[Emperor Smeat]

The Sheets:

Originally Posted by Observer MLW announced today that the promotion is introducing a National Championship. It will be an openweight title, featuring wrestlers from the middleweight, heavyweight, and super heavyweight divisions. The inaugural National Champion will be crowned at MLW's television tapings at the Waukesha County Expo Center in Waukesha, Wisconsin on Saturday, June 1.

Originally Posted by PWI The second episode episode of Viceland's pro wrestling documentary series Dark Side of the Ring on 4/10 garnered 181,000 overnight viewers for their Montreal Screwjob episode, up from last week's 154,000 overnight viewers. Next Wednesday's episode will focus on the Bruiser Brody murder.

Next week's numbers should be interesting since its been available online for a while due to Viceland airing it as the pilot episode for the series.

Originally Posted by PWI Since it’s been a couple of months, I just want to point out how bad it is that The Pursuit Channel, which is partially OWNED by Anthem, still has yet to be able to correct their cable and satellite guide listings to properly show that Impact Wrestling is a two-hour series. We continue to receive complaints about the issue from readers with different providers and again, this week, on my own provider, Verizon Fios, the series is listed for 30 minutes with 3 replays, which means that if I don’t add time to my DVR (or pay attention enough to care), I’d end up with 30 minutes and nothing more of the show. I know that Impact management has been well aware of the issue and the channel is slow to respond to requests, but at this point, it’s beyond terrible that nothing has been fixed

Originally Posted by PWI Chicago broadcaster legend Chester "Chet" Coppock, who had a storied career covering sports on Chicago Radio and TV passed away due to injuries suffered in a Georgia car accident on 4/11, his family announced today. Coppock was 70 years old at the time of his passing yesterday, surrounded by his family. He was very much a living legend in the Windy City, where he won several Emmys and was inducted into the city's Broadcaster Hall of Fame ... Pro Wrestling was a small portion of Coppock's career. He had AWA competitors on his radio show regularly in Chicago to help promote live events that were taking place in Comiskey Park ... Coppock was also the ring announcer for the Chicago portion of WWF's second Wrestlemania in 1986 and made at least one radio appearance doing announcing for WWF's Radio show, commentating with Gorilla Monsoon for a radio broadcast of Wrestlemania X in 1994 in NYC. He also handled local promotional interviews pushing WWF events in Chicago in the late 1980s.

Originally Posted by Fightful Nikki Bella said on her podcast that a match with Stephanie McMahon would bring her out of retirement.

Originally Posted by Fightful According to the Sports Business Journal, WWE talent signed to developmental contracts are paid on average $50,000 to $150,000 a year. The overall average for those in development is roughly $80,000. The report goes on to say that salaries can climb into the seven figures "if they reach the top of WWE."

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Right now, the idea is that the women’s champions, double champion Becky Lynch and tag team champions Billie Kay & Peyton Royce will be working both brands and have different challengers on each brand. It was indicated Kay & Royce would also defend their titles on NXT. They made clear that the Raw and Smackdown titles are different and Raw brand wrestlers like Natalya and Lacey Evans made it clear they were after the Raw belt. It appears that when Lynch loses one of those titles, she’ll be exclusive to the other brand. Only a few wrestlers were brought up. The two top stars of the last year on 205 Live, Buddy Murphy and Cedric Alexander, were moved off the brand, with Murphy going to Smackdown and Alexander to Raw. While it’s long been established that 205 Live is somewhere between developmental and purgatory, this establishes that the original goal of it being the home for the best under-205 pound guys in the company is over and it’s just an hour of filling time and waiting for the top guys to make it to the main roster. Even though Murphy was cruiserweight champion and on many PPV shows (granted, often on the pre-show), when he arrived on Smackdown he did an introduction interview with the premise most people didn’t know him and would be hearing about him for the first time.

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter The Mysterio move is interesting because FOX has been airing previews for Smackdown on baseball and the shots were of John Cena, Reigns, Mysterio and Flair as the four stars focused on the brand.

at WWE already messing things up for FOX's promotion of Smackdown's arrival on their network.

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Regarding Sanity, Eric Young will be on Raw. Nobody knows what’s going on with Killian Dain, or his wife, Nikki Cross. Alexander Wolfe wrote a farewell message on social media to WWE, but those in WWE have told us that Wolfe isn’t leaving the company. There is talk he may go back to NXT as a single, or he could be used as a flagship guy on the European brand.

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter WWE last week also announced Legacy Hall of Fame inductees. This is the category they use to honor people who, for whatever reason, they don’t feel are marketable names to the modern audience to put in their actual Hall of Fame. It’s basically the answer of how can you have a Hall of Fame without Lou Thesz and Strangler Lewis, with the answer that they are quietly in it, just not listed in the main Hall of Fame. It’s basically a situation based on two factors, the nature of the WWE Hall of Fame being what it is, which as those in the company have always stressed, is nothing more than a marketing idea and not meant to be taken seriously, and an industry that has reshaped its history to where much of it is ignored and the modern fan knows little of it. The usual rules apply, one woman, one African-American, which can be tricky since that isn’t the easiest. They used Luna Vachon as the woman, which is fine since there are no real standards for a WWE Hall of Fame, past the point that Vachon shouldn’t even be in the legacy category since she was part of the company’s modern era. The African-American was S.D. Jones, the perennial prelim wrestler, joining Johnny Rodz as guys who were essentially television jobbers being in the Hall of Fame.

