ben.

So are all the old DVDVR Reviews and Road Reviews gone? I would love to possibly put together some PDFs of them to host if they are not and just stored in some .html or other document files somewhere

Lol, man am I going to get a full inbox today haha.

So I actually have recently come across an electronic copy of the book, if Phil wouldn't get mad about us creating a book club for the Gary Hart book, I'd have no problem passing it around...

EDIT: Nevermind, sounded too much like piracy in my opinion but still feel like Gary Hart's book should be put out somewhere if the co-author doesn't want it to be reproduced.

So here is the official squash to the Savage never being allowed back in WWE rumors after 1994. Dave mentioned this in November 1996: There were talks with Randy Savage. Apparently the two sides were far apart on terms and no talks are going on any longer. The feeling is that Titan is so fearful of raids that they only want guys that they sign for three to five-year contracts and the feeling is that Savage may help in the short run because of his name, his guarantee would be so high and they wouldn't want him on top for long so it makes no sense to sign him long-term, but they don't want him on TV for one year and then have him go back to WCW when the deal is up either.

Apparently had the money been right, he was considering it but WCW lowballed him. He retired two months after Dave reported this when he got hurt in AJPW, I believe. Another funny thing from the same newsletter: "WWF reportedly sent WWN a legal threatening letter about usage of the initials." Funny how things turn out, right?

Just an interesting little nugget I read in a back-issue Observer: "The numbers we were given was that DiBiase wanted $100,000 to $125,000 for a 100-date deal and WCW didn't want to make that commitment which should tell you something about future contract negotiations with a lot of wrestlers because there aren't a lot of DiBiase-calibre performers in this country. He was also told his first match back would be a 30:00 draw with Dustin Rhodes in a U.S. title match at the Halloween Havoc PPV show (which would have replaced the scheduled Steve Austin in the spot), which he apparently didn't feel like was the appropriate way to begin with a new promotion."

So the history now goes according to every Monday Night retrospective that Vince McMahon was fighting to keep the lights on from 1995-1997 so this is something I never really thought about: What if the WWF went out of business first? Things didn't turn around and Vince McMahon had to sell off WWF. Does Turner buy it or does someone else sweep in and buy it? In the interim because WWF guys don't have guaranteed contracts, who leaves to WCW? Or if WCW buys it, who do they keep? What happens to Vince McMahon? Lets set the date for this February of 1997 so this makes the WWF Championship vacant with Shawn Michaels "out with a knee injury", Bret, Austin, Vader, Taker and Sid feuding over the belt, Rocky Maivia having recently debuted, you have guys on the roster like Triple H, Mankind, Goldust, Ahmed Johnson, Faarooq, Flash Funk, Sultan, etc. So how do we see the future years play out?

My article on an upcoming deathmatch tournament got some play from Meltzer yesterday, that made me happy. If anyone is in Denver, this should be a fun show http://www.coloradoindies.com/post/5/show

It is sad to hear about O'Haire, I saw it on Facebook this morning. The Devil's Advocate character was awesome but I'm thinking everyone forgot about how he majorly messed it up once they put him in front of the crowd because he couldn't stop laughing while trying to cut the promos so that is when they gave him Piper. If he could have gotten through the promos and developed he might have been good but I think that is essentially the point they gave up on him.

So this is something I've been working on, hope it is alright to post it here: http://www.coloradoindies.com/ It is essentially a site designed to help Colorado Independent Wrestling get noticed since essentially most people don't realize it exists. I'm hoping I can find a few fanboys in the area to recreate the magic that our DVDVR playaz used to do with their road reports but alas, nobody has stepped up to the plate in that aspect

The Patriot sucked hence the reason why they got rid of him and gave Kurt Angle his theme music and patriotic colors.

So if Smackdown! does in fact move back to Thursdays, what will happen to NXT on WWE Network? I assume they won't run the shows against each other, will they move NXT to a different night or move it to an earlier or later time?

During the notes for the Oregon Raw, Dave mentioned that there was a big issue in the early 90s where Howard Finkel turned in a blood sample for Hogan in Oregon when they were blood testing and it tested positive for AIDs. I've googled this a bit but couldn't find anything substantial, anybody have the story on this?

In Your House Beware of Dog. It went out after that promo and then I sat there wondering what the hell was going on as the PPV just went offline. 10-year-old me sat there wondering what was going to happen and suddenly they come back on and you can hear action in the ring but Vince mentions that the power was out or something along those lines and I got even more pissed that you could hear a match going on in the background and we couldn't see it but they could let us know that the power was out. Overall the show wasn't too bad because they did part 2 on Tuesday for free but for a kid to sit there and look at an essentially blank screen for an hour and a half until it comes back in for the main event made me so angry as a kid.

