Post by andrew8798 on Nov 28, 2007 2:16:26 GMT -5
WWE has been taping new show opens and such in HD in preparation for the switchover. I believe Smackdown will go HD on the CW starting in January (A MONTH AWAY~!), and Raw hopefully a few months later. USA and Sci-Fi in HD should be launching at any time.
Matt Hardy underwent an emergency appendectomy last Tuesday and will be out of action one to three months. It actually plays perfectly into his storyline with MVP, since the last show before the injury saw MVP destroy his knee after they lost the tag titles. WWE even tried to turn it into a storyline, writing, "Did the attack by MVP help lead to the appendectomy that Hardy underwent tonight?" He showed up at the building for Smackdown in immense pain and went right to the trainer, and they sent him right to the hospital. At the time, his insides were already being poisoned, so they said it was a good time they say him when they did. That's scary. This poor dude can't catch a break.
Hardy wrote on his blog: "I AM STILL ALIVE. As most of you know, I experienced a ruptured appendix which released toxins that internally poisoned me on Tuesday. After being in excruciating pain for nearly 24 hours, I went under the knife late Tuesday night and had my appendix removed. For the last four days, I've been virtually bed-ridden in Tampa General Hospital. For those four days, I've been having my body intravenously pumped and flushed with powerful antibiotics to kill the infections within my abdomen caused by the toxins. It wasn't exactly the way I planned on spending Thanksgiving of 07-- away from home, away from my family, and in torturous pain. But it was a good Thanksgiving nonetheless -- because I'm very thankful I'm still alive. I've got a lot left to do in this life, and I wanna thank God for continuing to give me that opportunity. I'll speak on all this in greater length later, but I need my sleep now. Thank you guys for all your support and get well soon wishes, they mean a lot".
Armageddon looks to be Undertaker vs. Edge vs. Batista in a three-way for the WWE Title, which I guess sort of explains the absurdity at the end of Smackdown this week, plus Randy Orton vs. Chris Jericho for the WWE Title and Shawn Michaels vs. Mr. Kennedy.
Notes from an NZPWI interview with Bret Hart. He put over Jericho and Foley's books, but said most of the others were crap. He said he hadn't gotten any feedback so far from anyone in the business, and hadn't even heard from anyone in his entire family. As far as people in the business, he must not be looking very hard because at the very least Lance Storm wrote a column on it on his website.
He said the book wasn't written for wrestling fans at all. "It’s written for someone that’s not a big fan. Like, not a huge, wrestling -- you know, they can’t get enough of it kind of thing. But this is for someone who has a bit of an understanding of it, they watch it on TV, they know who some of the characters are, and they kinda wonder what the real wrestling is, how the business really works, how the personalities really mesh together." He said he was very proud of the WWE Bret Hart DVD despite the fact that it was quite stressful to have to put the whole thing together in basically 15 days. He said he really hoped they did one or two more. Still not happy with Shawn. "Shawn cried all the way through that whole [Montreal] episode in the dressing room with Vince. But he doesn’t write any of that in his book, and I thought, for me I want to put it in perspective. I want people to see this little sniveling coward. For a Christian he seems to enjoy lying quite a bit. I don’t really buy into that so much. Mind you, he wouldn’t be the first Christian to lie so much, but I think that I wanted to let people see people like him for what they really were, and then at the same time see someone like Undertaker for being the man that he is. See that not all of us are a bunch of sneaky rats who have no principles, some of us are really tight, and really close." He did admit that Shawn was a hell of a wrestler.
