Straight Shooting
by : Fritz Capp
August 8, 1999

Been a long time eh? Well to be honest not much has really changed in wrestling since the last time I wrote this column. Oh, I'm not saying that there hasn't been 2 ½ tons of wrestling news but the reality is that nothing is new as far as wrestling itself is concerned. It is still the same over glamorized, over produced, backstabbing, over glorified, do what you can to rip out the heart of your competitor business that we all love to watch and talk about.

Now I know I've missed a lot of things and usually I just take one topic and go to town but look at everything that's been going on:

Paul Heyman once again shows Philadelphia, the town that put ECW on the map, the way he truly appreciates them by having the very first TNN taping done right from the ECW Arena. Huh? Oh that's right, Heyman is having ECW's first taping in Ohio. Sorry, I forgot. But anyway, ECW's second taping for TNN comes to you from beautiful South Philadelphia, the birthplace of Hardcore. Oh sorry, my mistake...the second taping is in New York isn't it? I don't know what I was thinking. I mean why would Paul show any loyalty to the fans from Philadelphia? He doesn't show it to anyone else.

Who the hell chose Ivory as the women's champ in the WWF? This chick has about as much business as the WWF woman's champ as Eric Bischoff has being head of WCW. Both really suck. I mean c'mon, she really can't work, her mic skills are horrible and she looks to be 50 years old half the time. In fact unless Vince wants to get serious about a women's division, scrap the whole damn thing. I would sooner see the valets getting in pseudo fights and that would be it. If Vince really wants to have a woman's division he should study the tapes of All Japan's women and others from the land of the rising sun because the bottom line is no one here in the states knows what they are doing when it comes to women wrestling.

Joel Gertner is getting tremendous heat because of comments he made right after the JFK Jr. accident. What... is everyone on the Internet just stupid? Nothing goes down in ECW without Heyman's approval. I cannot believe that all of you so called smarts actually bitched and whined about Gertner without saying one thing about the guy who scripted it and allowed it to air. And yes people, Heyman has admitted that he scripted it and used it to get people to talk about his promotion. I guess that says a lot about the current booking and product of ECW. If you have to go after cheap heat to get people talking about your promotion instead of allowing your product to speak for itself then you have a problem plain and simple.

Speaking of product in ECW, I had the best laugh I had in a long time the other day. I was browsing around and I was treated when I found a column that actually stated that the ECW of today is every bit the ECW of old. Now I'm not going to embarrass the writer of this mish mosh of bull by naming him, and thankfully the webmaster of the site that this crap was sitting on updated it so they do not have to be embarrassed by this guys writing anymore. (Although they probably believe that just as well.) In his column he stated that the locker room in ECW today was every bit as strong as the old days. Now let me see if I got this correct, today's ECW locker room is just as talented as when ECW had Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, Eddie Guerrero, Mick Foley, Rey Misterio Jr., Raven. Stevie Richards, Sandman, Chris Jericho etc. Who's butt is this guy sniffing? (<---dog reference) Sure you have some good guys in ECW today but there is no way in hell they can compare to the old stable of wrestlers that ECW had. What is becoming apparent to me is that this guy may be being weaned to become the heir apparent to a certain person who is becoming more focused with a certain wrestling promotion down south because the writer of this dribble can't actually believe that crap that he wrote. This was nothing more then a resume showing the ECW higher ups that he can kiss ass just as well as the current incumbent.

Have we seen enough of Al Snow's mental problems? I said when he first returned to the WWF that he didn't need the "Head" gimmick but he got it over and it was amusing for awhile but damn man, it's time to move on. Al Snow is a talented worker and knows the business inside and out. The latest angle has had Snow fighting midgets, talking to stuffed deer heads and he now has a dog? C'mon Vince, let's get back to the program.

Has anyone else seen Hogan re-inventing himself again? Sure you have, how can you miss it? He's now clean shaven and he comes back to WCW TV and gets the belt right away. Vintage Hogan, vintage bullsh*t. All we need is the yellow and red to make the change complete but Hogan has said he would never do that. Of course he said he was running for president too and you all see where that went.