SD Jones is sick of being "held down" and immediately begins getting black wrestlers on his side to fight the man, he recruits Koko B. Ware, Bad News Brown, and Ivan Putski to begin fighting the race wars in the WWF. They plan to take the WWF by storm, constantly calling out discrimination and end up getting into a feud with Volkoff and the Sheik for stealing their heat. It is all for naught however as Jones used this as a chance to get close to Koko and Frankie so that he can cook him and feed to Koko, ending with an Aviary in a Cell match where they fill a cell with tons of birds and the guys have a match. Koko commands the birds to attack Jones but all of them just perch along the ropes. When one of the birds poops on the mat, King Kong Bundy takes offense and storms out to the ring, ripping the door off the cell and biting one of the birds heads off before attacking both Jones and Koko. The joke is on him though as Jones and Koko work together and beat up Bundy, commanding the birds to all poop on Bundy. None of them listen so they just rub his face in the poop on the outside of the ring. And this was all a ploy to get into a feud with the British Bulldogs, obviously ending with a blow off match where Matilda is hung from one pole and a flock of birds are hung from another. The match ends when Dynamite pulls Matilda down but then delivers a stiff piledriver on her for not pulling her weight in the team.

Sorry to hear about your neighbor Uncle Coaster. This was a great read and all of these have been pretty amazing, it reminds us just why we troll these boards and seek out these matches, etc, etc. I've been watching wrestling since before I could walk. My grandfather had an obsession that he passed onto me. I remember dates by what PPV it was close to or recall why I got into a skill or hobby based on what I saw on a pro wrestling show. For all of the shit that everyone on this board gives each other, it is always awesome to see us reminiscing on why wrestling is so great and why we love it.

I think like Angle mentioned when he first went on Tough Enough, it more or less was about not liking pro wrestling at the time more than anything. He mentions WWE offering him a big contract after the 96 Olympics (Which makes sense considering they gave Mark Henry a big contract) and he turned it down, leading him to not getting into the business until 98-99. I don't think ECW realistically ever had a chance of bringing him in and I'm not sure why he was at their show in the first place but I wasn't there, I wouldn't know haha.

I don't know if this has been touched on but I have heard a lot of people through my social media talking about how WWE would make a lot more money off of monthly $60 PPVs compared to $10 monthly subscriptions and that really is not the case. PPV takes something like 50% of the revenue of PPVs whereas WWE gets an 80-90% return for their Network depending on which Streaming Device they have to pay dividends to. You figure that they have 650K+ on the Network, they had a lot more people purchase Wrestlemania than they expected with the inclusion of the Network, and more people are watching the PPVs, they are not that far off from what a lot of people I've read have been assuming. I think this stock crash is temporary (I bought 3 stocks at around $11) but I expect them to go up soon. People act like Vince McMahon doesn't know what he is doing but at the same time he has been essentially the only game in town for over a decade and has done things nobody ever expected of professional wrestling.

Ah, thanks for the note. I continuously confused those two and the Bucks. Racist or my aging eyes, I'll continue to go with the latter. I had minimal problems with the stream but there was definitely an issue on Chrome when they were making switches. My browser plug-in crashed while I was waiting for the show to start, crashed again when they started intermission, and crashed again when they were leaving intermission. Other than that, I had a few times where it slowed but it never went completely out except for one time during Cole/Liger.

I was talked into getting the uStream so I threw together a review of it overall, I haven't been too into ROH in a very long time so, yeah, my review isn't all ROH fanboy-ish: https://medium.com/p/e9d66342fd41

Haha, I was in a match where my tag partner saw a kid he "thought was his neighbor's kid" in the crowd and when the kid was yelling at him, he backhanded him. Turns out, wasn't his neighbor but the security guards son so I'm trying to work a match and this security guy is in my tag partners face and about to kill him. The promoter had to break them up and thankfully I got a new partner after that show.

Who here has blogs where they review wrestling shows they go to? I need to fill in the fact that those old DVDVR farts don't do them anymore (I'm staring at you Pete ). Also, this was probably something that was discussed here last year but I just found it on The Chive and this is what pro wrestling needs, more guys punching kids haha. www.redux.com/view/post/3307074/Pro-Wrestler-Accidentally-Punches-Kid-Fan-In-The-Face

Whoooo! Great read, I can't wait to watch Rampage Vs. Mickey Finn and the Hash's and NOT watch that lucha match because fuck those guys for forgetting their storyline.

That part makes sense but I am just surprised that MSG would let WCW use the venue with their allegiance to the WWF. Then again, I guess there are probably some legalities where MSG might have had to let WCW use it if there wasn't any exclusivities on it. Anyways, yeah, just thought it was interesting that WCW would tread that close to WWF's big arena. EDIT: And in terms of timeframe, this was RIGHT after Hogan was revealed as the 3rd man so I'm also surprised that the show bombed...