roll-up while he’s tonguing Nidia. Tazz says he just taught her in-ring stuff, and she must’ve learned to be a whore from Snow. HA! Noble wins with leg lock called the “trailer hitch”. For every DDP that retires, a new one takes his place. As we go to break we see the shot of Angle breaking Holly’s arm back in the day, and coming up next we’ll see Undertaker and Triple H sign the contracts for next week’s KOTR main event. Commercials SNICKERS REWIND shows the contract signing, then we break before seeing Taker and security attack and Hunter grab the sledgehammer. We can only assume that Snickers is too damn cheap to pay for the whole replay. Triple H holds Smackdown “hostage” and starts breaking things. He informs Vince you can’t have a show without announce tables or monitors. The Spanish audience can all attest to that NOT being the case from every PPV since, like… ever. Vince gives him Taker in a tag match along with Angle and Hogan then he destroys a $50,000 camera (while that’s not an outlandish estimate for a TV camera, you can bet that one was put together with every half-working piece of equipment in the truck). Taker and Angle then attack Hogan backstage but apparently there are more sledgehammers under WWE rings than tables in the old ECW ones so Hunter soon has an equalizer. Angle attacks from behind and Olympic slams the Game after he’s already been disqualified. As he goes back up the ramp Hogan comes out and drags him back inside the ring, where he’s tortured by the faces and then stripped of his wig (and pants… which was REALLY unnecessary). Commercials. This Monday the question of what Vince does with total control is answered. Is betting on “gloating about it” too much of a long shot? TWO WEEKS AGO: These guys wrestled on SmackDown. Must’ve been a real scorcher for the rematch to get “upgraded” to this show. Kurt’s wearing the wig again. They discuss KOTR, with Tazz making the brilliant deduction that “for the first time since the brand extension, A RAW star will face a SmackDown star at King of the Ring.” DUH! How many past KOTRs had a brand extension? Stiff, solid match. Both these guys will feel this one in the morni… er, felt this Wednesday morning. Coming up next, straight from Vince’s mouth “the REAL story of the Stone Cold situation”. Riiiiight, because the words “reality” and “McMahon” have historically gone SO hand-in-hand. Match picks up big time at the end. Lots of near falls and near ankle locks, but it’s finally decided by Angle holding the ropes as he has leverage on a roll-up. Teddy Long misses it and counts three. Angle goes to King of the Ring now, which this may or may not have been a qualifying match for. This one is in the books, folks. Time for the main event. WWE CONFIDENTIAL 6/15/02 I’ll say this once, if I had a vote in the “voices that we should never have to hear on wrestling programs ever again” poll I’d vote for Gene Okerlund over Tony Schiavone every day and try to figure out ways to rig it and vote more. OPENING CREDITS: Vince says that Austin “took his ball and went home” (and then gave her a black eye… most likely after she made another shitty batch of cookies). Ross says “it’s like saying John Wayne turning coward”. Pfft, Wayne was a fag. No straight guy calls other men “pilgrim”. Gene-o Machino starts by saying the WWE (I STILL can’t say that without thinking of WEEEEEE!) was “on the receiving end of a stunner this week”. He informs us that Austin had issues with certain people and directions recently until it reached the boiling point. That sounds eerily similar to something else that happened recently, but damned if I can put my finger on what. The question is whether Steve Austin’s days in the WWE are over, and tonight Vince and Jimbo will answer those questions “and others” (I got one… “Don’t you realize Austin is like the only star on RAW that you’re not still a year away from pushing to the top? Also, when is Ellen going to be a guest on your very gay show?”) But first, BOBBY THE BRAIN HEENAN! Without ANY doubt the greatest color commentator in the history of this business, and one of the main reasons I became a true fan during the transition from wrestling being “stupid fake shit” into my one of my favorite forms of entertainment. Gene reads off his accolades. Manager of Andre and Flair, the man Hogan says is monumental in the success of Hulkamania, and who Bob Costas (and we all know what a friend of Vince’s HE is) unabashedly calls “the smartest man in wrestling”. After explaining he was called “The Weasel” because of his ability to slink out of any mess Gene laments, “Sadly, he recently found himself in a situation he couldn’t talk his way out of”. They begin with a clip of Heenan lambasting Gorilla Monsoon on the old “PrimeTime” show. No other announce team will ever be able to TOUCH what they did. He then starts to tell about his throat cancer, that it’s right on his tongue. All traces of the “boom” in his voice are gone. HOLY SHIT I may not make it through this segment without tearing up… gimme a second. Aaaaah… Jagermeister. Liquid testosterone. Where’s some raw meat