Falls Count Anywhere

07-22-03

I'll twitch it, I'll twatch it, I'll even let you watch it.

Welcome to Falls Count Anywhere! My name is Chris, and no one can tell me that frying a peanut butter and honey sammich in butter is bad for the heart.

RAW
We are treated to an interesting, yet jumbled pre-show review. When Bisch came out, he looked like a guy going to the country club for his membership interview. Linda comes in to today's latest club hit. She is awful on the mic, but whenever she comes out, something important happens and she gets a decent pop.

The whole thing wormed and slid into annoying segment land. Bisch was funny at the end with his singing, but the whole thing, while advancing the storyline, aren't well done.

God, Victoria is hot. I say this every week, but my sweet lord, how can I not? The Mullets are in the house, and no, I am not talking of Eddy Guerrero and his sister, Eddy Guerrero. Molly busts out the sweet handspring elbow! Sweet Trish headscissors on Victoria! Victoria throws some vicious punches into Gail Kim! Trish pulls a Matrix move! Fun little match. The way Victoria said "Welcome to RAW, Gail," shows why she is my favorite.

Teri and Jericho have a nice little interview in the parking lot. Jericho is great, and he got a nice pop. Why is he the king of bling-bling when he wears 0 bling? Now Bishop Donn Magic Juan would; there is the real Rey de Bling-bling.

Man, it was Duck Season, Rabbit Season from Austin and Bisch backstage. Why am I hating this so much?

Evolution comes out before Randy Orton's match with Val Venis. Orton gave a little promo that wasn't half bad, but it got almost no response. The match was average, but HHH's commentary was fun. Man, I haven't heard a crowd this dead since the last time I watched a Dodger game. Man, Orton has a nice dropkick.

HHH does his little Evolution speech after the match, but then Goldberg comes out and saps all the charisma from the ring. The "you're next" got a decent pop, but not what you'd want from the start of the big feud leading into SummerSlam.

Michaels got the biggest pop of the night, and the match started out with a solid build, some nice ground exchanges and Michaels doing the classic Michaels stuff. This was not the crowd that would appreciate this kind of work.

Hey, a Free Kobe sign!

It sets up slow, like an old school World Title Match. I'd say this was along the lines of Brisco-Funk in the mid-1970s. They picked it up into a Mid-1990s main event type match, complete with planchas, higher speed, and the Flair run-in. HBK is solid, and this match is very much along the lines of the Iron Man Match that Hart and Michaels had in Anaheim back in 1996. It started slow, but got better with strong work and styles that changed as the match wore on.

This is the model that the WWE wants people to work. If every fan were like me, this would work huge, but I can already see that the rating for this week will be rather low. I have to say that giving matches this much time will not happen much, but it is what they need to do to make certain special RAWs seem like real events when there is no PPV in the coming month. Man, even at Shawn's age, that is a gorgeous elbow off the top. The crowd picked up, the action picked up and it turned out to be a stronger match than I expected.

Lance Storm comes out to play into the boring gimmick and does a half-decent job. Hey, Rob Reiner is in the house. Whaddya know?

Let's see Michael Eisner take this sort of abuse... actually, I would totally watch that.

Kane enters like Nails back in the early 90s. This whole house arrest gimmick is lame.

Test vs. Booker T. Why? The match was OK, Test isn't great in the ring, but he can put together a brief match that doesn't suck. Booker can be really good. Why do they keep the Test/Stacey thing going?

Well, this was exactly what I expected from the Kane vs. RVD match. RVD just needs one big thing to get him into the top rung of stars, but this likely won't be it. Kane isn't working at the level he was in 1999, but he has intensity again, which is nice to see. Linda taking a move? Did she lose a bet? Man, it didn't look great, but it's more than she's ever taken. A nice way to go out on a show that I thought was spotty at best. The highlight was the Michaels vs. Jericho marathon, but I must admit that I wasn't lit up by the rest of the show.

NEWS
Jeff Hardy started with Ring of Honor Wrestling this past week and was not greeted warmly. He was heavily booed and according to reports, didn't light up the ring with his work due to the fact that ROH has many athletes whose work far outstretches Hardy's.

No word on Manny Fernandez.

FlashBack!
In the 1970s, the Hard Rock Café chain of restaurants changed the way people looked at going out to eat. Memorabilia on the walls, loud music playing at all times, it brought attraction to eateries and made a boatload of money.

In the 1990s attraction restaurants exploded, with Planet Hollywood, The Rainforest Café, DIVE!, and ESPNZone (please don't forget Marvel Mania -- editor). The center of the Theme Restaurant world was Las Vegas. Every casino had one, two, or in the case of the MGM Grand, three. The money they pulled in was huge and the other thing that exploded in the 1990s was WCW wrestling. So WCW took three things and combined them by opening the WCW Nitro Grill at the Excalibur in Las Vegas.

Through these doors lay a massive failure. Go figure.

The site used to be Wild Bill's Saloon and Steakhouse, but that concept had failed when WCW came calling. The entire thing was altered in about a month on a tiny budget for the type of enterprise they were planning. Much of the original elements of Wild Bill's remained, but they plastered the walls with things like championship belts, Ric Flair's robes, photos and autographed pictures. They also added arena-style lighting to give more of the WCW feel. The place looked more like a steakhouse with a few knickknacks on the wall than a theme restaurant that would pull in an estimated ten thousand dollars a night.

The whole thing had a huge lead in, with a press conference that got a ton of the stars of WCW in to push the concept. DDP, Hogan, Savage and many of the other stars were in town and it drew quite a crowd.

The first sign of trouble was that the typical opening rush was there, but it only lasted a few weeks. They would get good crowds for PPV showings and anytime they had stars, but the costs were huge, which meant big prices. The steak dinner at the Nitro Grill cost about 17 dollars. Binnion's famous steak dinner costs three dollars and I am pretty sure they were exactly the same.

I went in early 2000 and had the Big Sexy T-Bone Steak. Twenty-one dollars, nicely cooked, but then again, not awesome. There were about 15 people in there on a Saturday afternoon. We ate and watched WCW Halloween Havoc 1998 on the big screen, for about two hours.

The funny thing? The place closed about two weeks after I was there. They did it gradually, closing for weekdays, and after a month or two, it closed for good, though I believe they maintained a merchandise cart in the Excalibur mall. The reasons were obvious: the lame theming, the lack of continuity, the fact that WCW was cooling down and the costs involved with flying out the stars to make appearances. It closed and Turner lost a lot of money.

The WWF opened their restaurant after WCW, but caught all the same troubles that we will examine on Friday.

Chris Garcia