The Bell to Bell News Report 09.17.10

It’s been another pretty quiet week in terms of wrestling news outside of a few various bits and bites, but there’s still plenty to cover, so welcome to this week’s edition of The Bell to Bell! This week, we’ll be covering the Matt Hardy situation with the WWE, discuss the new Ring of Honor Champion that was crowned last weekend, as well as the chance that TNA could soon be without a TV deal in the United Kingdom.

Before we get to all of that though, I’d like to take a moment to discuss something that I had never imagined would happen in about a million years. Last Sunday afternoon at Canad Inns Stadium, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers actually managed to put on a Banjo Bowl beatdown as they handily thumped the Saskatchewan Roughriders 31-2 in the annual Labor Day rematch. While there’s still plenty of reason to think that this could just be an exception rather than the rule as the team is still just 3-7, there is now hope that they’ve turned the corner. Following QB Buck Pierce’s elbow injury, Stephen Jyles did a great job running the offence while limiting his mistakes and RB Fred Reid ran roughshod on the Rider defence throughout the game. Perhaps most rewarding was how well the defence played, rekindling hopes that we may just be able to make some noise yet this season. Next up is a crucial battle with the Toronto Argonauts in Toronto that if the Bombers win will move them just two points out of second place in the East Division.

Of course, this past weekend also saw the beginning of the NFL season and while it may not have been the best weekend for teams like the Chargers or the Jets, my Pats put up a fantastic showing against the Bengals, laying a 38-24 mauling on the boys from Cincy. The thing I liked the most about this game was seeing Wes Welker back and better than ever in his slot receiver position. Julian Edelman did an admirable job of filling in after Welker’s injury last season, but there’s no replacement for Welker, something he showed even in just the first quarter. Having Welker catch balls over the middle keeps the defence honest, not only against the run but in opening up the deep ball over the top. This week it’s the Jets in a big one that could put the Pats a game up on the team expected to be their closest competition for the division this year in the AFC East. Should be a great one…

Anyhow, you all haven’t come here for football or musings on my teams (though some of you may have for all I know), you’re here for wrestling news and here it comes!!

You know the drill…

Ding Ding….

— The Matt Hardy saga continued this week as he was sent home by the WWE for unknown reasons in news that was denied by Hardy before being confirmed by independent news sources outside of the WWE. That was just the beginning of the story though as Hardy posted videos on his website to protest his innocence in the situation, blaming a “stooging punk” for the incident, while making more cryptic posts on his Twitter account.

“Here’s a quick hello to all my people & a reassurance to everyone that I’m fine, healthy, & in good spirits. Thx for all of your support.

When the time is right, I’ll put everything out there as far as what “really” went down. I know I have to protect me & my brand, & I will.

I appreciate my fans so much that I’ll always be honest with them, & the whole story certainly isn’t out there now.

I appreciate all of the things the WWE has done 4 me in the past, they have been gracious to me-but now, it’s decision time for me. Thx all.”

Well, this certainly sounds a lot like Hardy’s days with the company could be numbered. Who knows what Hardy means by a “stooging punk” when he tries to lay blame for the situation as that could mean that someone let WWE officials know about some kind of Wellness violation or of activity that Hardy was conducting with TNA in an attempt to make a jump to that promotion. It’s nice of him to state that he appreciates everything that the WWE has done for him and certainly more than he needs to say about the promotion who has basically told him that they don’t need him anymore, but it also comes off as somewhat disingenuous as he follows it with speaking about “decision time”, which clearly means that he needs to decide about possibly jumping to TNA.

Hardy is allegedly on VERY thin ice with the WWE and news of his release could be coming in the very near future. The WWE had been reluctant to release Hardy as they would essentially be handing TNA a Hardy Boyz reunion that could turn into some lucrative business for them. According to sources inside the company though, there is no longer a concern for that possibility and the decision to release Hardy will be made based on the current situation rather than where Hardy could go once he is cut loose by the WWE. With Hardy being sent home from shows and pulled from appearances arranged by the WWE, the writing is definitely on the wall. Bear in mind that the rumors of Hardy possibly being dropped by the WWE began all the way back when the WWE cleaned house on the likes of Jimmy Wang Yang, Tyler Reks and others earlier this year, so it will be interesting to see what has caused this situation to come to such a head so quickly.

After last week’s blog posting and all of the things that accompanied that, many were concerned about Hardy’s health and well-being and it’s nice to see that he somewhat addressed those concerns with the Twitter posts, but this still feels like a very strange situation where tomorrow could bring news of Hardy ending up in TNA or Hardy ending up dead in a hotel room somewhere after chugging a handful of pills. Now that’s not a slight on Hardy as a person, but given how things have gone in wrestling as of late with the passings of Lance Cade and Luna Vachon, as well as the general cryptic nature of Hardy’s postings, it’s not hard to make the leap to something severe possibly happening.