I can eat or fuck? Bobby shills his book. Despite his hand being in the way you can see it’s co-written by Steve Anderson. Last I checked (thanks to Sebollox and Sayeitan) he was still reading Lethal. SEND ME A COPY, STEVE!! “THE BARBED LIBRARY” SERIES NEEDS A NEW ENTRY (and the old ones need archiving… d’oh!). Clips of Bobby taking his bumps. He tells about wanting to be loved by everyone when he came in, but that once he started managing Patterson and Stevens his future was ordained. We then move ahead to the PrimeTime clips. He says they were the best moments of his life. Ironically, a lot of those moments still stand atop my favorite moments in this business. He compares their chemistry to Gleason and Carny, and it’s really not a bad analogy. I never faulted Tony for it, but every broadcast I ever watched of Schiovane and Heenan was frustrating, because you could see Bobby setting up a joke, and Tony didn’t have any idea what to do with it. That NEVER happened with Monsoon. It was like one mind controlling two people it was so fluent. Arn calls him the funniest guy he’s ever met, better than any stand-up comedian. Bobby then talks about meeting Vince and immediately knowing how the company had all the right elements for it to be huge. You get a little insight into the future by him telling the story of toasting Vince with a beer after Wrestlemania, saying “here’s to Wrestlemania 2”. Vince responded, “what do you mean? Here’s to Wrestlemania A HUNDRED AND TWO”. Say ANYTHING you want about Vince, but you can never take away his drive to succeed. He shows something that has to be among his most prized possessions; the plaque from being selected for the 1988 “All Madden Team” even though he never played football. YES! Clips from “The Bobby Heenan Show”. If anyone knows where I can get a tape of all the episodes of that you don’t even want to know how much I’ll pay for it. They even show the classic one where porn star Heather Hunter comes out, who Bobby was “informed” was a star of the Eddie Murphey movie “Coming to America” until she corrects him by saying she’s the star of “Coming IN America”… then knocks him out of his chair with a striptease. There’s also footage of “Jamison” who is a story all to himself. Then we go to the story of him in WCW. He says it was a “no brainer” since his daughter was going to school in the south and he was living in Florida. And the clips are PRICELESS, as each one just shows him ridiculing the nonsense that he’s having to do. He tells us right out, “the production was poor, and it was people that didn’t know how to run a wrestling company. They didn’t even know my character, they wanted me to be a straight announcer.” The one that sums up EVERYTHING (from the Nitro announce table): Bobby: Can someone tell me PLEASE what is going on here. Tony: I don’t know what to tell you, Bobby… I’m just like you are. Bobby: You’re NOT just I am. YOU DON’T CARE!! YOU DON’T CARE!! He said after that, he just went home. He tells of his last moment in the sun, the “old timer’s battle royal” he called with Mean Gene. They show him shaking hands with everyone after the match is over, and Paul E. has the look in eyes that every star-struck kid who was ever lucky enough to meet his hero has. He ends by saying he wouldn’t trade his life for anyone’s. We’re going to commercial, and I need to compose myself. Thank you for being everything that was great about this business, Bobby. STILL TO COME: Vince calls what Steve Williams (uh oh… using “real names”. This is SERIOUS, people) did the most selfish thing he ever could have done to the WWE. Commercials Gene leads us into a bit on Kurt Angle by first trashing his bravado, then saying all the things he brags about are true and that he’s really a great guy with a work ethic we should all look up to. At moments like this I miss the days where “kayfabe” was not only practiced, but also a word none of you knew. Kurt tells the story of his run to the Olympics, and how his family and he reacted to it. There’s a pretty funny tale of his dad toughening him up by having an imaginary “stop” button Kurt could push if they were working out and it started hurting, and that a few times he’d feverishly be “pushing” it and his dad would tell him “the button is broken”. He tells about his training, and how he hated doing it but looked forward to every minute because he knew it’d make him better. We also go through the death of his father and how that inspired him to re-dedicate his life to him. Then it goes through his NCAA achievements and all the training for the Olympics. This would be a lot more interesting if there wasn’t a story WE’RE ALL WAITING TO SEE COMING UP!! It ends with Kurt sort of digging the irony of using the Olympics, with athletes that looked down on the pro guys, as a springboard to the WWE. When we come back we get to the good stuff. Clip of Vince saying he has “no idea” what caused Austin to walk out of the company, as if a week ago Steve was the happiest guy in the whole locker room. Commercials Gene says that the WWF Attitude was basically built on the relationship