WWE General Discussion - January 2008

[slimm44 0]

With the way Elimination Chambers have been booked, is it safe to assume HBK, Hardy and Jericho will be the first three out?

 

Jericho, yes.

 

My thinking would have HBK, HHH, Hardy, and Umaga as the final four, with DX eliminating Umaga, Hardy eliminating Michaels (setting up a Wrestlemania match), and then HHH vs Hardy with HHH winning.

 

However, I wouldn't mind seeing JBL vs. HHH as the final two

[Diamonddust 0]

With the way Elimination Chambers have been booked, is it safe to assume HBK, Hardy and Jericho will be the first three out?

 

Jericho, yes.

 

My thinking would have HBK, HHH, Hardy, and Umaga as the final four, with DX eliminating Umaga, Hardy eliminating Michaels (setting up a Wrestlemania match), and then HHH vs Hardy with HHH winning.

 

However, I wouldn't mind seeing JBL vs. HHH as the final two

 

Imagine that feud...

[King Cucaracha 0]

With the way Elimination Chambers have been booked, is it safe to assume HBK, Hardy and Jericho will be the first three out?

 

Not with Uma(n)ga in it, I wouldn't think.

[foleyfanforever88 0]

With the way Elimination Chambers have been booked, is it safe to assume HBK, Hardy and Jericho will be the first three out?

 

Not with Uma(n)ga in it, I wouldn't think.

 

I figure the order of elimination will be HBK, Umaga, Jericho, JBL, Hardy.

[TheTomster 0]

A friend and I was talking about the elimination chamber earlier, and heres what I think about it

 

Orton/Cena should be gaven to Orton, winning by a cheap DQ

The final 2 in the Elimination Chamber should be Jeff Hardy and Triple-H, but they have to stop the match for some reason, possibly blood loss.

 

Then, in the weeks leading up to WrestleMania, the Mania Main Event is annouced as:

Randy Orton vs John Cena vs Triple-H vs Jeff Hardy for the WWE Championship

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

People do love multi-man title matches at Mania, after all.

[Brett Favre 0]

That would be the perfect stage to have Jeff Hardy win though. Beating Orton, Cena, and HHH. I'd do that if he keeps working hard and is still over with the crowd.

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

It would be a pretty huge win, no doubt.

 

I'm sure this isn't the case, but I have to wonder if Cena coming back so early and apparently treating his Rumble victory as a Money in the Bank stipulation is just some hot shot deal where they get a big surprise bump in product interest with Cena's return, do a good buyrate for a former filler show between the Rumble and Mania, then Cena disappears to further rehab his injury after Orton gives him a beating at No Way Out.

 

You'd think they could accomplish the HHH / Cena match (if that's the plan) at Mania without tainting the Rumble prize by just having HHH get a title shot at No Way Out for being runner up, but that would result in two title changes in two months if Cena were to go over and they seem to be against that sort of thing these days.

[Atticus Chaos 0]

If Orton is out of the WM main event I can see them booking him to retire Flair as a consolation prize. It would fit in with his whole gimmick, and it's better for Flair to go out in a match with Randy rather than a mid carder (Kennedy, MVP).

[Atticus Chaos 0]

Well, Kennedy got a clean win over HBK and is still in the exact position he was. I think MVP going to be star anyway, and it'll be the inevitable fued with Matt that does it rather than a Flair match.

 

Just saying, if I'm Flair, I'd rather go out losing to the top heel on Raw rather than an unproven midcarder. . Let's face it: the Flair retirement is a mid card storyline that's been fairly flat thus far. Putting Orton in there will make it into a bigger deal.

[luke-o 0]

I thought the EC was suposed to be the last 6 people of the Rumble?

[JPopStarKami 0]

I thought the EC was supposed to be the last 6 people of the Rumble?

 

No, that was just a rumor. Nobody ever said it officially, least of all WWE.

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

Dave Lagana probably started that rumour.

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

Songs that will remind me of Dave Lagana:

 

"Tell Me A Lie"

[TheFranchise 0]

Songs that will remind me of Dave Lagana:

 

"Tell Me A Lie"

 

 

 

Start spreading the news

I'm leaving today

 

[Thanks for the Fish 0]

Umaga needs to head over to SD!ECW. He's played out on Raw and on jobber duty, but in the Rumble he was interesting when facing off against Undertaker and Batista.

[Maztinho 0]

Umaga needs to head over to SD!ECW. He's played out on Raw and on jobber duty, but in the Rumble he was interesting when facing off against Undertaker and Batista.

 

He needed to be moved to SD! the second HHH buried him upon his return.

[Mike wanna be 0]

He's a savage, how's he supposed to know he's been traded? [/kayfabe]

[Diamonddust 0]

He's a savage, how's he supposed to know he's been traded? [/kayfabe]

 

Even though they won't do it, but his old friend Armando could pull some strings to get him on Smackdown. I could see them trying to do a Batista/Umaga "Beast vs. Beast" feud.