As with everything in wrestling, it’s not just Matt Hardy that is speaking on the situation as former WWE employee and current indy star Paul London weighed in on the Hardy’s recent issues in a recent interview and he wasn’t very complimentary of his former co-worker;

“Matt Hardy, he’s definitely one of those guys who’s very phony to his fanbase. I think he tells them what he thinks they want to hear so they continue to kiss his ass. But he’s very much one of those guys who won’t even take his sunglasses off to talk to somebody, like if he ran into a fan at an airport or something like that. It’s disgusting. When the camera’s on you and people are watching, of course they’re going to be fan friendly and ‘I love my fans! Hey!’ and all that stuff. But when it gets down to it, they couldn’t be nastier about their fans and talk nastier about their fans. And it’s not just that goof, but most of those guys.”

You can say what you want to about Paul London and his ability in the ring or his flakiness outside of it, but what he says about that type of person does ring pretty true. The people who say that they are all about their fans are usually the ones that are the most harsh, while the ones that actually take the time to spend with fans signing autographs and taking pictures tend to not make that big a deal out of it. Now again, there’s no telling which category that Hardy fits into, especially with there not being a lot of chances to corroborate London’s story, but given that London’s possibly seen this kind of behavior in the past, there’s very possibly some credibility to the story.

While having little else to do since he was sent home by his employers, Hardy responded in short order to London’s mini-rant with one of his own, again from his Twitter account;

“You know the deal, you know me. When someone becomes obsessed with jealously it’s sad. I kinda feel sorry for the guy, he’s a mess. He’s not important or significant enough to me to even dignify his absurd, delusional comments.”

Now, I’m not even going to get into the fact that by addressing London’s comments, Hardy has contradicted his post that he isn’t going to dignify the comments with his reaction to them. I can’t imagine what London would have to be jealous of when it comes to Hardy as he hasn’t been THAT much more of a success than London was when he was in the WWE, unless you count having a longer term of service with the company. Sure Hardy has won more secondary titles, but those don’t really mean very much and London was one-half of the longest reigning WWE Tag Team Champions (Smackdown version) in the history of those title belts with Brian Kendrick. Either he doesn’t want to get into a pissing match with London because he has other more important things going on, or he’s trying to do a little damage control after someone he once worked with laid a little truth on the world. My guess is that it’s somewhere in between that and that Matt Hardy is one of those kinds of people that Googles himself ceaselessly to see if people are talking about him. Surely there will be more on this story next week, so check back into the Bell to Bell for more info on the latest twists and turns of the saga.

— After missing out on their regular weekly show last week due to not wanting to run head-to-head against the NFL’s Thursday night Kickoff game between Minnesota and New Orleans, TNA is facing a much longer outage of their programming in the United Kingdom. This past week British Sky Broadcasting bought out a package of channels from the Living TV Group, including the Bravo channel that is currently airing TNA Impact. Unfortunately for TNA, the BSB announced that Bravo is too similar to their own Sky1 channel and that they would be shutting down the channel in the very near future. This would leave TNA without their biggest TV presence in the UK and would only leave them with their current deal with BT Vision that carries Impact and TNA PPVs for a fee of roughly 7 pounds or about 10 dollars a month. In a statement from TNA officials, they seemed less surprised by the news than the vast majority as they discussed that there was always the possibility of Bravo being dropped, but that they ultimately remain confident that their ratings will help them find a new home on a different Living TV Group channel.

This is a disaster for TNA, who have had some of their most successful house shows ever while touring the UK and for their sake, they had better hope that they can get onto an equivalent channel or better very quickly or they run the risk of losing their footing in the market at a time that they can ill afford that kind of loss. With their pay-per-view buyrates domestically tanking and house shows here drawing less and less people seemingly every month, TNA needs all of the positive that it can get and their UK business is one of the positives. Unless they can find a way to get their programming back onto one of the larger free channels (compared to the BT Vision premium package deal) TNA could find themselves slipping even further behind the WWE on an international level. Things aren’t completely doom and gloom for TNA, but it seems like there’s more bad news than good news coming out of Orlando as of late, which doesn’t seem like the best way for the company to stay out of financial peril long-term. I’m not one of those that thinks that TNA is months away from death, but this is certainly another nail in building the coffin should things keep going south.

