Straight Shooting
Jeff Hardy, Hulk Hogan, Spin doctors, The WWF, Vince McMahon and Mick Foley
April 7, 2000
By Fritz Capp
First things first, once again I want to thank everyone who sent in all of the e-mails I received. Yes, I even thank the morons who just had to find something to whine about. All mail is welcome even if it does show that you have the total mentality of a pea. Am I trying to endear myself to people here? Nope not in the least. Everyone who reads my columns and then sends me intelligent e-mails, whether they agree with me or not, know who they are and are not offended by what I just said. If you are offended, then I guess we know where to catagorize you now don’t we?
I want to say I totally enjoyed the WWF "All Day" PPV feature. It was cool to sit back and relive all the PPV’s once again. Why they had Ivory working with Michael Cole is beyond me though. She just annoys me to no end. It’s as is she tries too hard and she comes across really bad. I thought it was a classic to see "The Fink" with hair.
WrestleMania itself was pretty good, but not up to its usual standards. Maybe the fact that Mick didn’t get the belt had something to do with it, but I kinda doubt it. Did you notice how flat the Anaheim crowd was? If I was Vince it would be a long time before I put another major PPV there.
I think Jeff Hardy is going to have an illustrious but short career if he continues on the path he is currently taking. It doesn’t take much of a miscalculation to totally screw yourself up with the high risk moves he does.
Let’s see, Nitro started with a clip of Hogan’s history in WCW and Thunder ended with a Hogan interview. Any idea what direction the new WCW is heading in? And what was all the crap that Hogan was trying to pawn off about when he does a PPV it makes money? When was that...1994? It has been shown time and time again that WCW loses ratings when Hogan is on anymore. Their PPV buy rates are not going through the roof either when he is on the card. I’m not even going to get into the Kidman bashing that he is doing. Part of that is just to draw heat and the other half is probably a bit of jealousy as Kidman with as young as he is has a better work rate then Hogan did throughout his career. In my opinion I think Hogan would be hard pressed to sell out a flea market at this junction in time.
Speaking of Nitro I almost wanted to hit the old porcelain temple listening to Madden and Schiavone go on and on about Nitro. Did they actually believe the stuff they were trying to sell? And where did they get their facts, an old PWI magazine? I turned it off after the first hour to watch RAW but would flip back during commercials. I thought it was a great touch to see them showing the fake heart attack by Ric Flair and the subsequent in-ring announcement of Eric Bischoff to that effect. I find it amusing that the same people who whined and cried about my parody of that on my old Internet show still does not have the guts to come out and say anything about the actual event I was parodying and they have shown it twice now.
Some supposedly very highly rated reporters couldn’t understand why the WWF’s stock dropped earlier in the week. For the life of them they just couldn’t understand why the WWF’s stock dropped especially since they just cut that deal with NBC. Since then on other highly respected sites I see all the speculation going on about this phenomenon. How about this people....when their stock dropped drastically people who play the market bought it low and now that it went up between 5 - 6 points since they purchased it they cashed it in. There are a lot of people who don’t care what stock they buy, they just want a return on it. Also today’s stock market player does not necessarily buy stock for the long haul. So basically that’s the gist of it. Nothing fancy, nothing sinister, just plain old greed is why their stock dropped.
I just finished watching Smackdown. Does every guy in the country want to hang out in San Jose or what after seeing the Godfather’s ho’s last night?
Am I the only one or does everyone else think that the majority of the WWF Aggression CD sucks?
With The Rock going off to do a movie soon, shouldn’t McMahon have waited to turn heel to fill some of the void during The Rock’s absence and given the rub to someone else since the Rock clearly does not need it?
Wouldn’t Mick taking the belt at WrestleMania and causing a World Title tournament have set up Backlash a lot better and also made it easier to book the RAW and Smackdown programming leading up to it considering the events are only three weeks apart?
When is Stephanie going to finally "Do it her way" in reference to Triple H and paying him back or is the WWF going the way of WCW and just forgetting about finishing a story line?
Who is Mark Madden to even think about criticizing Mick Foley for doing the WrestleMania match? The really sad thing is first he complains about it, then tries to cover up his whining by saying he is not criticizing him after he does. He is getting as bad as everyone else. No wonder he has a job at WCW, he fits right in with the rest of their employees. Talking out both sides of their mouth must be a pre-requisite for that company.
With the WWF only 13 weeks away from breaking WCW’s consecutive wins in the ratings do you think Vince will do everything in his power to see that the WWF accomplishes that small feat? Who thinks that if WCW gets close to filling the gap that we'll see Steve Austin back on TV a lot sooner than expected?
Does Vince McMahon even understand the term hypocrite? On one hand he whined and cried about the PTC but on the other hand he forced USA and UPN to pull advertising for "Beyond The Mat" and now supports NJ Gov. Christie Whitman’s new bill in support against "extreme wrestling" even though the WWF is nothing more than a multi million dollar company doing ECW on a grand scale. How can Vince speak out against violence in "extreme wrestling" but yet be selling the Street Fight between Mick Foley and Triple H which was nothing but a bloodbath? How about all the chair shots, putting women through tables and all of the weapons that are used in the WWF? Is this a case of an emperor that doesn’t realize he is wearing no clothes?
Nope, nothing to say against ECW except they should worry about what they are doing and not that XPW is using the term "extreme" in their name. If that was the case, WCW has a great case against ECW because they use the word "championship".
And with that I am outta here. Remember, wrestling is nothing more than it appears to be.
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