[cabbageboy 0]

Thing is, then Umaga just gets jobbed out to UT and Batista as well and he's right back where he started. He really needs a tag partner if they want to bother keeping him around long term.

[Enigma 0]

So why did they split up Umaga and Armando anyways?

[RonL21 0]

So why did they split up Umaga and Armando anyways?

 

Honestly..

 

I think Armando was getting too Popular and taking away from Umaga..

 

Last Year this time I thought for sure Armando was gonna be like Bobby Heenan/Jimmy Hart..

 

Have a stable of wrestlers that were just odd...

 

I thought for sure Armando was gonna have an Umaga/Khali tag team to make Cena's life Hell

 

I remember the old PPVs were Jimmy Hart would come out w/ one team like the Nasty Boys for the

 

first match with Nasty Boys Suit and Megaphone...

 

then later on came out with another wrestler complete w/ outfit change...Gold Stuff..

[Enigma 0]

Former TNA star since the company's inception in June 2002, Chris Harris, announced just minutes ago on his website that he has officially signed with WWE.

 

-- Meltz

 

I'm assuming he's going straight to the main roster and not doing OVW/FCW.

[justcoz 0]

Dave is The One Who Used to Write For Friends. Brian is the wrestling mark.

 

Are you sure about this? I know Dave wrote for Friends but the PWInsider guys are always referring to him as an ECW Arena alumni. I remember reading - back when he was teamed with Heyman during the ECW relaunch - that he was a regular at ECW shows. Brian Gerwitz has attended ROH shows I think. Apparently he hasn't learned anything.

 

[Mecca 0]

F4W on CM Punk..

 

Regarding his loss to Chavo, clean loss to Edge a few days later in the big revenge match, and elimination by Chavo in the Rumble, we're told that Punk is in the dog house of late. The story is that he isn't listening to the agents and his house show matches are considered "indy level sloppy". He's botched a lot of stuff and the agents claim he comes to the back and laughs about it. There also may have been another political issue of some sort recently involving hitting on the wrong person.

[Scroby 0]

F4W on CM Punk..

 

Regarding his loss to Chavo, clean loss to Edge a few days later in the big revenge match, and elimination by Chavo in the Rumble, we're told that Punk is in the dog house of late. The story is that he isn't listening to the agents and his house show matches are considered "indy level sloppy". He's botched a lot of stuff and the agents claim he comes to the back and laughs about it. There also may have been another political issue of some sort recently involving hitting on the wrong person.

Or....the losses to Chavo and Edge are ways to set up a program. Why does there always have to be a reason why someone loses?

[Mecca 0]

Here's the whole F4W report this week...

 

Bobby Lashley is finished with WWE. We don't know the entire story yet because it's very complex, and of late Lashley has opted out of talking much about it because he has not officially been released and he wants to make sure he gets that release without any problems. This is what I know. Lashley was very upset with the handling of his girlfriend Krystal and her departure from the company several months back.

 

She had gotten a reputation as being difficult to work with, and in particular I believe she had ixnayed a storyline that would have put her in the Vickie Guerrero role as Edge's love interest. I know that Lashley is the one who wanted out of WWE and not vice versa, and he didn't want out to go to UFC or EliteXC or TNA or anywhere else, he just wanted out of WWE. On his website last week, he wrote: "I am sorry to everyone here but I am serious when I say I won't be back. Everyone wants to come here and hear the real story and I am telling you the real story. Circumstances which are out of my control left me no decision but to leave the WWE. I can't go into details of this now but like I said before sometimes people will hate you personally and try to destroy you which has happened here. Evil has prevailed however like I said before if you continue your struggle doors will open around these people. You have not scene the last of me so please don't stop your support. Add Bobby Lashley to the list of RECENTLY RELEASED!"

 

There were people who doubted that Lashley actually posted this, so he went on his message board and said if anyone didn't believe him they could PM him their number and he'd call them personally to verify it. Believe it or not, he called several people. The aspect of this that WWE does not want to talk about is that it may have had to do with an old-school "racist" mentality by some of the older agents and power brokers in the company. I put "racist" in quotation marks because, as someone who has been around this business in some form for over a decade, including in the ring and backstage, there is, dating back decades, a tendency for older wrestlers to really go heavy on the racial slurs. I don't know if any of these people are actually racist, although the odds are that some of them are.

 

But I have known older wrestlers who have flippantly thrown slurs around and I can tell you that they were not racist, it was just the way they were brought up on the road in the business. The point is that there are individuals in WWE who still throw slurs around, maybe not so much to people's faces but behind their backs, and a few of them when they get drunk got at it really hot and heavy. I'm told the original reason for Mark Henry being called the "Silverback" was because one of the writers was constantly referring to him as King Kong. Whether that was a racial jibe or not, who knows, but the writer in question is one of those known to throw these terms around. The belief is that the reason Krystal balked at the Edge storyline was because she was concerned that a racial element would be brought into the story, and she was vigorously against that. Shortly thereafter she was released, which did not sit well with Bobby.

