Hi Scott, hope you are well.
Thought you might get a kick out of this. Paul Heyman showing his awesome prognostication skills in the summer of '95, in regards to the chances of Monday Nitro succeeding. Love the line about WCW having a 46 year old guy who only cares about getting laid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A7ZxJ38hTw
Though to be fair, few people were predicting success for the show.
Nobody was. Everyone from the smarks to Meltzer to, as you note here, Paul Heyman, was predicting that it would be a slaughter the likes of which we wouldn't see again until TNA tried the same thing a few years ago.
What he said near the end about what WCW will become when Nitro fails is exactly what TNA is. Scary.
ReplyDeleteAlso read an interview with him from 1993 saying he believed Shawn and Austin would one day be atop the business. The guy knows "it" when he sees it
ReplyDeleteHe also allegedly said the same think about Taker but that was from a WWE doc several years ago so he might have just been playing to the cameras.
ReplyDeleteAnd Shawn, while he did end up as one of the best work horses of wrestling, sadly never was a big money draw. But then again I'm sure not even Paul could have realized just how big Austin would become.
Was this before or after King Mabel?
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame he couldn't turn his predicting ability into a money-making enterprise.
ReplyDeleteI'm completely serious, the dude has an eye for talent, but he could never make money.
He did help Vince make a ton of money though. Poor sap.
ReplyDeleteAfter. And I've mentioned this before but I'll still defend their decision about not having Taker or Shawn win the 95 KotR. They didn't need it. Now Mabel sure as hell didn't need to win it but it should have been a newer guy.
ReplyDeleteShawn Michaels could have used it.
ReplyDeleteIt would have been nice on his resume I guess but history and hindsight showed he didn't need it.
ReplyDeleteThe financial responsibilities of ECW handcuffed and distracted him. If he could have been the booker of ECW without the pressure, fear and eventually panic of ECW's monetary issues then you would have seen a completely different outcome in the mid to late 90's. If Heyman could have locked down his talent with contracts, legally owned various gimmicks and terms, such as "hardcore", and, most importantly, launched a television show on cable that was available to as many, if not more, people than RAW and Nitro were available to, he/ECW would have come out on top.
ReplyDeleteHis eye for talent and the way he developed them was, and to some extent still is, uncanny. Whenever he got his claws into someone special, they were snatched away to WCW or WWF where, naturally, they became major successes.
Had he had a financial backer who ran the books, he coulda probably kept Austin and Foley around and things would've been very different.
ReplyDeleteAnd what he predicted what WCW would do (settle for being a nice little cheap promotion) is probably what TNA should be doing.
ReplyDeleteFor what, he was spending all of 95 beating everybody up and down the roster.
ReplyDeleteThe KoTR wasnt gonna stamp and say "NOW This is the guy we want."
Its only fair. Vince was funding him from at least 97 onwards.
ReplyDeleteOf course that did not explain or justify fucking Justin Credible though.......
ReplyDeleteEspecially since he had Tommy Dreamer around......
Undertaker would have been a safe choice.
ReplyDeleteIf TNA could get their production costs down by getting rid of the overblown Titantron and lighting effects and ultra-slick backstage segments, they could survive forever with that formula. Is having a video wall the difference between a 1.0 and a 1.1? Doubtful.
ReplyDeleteThen why did they feel the need to put the IC title on him?
ReplyDeleteNo joke, that video wall is probably like my favorite thing in TNA. It's slick as hell.
ReplyDeleteHe was hardly a lock in 95, he needed to do something to build momentum for his 96 run. A KOTR win would have accomplished that.
ReplyDeleteBut the end result was hideously bad. That's what I was getting at with the first comment. I understand the perception of a big company dominating an industry, but the WWF was a trainwreck and WCW more than arguably had a star power advantage. I guess it's all hindsight, but that era of WWE was so awful that they were ripe for the picking.
ReplyDeleteI realy really legitimately wish Billy Corgan had put some money into ECW at some point. Or even better, convinced David Geffen to.
ReplyDeleteBecause HBK/Shane Douglas was gonna be the late summer/fall IC program that was supposed to rewrite wrestling.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course HBK forfeited the title cuz he didnt job in title matches
They should film in a studio, maybe with some pink backdrops, and to simplify the BfG series they should turn it into a Team Challenge Series!
ReplyDeletethe HBK push started in 95. Right after WM11 when he lost to Diesel and he got cheered more in losing.
ReplyDeleteIt would have been nice to win KoTR, but it wasnt needed. He was beating everybody like i said up and down the card.
The Fans had already tapped him as the one they wanted on top.
