Falls Count Anywhere

01-16-09

I'm an economist AND an astronaut.

The world of wrestling has been pretty stable for a while. Last year saw no major shake-ups, there was some fall-out from the year before that still made things difficult, but over-all, it was a good year. In fact, last year was so slow that the replacement of a third tier wrestling company’s booker was the lead story on every wrestling website for two weeks. In the first two weeks of 2009, there have been two major shake-ups and there promises to be even more as the going gets rocky for everybody.

The first was the release of the findings of the committee, headed by Henry Waxman, looking into steroids in wrestling. The report was damning in the extreme, including contradictory statements made by different members of the McMahon family. Vince gave very strange answers, some of which contradicted his own statements and none of which seemed to go along with what Stephanie and Linda McMahon said.

He said there was no advantage in large size, which certainly wasn’t what Linda and Steph said. Linda was largely out of the loop on the wrestling side, and Steph sounded clueless, but did seem to be answering honestly, at least as far as I managed to read into the several hundred page report.

The talk with Dixie Carter of TNA has been viewed by many as embarrassing, making her look like a total money mark, which is more or less what she is. She gave the committee nothing to work with, which is one of the nice things about being a money mark: you have total plausible deniability. She sounded dumb, made a few really weird answers that anyone in the business would never get caught in and just seemed like worthless testimony.

The real significant thing here is that they’re all on record. There’s no escaping statements made on the Congressional Hearing record. There’s no escape for McMahon for saying that he never knew anything about steroids, that he didn’t push people based on size and that he had never recommended that stars try and get bigger.

According to reports from the Observer and Figure Four On-Line, Vince's lawyer was very pushy, but there are a lot of other questions that are circling around and making people uncomfortable. If Congress were to pass a resolution that wrestling testing has to be done with government oversight, that could doom a lot of folks.

If they were to say that testing applied to all organizations, large and small, that would make it impossible for Indies to survive for the most part. There are significant portions of the business that are hoping it all goes away, but there are serious thoughts of introducing legislation, though that could change.

The second shake-up involved the restructuring of the WWE. This involved letting go about 10% of their total workforce. This included office staff, a few wrestlers and referees and even a high-level executive. This didn’t come as a super-shock, Linda McMahon had talked about some reorganization in recent quarterly shareholders meetings, but the names are somewhat shocking. Sgt. Slaughter, Ron Remus, was let go after nearly 20 years of continuous service in roles ranging from wrestler to agent. He was thought to be one of the safe ones, but he had been around a while, so he probably had a high salary that was hard to defend. They had let Barry Windham go a few weeks ago, too, possibly as a prelude to the massive firings.

Refs took a hit with Jimmy Corderas being let go after about 20 years. There was also the release of Sean Morley (Val Venis), who was always a good worker and a popular backstage figure at times who had survived so many other periods of lay-offs that you knew his time was coming. D-Lo was let go, which is sad as he’s always been very good, but they didn’t have anything for him. Matt Cappotelli, a Tough Enough star who was signed, then had to back out from OVW because he had brain cancer, was also released.

This looks bad on the surface. Everyone who worked in the offices was escorted out by security, which is typical of these things, but the tension in the offices and the morale of everyone is really down right now.

What’s next? Hard to say. The restructuring certainly isn’t complete, and they’re going to need to do some departmental consolidation and other steps to make the restructuring legit. They’ve said that a 3 million pay-out in severance and so forth will allow them to save 8 million annually over the next three years.

That’s a lot of cash, and probably a good idea as Vince is very worried about the current financial situation, and like yours truly, believes that we’re in for a 3 to 5 year Depression followed by very slow growth out of it. That’s almost exactly what I’ve been saying for months (and apparently just now in this column)!

The big problem is that the WWE pays a very large dividend and that means that they’ve had to dip into cash reserves, which have saved the WWE more than once. They’re also producing more movies, which is putting more pressure on those reserves. That’s rough water, but if they cut the dividend, they lose buyers who picked up the stock specifically for the dividend, and then the price goes down and Vince loses large chunks of money even though he’s been getting the bulk of the dividend pay-out.

UFC hasn’t had much big news other than the fact that the most recent PPV actually topped the Lesnar PPV buy-rate. It’s hard to tell why, and it may be something to do with underreporting the Lesnar-Couture buy-rate (possibly because of slow response) or that they’re over-estimating the later PPV numbers. Right now, it’s hard to say, but Dana White told a press conference that he thought the difference was 125k or so. That’s a lot to be off by.

Congrats to Mickey Roarke. The guy gave a helluva performance in The Wrestler and now he’s won the Golden Globe. The guy’s always been a favorite of mine, so I’m glad to see him get the respect he deserves. The Oscar nominations are coming soon and it’ll be great if he’s on the list.

That’s all for this week. I’ll be writing a look at more Shawn Michaels and Hell in the Cell DVD matches soon. I forgot just haw good the six-man HitC from 2000 was.

Chris Garcia