Mid-Week Report

By Bill

So do we.

Trivia Question: How did King Kong Bundy get into the pro wrestling business? (answer at the end of the report)
The mailbag:
- Drew from Raleigh, NC writes:
  Funny you should mention "The Man Show" in the mid-week report as they had a segment on the other night dealing with wrestling. It was part of the "Man-o-vations" segment. It was a book-on-tape style item called "Stars of the WWF read the bible."
  The three wrestlers which had samples used (and, no, it wasn't actually them reading it, just bad impersonators) were Shawn Michaels, Steve Austin, and strangely enough, Randy Savage (guess they don't know their wrestling that good).
  All I remember was that the Savage one dealt with Slim Jim and the Austin one dealt with one of those "So-in-so begat so-in-so" lines (strangely, there were no mentions of any 3:16s). The weirdest one was HBK's. His was David and Goliath and it ended with him doing a fake plug for a match at the Silverdome........against Bret Hart.
  If they only knew....
Joel C. sent a link to a review of Beyond The Mat on CNN. Suffice to say, with all the other reviews of the movie either glowing or at least moderately positive, this is definitely an "opposing viewpoint".
Everyone's entitled to their opinion, plus I haven't seen the movie. So, on both counts, I'm in no position to attack his critique. However, the article reminds me of articles on pro wrestling about three years ago, before the media was jumping on the bandwagon, where the writers do a slash-and-burn on the sport and the athletes without getting their facts straight.
I'd love to write the guy to make the corrections, but I couldn't find an e-mail address. So, just to release my aggression, I am going to point out the out-and-out bad reporting in this guy's article. From least annoying to most annoying:
- He makes the statement: "Somehow, showboating grapplers don't seem to understand that everyone knows that they get hurt when they're flung by their hair into a concrete post. How could they not get hurt?"
  I really think that's an inaccurate statement. I think there are a lot of fans, especially the "non-smart" fans, who think that pro wrestlers are like circus acrobats and are not wrestling in pain on a regular basis. You know...all the people who think there's a big spring under the ring.
- Speaking of Jake Roberts, the writer says: "...he comes equipped with an array of addictions and shattered family relations that would put Sid Vicious to shame."
  The writer is referring to Sid Vicious the punk rocker, not Sid Vicious the wrestler, but that line is really confusing, and for those people who've only heard of Sid Vicious the wrestler, this is practically a libelous statement. Granted, you can't expect a movie reviewer to do huge amounts of surrounding research, but Sid Vicious is the freakin' World Heavyweight Champion of the number-two company in the business. Obviously, no one anywhere in the editing process of this article knew a damn thing about pro wrestling.
- The author states: "When the acerbic comedian Richard Belzer briefly had his own talk show back in the 1980s, "Hulk" Hogan went so far as to pick him up and slam him on his head to prove that there's nothing phony about what goes on in the ring."
  Wrong, wrong, wrong!!! Hogan did not pick Belzer up nor did Hogan slam Belzer on his head. Hogan demonstrated a front facelock and Belzer passed out while in the hold. When Hogan let Belzer go, Belzer crumpled to the floor and hit the back of his head and cracked it open. (At that point, Belzer came to, jumped up disoriented, and told the producers to go to commercial.)
  I already knew that, but to put it into perspective, it took me less than three minutes of research via Altavista to informally corroborate it.
Question for you other webmasters out there, both wrestling-related and non-wrestling-related. Have you had much trouble with other websites plagiarizing your stuff? I'm curious. If you've got a few minutes, tell me your story(s) and how it turned out.
When I graduated from college and took my first (and thus far only) job, there was this particular woman who started straight out of college the same time I did. She wound up having problems with her first set of roommates and she said they really jerked her around. I felt bad for her. Then, she later complained about the same thing happening with her second set of roommates. Then, her third set.
I started to recognize the pattern, and I said to myself that maybe the problem wasn't the roommates, it was her.
Think about that story next time Shane Douglas complains about how he was screwed by WCW.
For those of you interested in some info about Mike Modest, William W. passed along a link to this tribute page.
In case you haven't heard, Nitro and Thunder are canceled next week, supposedly to give the new talent (talent being a new writer and booker...certainly not a new wrestler) time to come up with new storylines.
For those of you who might be interested, Court TV will be debuting the show Wrestling with Death, this Monday, April 3^rd, at 10:00 p.m. EST. It looks like they are going to cover the dangers of backyard wrestling as well as little kids who have been accidentally killed by other little kids performing professional wrestling moves on them.
Does it bother anyone besides me that (as of Tuesday, anyway) the pictures on the main page and the second page of the official WCW site were of a writer and a booker, instead of wrestlers?
For those of you interested on my take on the new regime in WCW, I'd love to write a really eloquent essay that wows you all. However, as often happens in the hack webmaster biz, you read something someone else wrote that expresses your opinion infinitely more eloquently than you could do it yourself. To see what I'm talking about, click here.
Trivia Answer: A promoter was trying to call someone else, and happened to get King Kong Bundy by dialing a wrong number.

Mid-Week Report

By Bill

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