I lashed out about Bischoff when he forced himself on Flair's wife. I said that there wasn't any place for that in wrestling today. Now we have the WWF doing the same angle with Prince Albert. It still sucks, I don't care what federation it's in. If you need to do something like that to get a person some heat then get rid of the person because they can't draw. It's not like anyone would miss the hairball anyway.

Poor old Kevin Nash is probably being forced out of his booking job. Why do I say that? Because Bischoff is changing what Nash has planned "on the fly". Now if I was Nash I'd tell him to get screwed. Why put all the time into booking a show just to have some ex meat salesman change it at the last minute?

Droz is becoming one of the biggest turn offs in the WWF. When they brought him in you could see that he had potential and he still does but these stupid gimmicks the WWF is giving him makes me want to change the channel when I hear his name, let alone want to watch one of his matches.

Randy Savage in a stupid angle beats on Gorgeous George and everyone is offended. So what does the WWF do? The next week on RAW they have Shane elbow Stephanie in the mouth. Was this the WWF's way of saying to WCW that if your gonna use male/woman violence all you have to do is make it look like an accident and it is ok?

What is the deal with all the wrestlers on television shows anymore? On any given day you can almost guarantee that your gonna see one of the WWF or WCW's workers on some talk show, movie show, game show etc. I love wrestling as much as the next person but I thought the glut of wrestling shows was overkill but now we have to see them everywhere else also? There's nothing wrong with a little promotion but this is outta hand.

Speaking of outta hand Rena Mero is starting to make me sick. I wouldn't care if this bitch was sent off into space and lost forever, in fact I think I would enjoy that pretty much. (At least I would get a good laugh at trying to figure out how she would try to blame the WWF for it) This chick was nothing before Vince and after her little fling at trying to make it on TV she'll go back to that, being absolutely nothing. Her timing of her trumped up lawsuit against the WWF shows what kind of shrew this woman really is. I guess she forgets that it was Vince McMahon who bought her that body she so proudly displays. Breast augmentation, liposuction and other enhancements sure make a difference don't they Rena? A little airbrushing doesn't hurt either. Just remember, it is ok to come out on national TV for a year and a half wearing basically nothing in front of little kids, except when you want out of your contract. One thing I am glad about, I don't have to watch her do that damned "grind" anymore. It would have been cool if she knew how to do it.

Speaking of women in the business who gives a rats ass about Madusa? This woman should go back to doing soft core promotional videos in Japan because no one cared about her before and no one cares now.

The WCW chat rooms have become a sort of dictatorship instead of a chat room as of late. Bob Ryder has seen to it that while it is ok for him to insult and chastise people no one is allowed to do or say anything back to him. His little guard at the door is some West Virginia inbred who actually leaves his computer on 24/7 so that his autokick remains on at all times. I mean this guys will drive hundreds of miles just to go to a Nitro. This guy is pathetic. In fact, it appears that there is now a list of names that is automatically kicked whether you have ever been in the room before or not. There was a bit of a chat on the 1wrestling.com message boards between someone and Ryder. The writer explained that he had never been in the room before but was banned from entering for no reason at all. All Ryder said was that he had to talk to the new gestapo agent in charge. Now here's the thing about WCW's chat rooms. If your going there from AOL you cannot be banned. They can and will kick you but you can log back on. The funny thing is that while you cannot say anything about myself, PWBTS or disagree with Ryder you can go in and attack and threaten the other people in the room without being kicked by Ryder's lackey otherwise known as Fanatics. That just happened last week. Also if you see Fanatics be careful what you say to him because it could actually be his wife. They play a game that no one knows which one it actually is. I am sure that makes for some very interesting chats in the sex rooms huh?

I wonder how many people e-mailed Kevin Kelly as it is being reported that he questioned the timing of Bret Hart's interview on Nitro a few weeks back saying that it was questionable at best. Probably no one, but yet everyone and their grandmother e-mailed me when I said the same thing when it went down telling me how horrible I was. The only thing horrible is that all you marks refuse to open your eyes to the truth about the business. You all sit here on the computer thinking you are really cool because you may or may not get some inside dirt but as soon as you are all faced with the truth of a situation you want to hide behind the guise of true love for the sport. You can't have it both ways boys and girls. Either you want to be a fan or you want to pretend your smart to the business. Remember, I have the guts to say what most of you think, so that should show you where you sit in the food chain.

