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Old 01-30-2020, 09:06 PM   #1209
Emperor Smeat
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Splitting the sheet news into 2 posts since this week's Observer Newsletter was released earlier than usual. First post is just from this week's Newsletter and the next one will be have Thursdays daily news.

The Sheets Part Evil Uno:

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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
What’s notable is that in all the plans until the last week, Reigns and Baszler were scheduled as the Rumble winners. Vince McMahon changed his mind about a week ahead of time. We don’t know exactly when, but significant money came in on Flair to win on 1/19, so that’s a pretty good hint.

The reasons were that it was said he wanted matches to create stronger main events for Mania. For the men’s side, that does make sense. The decision is to go all out with Lesnar vs. McIntyre as the main event at this point, barring an outside attraction match, and not Wyatt vs. Reigns. The original idea was for Lesnar to destroy everyone in the Rumble, eliminating the first 13 guys, until a combination of a low blow by Ricochet (in retaliation to Lesnar laying out Ricochet on TV the week before with a low blow) and a Claymore kick by McIntyre would lead to Lesnar being out. The idea is that once he eliminated Lesnar, that McIntyre didn’t need to win, and that Reigns could win and challenge Wyatt so you have the two title matches as someone even.

But McMahon wanted to establish Lesnar vs. McIntyre as the main event, and thus everything is geared to making the main event as strong as it

It should also be noted that it was only in the last few weeks that McIntyre was in the spot to face Lesnar. We were only told that Cain Velasquez, Tyson Fury and Edge, who were the names rumored for Lesnar, were all not true. The decision came down to McIntyre and Aleister Black, the latter a major Paul Heyman project. The feeling is that at this point in time, McIntyre was the more over of the two so the decision was made for him.
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
Right now the Flair match on the books is with Ripley for the NXT title. It’s the latest move to give NXT new juice since it fell behind AEW once again in the ratings after the momentum had seemingly turned away from AEW in November and December. While some thought that the AEW vs. NXT deal as a prime concern was over in McMahon’s mind, since the whole idea was to make sure AEW didn’t get strong enough numbers to get the paying television deal that would make them profitable and not going away any time soon. In that sense, McMahon failed in the big picture, with only some little wins like keeping other groups out of Madison Square Garden, which is a big deal to him, but far less important nowadays in the big picture ...

Still, if Lynch vs. Baszler is the key women’s match on the show, then it would have made sense for Baszler to win the Rumble, particularly since a large percentage of the viewership doesn’t watch NXT and isn’t familiar with her, yet she’s in the top women’s match on the show unless Rousey is coming back, which according to what we are told, Rousey will not be wrestling this year at Mania.
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
The other major story was the return of Edge (Adam Copeland, 46), who retired after the 2011 WrestleMania due to neck problems ...

He wouldn’t have been allowed to do that spear at SummerSlam if he wasn’t cleared. This all dates back to last summer when AEW made Edge a major offer to wrestle a few matches per year. Edge used that offer, which he told WWE was for $3 million per year and he would start when the company got television as his leverage, to get the same deal with WWE. So that was his leverage to get one of the highest deals in WWE history ...

Since this is now a second time this has happened, it does bring up unique speculation as to guys who were medically disqualified from ever wrestling in WWE again (Edge and Bryan) both were cleared when it became clear that they were going to wrestle outside WWE. It’s not as cut-and-dried as that, but when it happens twice in a row involving talents that legitimately would garner substantial interest outside WWE, it is notable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
The men’s Rumble was put together by Shane McMahon, James Gibson (Noble) , Chris Park (Abyss) and Lance Evers (Storm) with input by Paul Heyman and Brock Lesnar regarding the early part of the match. Vince McMahon was heavily involved in the finishing sequence and not only made the final call on McIntyre winning, but also the sequence and his eliminating Reigns last.

The women’s Rumble was put together by Michael Seitz (Hayes), T.J. Wilson (Tyson Kidd), Adam Pearce, Mickie James and Paul Levesque had input the day of the show to help out and made it flow better.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
U.S. champion Andrade failed a drug test, which those in the company were informed of on 1/27 in the afternoon. Paul Heyman made the call not to take the title off Andrade, who was suspended without pay for 30 days. He sees Andrade as one of his major players going forward and felt it was too early for him to lose, and too early in a planned long-term program with Humberto Carrillo for Carrillo to win. So they did an angle where Carrillo gave Andrade a hammerlock DDT after removing the protective mats on the floor. It was retaliation for what Andrade did to Carrillo that put him out of action for a few weeks. So there was a storyline fit in how it was handled.
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
The Rumble drew a sellout of 36,000 fans to Minute Maid Park in Houston with the announced figure being 42,715. There were some people turned away the day of the show. They sold out with the walk-up as they were selling tickets until just before show time. The paid would have been in excess of 30,000 as that was the figure they were in the ballpark of two weeks out ...

As impressive as that crowd is given the general toughness in selling tickets to live wrestling these days in the U.S., the interest in this year’s Rumble was way down. It had 500,000 Google searches, which by modern standards would mean the equivalent of a PPV show that by old standards would do 125,000 to 230,000 buys, which is way lower than any Rumble has ever done in modern times prior to the network.
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
For the second time in less than a year, Pro Wrestling NOAH has been sold, this time to CyberAgent, a Japanese media company that is worth $5 billion.