My theory: Heyman was employing the same style of booking WWE is today. He knew a majority of his fans were smarks at that point, so he wanted to get Credible over as the top heel to troll the smarks. Unfortunately, a lot of people just walked away.
ReplyDeleteBischoff is there...
ReplyDeleteYou sir, might be onto something.
Agreed. All they really need to do is keep the lighting setup so it doesn't look bush league and they'd be fine. They can't go down to ROH production levels or ECW circa-1998, but they don't need all the bells and whistles they currently use.
ReplyDelete"snatched away"?
ReplyDeleteNEWSFLASH: He was a feeder system for Vince.
It's not so much that he needed it, as it was "we don't have that many good options". The only three guys in the tournament who had any right to win this (considering Hall/Razor was taken off the show) were Michaels, Taker and Jarrett.
ReplyDeleteSometimes you just have to make the logical decision. Bret won one of these after already being the World Champ.
You need to give him something to do. It's why he won the IC title, and a KOTR win accomplishes the same thing.
ReplyDeleteWhat?
ReplyDeleteEven with Shawn and Taker out of the equation, there were at minimum THREE other picks that would have been better than Mabel.
ReplyDeleteYoko, even dramatically increased in size and decreased in mobility, was still a believable upper midcard/main event guy, especially in the shallow talent pool of late 1995. If they were THAT adamant with going with a big guy, Yoko was far and away the better choice.
Kama had been working the program with Taker, and had a believable enough gimmick and look that if he turned up in a main event, the first instinct wouldn't be hilarious laughter. Kama wins, gets his title match against Diesel. Taker interferes, costing Kama the title while planting the first seeds for Taker's eventual feud with Diesel. It makes *sense*.
Even Savio Vega would have made more sense. They'd spent the whole tournament building him up as this scrappy underdog who kept finding ways to win, even when he realistically should be outclassed or otherwise too tired. If you're going to give a guy that type of push, you don't crap on it by having him *lose* at the end then basically doing nothing with him save the Austin feud for the next year and a half.
Would it have provided the creative jolt the company needed? Probably not. At a minimum it would've been more interesting than what we got. But any were a decent enough pick that they could have at least gotten more than a punchline's worth of mileage out of it.
English motherfucker, Can you read it?
ReplyDeleteYes. I just have difficulty understanding it. Especially with lines like this: "that was supposed to rewrite wrestling."
ReplyDeleteVince brought Douglas back into the fold because at the time he was the best indy wrestler not in the Big 2. At least the most over (and vocal).
ReplyDeleteHe had been rave reviews at the time about his matches and the heat he generated in Philly.
HBK was arguably the best worker/performer in the WWF at the time. So it was gonna be a natural fit.
Its obvious he was gonna be programmed with HBK in the fall and HBK was gonna job the IC belt to him after some assumed classics.
Is that better for you?
Fuck.
HBK was just dropping the title to him so they could move him on to Bret. Hardly "rewrite wrestling" stuff. Even if Shawn agreed to job, it's just one match on a throwaway PPV. He did the angle with Owen less than a month later.
ReplyDeleteBret is/was a mark for himself
ReplyDeleteVince could throw him that bone and he would take it cuz he thinks its "Real".
Vince played Bret for a sucker damn near every chance he got because he was a mark.
Im in the camp, that HBK didnt need the KoTR nod, or the IC belt. He main evented (Co-main) WM11 that year. He is unofficially above the IC belt at this point. What the hell does a KoTR win do for HBK? He is penciled in at WM12 to get the belt.
Why not try and make a new star?
Wrong.
ReplyDeleteDouglas was brought in with alot of hype. Got stuck with a shit gimmick but it was 95, what can you say?
But he was hailed as a future player.
He didnt drop the belt. He gave it up because he couldnt work from the SYracuse incident (lame excuse) and Douglas got the title by forfeit, then lost it to Hall same night IIRC.
I'm not a huge Douglas fan but if he came over from ECW with a similar gimmick rather than The Dean, he could have been pretty big. Especially in the environment that WWF was in 1995.
ReplyDeleteRight. And then jobbed it immediately to Razor.
ReplyDeleteSo you want to take away a potential classic KOTR performance. HBK/Jarrett and HBK/Razor 2 away from Shawn in 1995.
ReplyDeleteMight as well take away the Owen/HBK angle too.
Because the options given in that tournament are all garbage. Sometimes you just have to roll with it and make the safe choice. It didn't have to be HBK but most of the options were atrocious.
