Mid-Week Report
Mid-Week Report
By Bill
"The Rock doesn't even know what this is!!!"
- Trivia Question: A three-parter. In the early 1980s, Randy "Macho Man" Savage and his brother "Leaping" Lanny Poffo both wrestled in the Memphis territory. At that time, they had relatively equal "star power". As a result, many people wondered who would win a one-on-one match between them.
So, to find out the answer, Pro Wrestling Illustrated arranged for them to wrestle a match against each other in an empty arena.
- Who was the referee?
- What was strange about the way Poffo and Savage were dressed for the match?
- What was the outcome?
- Lots of stuff going on this week. Hopefully, it will make up for the lame mid-week report from last week.
- The mailbag:
- Chan sends in an interesting question. If you have any information for him, write him back:
I bought some old magazines the other day and came across a very interesting tidbit. This is excerpt is from page 54 of the November 1984 edition of the Wrestler. It's in the What's Happening section:
"Speaking of tag teams, look for coverage soon of the Wolfpack, a pair of behemoths who stand 6'8" and 7-feet tall, and weigh in at close to 300 pounds each!"
I found this to be cool because Hall and Nash use the name Wolfpack and Hall is often listed at 6'8" and Nash at 7'. It would be 6 years after this magazine that Nash first stepped into the ring. Could you see if any of the readers know anything about who these guys were or what became of them?
- I got rid of Brushes With Greatness a few months ago, but this message from Bill D. of Salisbury, MD was definitely worth a special post:
I'm a HS wrestling coach in Salisbury, MD and had a 17-team tournament this weekend. Who's in the stands but none other than ... Van Hammer!
OK, maybe not the biggest star WCW has, but get this - more than a dozen people came up to me to point him out! I've been watching Nitro for about six months and I wouldn't have recognized the guy if he fell on me. But apparently, that's not the case for others.
Anyway, I didn't bother him, since he was there to see a kid of a friend of his wrestle and I figured he didn't come here in the middle of nowhere to be hassled. The kid he was there to see got to the Finals on
Saturday, and Hammer was there for a good portion of both days, signing autographs for those who wanted them, and basically being a nice guy.
Also - he seemed to actually know about amateur wrestling - one of my wrestlers wrestled the kid he was there to see, and the moves he was shouting at the kid to hit were actually correct for the situation.
One last thing - I don't know how tall he looks on TV, but in real life? HE'S MASSIVE!
- Thanks for all the positive feedback on Wrestling Flashback - 25 Years Ago. Unfortunately, it was a one-shot deal as it just so happened that I was lucky enough to have someone send the JPGs to me, but I thought it was really cool. Thanks again to Larry E.
- Another thank you is in store all of you. We have the results of every single match in WCW for the month of January on-line and in our statistics. While we did get some off of the newsboards, a lot was results sent in by readers. We can't thank you enough. Keep those results coming in.
- While I'm at it, thanks for all of the positive response on the Lash LeRoux piece. It was pretty much a one-off as, although we'll keep following Lash, I don't have any plans to do more stuff with other guys.
Reason being that for us to do a piece like that, three things have to happen. It has to be someone we like, we have to be able to find articles/info, and there has to not be much stuff about them already on the web. That's why I originally did the Arn Anderson tribute page. For example, I'm not going to do anything for Ric Flair, because information about him can be found all over the internet. As for Norman Smiley, the problem is that the information is impossible to find. In Lash's case, "all of the planets were in alignment" and the ingredients were there. Plus, I thought that article that Chan had about the WCW Power Plant was so damn cool.
As I said earlier, you can look forward to us continuing to follow and hype Lash as time goes on.
- Speaking of Lash, I thought his match on Nitro was awesome. Not bad for a guy who is only 22...he showed the savvy of a seasoned veteran, imho.
For whatever it's worth to you, from what (little) I know about WCW travel schedules, since Lash wrestled on Nitro, there's a good chance he'll be wrestling on Thunder tomorrow night.
By the way, a number of people wrote me asking how to get one of those t-shirts he wears to the ring. I did a little research and found that you'd need to convince WCW merchandising to mass produce them. So, if you are interested, write the WCW feedback line.
- Chad M. sent in a link to a Chris Jericho screensaver, for those who are interested. Go to http://www.ratloaf.com/ and go to the "C"s.
- Far be in from me to second-guess anyone, but when was the last time you saw a star as major as the Sandman lose in their debut with a new federation? I can't think of it ever happening.
- Remember how I said I'd have an update on Jay Diego? Well, it's still in the works. As sort of a prequel to it, to give you an idea of the difference two years makes, check out Sugar then and now. If you are interested in seeing Jay wrestle, he'll wrestling for Power Pro Wrestling Federation on February 27th in Copperas Cove, TX, at the Civic Center, bell time 7:30pm. Sugar will be there, too.