He buried the wrestling business as it is today, saying there was a desperate longing by fans for wrestling the way it used to be. He said if it were up to him, WWE would just show reruns. Well, the reality is that there is a place where you can see WWE reruns, and it has less than 100,000 subscribers after being available for a few years now. The main programming, the modern stuff, Raw and Smackdown, do 5 million viewers a week. Sure, one is free and one you have to pay for, but even a bottom of the barrel modern WWE PPV, which costs five times as much as a month of WWE 24/7, still does way more than 100,000 buys. He was asked about a comment Hunter made a few days back. Hunter was asked if something like Montreal could have ever happened to him or Shawn, and he said no, they weren't that stupid. Bret said: "And maybe I was, maybe I was stupid, maybe I was stupid to believe a man that had acted like my father, and treated me like -- he’d done so much for me. This is the same guy that’s his father-in-law today. So to take someone at his word, and believe him, and give him your word in return, if that’s stupid, then I guess I’m stupid. You know? But you should understand that all I did was tell the truth and be honest, and his father-in-law was pretty downright dishonest, and they’re total liars, if they can be proud of that, maybe that makes him smart to be a liar, I don’t know. In the end I wake up in the morning, I look in the mirror, I see a guy that -- you know, I have nothing hanging off my conscience that I feel bad about, I feel like in the end that was a heroic moment for me, because I was right,
I was telling the truth, and I was fair. I did everything that I would have done for my father. I came there, to be the pro that I’ve always been, and dealing with some people that are very unscrupulous, very dishonest, and Shawn Michaels even wrote in his own book that his big problem was simply the fact that I was being paid more than him. To decide that somebody’s being paid more than you, who’s been in the business longer, who’s a couple of years older, he’s the highest paid guy in the company and he’s paid his dues, and he’s being paid more – I don’t know how you can take exception to that and say 'you know I want to see if I can push this guy out, and get him out, ruin him, get him out of here, and take over everything.' You know I think that in the end when you look at how corrupt and slimy the Hunter Helmsley, and Vince, and Shawn, and that whole group, how wickedly deceiving and corrupt they were -- I think you can look at me, I don’t know that I was ever -- I don’t know how you’d rate my heroism, throughout my career, because a lot of it’s fabricated, it’s TV, but in the end that day I lived up to being the hero that I always pretended to be. Punching Vince in the jaw was a really brilliant thing to do, because it made people respect me forever."
He said if Paul Jay hadn't been there filming Wrestling With Shadows, nobody would have cared at all about the whole thing today. Well, the pivotal part of the story is the conversation that Vince and Bret had in the locker room that day, which you can still purchase in text form from Dave Meltzer in an old Observer, and the only reason that conversation exists is because Bret was wired for the movie. Without the conversation recorded, it would have been very easy for most everyone to believe Vince's side of the story, and since so many people in WWE seem to really believe what Vince told them in the aftermath (that he had to do it, that Bret refused to ever lose the belt, and that Bret was going to take the belt to Nitro the next day, none of which is true),
it would have been Bret's word versus the insistence of a huge number of people. I have a friend named Mark who refuses to watch TNA. Why? The shitty booking? The wasted talent? No. He refuses to watch because he hates the six-sided ring. I always thought that was absurd. Then I read this interview where Bret said he hated the ring so much that if he were younger, "I would probably not join that company just for the whole reason that I hate the ring." He hated the WCW ring as well, particularly the cables which gave you no spring. It's funny, because when I did the Derby City match, it was the only time in my life I'd ever been in an actual ring created by WWE, a huge 20x20 ring with real ropes.
Buddy's ring at his school, where I normally train, is 16x16 with cable ropes. What a world of difference it was. Someone once said that the WWE ring was like running a football field, and while I've never played football I would guess that this is an accurate statement. The thing was huge. And the strange thing was that when I hit the ropes for the first time, I was surprised to find myself actually propelled back towards the middle of the ring. Bret noted that with cable ropes you don't get that spring and he said sometimes he had to actually start running again once he hit them.
I never noticed it before, but boy did I ever notice in the WWE ring. He said he'd love to read a book about Vince McMahon if Vince was honest about everything. Hope he's not holding his breath. "My feelings for Vince aren’t so harsh as they are about Hunter and Shawn. Vince, I always had a lot of respect for him in a lot of ways, and I feel a bit of a -- if that day in Montreal had never happened, I feel that I would have been probably sitting right beside Vince McMahon, doing everything I could to help him and his company. I was a guy that really loved his company, loved his business and wanted to give him -- I was grateful for everything that he did for me, and I wanted to always be a contributor. So my feelings for Vince, and WWF, have never really changed, I’m always going to be grateful for what he did for me, I just don’t understand why he was so programmed to --
what they were trying to do to me at Survivor Series was really just to be as malicious and hurtful as possible, ruin me as much as possible, and have their own private joke, you know, we just really stuck it to Bret Hart." He talked about Vince calling him about the Hall of Fame. "Well, when I had that conversation I was about 5 days into my stroke. And I was really going through my most difficult challenge in my life. And I was really -- for lack of a better word, I was really down. He called me, and I didn’t know he would call me, but I did write about that in my book, it was almost like a --
I don’t know, when he called me we kind of put the hostility down and talked man to man. And I appreciated it as a kindness at the time, and he gave me a nice pep talk, told me that I was a fighter and I would beat this thing, that he had no doubts, and hang in there, and it was nice of him to call. I really gave him a second chance in some ways after that. I appreciated the fact that he took the time to call me when so many of people didn’t. I didn’t get a lot of calls, no-one really cared, and I had guys like Hogan and Flair bash me in their books which came out around the same time, and I felt like I was getting kicked while I was down. But Vince, you know I told him when we talked, I said 'I don’t want to be erased, I don’t want to be forgotten, because I really had some great wrestling matches for you, and I would love to do something,' because we had always talked about doing an anthology – a bunch of, at the time it would have been videotapes, videotapes of my greatest matches, I think we were talking about a five volume set, starting from the Hart Foundation, and building up to end of my career.
