Mecca

The Royals have signed Jose Guillen to a 3 year 36 million dollar contract.....they supposedly have spoken to Andruw Jones also, I'll believe that one when I see it.

Remind me not to post when I'm half asleep.

From Kennedy.... "I had a legitimate medical reason to have it (steroids). How was I supposed to know my doctor's a quack? I was injured and had a legitimate reason. I tore my lat in 2005. I had surgery, went home and had a staph infection that I almost died from. I lost about 45 pounds in about three days. I had a legitimate medical reason for having it, however my name turned up on that list. Vince and the company's hands were tied. They had to suspend me... it's one of those things. But stuff happens in this business. I'm going to learn from my mistakes. I'm not going to make that same mistake again. I'm just going to keep pushing on and moving forward."

Now in fairness here, the Oregon team USC faced is not the same one that finished the year. That is not the same team without Dennis Dixon, and to say USF is better because Dixon blew out his knee is a bit much.

- The 11/10 house show at the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, Australia did a building record of 15,506 fans. - The tri-branded super show in Ft. Myers, FL, the night before the Survivor Series, drew a 7,500 sell out, with a gate over $250,000. - The 10/22 Raw was watched live by 96.6% of viewers, thus, 3.4% watched the episode on tape. - Dr. Gary Brandwien was arrested on 11/14. Dr. Brandwein, a Boca Raton doctor with Signature Pharmacy, was arrested in connection to the Albany, NY D.A. investigation. He personally wrote steroid prescriptions for Chris Benoit, Eddy Guerrero, and Brian Adams. (credit: The Wrestling Observer Newsletter) - Sci Fi network sent out a press release this week touting their recent ratings success. Ghost Hunters and Battlestar Galactica were the most praised shows. However ECW which is week to week one of Sci Fi's top rated shows was not mentioned at all. - The Ringside Collectibles exclusive "Brood" era Hardy Boyz two pack is now in stock. http://www.wrestlingfigs.com/uploads/artic...471_article.jpg - CM Punk attends AIDS event. http://www.mississauganews.com/article/8991 - Candice Michelle is tentively scheduled to return to the road on 12/29. - Smackdown v. Raw 2008 debuted at #2 in the U.K. in its first week of release for all game formats. (#1 on PS2, #2 on PS3, and #3 on X Box 360 and PSP) - WWE in Brazil will be shown on SBT (Brazilian Television System) in December 15. SBT will be starting shown RAW on (Saturday), and later on 16, Sunday, will be starting shown SmackDown!. RAW will be on 19:15 PM every Saturday and SmackDown! will be on 12:30 AM every Sunday. Gerweck.net

Dave Meltzer is reporting that WWE is trying to line up some huge surprises for the RAW 15th anniversary special next month. WWE has contacted former WWE Champion and Hollywood star Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson for an appearance. Johnson has done taped segments but has not appeared live in many years. While he has made an effort to distance himself from pro wrestling, the feeling within WWE is that Johnson has solidified himself as a legitimate actor and is beyond the point where appearing on a special WWE show would hurt his image. The 3-hour special will air Monday night December 12th. The show will start 1 hour earlier, at 8PM eastern. Expect WWE to stack the show with a lot of star power and PPV caliber matches. The best part of this report.....is I don't think December 12th is a Monday..