between Steve Austin and Vince McMahon, and that sometimes “art imitates life”. He runs us briefly through Austin’s tirade on “Byte This” and leads up to last Monday, where Austin walked out of the show just before RAW was supposed to go on the air. Gene states that while many people think this is part of the show, he can assure you that it is not (and Gene has never given any information that was anything less than “Gospel” in his life… so you KNOW it’s true). “The Stone Cold era may be over” he says solemnly, and we’re off. COVER STORY We start with the Byte This stuff: Austin calls the writing “piss poor” and the whole direction of the company “shitty”. He says he loves his job but creatively they could be doing a hell of a lot better than they are. One week later on the same show Vince tries to pretend Austin is simply bitter that he’s not performing as well as he used to, while at the same time admitting he needs better material to work with. Jim Ross welcomes us to Atlanta, Georgia. Ric Flair announces that Stone Cold Steve Austin did not show up. So here’s Vince’s first comment on it: “He was hell-bent on not showing, so he got on the plane and went home. He took his ball and went home and obviously I’m pissed off.” Now, I’m going to make every effort to be as objective as possible about this whole thing, but my very first thought there is “if he was so hell-bent on not showing, why did he ever fly to Atlanta in the first place?” Ross says that Austin was upset with the things they had planned for him on Monday (a job to Brock Lesner if I’m not mistaken) and that while he’d always talked to Vince straight up in the past he didn’t want to this time. Vince then called Steve and asked him to call him back. As he tells it, Austin agreed to everything (obviously begrudgingly), and Vince says “not that I needed his approval, but it’s good to have the performer buying into what you’re asking them to do”. Yeah, unless you’ve carried the company on your shoulders for the last five years… like X-Pac and Kevin Nash, right? Ross and Vince say they got a call from their travel agent that Austin had booked a flight home, and done it in a way where he wasn’t planning to tell anyone he wasn’t going to be there. If that’s true, that’s pretty damn close to being inexcusable regardless of any other circumstances. Vince says that after the first time Austin did this they’d told him that no matter what, this can never happen again. It’s like the one unpardonable sin in this business. That reminds me… NO MATTER WHAT, YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DELETE ANY MORE FORUMS, MMN (hey, I have to give him shit… this thing is taking twice as long today because I don’t want to bring down the board after his AWESOME “cards” post). Vince says last time this happened he chalked it up to Austin being “burned out” which while still not an excuse is understandable. Ross says he all but begged Steve to get off the plane and come talk to McMahon face to face, and he’d be the mediator if necessary. Not doing so, Ross stresses, was “the biggest mistake of his professional career”. We go to break with a clip of Vince: “This is not a publicity stunt. This is something that unfortunately… it’s sad. That’s what we’re confronted with. This is sad.” Boy, if I had a nickel for every time I said THAT last Sunday I’d have… um… at least sixty-five cents. Commercials Vince says when things like this happen he looks in the mirror and asks himself what he could’ve done to change things, and while he’ll accept whatever blame people want to give him over this he doesn’t know what he could’ve done differently. If that’s REALLY a regiment he goes through I find it hard to believe that after all these years he’s never once had the notion that “I could have NOT screwed Bret”. He says that in the past they’d always been able to talk and work something out, but Austin ended that mode of communication. As much as I know Vince isn’t saying anything “wrong” here, I can’t help but wonder how many of those recent “face-to-face” talks recently had netted Austin nothing. You can’t look at the timing of all of this without tying it to both the hiring of the nWo and the complete destruction of the product. I’m not saying Steve is right, only that I’m sympathetic. JR says that if you have a problem you need to eliminate it, but Austin eliminated himself before letting anyone try to solve the problem. He then reminds us that we’re going to read a lot of things about this and that most of it will be crap (hence, if you’re going to follow this on the web, the only place for the REAL story is WWE.com. Anything Austin says to rebut it is the overactive imagination of net geeks). Ross points out all the people there in Austin shirts and holding Stone Cold signs that got screwed over by his decision. Vince rambles on about the investment they made in him, and that in ten years he still would have been part of the WWE family because that’s how Vince takes care of those who helped the company. After all, look at his history with his biggest stars; like Bruno, Bret, Savage, and