 

I don't know if something was heard or said recently, but there is certainly a belief by some that this in some way, perhaps minor and perhaps major, played into the Lashley departure. It should be noted that Lashley was upset with a number of things for quite awhile now, and it may be a situation where a bunch of little things added up and something big may or may not have broken the camel's back. What he'll do now is anyone's guess. Had he come along a few years later he almost certainly would have gone into MMA instead of pro-wrestling. In fact, he was training at the American Kickboxing Academy in 2004, but that was before UFC exploded and so when he got the WWE offer he took it. He currently lives in Colorado and trains with the Army wrestling squads, and has also trained quite a bit in an Octagon with a friend who does MMA locally. He's a big UFC fan and would obviously be interested in giving it a shot, but unlike Brock Lesnar he doesn't have the name yet that would make such a thing financially viable at the start.

 

He'd have to pay for all of his own training, and even Brock has been training full-time for two years prior to his debut this Saturday. In two years, what will Lashley's name mean? He'd pretty much have to start at the bottom like anyone else for a few thousand bucks a shot and work his way up from there. Of course, there are all sorts of upstart groups, including the new YAMMA, who may want to throw big money at him, particularly if Brock destroys Mir on Saturday.

 

At 31 he's starting awfully late, though he does have the strong wrestling background (two-time Armed Forces champion, NAIA wrestling champion in 1997 and 1998, and a Missouri Valley College National Champion in 96, 97 and 98). TNA is obviously salivating at the chance to bring him in, but my gut tells me that would be a last-case scenario for him, although I could be wrong.

 

Among the tentative plans for WrestleMania, and I can guarantee that this will probably change 100 times: Cena vs. Hunter for the title, which means the plan right now is for Cena to win the belt from Orton at No Way Out. I have also heard it may end up a three-way with Orton, Cena and Hunter.

 

Either way, the chances of Hunter not fighting for the belt at WrestleMania appear to be about zero. It's said he has been politicking like crazy ever since Sunday night; Edge vs. Undertaker for the belts and the Mania streak, which has been the plan pretty much forever. They're doing TWO Elimination Chambers at No Way Out, so obviously Taker wins the other;

 

Flair vs. Kennedy, MVP vs. Matt Hardy for the US Title, which has been the plan forever; the remaining big stars (Hardy, Orton if he's not in the title match, etc.) in Money in the Bank; and something involving Vince and Finlay, though not necessarily a singles match. I have also heard Vince vs. Foley, Foley vs. Shane, or Finlay & Foley vs. Vince & Shane.

 

 

ECW writer David Lagana, who had been with the company for years and was at one point the head writer of Smackdown, was fired this past week. This had been something in the works for probably around two years or so. Stephanie fired him while he was on vacation and sent a one sentence terse e-mail to all the other writers saying that he had been terminated. It was said to be very cold unlike most e-mails where they at least put over the contributions of a dude who is leaving the company.

 

The gist of the story is that Stephanie believed that Lagana was responsible for leaking creative and management information to newsletters and websites. They had been watching him closely for years but could never prove it. The beginning of the end for him took place in May of 2006 during a creative meeting. The meetings take place at the building prior to TVs and PPVs, and the way it works is everyone gets together in a room with desks and such, very similar to a classroom layout.

 

Vince, Kevin Dunn, Steph and the lead writers are at the front of the class and all the low-level writers and agents sit at the desks. The writers go over the show and they do a read-through of the script, and then Vince makes all his comments/changes, etc. The agents also give their advice. So Lagana was sitting there at one of the desks on his laptop, and he usually sat in such a position where nobody could see his screen. But on this particular day there were people that could see his screen, and allegedly he was seen sending an e-mail with creative info to one of the major wrestling websites.

 

Nobody said anything at the moment, but after the meeting Stephanie was approached and told the entire story. She immediately confronted him and almost fired him on the spot, but he insisted he was innocent and managed to get off the hook. The key was, he was the tech guy in the company, where if anyone had a problem they went to him and he took care of it. He was very computer savvy and was able to permanently delete e-mails, likely hide IPs, whatever. The next week, however, he was immediately demoted from Smackdown to ECW. The picture that was painted was that it was a positive move, but it wasn't and he knew it.

 

He was working under Paul Heyman, who he'd known dating back to ECW. Still, he wasn't head writer and would basically just type up the scripts that Paul recited to him. Life got tough for him as he had a bad reputation from the Smackdown days of speaking down to the wrestlers (whether justified or not, that's what people believed), and people would make fun of him for his look (a dead ringer for the dude on Blue's Clues) and his voice ("Dr. Evil from Austin Powers").