Thomas Moore, a British wrestling champion in the 1950s, passed away this past week at the age of 87. He wrestled under the name Jack Dempsey and had his roots in Wigan, home of the infamous Billy Riley catch wrestling Snake Pit. Apparently there was a major TV documentary done on him twelve years ago. He beat Mick McManus to win the British Welterweight Title in 1957. After two days of deliberations, "Hardbody" Harrison Norris was declared guilty by a federal grand jury this week on multiple charges of sex trafficking and slavery related to a scheme to force women into prostitution. Norris took in a number of girls, promising to train them as professional wrestlers, and instead forced them into prostitution. A number of women testified during the trial that Norris had threatened and beaten them if they disobeyed, with one claiming that Norris headbutted her when she refused to have sex with two customers and told her he'd throw her through a plate glass window. He ran his home like a military camp, putting the girls in "squads" overseen by an "enforcer". He was referred to as the "General" and the girls often had to sleep with him in "the General's Quarter". One women said that Norris had forced her to sexually assault another woman during a party, and that acts of prostitution had occurred throughout North Carolina and Georgia, in hotels, nightclubs, apartments, etc. He really got hit hard because he crossed state lines. At the house, Norris forced them into labor, and also fined women for infractions such as not working out or talking too much. He would tell the girls they could not go free until their debts were paid, but then increase their debts regularly. Because his offenses were found to involve aggravated sexual abuse, he faces life in prison when sentences in February of 2008. Acting Assistant Attorney General Rena J. Comisac said, This jury has vindicated the rights of the numerous young women this defendant exploited, abused, and forced into prostitution. The Department of Justice will continue to prosecute vigorously matters, such as this one, involving the sexual exploitation of young women." United States Attorney David E. Nahmias added, "The evidence at trial clearly proved that Norris used force and threats of force against the victims forcing them to work as prostitutes against their will. Sex trafficking and other forced labor are forms of modern day slavery and cannot be tolerated." The grand irony here is that Norris, involved in modern day slavery, won over a million dollars in a racial discrimination lawsuit from WCW/Time Warner. The line-up for the Tokyo Dome show on January 4th, which has a New Japan vs. TNA theme, looks to be Manabu Nakanishi vs. Abyss, Giant Bernard & Maybe Travis Tomko (he underwent emergency surgery for some sort of muscle tear last week so I have no idea what the story is with him) vs. Rick & Scott Steiner for the IWGP Tag Team Titles, Kurt Angle vs. Yuji Nagata for Angle's V2 or V3 or whatever version it is of the IWGP Title (the original belt that Brock Lesnar took with him when he left New Japan, that ended up going to Angle after Angle talked Brock into putting him over at the debut Inoki Genome Federation event earlier this year in exchange for an MMA match between the two down the road that probably is never going to happen) (got all that?), and Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. the winner of the December 9th Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Toji Makabe number one contender's match. I'm not sure what will go on last, but at least at this point they're really positioning Kurt's IWGP belt higher than Tanahashi's "official" IWGP belt. Obviously, the idea is to built towards a unification match. I suspect they'll go with Tanahashi vs. Angle since Angle is an outsider and that's been New Japan's modus operandi for two decades, though they could go with Nagata since Tanahashi beat Nagata for the official belt a few months back. Naruki Doi & Masato Yoshino of Dragon Gate beat Kotaro Suzuki & Ricky Marvin on November 24th at the NOAH show in Sapporo to win the GHC Jr. Tag Team titles. It's pretty interesting that if you look at all available factors (in-ring work, attendance, etc.), you could probably make an argument that Dragon Gate is one of if not the top wrestling promotion in the country right now. ROH announced that Daniel Puder would be appearing at the December 29th and 30th Final Battle shows in Manhattan. They said he liked the physical style of the company and was there to see what ROH was about in person. Don't know if he'll have any interest in wrestling since he's fighting fairly regularly these days, and pro-wrestling is much harder on the body and would require quite the pay cut, credit:F4W Newsletter

