By Scott Bowden
March 24, 2005
“Yo, Adrian! I’m going to WrestleMania!”: WWE announces Sylvester Stallone to induct Hulk Hogan into the Hall of Fame. Also this week, Marty Jannetty overcomes a sticky situation, Triple H makes like The Undertaker and buries everyone, and Scott Bowden plans to take the NWA World title from Jeff Jarrett
Sly move: Sylvester Stallone will be inducting Hulk Hogan into the WWE Hall of Fame April 2, while at the same time promoting THE CONTENDER, his TKO’d reality TV show on NBC. (I say it’s technically knocked out because the ratings indicate that it won’t last the proverbial 15 rounds. Where’s Burgess Meredith when you need him?) Wouldn’t it be great if a jealous Terry Funk crashed the HOF ceremony and attacked Stallone and Hogan: “You cast me in PARADISE ALLEY, but I wasn’t good enough for ROCKY III?! I wasn’t good enough?!” Funk’s got no one to blame but himself; after all, he was the one who ventured down to the docks and convinced a young Terry Bollea to give wrestling another shot (at least that’s the way Hogan tells it his biography). Some have been critical of the choice of Stallone; however, the move has already garnered WWE some mainstream publicity, so it’s hard to argue with success. Besides, who’d you think they’d get…Verne Gagne?
Yes, a guy like Superstar Graham, the wrestler who Hogan and countless others patterned themselves after, probably would have been a better choice as far as most diehard marks are concerned; however, the Italian Stallion (Stallone—not the old NWA jobber) is a far more interesting selection to casual fans. You almost have to believe Hogan wouldn’t settle for being inducted by a mere mortal wrestler.
Although Hogan was already a huge star in the business (selling out arenas for Gagne’s AWA following a successful WWWF run with McMahon Sr.) when Stallone cast him as Thunderlips, the wrestler his Rocky Balboa character brawled with in ROCKY III, the future WWF champ gained plenty of publicity from the film, including an appearance on THE TONIGHT SHOW with Johnny Carson.
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Still, it’ll be a shame if Hogan doesn’t at the very least put Graham over as the man who influenced everyone from himself to Austin Idol to Jesse Ventura to Scott Steiner. (Actually, I guess Superstar gets the blame, not the credit per se, for Big Poppa Pump…or was it the Booty Daddy?) That being said, I’d say it’s 50/50 that Hogan recognizes Graham, as he usually tries to act as if he was the one who was the innovator and not the imitator. In fact, one of the few references to Graham in Hogan’s bio was the gem about Bollea’s arms getting bigger than the Superstar’s in a few short months using the unique regiment of lifting weights, saying his prayers and taking his “vitamins.”
The Brain behind the brawn: In other HOF news, Bobby Heenan will be inducting his former charge “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorff. Heenan gave an amazing performance at his own induction last year, so I couldn’t be happier with this decision. Appropriately enough, Jimmy Hart will be inducted into the Hall by Jerry Lawler, who was responsible for getting the former singer of the Gentrys into the business as his manager. Hart, of course, turned on Lawler when the King suffered a broken leg at the hands of referee Jerry “the Crippler” Calhoun in a touch football game. This led to Hart’s line, fed to him by promoter Jerry Jarrett, that legitimately irked Lawler to the point of purposely (as some suspect) breaking the manager’s jaw with a stiff shot in Evansville, Indiana: “If you have a prized racehorse, a thoroughbred, a champion, and he breaks his leg, what do you do to him? What do you do to him? Jerry Lawler can’t make me any more money, baby!”
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During his feud with Hart’s First Family of Professional Rasslin’, Lawler would often remark: “I’m the one who got you into the business, and I’ll be the one to put you out of it.” Ah, but that was years ago—it’s all water under Adrian Street’s London bridge (the Exotic one’s finisher, you marks) at this point. Other 2005 HOFers and their inductors: The Iron Sheik (Sgt. Slaughter), Nikolai Volkoff (Jim Ross), Bob Orton Jr. (Randy Orton) and Roddy Piper (Steve Austin).
Rock on: Things didn’t look promising for Marty Jannetty in the early going of his bout against Kurt Angle on last Thursday’s SMACKDOWN. Hell, before the bell even rang, he looked lost: “Damn it. Where do I put this gum?” I suppose he could have taken a page from Hall-of-Famer Don “The Magnificent” Muraco and simply worked the bout with the big wad of gum still in his mouth. But with some tricky spots worked out for the match, Jannetty might have ended up choking to death, effectively putting an end to his comeback before it even really began. (But talk about heat for the HBK vs. Angle bout at WrestleMania! Good for the business, right?) Perhaps the perfect solution would have been to pull a Curt Hennig, but that involves a little timing and even Mr. Perfect wasn’t flawless with the gum-slap. Jannetty improvised, planting the gum on a ring post moments after entering the ring. (I have no idea whether or not he reclaimed it after tapping out.)
