Falls Count Anywhere

06-20-08

If she can take it, so can I...

The RAW experiment with giving away a million dollars has been a rough road. The first week, the rating was down to a 3.0, though that may have had something to do with the NBA finals being on along with the Stanley Cup. This week, it was a 3.3, which seems more natural. I’m not thinking that this’ll turn things around for the WWE, since what they really need are new stars. I’d say they should work on the product, throw out about 90% of their writers and go with that.

I also didn’t know that Stephanie McMahon was pregnant and giving birth next month. I was shocked. I think Shane only has one kid (with his lovely wife, Marissa Mazola, of the Cooking Oil family) so the balance of power shifts to her!

I’m kinda shocked that I’m writing this, but it appears that a movie based on the life of Brian Pillman is in the works from one of the directors I’d most want to see it from: Rusty Cundieff! The rumor mill started about a week ago and has slowly chugged along. No names, but if it gets made, I’m sure it’ll be awesome!

Looking at the WWE’s international balance sheet should be good this year. They’ve done Spain, where wrestling is on fire, and Portugal and Mexico and sold out with high ticket prices. They’re doing South and Central America, which was once a hotbed for wrestling, and they’ll again do big sell-out. The tour of Asia and Australia later in the year has been talked about as the biggest tour they’ve ever done in that part of the world.

I watched a little bit of TNA last week. It wasn’t bad stuff. It’s obvious that Kurt Angle is going to have to retire soon. I saw his match with AJ Styles and he just looked beat up even though the two of them had a good match.

They announced that Anderson Silva, the Middleweight Champion in UFC, will be fighting his first fight as a Light Heavyweight against James Irvin on the show they’re putting on against the Affliction show. The show that will face that UFC show is scheduled for Anaheim on July 19th and will feature Fedor Emelianenko fighting in the US. He’s taking on Tim The Maniac Sylvia, who lost to Nogueira in February in a really good UFC fight.

The other fights are Josh Barnett vs. Pedro Rizzo, Renato "Babalu" Sobral vs. Mike Whitehead and Matt Lindland vs. Fabio Nascimento, which all look OK. I actually wanna see that Lindland fight because he’s a talented guy.

Affliction is also a clothing line and whether or not they can survive as a promotion is still to be tested. This’ll probably cost them somewhere around five million dollars.

The rise of MMA shows a potential rocky road for US wrestling. Ratings are down over a year ago, and gates are doing OK, but not rising. The same thing happened in Japan around 1999 or so. The peak of the Japanese Pro Wrestling Era happened between 1995 and 1999. There were huge shows and they made tons of money.

Then MMA started taking over, there was the rise of a bunch of organizations, with Pride as the UFC of the day. There were tons of others, but Pride was the biggest deal and it got huge ratings. The wrestling side started slipping and has never really hit the heights it managed throughout most of the 1990s.

Could we see that today? Well, it’s hard to say, but the more important question is how bad will it get for Vince. It’s a one-party system, really, with TNA as a notable minor league. If things go too far south for the WWE, how will wrestling itself stay afloat? There are a lot of questions.

That’s the shortened Falls for this week since I’ve got to get a lot of actual work done. I’ll be talking about the Future of Wrestling with a look at TNA and what happens if they fold. This one should be interesting.

Chris Garcia