Consequences Creed signed with TNA. Latest TNA idiocy is that the main event of this Sunday's PPV is a Feast of Fired Battle Royal. It's a smurfing POLE MATCH with briefcases on four poles. In three of the briefcases are contracts for the three major titles (World, Tag and X). In the fourth briefcase is a pink slip. So yes, COMPLETELY AT RANDOM, a man can either get a WORLD TITLE SHOT or GET FIRED. I'm trying to think of a stupider concept for a match. This is seriously worse than the reverse battle royal. At least that match just was impossible to work without making it look stupid. In this, they are basically saying that their titles are so meaningless that any person completely at random can get a chance to win one, and has nearly as much of a chance of randomly winning the shot as he does of randomly being fired. And if title shots are given out so randomly in TNA, why not just wait until the next time you can randomly win one? Why enter this match where you may get fired? Futhermore, and obviously nobody thought this much about it, if the first three briefcases are opened and all contain title shots, why the smurf would anyone get the last briefcase? Can the match end without that briefcase being opened?. The January 6th PPV will take place in Orlando and the February 10th show probably takes place in Greenville, SC. Sting is finished until such time comes that he signs a new deal. It's not a guarantee he will. He was ready to walk away at the end of this year and quietly retire, but Dixie Carter really wants him back. I would think for $500,000 per year to work a super limited schedule he'd be willing. They beat him clean at the last PPV just in case, though, so for now that is the final match of his career. Read a doozy of a Kurt Angle interview with David Robson on a bodybuilding site. It's actually several months old but I just discovered it. His VERY FIRST SENTENCE was about how he was on the road 300 days a year for WWE for seven years. This is the new Hulk Hogan. He couldn't handle the grind, he said, so he quit and went to TNA. Well, if you tell the story enough times you start to believe it. WWE fired Angle, fearing that he was about to die. That's the truth, no matter what anyone says now and in the future. He claimed TNA was averaging between a 1.1 and 1.5 rating on Spike, and that WWE was doing "around a 2.6". TNA has never done a 1.5. They've done 1.5 million VIEWERS, but never a 1.5 rating. Raw is nowhere close to averaging a 2.6. Smackdown is, but that's a network rating as opposed to a cable rating, meaning they're still doing around 5 million viewers and have beaten Raw on certain weeks. He said TNA "easily matches the ECW ratings" and were "climbing fast to the Smackdown ratings". Does he believe this bullcrap? They've actually never even beaten ECW, even when ECW bottomed out at the 1.1. He had a very specific percentage for how much more action we got with TNA: 210%. No idea where that came from. He said he was 6-0, 220 pounds and five percent bodyfat. He claimed with TNA he was on the road "100 to 150 days a year". Keep in mind the average guy in WWE is on the road 140 days a year. With four TV tapings a month and one PPV, that's 60 dates for TNA. So I guess they're running 40 to 90 house shows a year. No idea where those shows are at. He said in WWE you could have 280 matches a year. He talked about his diet and training regimen and said he was far healthier now than he'd been in a long time. I'd agree with that. He said he'd love to have one fight and was negotiating with different MMA companies. When asked about opponents he said he'd love to face Randy Couture. He said the fans considered him the greatest pro wrestler of all time. He said he wrestled for "30 minutes a night, every night". He added: "Just getting clotheslined and hitting the plywood or concrete floor is enough pain for one day, but we go through a thirty-minute match where we are doing all of these moves, being thrown on your heads and suplexing one another over and over. You have to remember the ring is metal and wood with very little give. The ring has a little bit of canvas but all-in-all it's a pretty solid surface." So Bret was right. He said Abyss was 400 pounds. He said "in the past seven years I have won more titles than any other wrestler in history winning 11 world and Olympic titles. And no one has ever done that. Rick Flair has won 16, but he has been a wrestler for 34 years. If I wrestled over that period of time I would probably have 30 titles." Elsewhere, it was said that he was the best wrestler ever because he won the TNA, IWGP, X-Division and Tag Titles, and that no one had ever held that many titles at the same time before. Actually, Ultimo Dragon once held ten belts at the same time. I guess he doesn't count because he's a foreigner. Credit F4W