Once the gum was out of the way, Jannetty quickly had the audience seeing red, as his cherry-colored bikini briefs kept trying to overtake his trunks; it was almost like a rasslin’ match itself. (Where did Jannetty get those trunks anyway? Jeff Jarrett’s dressing room in Orlando?)
Still, once the former Rocker got rolling, the gum and briefs take a backseat to some damn good work. Better yet, because Jannetty is a legit Georgia boy, the crowd in Savannah was hot for him, with frequent chants of “Marty.” Slowly, the audience started believing just maybe….
Jannetty and Angle had some nice mat wresting and effective false finishes, which the live crowd got into. In the end, Jannetty tapped to the ankle lock after nearly escaping, by no means burying him as you might have expected. Makes you wonder just how good Jannetty could look if he again worked a regular schedule with top-notch WWE guys. (There’s no question Angle deserves a lot of credit as well for last week’s bout.)
WWE must have been impressed, as they offered Jannetty a contract earlier this week. Apparently, he’ll work on the RAW side, though I don’t think they’ll have him turn on HBK just yet (if at all), as some are speculating.
The world’s gravest wrestler: Delivering a promo Monday that would make The Undertaker jealous, Triple H buried everyone from Chris Benoit to JBL to John Cena in a promo that went way too long. Yeah, he buried Randy Orton, too. But that didn’t bother me as much because it appears that the Legend Killer will be aligning with Trips again, so it made sense from a storyline aspect to have the Game do what he does best and manipulate Orton into coming back to the dark side by pointing out the shambles his career is in now. (The RKO that Orton gave Stacy on RAW didn’t exactly help matters. But I’m getting to that.) I mean, JBL and the whole SMACKDOWN! side in particular already comes off second-rate (granted, Layfield as champ is partially to blame…but he’s actually gotten much better in the role), so we don’t need that point regularly piledriven home by the World champion.
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Notice that Trips is the champion of the entire planet—not the mere WWE company champion. To this day, I still can’ t believe they didn’t elevate the company’s former WWWF/WWF title to their World title, ignoring the belt’s rich heritage that dates back to names like Bruno and Backlund, and even to Austin and The Rock. They briefly toyed with the idea of misleading the fans into believing that the RAW World title was the NWA title of old, even going so far as to have Ric Flair insinuate as much. But I digress.
Now, when HHH discussed Batista, the RAW promo was strong stuff. But why rant about the JBL vs. Cena match-up not mattering (y’know, because Batista could beat them both easily) when I thought the whole idea was to have the champ focused on Batista to the point of being paranoid? For those who defend such a promo by dismissing Triple H’s comments as being that of a typical cocky heel, I would suggest you watch Flair’s old promos from his days as NWA champ: The Nature Boy was arrogant yet he would always build up his challengers as the greatest wrestlers alive—besides him. Triple H’s promos don’t quite do that and, more important, they’re not nearly as entertaining either. Something’s missing for him—maybe he has too much control over his character to the point he cannot see his shortcomings. His heel persona is more annoying than infuriating, which doesn’t exactly put asses in the seats. Yes, his work in the ring of late has been as strong as ever, but he’s getting the kind of negative heel-champ heat that Jeff Jarrett currently has in TNA as NWA champion. Not good.
Meanwhile, on Planet Jarrett (Isn’t that near Planet Stasiak?): I’m personally going to take the NWA belt off Jarrett. When the TNA line of action figures from ToyBiz debuts this spring, I’m purchasing the Jarrett figure—strictly for the classic NWA-belt accessory, which I will promptly put around the waist of my classic Ric Flair figure from WWE. Woooo!
(Then I’m going to pull an Abdullah on the Jarrett figure, using an exacto knife as my foreign object of choice. Or maybe I’ll pull a Lawler and set JJ on fire.)
Post-concussion syndrome: Randy Orton lost his head Monday, applying the RKO to Stacy Keibler out of nowhere in sending a message to ‘Taker. (Apparently, the message is “There’s not a woman alive I can’t beat up!” Oh, wait—that was my catchphrase when I was feuding with Ms. Texas in Memphis years back. Something tells me that wouldn’t have exactly have worked on a T-shirt.) Old-sage announcer Jim Ross deciphered the message as “Orton will do anything” to defeat the Dead Man at WrestleMania. OK, I guess I’ll buy that, but it seemed a little rushed to have Orton drop Keibler like that quickly—I mean, we’ve been subjected to these painful malt-sharing moments between the two all this time and that’s the payoff?
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I figured he’d dump her ass in going heel, but I think there should have been a little more buildup. After all, men hate it when women doubt them, so maybe Keibler’s lack of faith in him should have been expressed a little more clearly from a logic standpoint. Still, I do like that Orton’s a full-fledged heel going into WrestleMania instead of some lame, tired ‘tweener role—makes for a far more interesting bout with ‘Taker in LA.
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