Lately there has been an e-mail campaign by Scotsman of xwrestling.com. The campaign was to get people to send fake news to reporters to see if they would print it without checking it out. I must say that this caught a lot of people off guard. It also showed that a lot of the so-called reporters on the Internet just cut and paste news or re-write it without checking their sources. Now personally I do not have a problem with Scotsman doing this. Scots is a different kind of person to say the least and all he was doing was showing everyone how stupid a lot of the wrestling news that goes around really is. He also showed that a lot of the so called respected reporters on the Internet are anything but. Now I know I'm going to take heat from friends of mine for that viewpoint but what the hell am I supposed to do? Act like I'm offended when I'm not? Look at some of the list that was caught with their pants down:

Joe DeLeon, Mike Shalik, Justin Fritz, Sister Midnight, Steve Carrier, Michael Lynch, Mikey G., Ryan Sanders, Jaspreet Mathur, Georgiann Makropoulos, Shannon Rose, Adam Creel, Zach Zaworski, Parke Miller, Ray Kim, Dan Wahlers, John Feltham, Dave Scherer, HWOGlacier, Dave Messina and the list goes on and on.

The best "fake" news that got posted in my opinion was that Adrian Adonis signed with the WWF. Considering he's been dead for years this one has to win for best fake news story.

The point of this is to say that while there is supposed to be some sort of trust between reporter and readers why would you just go ahead and post something as news from someone you probably never heard of or from before? News items like "Austin To Be On Loveline" are very easy to check out. Others like "A Fan's Meeting with (insert name here)" are a lot harder to verify. But all in all it is the responsibility of the reporter to verify that what they are posting is news. The worst case scenario is if you want to go ahead and run something that you received in e-mail report it as a rumor sent in to you by (insert name here). That will at least give you the post and it lets people know where you got it from. Some of the names above know better, some just steal news from where ever they can get it and re-write it is their own, right Zach?

Everyone is up in arms about Jesse Ventura being a ref at SummerSlam. Well not every, just his political opponents and WCW employees because Jesse didn't sign with WCW. I personally think it's great. Why? Because I do, do I really need to explain everything to you? Would anyone have a problem if Jesse was an ex basketball player and wanted to ref a game and donate his money to charity? No one would question Bill Bradley, what is the beef with Jesse?

Jeremy Borash of WCW Live!, at the Jesse Ventura press conference announcing he was going to be at SummerSlam, asked Jesse what he thought about the WWF not being able to wrestle in Oregon because of the states strict drug testing policy. Hey Jeremy, how come WCW doesn't wrestle in Oregon? It couldn't be because a lot of the workers in WCW are so pumped up they wouldn't be able to pass the drug test for 5 years if they stopped using right now could it? The truth of the matter is that both federations have a major problem that they still refuse to address because looking the other way is easier than helping those who make them money. Sad but true. Why is it every time WCW holds a surprise drug test at a house show none of the big names are ever there?

It has been revealed that Mr. Ass's mother on the TitanTron on RAW was actually played by WCW's own Mark Madden. Madden was shown as he vacationed at the Live Oak Nudist Resort in Washington, Texas. He donned the wig so no one would recognize him.

Chris Jericho is finally out of the concentration camp known as World Championship Wrestling and is now headed to the WWF. I call WCW a concentration camp because unless your name is Hogan or the president can look over his backyard fence and see your wife sunbathing you are held down to a midcard status even though you could out wrestle most of the people in the locker room. Good luck Chris, you deserve it.

Another pair of faces entering the WWF is none other than The Dudley's from ECW. I find it very interesting that they are leaving ECW just before the company goes national. What do they know that we don't?

And with that I'm outta here until next time. Remember, wrestling is nothing more than what it appears to be.

Fritz Capp is the editor of Pro Wrestling's Between The Sheets - for comments or opposing viewpoints please e-mail to Fritz Capp