WWE has been taping new show opens and such in HD in preparation for the switchover. I believe Smackdown will go HD on the CW starting in January (A MONTH AWAY~!), and Raw hopefully a few months later. USA and Sci-Fi in HD should be launching at any time. Matt Hardy underwent an emergency appendectomy last Tuesday and will be out of action one to three months. It actually plays perfectly into his storyline with MVP, since the last show before the injury saw MVP destroy his knee after they lost the tag titles. WWE even tried to turn it into a storyline, writing, "Did the attack by MVP help lead to the appendectomy that Hardy underwent tonight?" He showed up at the building for Smackdown in immense pain and went right to the trainer, and they sent him right to the hospital. At the time, his insides were already being poisoned, so they said it was a good time they say him when they did. That's scary. This poor dude can't catch a break. Hardy wrote on his blog: "I AM STILL ALIVE. As most of you know, I experienced a ruptured appendix which released toxins that internally poisoned me on Tuesday. After being in excruciating pain for nearly 24 hours, I went under the knife late Tuesday night and had my appendix removed. For the last four days, I've been virtually bed-ridden in Tampa General Hospital. For those four days, I've been having my body intravenously pumped and flushed with powerful antibiotics to kill the infections within my abdomen caused by the toxins. It wasn't exactly the way I planned on spending Thanksgiving of 07-- away from home, away from my family, and in torturous pain. But it was a good Thanksgiving nonetheless -- because I'm very thankful I'm still alive. I've got a lot left to do in this life, and I wanna thank God for continuing to give me that opportunity. I'll speak on all this in greater length later, but I need my sleep now. Thank you guys for all your support and get well soon wishes, they mean a lot". Armageddon looks to be Undertaker vs. Edge vs. Batista in a three-way for the WWE Title, which I guess sort of explains the absurdity at the end of Smackdown this week, plus Randy Orton vs. Chris Jericho for the WWE Title and Shawn Michaels vs. Mr. Kennedy. Notes from an NZPWI interview with Bret Hart. He put over Jericho and Foley's books, but said most of the others were crap. He said he hadn't gotten any feedback so far from anyone in the business, and hadn't even heard from anyone in his entire family. As far as people in the business, he must not be looking very hard because at the very least Lance Storm wrote a column on it on his website. He said the book wasn't written for wrestling fans at all. "It’s written for someone that’s not a big fan. Like, not a huge, wrestling -- you know, they can’t get enough of it kind of thing. But this is for someone who has a bit of an understanding of it, they watch it on TV, they know who some of the characters are, and they kinda wonder what the real wrestling is, how the business really works, how the personalities really mesh together." He said he was very proud of the WWE Bret Hart DVD despite the fact that it was quite stressful to have to put the whole thing together in basically 15 days. He said he really hoped they did one or two more. Still not happy with Shawn. "Shawn cried all the way through that whole [Montreal] episode in the dressing room with Vince. But he doesn’t write any of that in his book, and I thought, for me I want to put it in perspective. I want people to see this little sniveling coward. For a Christian he seems to enjoy lying quite a bit. I don’t really buy into that so much. Mind you, he wouldn’t be the first Christian to lie so much, but I think that I wanted to let people see people like him for what they really were, and then at the same time see someone like Undertaker for being the man that he is. See that not all of us are a bunch of sneaky rats who have no principles, some of us are really tight, and really close." He did admit that Shawn was a hell of a wrestler. He buried the wrestling business as it is today, saying there was a desperate longing by fans for wrestling the way it used to be. He said if it were up to him, WWE would just show reruns. Well, the reality is that there is a place where you can see WWE reruns, and it has less than 100,000 subscribers after being available for a few years now. The main programming, the modern stuff, Raw and Smackdown, do 5 million viewers a week. Sure, one is free and one you have to pay for, but even a bottom of the barrel modern WWE PPV, which costs five times as much as a month of WWE 24/7, still does way more than 100,000 buys. He was asked about a comment Hunter made a few days back. Hunter was asked if something like Montreal could have ever happened to him or Shawn, and he said no, they weren't that stupid. Bret said: "And maybe I was, maybe I was stupid, maybe I was stupid to believe a man that had acted like my father, and treated me like -- he’d done so much for me. This is the same guy that’s his father-in-law today. So to take someone at his word, and believe him, and give him your word in return, if that’s stupid, then I guess I’m stupid. You know? But you should understand that all I did was tell the truth and be honest, and his father-in-law was pretty downright dishonest, and they’re total liars, if they can be proud of that, maybe that makes him smart to be a liar, I don’t know. In the end I wake up in the morning, I look in the mirror, I see a guy that -- you know, I have nothing hanging off my conscience that I feel bad about, I feel like in the end that was a heroic moment for me, because I was right, I was telling the truth, and I was fair. I did everything that I would have done for my father. I came there, to be the pro that I’ve always been, and dealing with some people that are very unscrupulous, very dishonest, and Shawn Michaels even wrote in his own book that his big problem was simply the fact that I was being paid more than him. To decide that somebody’s being paid more than you, who’s been in the business longer, who’s a couple of years older, he’s the highest paid guy in the company and he’s paid his dues, and he’s being paid more – I don’t know how you can take exception to that and say 'you know I want to see if I can push this guy out, and get him out, ruin him, get him out of here, and take over everything.' You know I think that in the end when you look at how corrupt and slimy the Hunter Helmsley, and Vince, and Shawn, and that whole group, how wickedly deceiving and corrupt they were -- I think you can look at me, I don’t know that I was ever -- I don’t know how you’d rate my heroism, throughout my career, because a lot of it’s fabricated, it’s TV, but in the