- Hey, if you haven't checked out Xavier Doom's Slayground in the last few days, you definitely should. There's two new features.
First, the Vince McMahon Hall of Shame has been updated with "Sex & Violence: The Attitude Years". Like everything else in his Halls of Shame, a must-see.
Second, Xavier's got his first newsboard. It's unlike any other pro wrestling newsboard you've ever seen. Well, scratch that. Actually, it is just like every other newsboard out there. Well, then again...ah, forget it. Check it out yourself to see what I mean.
- To be a pro wrestling fan, you have to suspend a lot of disbelief. However, even I have my limits.
I can't come to grips with this bit with Hogan and David Flair. So, it's supposed to be live, and it's daylight out in Charlotte at 11:00 p.m.?
Spare me.
- As for the rest of Nitro, for the first time in a long time, I pretty much watched it from beginning to end. I thought it was a pretty good show. Well, except for Benoit losing twice.
The really weird thing is that the theme seemed to be "extreme". There was the obvious, with the Sandman and Bigelow match. However, the Steiner/Jericho match looked awfully stiff, and in the Norton/Miller match, there were points where I though Norton was seriously attempting to murder Ernest Miller. It was an odd, but really interesting match, but of all people to get cheers for beating up Ernest Miller...Scott Norton?!
- If you are not a statistics wonk like me, you may want to skip this bullet point. But, if you do like statistics, my ISP finally got my statistics working. (That's not a criticism...it's just that I got so much traffic on so many pages and JPGs that you kept blowing out their logs.) So, for the first time ever, I'm was able to get a full month worth of statistics on DDT Digest. In case you are interested, here are some fun facts about the month of January:
- Total visitors: 116,039. That's over 26,000 per week. That's the number of people who access the main page, although obviously a lot of those are the same person visiting multiple times in a given week and/or month.
- Total download volume: 8.4G
- Ratio of HTML download volume vs. JPG/GIF/WAV volume: 1-to-1
- The two busiest days are Tuesday and Friday.
- The peak hour is between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The hour with the least traffic is between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. Eastern Time.
- More people come directly to DDT Digest from Yahoo than any other one specific place.
- And the thing that shocked me most is that nearly one out of every five people to come to DDT Digest goes to the tributes page. I started the tributes page as kind of a lark, and it got 22,466 hits in the month of January, more than any other single page other than the main page. The next most popular is my links page.
- I was talking to my old roommate last night, and he mentioned that the Washington, DC, City Paper had an interview recently with King Kong Bundy. Unfortunately, he no longer has a copy of it. If anyone has a copy and is willing to mail it to me, please let me know.
One interesting thing from the interview that my roommate passed along is that Bundy said that the original creators of Married With Children were huge professional wrestling fans. Certainly, the multiple episodes featuring King Kong Bundy and/or professional wrestling are a hint, but according to King Kong Bundy, the Bundy family on the show was, in fact, named after him. In case you didn't believe him, he noted that the next door neighbors of the Bundys were Steve and Marcie Rhodes. And, remember the guy who worked alongside Al in the first season selling shoes? Luke Ventura.
- Jason K. from University of South Florida, the guy who is responsible for 90% of the upkeep on the tributes page, noted that the official Bret
Clark Hart page, which was part of the official WCW home page, is now gone. Odd since the Goldberg and DDP pages are still there.
- Like many of you, I watched the WWF's halftime show. I thought it was pretty entertaining. It started slow, but the match was pretty funny although it wasn't exactly great wrestling. The best analogy I can give is to ECW. ECW has continued to up the ante with the violence and insane spots, and now they are expected. Same deal with the WWF these days although instead of upping the violence ante, they are upping the ante on humor, sexual titillation, and seeing belts change hands. Unless all matches are entertaining and way out as what we saw during halftime, people will start being disappointed.
Vince says that "watching a couple guys in their underwear rolling around on the mat doesn't cut it anymore". That's too bad. I've always really enjoyed a plain, old well-worked wrestling match that has a story behind it (e.g. Savage vs. Steamboat at Wrestlemania III).
But, then again, I thought Lucky Charms was a better cereal when there were only four types of marshmallows.
- One interesting thing I didn't notice until the fourth time I watched the WWF Super Bowl commercial was that as the Undertaker is walking toward you, you can see a referee with a blind man's cane and blind man's glasses walking from right to left. It's pretty subtle and easy to miss, but damn funny when you catch it.
- Trivia Answer: The referee was Jerry "The King" Lawler, Poffo wore wrestling tights and Savage wore street clothes for the match, and it ended in a draw.