CyberAgent also owns the DDT promotion, Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling and Genbare Pro Wrestling. The company is best known for advertising and games, and also owns Abema TV, major Japanese sports streaming service ...

How this affects the Japanese big picture scene is a tough call. New Japan is far more popular, and really is in a different league than all other companies in the Japanese market right now. But CyberAgent is larger than Bushiroad, and everyone also knows that WWE is coming with an NXT brand in Japan. There is the feeling that a WWE/CyberAgent affiliation could be a threat to New Japan’s market domination far more than either could separately, with the idea that DDT doesn’t have the mass appeal, while NOAH doesn’t have the star power, and a combination of the two would probably be stronger, but also alienate both company’s current fan bases since each fan base like the current style and a melding of styles would get a bad reaction from much of each group’s current base.
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
WWE’s latest new concept show, NXT World’s Collide, built around a series of all-star matches with the U.S. and U.K. brands against each other, debuted the night before the Royal Rumble, on 1/25 in Houston ...

The crowd was 3,500 at the Toyota Center, about half or less of what you’d expect for a Takeover in the same building.
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
The NWA did its Hard Times PPV on 1/24 from Atlanta’s PBS Studios ...

Dave Lagana said that this PPV did more streaming buys than the first one.
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
It’s largely expected that Parka’s son will take over the La Parka gimmick in some form, but not any time soon. AAA feels the La Parka character is part of the legacy of the promotio
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
There have been at least openings of lines of communication between New Japan and Viceland for U.S. television. It’s a long process because TV-Asahi owns the footage rights and the AXS/New Japan deal was originally between AXS and TV-Asahi
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
In a move that will significantly hurt AEW’s PPV numbers going forward, ITV has dropped its entire PPV division. Right now the 2/29 Revolution show will be on FITE streaming and they are in talks with another television PPV provider in the U.K. but there aren’t that many options. ITV 4 would air the one hour pre-show live on television to push buys which made sense since they were partners and that also helped drive buys. U.K. television PPV usually meant around 15,000 to 20,000 buys, and while some will move to FITE, not everyone does so because a solid percentage of the audience still has an aversion to Internet only PPV
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
Tony Khan went to TNT before the 1/15 show to get the station’s approval on Jericho spiking Moxley in the eye with a spike, noting that TBS was furious in 1988 when the Road Warriors did the same thing to Dusty Rhodes. In fact, Rhodes got in a lot of trouble for booking that then. The other thing he got cleared in advance was MJF’s idea to wear the “I banged Dallas’ daughter” t-shirt. In reality, MJF and Page’s daughter Lexy Nair, who is now working for AEW as a backstage interviewer are actually good friends and she got a kick out of it. MJF is a big fan of old-time territories and got the idea from Greg Valentine wearing the “I broke Wahoo’s leg” T-shirts in the Carolinas in the 70s
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Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
There was a lot of talk this past week regarding the funeral of Rocky Johnson on 1/21. Superstar Billy Graham, who was not at the funeral, but his mother-in-law, who was friends with Johnson, was. He made a facebook post saying Vince McMahon and Pat Patterson were inconsiderate and tasteless. We heard from two people at the funeral who said that was true. They said that the pastor went very long and was more negative toward pro wrestling and it being fake than some were comfortable with. They said Vince did his strut coming to the podium which was way out of place and first put over Johnson for being a great athlete and performer. He then ended by saying the best thing Rocky ever did was marry Ata (Ata Maivia). He then pointed to Ata and said that Ata had kids (they had one child, Dwayne) and then he strutted off the stage. He then left the building. Shane and Paul Levesque left shortly after. Two people said that Vince made it clear he was annoyed the funeral went long. Vince did do the same thing at Eddy Guerrero’s funeral in 2005 ... One person noted that the preacher went long, which took away from time for friends and family speeches. He described Patterson’s speech as weird. The description was that he made perverted jokes, used the word shit, didn’t really talk that much in his speech about Johnson, kind of insulted Johnson at one point and eventually they cut his mic off. Patterson also talked about getting drunk the night before and going to the bathroom to drink some water when the toilet seat fell and hit him in the head, implying he was drinking out of the toilet ... Al Rosen, a close friend of Johnson’s, said that the family was not offended by anything that happened
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
There was an incident backstage at the Royal Rumble where Lesnar went to Riddle and told him to quit tagging him in posts and talking about him in social media because he would never work with him ever ... After the show, Riddle filmed some interviews where he was still challenging Lesnar and guaranteed some day the match will happen. Put it this way, if this is a Paul Heyman work, and to be fair, this would fit into his M.O. (think Lesnar/Undertaker at UFC), the one flaw is that if he’s grooming Riddle for Lesnar in a year, or even two years, that Riddle would have been protected more in the Rumble and got to stand out more rather than just being a guy dumped quickly. We’re told that Riddle’s Rumble performance was because he has a lot of heat right now with the Vince McMahon and this was to send a message. At a class at the Performance Center this week, on dealing with social media, talent was told not to call out anyone on the main roster in social media without their knowledge. The elimination was not primarily to use Riddle’s hardcore fan popularity as a way to get Corbin over more as a heel past the idea Corbin himself was chosen for it for that reason. But that wasn’t the reason he was in and out so quickly. We’re not sure as to why McMahon wanted to do that to him but it does explain his push not being commensurate with his marketability or how over he is.
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