end that day I lived up to being the hero that I always pretended to be. Punching Vince in the jaw was a really brilliant thing to do, because it made people respect me forever." He said if Paul Jay hadn't been there filming Wrestling With Shadows, nobody would have cared at all about the whole thing today. Well, the pivotal part of the story is the conversation that Vince and Bret had in the locker room that day, which you can still purchase in text form from Dave Meltzer in an old Observer, and the only reason that conversation exists is because Bret was wired for the movie. Without the conversation recorded, it would have been very easy for most everyone to believe Vince's side of the story, and since so many people in WWE seem to really believe what Vince told them in the aftermath (that he had to do it, that Bret refused to ever lose the belt, and that Bret was going to take the belt to Nitro the next day, none of which is true), it would have been Bret's word versus the insistence of a huge number of people. I have a friend named Mark who refuses to watch TNA. Why? The crapty booking? The wasted talent? No. He refuses to watch because he hates the six-sided ring. I always thought that was absurd. Then I read this interview where Bret said he hated the ring so much that if he were younger, "I would probably not join that company just for the whole reason that I hate the ring." He hated the WCW ring as well, particularly the cables which gave you no spring. It's funny, because when I did the Derby City match, it was the only time in my life I'd ever been in an actual ring created by WWE, a huge 20x20 ring with real ropes. Buddy's ring at his school, where I normally train, is 16x16 with cable ropes. What a world of difference it was. Someone once said that the WWE ring was like running a football field, and while I've never played football I would guess that this is an accurate statement. The thing was huge. And the strange thing was that when I hit the ropes for the first time, I was surprised to find myself actually propelled back towards the middle of the ring. Bret noted that with cable ropes you don't get that spring and he said sometimes he had to actually start running again once he hit them. I never noticed it before, but boy did I ever notice in the WWE ring. He said he'd love to read a book about Vince McMahon if Vince was honest about everything. Hope he's not holding his breath. "My feelings for Vince aren’t so harsh as they are about Hunter and Shawn. Vince, I always had a lot of respect for him in a lot of ways, and I feel a bit of a -- if that day in Montreal had never happened, I feel that I would have been probably sitting right beside Vince McMahon, doing everything I could to help him and his company. I was a guy that really loved his company, loved his business and wanted to give him -- I was grateful for everything that he did for me, and I wanted to always be a contributor. So my feelings for Vince, and WWF, have never really changed, I’m always going to be grateful for what he did for me, I just don’t understand why he was so programmed to -- what they were trying to do to me at Survivor Series was really just to be as malicious and hurtful as possible, ruin me as much as possible, and have their own private joke, you know, we just really stuck it to Bret Hart." He talked about Vince calling him about the Hall of Fame. "Well, when I had that conversation I was about 5 days into my stroke. And I was really going through my most difficult challenge in my life. And I was really -- for lack of a better word, I was really down. He called me, and I didn’t know he would call me, but I did write about that in my book, it was almost like a -- I don’t know, when he called me we kind of put the hostility down and talked man to man. And I appreciated it as a kindness at the time, and he gave me a nice pep talk, told me that I was a fighter and I would beat this thing, that he had no doubts, and hang in there, and it was nice of him to call. I really gave him a second chance in some ways after that. I appreciated the fact that he took the time to call me when so many of people didn’t. I didn’t get a lot of calls, no-one really cared, and I had guys like Hogan and Flair bash me in their books which came out around the same time, and I felt like I was getting kicked while I was down. But Vince, you know I told him when we talked, I said 'I don’t want to be erased, I don’t want to be forgotten, because I really had some great wrestling matches for you, and I would love to do something,' because we had always talked about doing an anthology – a bunch of, at the time it would have been videotapes, videotapes of my greatest matches, I think we were talking about a five volume set, starting from the Hart Foundation, and building up to end of my career. There was a lot of things like that, and when I talked to him on the phone, he said that anytime I wanted we could do all that, and not to worry about it, it was as good as done, and just let me know when I was up to for it, and we ended up doing that. And I’m grateful, even though the original concept of that DVD was to tear me to pieces, and I brought up the conversation I had with him when I was in the hospital, said 'you promised me a fitting tribute, I’m not going to do anything called "Screwed" where you highlight all the stuff that happened in Montreal, make money off that,' and in that conversation we agreed to do the DVD somewhere down the road, or that’s what we talked about, that concept anyway. I always told myself, if they ever asked me to do the Hall of Fame, that I felt that I had a right to be remembered, and I had a right to go back. And if there was ever, if they invited me, I would go. That was before I had the stroke. It was after Survivor Series that I thought about that. And when he asked me about it that day on the phone, I said that was something I would like to do but that right now I don’t have the heart for it, I don’t think that I could even -- I was in hospital, so I was pretty down and out, so anyway we had that talk, and it was all -- couple of years later when I had recovered enough, the Hall of Fame thing came up and I thought that it was a good way for me to find closure. To do something for my fans again, give the fans that goodbye. I had a lot of fans asking me when I was coming back, even just to say goodbye, and I didn’t want to break it to them, but I’d say goodbye at the Hall of Fame. That was my final WWF appearance." He said he was very nervous about it and it was tough to check him emotions, but in the end he was happy with what he did and what he said. He said his next goal is to try to get his book made into a film. credit:F4W Newsletter