ReplyDeleteSure it does. ECW was bouncing checks and missing payments left and right worse than TNA is now. The talent pool was getting so shallow due to Vince and Eric signing everyone they could (Taz, Sabu, and the Dudleys were all pretty much gone by the time the TNN show started) that perpetual jobbers Danny Doring & Roadkill wound up with a serious push. He had no money and was too busy trying to placate a bunch of unpaid wrestlers while worrying if the bank was going to foreclose the ECW Arena to even notice putting the belt on Aldo when RVD was RIGHT THERE was a bad idea. I mean jesus, do you really think a financially stable Paul Heyman who can sit back and do what he does best would have given us world champion Steve fucking Corino?
ReplyDeleteI'm kind of tired of the "so & so didn't draw money" argument. If the WWF in 1987 had the exact same undercard roster it did in '96 Hogan probably wouldn't have drawn shit either. You can say the main eventer/world champ is supposed to be the main draw, but most smart marks do you see on the net will shit all over him in favor of Savage, Steamboat, Hart Foundation, Bulldogs etc.
ReplyDeleteShawn hasn't wrestled in 3 years and still gets a huge pop any time he makes an appearance. He's had countless great matches on Raw & ppv and has as good of a case for being considered the GOAT as anybody if not better. I don't care how much money he made Vince in '96 or '02 on, he entertained me. Terry Gilliam's movies rarely made bank at the box office but it doesn't make me love Time Bandits or Fear & Loathing any less.
I see it the same way. There was no obvious guy for KOTR, so why not add it to Shawn's list of accolades at the time. Just further reinforces the idea of him as a top guy en route to his 96 title win
ReplyDeleteI agree with the majority of what you're saying.
ReplyDeleteHBK is the GOAT in the ring.
BUT
Wrestlers talk money. Money drawn, money earned.
HBK didnt mke the money that other before and after made.
It doesnt lessen my fandom for him. Its just how you wanna look at things. You think entertainment? HBK is your guy. You think money? Austin/Rock/Hogan is your guy.
its preference.
Steve Corino is a god of wrestling. Shut your lying whore mouth.
ReplyDeleteTune into Nitro to find out!
ReplyDeleteShit gimmick? Every kid watching had some teacher they didn't like. Douglas got INSTANT heel heat, and if he'd have worked it, he could have done well. That character ruled.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Douglas turned out to be completely over-rated on every level anyways.
Sure he is- God of Overrated Indie Nobodies!
ReplyDeleteAlas, Heyman never had the money, even to really start with, and that's what you need to make things work. ECW was always too "fringe" to really take off in the mainstream sense, and a more mainstream, watered-down ECW is what RAW turned out being anyways.
ReplyDeletei definitely agree that he was overrated.
ReplyDeleteBut as he was coming in. He had a alot of praise heaped upon him coming from the sheets.
Apter mags especially.
Yeah, I remember some of those- there was one when he left where he pouted "I give the WWF a failing grade!"
ReplyDeleteGranted, that probably wasn't actually him writing it (not enough swearing).
You forget about Bret.
ReplyDeleteHe does a shoot on some MMA show where he says he advised Vince not to let the UFC on Spike TV. Vince didn't see it as competition and let it happen, and the rest is history.
ReplyDelete""So you want to take away a potential classic KOTR performance. HBK/Jarrett and HBK/Razor 2 away from Shawn in 1995."" I would, because HBK vs Razor 2 was not as good as the first one and the most important WWF Match of the Summer was always the Main Event of Summer Slam and I'd rather would have something like Diesel vs HBK than Diesel vs Mabel. Razor could have defeated his IC Title against British Bulldog, if they would have splitted the Allied Powers a little bit earlier. And they could have the "epic" Yokozuna vs Mabel match. Or so. Everything better than King Mabel...
ReplyDeleteI agree about the segments. I really miss just having one of the announcers in the back just conducting interviews. The segments on TNA just seem dumb like the wrestlers don't know they're being spied on by the cameraman.
ReplyDeleteCan you explain this one for those of us — I may be the only one — who doesn't know what you mean here?
ReplyDeleteSimilar gimmick would never have gotten over.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfDA1lIRBWk
Oh.
The problem wasn't that Corino was ECW champ, it was him being a FACE when it happened. I still don't get what Paul was thinking when he tried that.
ReplyDeleteBilly Corgan, from Smashing Pumpkins, is a huge wrestling fan (he currently owns Resistance Pro Wrestling) and did some appearances in ECW during the later days. At the time people were really hoping he could invest in the company to help run it. I would think that even better would be if Corgan had influenced the David Geffen Company at some point when he was signed with them to throw some money into ECW so we could have Paul Heyman, creative genius and not Paul Heyman, corrupt wrestling promoter who can't run a company.
ReplyDeleteWasn't Taker in this middle of his beating random giants and fat guys?
ReplyDeleteHeyman also brought up the Hollywood Rock character 6 months before it happened on Off the Record.
ReplyDelete