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter For the TV ratings this past week, the AAA show on 4/5 did a 2.1 rating and 9.0 share, with 4.4 million viewers. CMLL on 4/6 did a 1.2 rating and 2.6 share, for 1.3 million viewers

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter TV Azteca announced a series of tournaments for a weekly Saturday night show that starts on 5/4. It will be a ten-week series, with two one hour shows taped every other Thursday in Mexico City at either the Pepsi Center or the Jai Alai Fronton (where Impact taped). There will be tournaments in a number of weight divisions as well as tag teams. The number of people in the tournament varies by division. We don’t have names yet but they announced there would be competitors from Elite (the Mexican promotion, not AEW), Arolucha in the U.S., Impact, MLW and AAA in all divisions. The idea is that the winner of each weight class will be recognized as champion in all five promotions and defend the title in all of them. It will be a new weekly TV show short-term on TV Azteca for the summer. The name of the show looks to be “Gladiatores: Liga de Campeone de Lucha Libre,” or Champions League of Wrestling

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Regarding television for AEW, there is nothing new to report this week other than it seemed a lock a few weeks ago what day the show would air, and now the day of the week is no longer a lock. But the two hours live weekly in prime time looks likely

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Regarding Banks, it should be noted that the decision to put the women’s tag titles on The Iiconics was not a last minute decision and many people knew about it in the company. However, Banks & Bayley weren’t told until the day of the show. They were also told at the time that the company was going to drop them as a tag team ... So it was the combination of not getting the title run they expected to establish the belts as meaningful and not joke belts, and splitting up their team so quickly that got both of them upset. Bayley was upset but didn’t quit or anything. Despite rumors to the contrary, she was never booked for television this week, at least since WrestleMania. They are hopeful she’ll be back over the next few weeks and she is tentatively booked for the 5/19 Money in the Bank show in Hartford, but nothing is concrete as far as her status. If she returns, she’s scheduled for Raw, because the reason for the split-up is that Bayley was always scheduled to move to Smackdown, a decision that has been the plan for some time even though kept secret until probably whenever they told Bayley she had to stay the extra day in Montreal this week

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter A lot of people have commented that the costs listed for expenses on the road for WWE talent were listed very high. While the estimates for rental cars was actually low, as noted, very often people share cars. Couples on the road also share rooms so total room costs would be a little bit lower. Plus, if WWE was handling it themselves, they would be able to get discounts. One person who is an accountant for a company that handles a lot of travel noted that WWE could open an account with Hilton as their official hotel and probably get costs down very low with deals that include parking, breakfast and gym access. In addition it was noted that a lot of wrestlers have gym memberships to chains, so that in most cities they can find a gym of that chain and it’s just part of their annual dues. That isn’t always the case. IRS guidelines are $71 per day per diems for workers on the road in most cities and $104 in major expensive cities like a New York or a San Francisco, although you can get that figure down if you have a hotel deal that provides for free breakfasts. The point being that one accountant who deals with this said even a $20 million estimate on costs to WWE for making talent employees would be insanely high.

This is in regards to Fightful's article about how much it would cost WWE to cover all of their wrestlers as actual employees. Basically the real amount would be a lot lower than what Fightful suggested and WWE pretty much doesn't do it due to their greed.

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter The agents for the Takeover matches were: War Raiders vs. Ricochet & Black was Terry Taylor. Velveteen Dream vs. Matt Riddle was Matt Bloom. Pete Dunne vs. Walter was Johnny Moss. The women’s match was Sara Amato. The Johnny Gargano vs. Adam Cole main event was Michael Hayes

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Enzo & Cass were not at either ROH show this weekend, nor are they booked on anything announced going forward. They have been given no future dates and right now are not factored into anything. There were key people very upset with that segment internally and as noted before, internal divisiveness whether to do it and it brought negative attention in terms of reaction. The idea of why was explained last week, but not everyone bought that. The original idea was to do a very quick bit that would take place in the corner by the guard rails. Enzo was to grab Mark Briscoe and Mark was to shove Enzo and that would be it. It would be so quick so as not to sound the alarms. People on TV may or may not see it, but people would hear about it. I guess the idea, since Enzo did interrupt a WWE show legit, was to play off that. Security was to then take Enzo away to make it look real. The idea is that if there was a buzz, maybe they’d follow up, but if nobody cared, it was so short that people would just assume it was real. It got out of control and right now there are no plans to bring them back, but there are also different people with different viewpoints involved with creative and it’s not clear how the wind will blow.

Some TPWW Frontpage stuff:

• WWE: Road Dogg Update, The Shield’s Final Opponents
• More on “The Viking Experience” Name Change
• Injuries: Sheamus Has a Concussion, Ronda Rousey Surgery