[Emperor Smeat]

Dirtsheets sponsored by Clothesline & Lariato Appreciation Day:

Originally Posted by Observer While there are still five more wrestlers left to be confirmed for this year's Mae Young Classic, it doesn't look like one of those spots will be filled by Jazzy Gabert. The 36-year-old Gabert wrote on Twitter today that she won't be returning for the 2018 tournament: "As you by now might know, I will not be at the #myc this year! The hope was high, I saw your tweets. Thank you for your support! Wishing all the fantastic girls on the Tournament lot of success and most of all FUN! I will be watching" ... Last December, Gabert revealed that she was offered a WWE contract following the Mae Young Classic but was "disqualified" during medical testing due to having three herniated discs in her neck. She underwent neck surgery earlier this year and has returned to the ring.

Link: https://twitter.com/Jazzy_Gabert/sta...41485777711105

Originally Posted by Observer/PWI Indies Roundup: The ticket prices announced for the CMLL Anniversary show on 9/14 suggests that there will not be an L.A. Park vs. Rush mask vs. hair match as was originally scheduled. Tickets go on sale on Saturday at 11 a.m. Nothing has been announced. There are people in Mexico who are connected who told me earlier this week that the match was now off but they weren't with CMLL. The belief is if that match was happening, the prices would be higher than they are listed. Matt Taven will be on Monday's CMLL show in Puebla. He was already announced for weekend shows. The top two matches on Monday, which does stream head-to-head with Raw, are Caristico vs. Volador Jr., and Atlantis & Octagon & Taven vs. Cuatrero & Forastero & Sanson. AAW runs Saturday night in LaSalle, IL at the Knights of Columbus with ACH vs. Jeff Cobb for the AAW title, Mat Fitchett & Davey Vega vs. LAX for the tag titles, Kimber Lee vs. Jessicka Havok for the women's title, Trevor Lee vs. Myron Reed for the Heritage title, Eddie Kingston vs. MVP Scarlett Bordeaux vs. Allie Kat. Defy Wrestling on 8/10 in Seattle at Washington Hall with Shane Strickland defending the Defy title against Brian Cage, Toni Storm vs. Nicole Matthews plus Trent Seven, Tyler Bate and guest ring announcer Melissa Santos. Major League Wrestling announced the following: PENTAGON JR. & REY FENIX TO DEFEND MLW WORLD TAG TEAM TITLES AGAINST LA PARK & EL HIJO DE LA PARK OCTOBER 4 IN NEW YORK CITY

Originally Posted by Observer Rumors all week are true that WWE has now decreed that wrestlers in the U.K. division are no longer allowed to take any bookings over a seven day prior period to a WWE U.K. event. Southside Wrestling noted that both Joseph Conners and Dan Moloney are off their 8/19 show due to that.

Originally Posted by Observer As was noted in the latest Observer that this was likely, it is now official that Verizon Fios viewers will no longer have access to Bein Sports due to the inability to come to an agreement on carriage charges with the current contract expiring. Antonio Briceno, the station's USA Deputy Managing Director said that the station offered to extend the current contract with the same rate and terms but Verizon chose to drop the deal. He said Verizon falsely claimed they were trying to get a significant rates increase.

Huge hit to Major League Wrestling due to the amount of markets they have lost for the time being. Official statement from Bein Sports: https://www.pwinsider.com/article/11...-fios.html?p=1

Originally Posted by Observer WWE announced a new book called "Creating the Mania: An Inside Look at how WrestleMania comes to life" by Jon Robinson will be released this coming Tuesday by ECW Press. This will talk about how the storylines were come up with and more.

More details: https://www.pwinsider.com/article/11...-week.html?p=1

Originally Posted by Observer Kazem Famuyide, an MLW podcaster, has gotten a job with WWE on its writing team. He started earlier this summer on a three-month summer trial.

Originally Posted by PWI The third season of WWE Story Time, which features animated retellings of superstar stories, will premiere on the WWE Network following SummerSlam August 19.

Originally Posted by PWI WWE Network News revealed today's "Hidden Gem" that will be added to the streaming service will be another clip from OVW Christmas Chaos which happened on January 31, 2001 featuring Stone Cold Steve Austin. OVW – 01/31/2001 “Raising Hell in OVW Stone Cold Steve Austin takes a rare trip to Ohio Valley Wrestling to leave a stunning impression on both fans and competitors.” This is actually the second clip WWE has added from this Louisville Garden show recently. A few weeks ago, Kane versus Leviathan a.k.a. Batista was added which features a run in from Steve Austin.