There was a lot of things like that, and when I talked to him on the phone, he said that anytime I wanted we could do all that, and not to worry about it, it was as good as done, and just let me know when I was up to for it, and we ended up doing that. And I’m grateful, even though the original concept of that DVD was to tear me to pieces, and I brought up the conversation I had with him when I was in the hospital, said 'you promised me a fitting tribute, I’m not going to do anything called "Screwed" where you highlight all the stuff that happened in Montreal, make money off that,' and in that conversation we agreed to do the DVD somewhere down the road, or that’s what we talked about, that concept anyway.
I always told myself, if they ever asked me to do the Hall of Fame, that I felt that I had a right to be remembered, and I had a right to go back. And if there was ever, if they invited me, I would go. That was before I had the stroke. It was after Survivor Series that I thought about that. And when he asked me about it that day on the phone, I said that was something I would like to do but that right now I don’t have the heart for it, I don’t think that I could even -- I was in hospital, so I was pretty down and out, so anyway we had that talk, and it was all -- couple of years later when I had recovered enough, the Hall of Fame thing came up and I thought that it was a good way for me to find closure.
To do something for my fans again, give the fans that goodbye. I had a lot of fans asking me when I was coming back, even just to say goodbye, and I didn’t want to break it to them, but I’d say goodbye at the Hall of Fame. That was my final WWF appearance." He said he was very nervous about it and it was tough to check him emotions, but in the end he was happy with what he did and what he said. He said his next goal is to try to get his book made into a film.
credit:F4W Newsletter
Matt Hardy underwent an emergency appendectomy last Tuesday and will be out of action one to three months. It actually plays perfectly into his storyline with MVP, since the last show before the injury saw MVP destroy his knee after they lost the tag titles. WWE even tried to turn it into a storyline, writing, "Did the attack by MVP help lead to the appendectomy that Hardy underwent tonight?" He showed up at the building for Smackdown in immense pain and went right to the trainer, and they sent him right to the hospital. At the time, his insides were already being poisoned, so they said it was a good time they say him when they did. That's scary. This poor dude can't catch a break.
Hardy wrote on his blog: "I AM STILL ALIVE. As most of you know, I experienced a ruptured appendix which released toxins that internally poisoned me on Tuesday. After being in excruciating pain for nearly 24 hours, I went under the knife late Tuesday night and had my appendix removed. For the last four days, I've been virtually bed-ridden in Tampa General Hospital. For those four days, I've been having my body intravenously pumped and flushed with powerful antibiotics to kill the infections within my abdomen caused by the toxins. It wasn't exactly the way I planned on spending Thanksgiving of 07-- away from home, away from my family, and in torturous pain. But it was a good Thanksgiving nonetheless -- because I'm very thankful I'm still alive. I've got a lot left to do in this life, and I wanna thank God for continuing to give me that opportunity. I'll speak on all this in greater length later, but I need my sleep now. Thank you guys for all your support and get well soon wishes, they mean a lot".
Armageddon looks to be Undertaker vs. Edge vs. Batista in a three-way for the WWE Title, which I guess sort of explains the absurdity at the end of Smackdown this week, plus Randy Orton vs. Chris Jericho for the WWE Title and Shawn Michaels vs. Mr. Kennedy.
Notes from an NZPWI interview with Bret Hart. He put over Jericho and Foley's books, but said most of the others were crap. He said he hadn't gotten any feedback so far from anyone in the business, and hadn't even heard from anyone in his entire family. As far as people in the business, he must not be looking very hard because at the very least Lance Storm wrote a column on it on his website.