Foley. You can’t get those guys to shut the fuck up about what a great “dad” Vinnie is. Jim “Mr. Obvious” Ross points out that sometimes what happens behind the scenes is more intriguing than what happens on the shows. Sure has been THIS year. Then again, the behind the scenes of that “Ya Ya Dykehood” movie have been more intriguing than some of the excrement in the shows recently. Ross says he doesn’t believe in any of that “lying on the couch psychology bullshit” (Freud was a cracked-out homo) but that something is different in Stone Cold’s head. He’s always been a man’s man who was up front about everything, and all of a sudden no one in the company is trustworthy to him. HELLO!?! REMEMBER THE “DTA” MOTTO YOU MARKETED FOR YEARS?? He talks about how tight they’ve been but has to evaluate where they are as human beings. He points out he’s not wearing his black cowboy hat because he’s not “Good old JR” for this interview. I think we figured that out when you didn’t scream every third sentence in triplicate, Jimbo. Ross continues, saying he doesn’t know when they’ll even communicate again. He says he doesn’t see how Austin could just go home like that. He then TOTALLY kills the serious tone of the whole segment with the ABSOLUTE FUNNIEST LINE anywhere on WWE programming this week: I wouldn’t do it. I don’t care how bad things are. We’ve all done things we’re uncomfortable doing here. I’ve had pig shit poured all over me in a pig pen, I’ve kissed Mr. McMahon’s ass, I’ve been beat up by a woman, I’ve had a lot of things happen to me here… BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! He says that everyone did what they did as a team, and you won or lost that way… you don’t just say “I’m not going to play anymore”. He says one day we may get the real story of why Austin did this, but only Steve knows what that reason is (riiiiiiiiight). Vince says Steve WAS a friend of his, but Austin acted like a child and he’s pissed. He says when something like this happens he feels like he failed in some way. He says he never had anyone that he felt he bent over backwards for like Stone Cold and this hurts. It may be the most sincere thing he’s ever said in his life… but he sure sounds a hell of a lot more like a “performance” than a “shoot”. He says by Austin leaving he spit in the face of everyone in the company, which again is pretty inarguable. When we come back “we’ll answer the question ‘will Stone Cold be back in the WWE’?” then in true South Park form answer it right then with Vince saying “there is NOT an open door for Steve Austin to return and I’ll tell you why?” Commercials Vince says as devastating as losing Austin is, it creates opportunities they didn’t have before. Ross seconds that by saying it’s time for everyone to step up and new stars are going to be created. Vince says in no uncertain terms the door isn’t open for a return. He has stockholders and workers to answer to and when someone walks out on you twice, the second with no intention of saying he was doing so, there’s no way to bring him back up and build him up again with the knowledge he may do this again. He says “never say never” in this business, but how he could do business with Jeff Jarr… er… Austin again is beyond him right now. Ross says the same thing, adding that if anyone else wants to leave they should but be professional about it. He also says he puked. He talks about all the problems Stone Cold came through and to see this happen after all that is too much, then he says the John Wayne thing I mentioned earlier. He ends it with “Stone Cold will NOT be on RAW on Monday night… as far as I know he won’t be on RAW ever again.” I KNOW it’s not a work, but since the last time I recapped this show Shawn ended by saying “Shawn Michaels is as dead as he’s ever going to be” 48 hours before joining the nWo you can see where speculation can NEVER be helped. When we come back, some classic Bobby moments. The lead-in is him asking a man in the audience how long he’s been married. When the guy responds “21 years” the Brain informs him “you know if you’d killed your wife on your wedding night you’d be out by now”. What a legend. Commercials WWE REWIND: Heenan and Okerlund hitchhike to Royal Rumble. HAHA! Okerlund from 95 shilling “The March to Wrestlemania… here on USA.” Just think, a year ago Barry Diller was probably still pissed he didn’t carry RAW anymore. It’s a rib by Gene where he says he’s located the Executive offices but it’s really the women’s bathroom. If you read that sentence in total deadpan, then that’s how funny the scene was. Thankfully we’re going to see more stuff that doesn’t have this goof in them. Clips of Heenan, too quick to really recap. All great. Man, he was the best. Brooklyn Brawler and Pat Patterson are the ones saying most of the nice things about him, which HAS to raise some eyebrows. Next week, up close and personal with Stacy Keibler. Gene says he’s going to have to handle that duty himself. Bet she can’t fucking wait. Hey, it’s still Sunday… what do you want? Barbwire Mike I was upset I didn’t have a place to post these WHY? |