Posts about me, in the thread about Sean Taylor passing away, stay classy guys. But hey take the time in a thread about a man being dead, to point out that wrestling sucks on a wrestling board....I mean the other million times weren't enough.....that you have to do it in this thread. Some people are like a fuckin broken record around here. And Vitamin is just mad because he can't pick college football games as good as I can.

They have punk in the description for the show, which would make it funnier if he's not on.

They must think we all want to see it over and over.

He doesn't remind you of the guy Death was usually in the ring with? Same guy.......all 3 are the same. Oops the board quoated the wrong post......but yea Deacon, Fake Kane, Festus all the same guy.

That just stuns me honestly, I thought he'd pull through. Things like this are just senseless. I'm bad with stuff like this because I don't know what to say, I loved the guy as a player and all he could do. Most importantly he has a young daughter and had turned his life around in many ways from being a perceived thug to a good guy..... It's just so damn senseless, damn.

Let's understand the live crowd cared more about Flair because of where it is......not every crowd will respond to him like that.

Mickie and Melina are the worst? He'd just rather see Jillians big fake titties.

I'm not sure what's worse..Raw or the boring as all hell football game.

Can they please fire the midget......it's getting worse.

Taker is such a face, tombstoning women and all.

This has to be funny.

Even if this happens there will be people saying Oklahoma, OSU, Georgia and LSU, provided they win deserve it over SC. I don't agree with that but there would be people saying it.

I think people tend to forget that SC's offensive line was in shambles for much of this season.

USC gets points for well being USC...... Most people are of the belief that they are better than most of the teams. And I fully admitted that my scenario was homeristic. I don't expect them in the title game, but I expect them to smack the shit out of whoever they get in the Rose, especially Ohio State.

It's gotta be McFadden doesn't it?

I hope something weird happens and SC gets to play for the NC, I know the odds of it are slim.