He said the book wasn't written for wrestling fans at all. "It’s written for someone that’s not a big fan. Like, not a huge, wrestling -- you know, they can’t get enough of it kind of thing. But this is for someone who has a bit of an understanding of it, they watch it on TV, they know who some of the characters are, and they kinda wonder what the real wrestling is, how the business really works, how the personalities really mesh together." He said he was very proud of the WWE Bret Hart DVD despite the fact that it was quite stressful to have to put the whole thing together in basically 15 days. He said he really hoped they did one or two more. Still not happy with Shawn. "Shawn cried all the way through that whole [Montreal] episode in the dressing room with Vince. But he doesn’t write any of that in his book, and I thought, for me I want to put it in perspective. I want people to see this little sniveling coward. For a Christian he seems to enjoy lying quite a bit. I don’t really buy into that so much. Mind you, he wouldn’t be the first Christian to lie so much, but I think that I wanted to let people see people like him for what they really were, and then at the same time see someone like Undertaker for being the man that he is. See that not all of us are a bunch of sneaky rats who have no principles, some of us are really tight, and really close." He did admit that Shawn was a hell of a wrestler.
He buried the wrestling business as it is today, saying there was a desperate longing by fans for wrestling the way it used to be. He said if it were up to him, WWE would just show reruns. Well, the reality is that there is a place where you can see WWE reruns, and it has less than 100,000 subscribers after being available for a few years now. The main programming, the modern stuff, Raw and Smackdown, do 5 million viewers a week. Sure, one is free and one you have to pay for, but even a bottom of the barrel modern WWE PPV, which costs five times as much as a month of WWE 24/7, still does way more than 100,000 buys. He was asked about a comment Hunter made a few days back. Hunter was asked if something like Montreal could have ever happened to him or Shawn, and he said no, they weren't that stupid. Bret said: "And maybe I was, maybe I was stupid, maybe I was stupid to believe a man that had acted like my father, and treated me like -- he’d done so much for me. This is the same guy that’s his father-in-law today. So to take someone at his word, and believe him, and give him your word in return, if that’s stupid, then I guess I’m stupid. You know? But you should understand that all I did was tell the truth and be honest, and his father-in-law was pretty downright dishonest, and they’re total liars, if they can be proud of that, maybe that makes him smart to be a liar, I don’t know. In the end I wake up in the morning, I look in the mirror, I see a guy that -- you know, I have nothing hanging off my conscience that I feel bad about, I feel like in the end that was a heroic moment for me, because I was right,
I was telling the truth, and I was fair. I did everything that I would have done for my father. I came there, to be the pro that I’ve always been, and dealing with some people that are very unscrupulous, very dishonest, and Shawn Michaels even wrote in his own book that his big problem was simply the fact that I was being paid more than him. To decide that somebody’s being paid more than you, who’s been in the business longer, who’s a couple of years older, he’s the highest paid guy in the company and he’s paid his dues, and he’s being paid more – I don’t know how you can take exception to that and say 'you know I want to see if I can push this guy out, and get him out, ruin him, get him out of here, and take over everything.' You know I think that in the end when you look at how corrupt and slimy the Hunter Helmsley, and Vince, and Shawn, and that whole group, how wickedly deceiving and corrupt they were -- I think you can look at me, I don’t know that I was ever -- I don’t know how you’d rate my heroism, throughout my career, because a lot of it’s fabricated, it’s TV, but in the end that day I lived up to being the hero that I always pretended to be. Punching Vince in the jaw was a really brilliant thing to do, because it made people respect me forever."
He said if Paul Jay hadn't been there filming Wrestling With Shadows, nobody would have cared at all about the whole thing today. Well, the pivotal part of the story is the conversation that Vince and Bret had in the locker room that day, which you can still purchase in text form from Dave Meltzer in an old Observer, and the only reason that conversation exists is because Bret was wired for the movie. Without the conversation recorded, it would have been very easy for most everyone to believe Vince's side of the story, and since so many people in WWE seem to really believe what Vince told them in the aftermath (that he had to do it, that Bret refused to ever lose the belt, and that Bret was going to take the belt to Nitro the next day, none of which is true),
it would have been Bret's word versus the insistence of a huge number of people. I have a friend named Mark who refuses to watch TNA. Why? The shitty booking? The wasted talent? No. He refuses to watch because he hates the six-sided ring. I always thought that was absurd. Then I read this interview where Bret said he hated the ring so much that if he were younger, "I would probably not join that company just for the whole reason that I hate the ring." He hated the WCW ring as well, particularly the cables which gave you no spring. It's funny, because when I did the Derby City match, it was the only time in my life I'd ever been in an actual ring created by WWE, a huge 20x20 ring with real ropes.