 

Worse, when the Paul/Vince split went down he expected to be moved up to the head writer position of ECW but instead they moved Dusty into that spot. People said his confidence really started to erode at that point and things got really bad over the holidays. There were a great number of leaks, including stories about the viral campaign for Jericho and Mr. Kennedy being planned to be Vince's illegitimate son (and I should note, I got neither story from Lagana).

 

Stephanie blew a gasket and had a meeting with the agents saying there were to be absolutely no leaks and if you were discovered revealing information you would be fired on the spot. Without saying so directly, she said she thought she had a pretty good idea who was responsible and even looked directly at Lagana when saying it. That same afternoon, all the writers got laptop upgrades (everyone has a WWE-purchased laptop and Internet phone). The laptops, as it turned out, had shadowing software. Very shortly afterwards, Lagana was fired. The belief among the rest of the crew was that Steph had been feeding him false info on very specific information to see if it would get out, and it did.

 

There was also an incident a few weeks ago where Brian Gewirtz went into Lagana's office and sticking out of his laptop bag were a bunch of newsletters. Lagana tried to hide them but failed, then claimed that he wasn't actually reading them but they kept showing up because his subscription was yet to run out and he'd just happened to pick his mail up from home. Gewirtz then made snide remarks over the next several days about how he wasn't surprised that news kept getting leaked. Michael Hayes, who hates newsletters and websites, also began to really bury him right and left, apparently in a really demoralizing manner.

 

The level of paranoia in the company is truly astounding. Not sure if Stephanie realizes that people have home computers, home phones, private cell phones, pay phones, stamps and paper, etc. Still, because of the misinformation deal, writers are likely to be more leery about what information they share for the foreseeable future.

 

Regarding his loss to Chavo, clean loss to Edge a few days later in the big revenge match, and elimination by Chavo in the Rumble, we're told that Punk is in the dog house of late. The story is that he isn't listening to the agents and his house show matches are considered "indy level sloppy". He's botched a lot of stuff and the agents claim he comes to the back and laughs about it. There also may have been another political issue of some sort recently involving hitting on the wrong person.

 

American Gladiators goes to 90 minutes on February 4th

 

Nick Hogan had a pretrial hearing this week and the judge waived his right to a speedy trial. He's back in court on February 6th.

 

There are casting calls for the next season of Gladiators all this week and next week throughout America.

 

New announcer Mike Adamle, besides being part of the original season of American Gladiators, worked at WBBM in Chicago for four years and was said to be, and I quote, "TERRIBLE live." He was so bad that radio disc jockey Steve Dahl would encourage fans to tune in to see him mess up, and they actually had several compilation tapes of his smurf-ups on newscasts.

 

Torrie is still out with a back problem. She told Yahoo that she'd just gotten four big shots in her back for a nerve block. "I've got two herniated discs and a bulging disc. And that's just me. I'm just a girl that doesn't wrestle half the amount that the guys wrestle. Some people's bodies take it better than others. I guess I'm just a little more fragile than most people".

 

Apolo (German Figueroa), who signed recently with WWE, is in jail for a month after missing a court hearing in Puerto Rico regarding his domestic abuse case with wife Habana (who also works as a valet). This is a grand level of stupidity because both sides had agreed to dismiss the case and all Apolo had to do was show up to court. But he'd missed a few court dates and this one set the judge off, so he ordered him imprisoned until the next court date on February 25th.

 

credit:F4W Newsletter

[UZI Suicide 0]

F4W on CM Punk..

 

Regarding his loss to Chavo, clean loss to Edge a few days later in the big revenge match, and elimination by Chavo in the Rumble, we're told that Punk is in the dog house of late. The story is that he isn't listening to the agents and his house show matches are considered "indy level sloppy". He's botched a lot of stuff and the agents claim he comes to the back and laughs about it. There also may have been another political issue of some sort recently involving hitting on the wrong person.

Or....the losses to Chavo and Edge are ways to set up a program. Why does there always have to be a reason why someone loses?

 

There doesn't, but there always seems to have to be one when CM Punk loses.

[Bruce Blank 0]

Apolo (German Figueroa), who signed recently with WWE, is in jail for a month after missing a court hearing in Puerto Rico regarding his domestic abuse case with wife Habana (who also works as a valet). This is a grand level of stupidity because both sides had agreed to dismiss the case and all Apolo had to do was show up to court. But he'd missed a few court dates and this one set the judge off, so he ordered him imprisoned until the next court date on February 25th.

shortly to be followed by

 

"the WWE wishes Apolo all the best in his future endeavors"

 

[benoit4hor 0]

Interesting that they fire the "leaker" and we all get our first genuine surprise (Cena) in what seems like forever.