Originally Posted by PWI The following "Home Video Classics" have been added to the WWE Network yesterday: 1993: UK Fan Favorites 1993 1994 Paul Bearer--Hits From the Crypt 1995: Shawn Michaels 1997 : Sunny

Originally Posted by Observer There has been no hinting on television regarding a John Cena vs. Undertaker match at SummerSlam, with two weeks of television left to take place. The match had gone around in certain circles including insider circles. SummerSlam will probably have two or three pre-show matches and will go no less than five hours and could go as long as six hours.

Originally Posted by Observer This is the last word anyone had heard regarding Hiromu Takahashi and it’s based on the belief from a few weeks ago. The New Japan doctors believe it will be nine to 12 months before he can return. The belief is that he suffered a broken neck, which sounds terrible and that’s why nobody has said anything public. The good news is that they had found no evidence of nerve damage so it’s all about the healing of the bone and making sure it can absorb the type of punishment in a New Japan ring. They were thinking he could get back to training and being athletic in six months, but were looking at the extra three to six months before letting him wrestle because of the type of style he works

Originally Posted by Observer Here’s an amazing stat. From August 1995, when he returned to action after missing time after an operation to remove a brain tumor, until June 2018, Jushin Liger wrestled at least one match in every month, which covers 22 years and 11 months. He didn’t wrestle a match in July because he wasn’t booked on the G-1 tour.

Originally Posted by Observer For what it’s worth, the fact that not only is Jay Lethal still wrestling, but there was no move to even take the title off him, tells you pretty clearly in this day and age that ROH management doesn’t believe the Taelor Hendrix claim that she was taken off television for not sleeping with him. Even if there is a little bit of doubt that it could be true, in a public company, with the charge out there, in this day and age, the very least they’d do is quietly remove him from shows

Originally Posted by Observer A piece of trivia regarding however this ends up going down in the future. The reason Don Callis was brought in to run the company is because Leonard Asper of the Asper family, which owns The Fight Network, Impact and tons of things in Winnipeg (the old Winnipeg connection) had a conversation with Chris Jericho about how the company has lost so much money and all of its problems. Jericho told him that Impact had been run by snakes and that those type of people are only going to rip him off. He went so far as to say that he should hire Callis to run the company or fold the company

Originally Posted by Observer There’s been a lot of talk regarding the shoulder programming that FOX is going to do in conjunction with WWE. Keep in mind that FS 1 and FS 2 is losing tons of hours of programming with the loss of UFC, and when we listed the decline in hours for UFC, that was only live fight programming, not the loss of hype shows before and after the events and all the endless hours of replays on both networks. The idea of NXT on FS 1 makes all the sense in the world, but those involved in the process told us it wouldn’t be happening. WWE is interested in keeping that as exclusive network property but FS 1 gives the show wider distribution and my belief is that distribution would also lead to larger crowds for the live events and more merchandise opportunities, plus it’s more programming WWE can sell and it’ll help FS 1 ratings. What has been talked about are things like FS 1 doing pre-game shows every Friday night before Smackdown and post-game shows on Sundays after PPV shows. Richard Dietsch just reported on the Friday & Sunday ideas this past week. It’s already been reported they are looking at a weekly studio show, perhaps on Wednesday, the WWE version of UFC Tonight. The problem is FS 1 shows of that ilk are supposed to be journalism and not pure hype. One can argue UFC Tonight was more hype but they discussed issues like lawsuits and fighter pay that I wouldn’t expect a WWE show to do on its own. UFC fighters also are a lot more open on interviews because the winning and losing on their own merit and lack of media training leaves them more unfiltered Those at FOX have said there are no announcements planned right now regarding any new programming and those involved in those deals have said the original FOX deal as far as in-ring wrestling programming goes only involved Smackdown and there was no talk of any other wrestling

Originally Posted by Observer There’s been overtures to Fenix and Pentagon Jr., even though as far as I’ve heard both still have three seasons left on their Lucha Underground deals. But they are two of the key guys on the indie scene right now

Originally Posted by Observer Another note regarding the 10/28 women’s PPV is that October is the annual Susan G. Komen month on WWE television