Buddy's ring at his school, where I normally train, is 16x16 with cable ropes. What a world of difference it was. Someone once said that the WWE ring was like running a football field, and while I've never played football I would guess that this is an accurate statement. The thing was huge. And the strange thing was that when I hit the ropes for the first time, I was surprised to find myself actually propelled back towards the middle of the ring. Bret noted that with cable ropes you don't get that spring and he said sometimes he had to actually start running again once he hit them.
I never noticed it before, but boy did I ever notice in the WWE ring. He said he'd love to read a book about Vince McMahon if Vince was honest about everything. Hope he's not holding his breath. "My feelings for Vince aren’t so harsh as they are about Hunter and Shawn. Vince, I always had a lot of respect for him in a lot of ways, and I feel a bit of a -- if that day in Montreal had never happened, I feel that I would have been probably sitting right beside Vince McMahon, doing everything I could to help him and his company. I was a guy that really loved his company, loved his business and wanted to give him -- I was grateful for everything that he did for me, and I wanted to always be a contributor. So my feelings for Vince, and WWF, have never really changed, I’m always going to be grateful for what he did for me, I just don’t understand why he was so programmed to --
what they were trying to do to me at Survivor Series was really just to be as malicious and hurtful as possible, ruin me as much as possible, and have their own private joke, you know, we just really stuck it to Bret Hart." He talked about Vince calling him about the Hall of Fame. "Well, when I had that conversation I was about 5 days into my stroke. And I was really going through my most difficult challenge in my life. And I was really -- for lack of a better word, I was really down. He called me, and I didn’t know he would call me, but I did write about that in my book, it was almost like a --
I don’t know, when he called me we kind of put the hostility down and talked man to man. And I appreciated it as a kindness at the time, and he gave me a nice pep talk, told me that I was a fighter and I would beat this thing, that he had no doubts, and hang in there, and it was nice of him to call. I really gave him a second chance in some ways after that. I appreciated the fact that he took the time to call me when so many of people didn’t. I didn’t get a lot of calls, no-one really cared, and I had guys like Hogan and Flair bash me in their books which came out around the same time, and I felt like I was getting kicked while I was down. But Vince, you know I told him when we talked, I said 'I don’t want to be erased, I don’t want to be forgotten, because I really had some great wrestling matches for you, and I would love to do something,' because we had always talked about doing an anthology – a bunch of, at the time it would have been videotapes, videotapes of my greatest matches, I think we were talking about a five volume set, starting from the Hart Foundation, and building up to end of my career.
There was a lot of things like that, and when I talked to him on the phone, he said that anytime I wanted we could do all that, and not to worry about it, it was as good as done, and just let me know when I was up to for it, and we ended up doing that. And I’m grateful, even though the original concept of that DVD was to tear me to pieces, and I brought up the conversation I had with him when I was in the hospital, said 'you promised me a fitting tribute, I’m not going to do anything called "Screwed" where you highlight all the stuff that happened in Montreal, make money off that,' and in that conversation we agreed to do the DVD somewhere down the road, or that’s what we talked about, that concept anyway.
I always told myself, if they ever asked me to do the Hall of Fame, that I felt that I had a right to be remembered, and I had a right to go back. And if there was ever, if they invited me, I would go. That was before I had the stroke. It was after Survivor Series that I thought about that. And when he asked me about it that day on the phone, I said that was something I would like to do but that right now I don’t have the heart for it, I don’t think that I could even -- I was in hospital, so I was pretty down and out, so anyway we had that talk, and it was all -- couple of years later when I had recovered enough, the Hall of Fame thing came up and I thought that it was a good way for me to find closure.
To do something for my fans again, give the fans that goodbye. I had a lot of fans asking me when I was coming back, even just to say goodbye, and I didn’t want to break it to them, but I’d say goodbye at the Hall of Fame. That was my final WWF appearance." He said he was very nervous about it and it was tough to check him emotions, but in the end he was happy with what he did and what he said. He said his next goal is to try to get his book made into a film.
credit:F4W Newsletter