Originally Posted by Observer Josh Thomson, one of Cain Velasquez’s long-time teammates, did an interview about Velasquez training last week at the Performance Center. Thomson said that Velasquez was looking to fight but he and UFC haven’t come to an agreement so he was looking at his options. Thomson thought that he could retire from fighting and go into pro wrestling, although technically both the UFC and WWE each have contracts that specifically forbid that. Even so, UFC did allow Rousey to do just that since she and Dana White are close, and also allowed Lesnar. C.M. Punk, on the other hand, needed to send legal threats to WWE after already being fired for WWE to not try and legally stand in the way of him fighting in UFC. This is not an athletic thing in the sense Velasquez is a great athlete, but he does come in with a lot of injuries and just turned 36 this past week. And I just don’t see him having a pro wrestling personality. As far as a young Velasquez with his drive, he’d blow everyone away in the drills, work harder than everyone and have more stamina than everyone, but the personality aspect would still be a challenge. The one WWE should be looking at after he retires is Daniel Cormier as an announcer. Since the company has the doctrine they need an African-American guy in the same third wheel position on every show, Cormier would blow away Coachman on day one, blow away Saxton on day one, and fairly quickly surpass Watson. The only negative is that everyone knows Saxton is good but the role he plays makes him bad, and if they try to take Cormier out of his game and program him to announce WWE style, there’s a good chance he wouldn’t be good either

So if you ever wonder why WWE went with 3 man teams for commentary and why the 3rd guy was always an African American, turns out its because of a mandate from the WWE and not something by pure coincidence.

Originally Posted by Observer Regarding the debut of Marina Shafir on 7/26, one person internally noted to us that “It’s really scary how natural these four women (Rousey, Baszler, Shafir and Jessamyn Duke) are in the ring. Just wait until you see Jess and Marina. All four are tremendous in their own way. Maybe recruiting women MMA fighters is going too be the future of the recruitment process.” I could definitely see the idea of WWE going after charismatic or very pretty MMA fighters, especially if they come from markets WWE is looking at recruiting from, in the future. They’ve already had interest in the past in Paige VanZant and while you never know how someone will adapt, she seems a natural with how well she did on “Dancing With The Stars” and the fact she’s unlikely to ever be a championship level MMA fighter, and going forward, WWE exposure is going to be so much more than UFC, that they can open up more doors for them outside of the ring/octagon.

Originally Posted by Observer World of Sport did 937,000 viewers between ITV, ITV+1 and ITV HD, which meant that 8.6 percent of people in the U.K. watching television were watching the show. In the U.S. that would be unreal for a wrestling show to do that. Nothing like that has happened since the Attitude Era. A 10:50 a.m. Sunday morning replay did 155,000 viewers.

Originally Posted by WrestlingInc Big E revealed in his recent TampaBay.com interview that they have looked into releasing some sort of branded pancake product. WWE previously released the BootyO's cereal for the group. "We've definitely explored trying to do something in that vain," Big E said when asked if there will be New Day frozen pancakes coming soon. "Cereal is easier. Right now our cereal is at FYE and FYE.com. … We're talking to people in licensing for a way for this pancake nonsense to be available to our fans."

Link: https://www.tampabay.com/things-to-d...akes_170379590

Originally Posted by WrestlingInc WWE has a new poll asking fans if Charlotte Flair stole Becky Lynch's thunder on this week's SmackDown. As of this writing, 80% went with yes while the rest went with no. As noted, Flair returned and defeated SmackDown Women's Champion Carmella in a non-title match, earning a spot in the title match at SummerSlam with Becky.

Some other sheet news includes:

• In a "WWE Did You Know" type fact, today is the 26th anniversary of Ron Simmons becoming the first ever African American to win a World Heavyweight championship in professional wrestling. Simmons defeated then champion Big Van Vader for the WCW World title.
• WWE added a new collection set in memory of Nikolai Volkoff to the WWE Network earlier today. Entire list of contents in the set via PWI: https://www.pwinsider.com/article/11...ction.html?p=1
• Website Fan Fest had a recent interview with Mick Foley talking about his career being associated the most with Hell in a Cell 1998, Owens homage to Foley at Extreme Rules, and his 1996 Boiler Room Brawl against Taker being one of his favorite moments. http://www.wrestlinginc.com/wi/news/...emembered-for/

Some stuff from TPWW Frontpage:

• Kane Wins Election and Becomes Mayor of Knox County, TN
• Aleister Black Injured
• Trent Barreta and Chuck Taylor Added to All In
• Rey Mysterio Likely Returning to WWE After All In
• Big Cass Returning to Wrestling, Now Known as “Big Cazz”
• Daniel Bryan’s Contract Expires in a Month and He Still Hasn’t Re-Signed