— Big news on the WWE Wellness Policy front as the company made its first major amendment to the policy since it began following the untimely passing of Eddie Guerrero, banning the use of carisprodol (somas), even if the wrestler in question has a prescription for the pills. Somas have long been the painkiller/muscle relaxer of choice for wrestlers and there have been numerous reports of wrestlers passing out or suffering negative side effects from soma overdoses. The drug also led to the overdose that took the life of Louie Spicolli in the late-90’s and is apparently one of the more addictive painkillers out there judging from some of the research I looked through. I think that this is a great move from the WWE as somas look as though they’re one of the more dangerous drugs that wrestlers could be involved in after most of the others were swept up in the initial policy. Part of me is looking at this with a cynical eye as it comes so soon after the death of Lance Cade, who had one of the highest-profile soma overdoses during his first stint with the company, but either way I’m glad that the change is taking place as it hopefully becomes another way for the industry to prevent the drug-related deaths that have become rampant in current and former wrestlers.

— Pro Wrestling Guerrilla will crown a new Heavyweight Champion on October 9th at their Curse of the Guerilla event when 2010 Battle of Los Angeles winner Joey Ryan, Claudio Castagnoli, Chris Hero and Brandon Gatson meet in a four-way battle for the vacant title. Former champ Davey Richards announced that he was vacating the title earlier this week citing the increased amount of time he spends in ROH and Japan as the reason for dropping the belt. Losing Richards as champion is a big blow for PWG as he was arguably the best pure wrestler on their roster, but you have to respect Richards for realizing that he was spreading himself too thin and not giving the promotion that put their belt on him the time that they deserved.

That being said, PWG announced that Ryan will have a safety net of keeping his one-on-one title shot that he earned by winning BOLA if he’s unsuccessful in the four-way bout next month. If that was what they were going to do, why not have Richards vacate the belt prior to the tournament and then make the tournament decide the new champion. Doing this kind of thing with Ryan kind of cheapens his tournament victory a little in my eyes and while I get that this was something that may have come at them out of the blue, they could have handled it a little better. I love that they’re putting all of the semi-finalists into the bout to crown a new champ, but as I said before, they could have easily set this up for the tournament. Stick with the Bell to Bell for more news on the show as it develops.

— Speaking of independent promotions with new champions, congratulations are in order for Roderick Strong, who finally got the monkey off of his back and defeated Tyler Black for the Ring of Honor World Championship in the main event of Glory By Honor IX this past weekend. With Black already on his way out to the WWE, the victory seems somewhat anti-climactic, but it is still a huge accomplishment for Strong, who has a history with Ring of Honor that dates all the way back to 2003. The bout itself was a strong one that did a lot to put over Strong as finally being championship material and with the return of Homicide, the emergence of Christopher Daniels and the news that Davey Richards has decided against retirement to chase after the ROH title, things are looking strong for Ring of Honor in their main event picture for the next few months even with their recent talent losses.

No word on when Strong’s first title defense will come, but it will not be at an upcoming Platinum Championship Wrestling event which had been billing their main event as a triple-title bout between PCW Champion Shane Marx, NWA Champion Adam Pearce and Strong. Ring of Honor has announced that they will allow Strong to work the show, but that they are refusing to sanction the bout as an official Ring of Honor title defense as they want the first defense that Strong makes of the title to be in an ROH ring. It’s believed that the bout was set up prior to Adam Pearce’s removal as booker of Ring of Honor, so that could be where some of the confusion comes from, but you can’t blame Ring of Honor for wanting to have control over the early days of Strong’s title reign as this could be one of the more crucial times in the history of Ring of Honor.

— Things aren’t quite all peaches and cream for the Northeast-based promotion though after last weekend’s event as there were numerous problems with the iPPV broadcast of Glory By Honor including a number of times during the event where the stream was dropped and large portions of matches were missed. It was allegedly one of the more successful iPPV shows since ROH started the concept, but you have to wonder if having these kinds of technical problems could possibly lead people who are on the fence about ordering to decide against it. To the credit of the provider, GoFightLive, they released an apology statement to the fans who ordered the show and explained the problem stemmed from a new piece of equipment that was introduced into the broadcast system. While it’s nice of them to issue the apology and the show has since been archived on their website, you have to wonder about why they would choose that particular time to introduce new hardware when there had been few if any problems with the past streams. At the very least, they could have tested it prior to the live show to ensure that the stream was as stable as it possibly could be. Hopefully this doesn’t put too much of a crimp in the plans for Ring of Honor to do more of the iPPV shows as I have thoroughly enjoyed all of them to this point and am looking forward to seeing many more.

— Sad news again this week as Mike Shaw, best known nationally as Bastion Booger or Norman the Lunatic, but most entertaining during his days in Stampede Wrestling as Makhan Singh, passed away this week at the age of 53. Shaw, who had been mostly outside of the wrestling business in the past ten or fifteen years following the end of his last big runs, suffered a heart attack and succumbed to its effects. Born in Michigan and trained by Killer Kowalski, Shaw began his career in Gene Kiniski’s Vancouver All-Star Wrestling promotion after working some small shots in the Northeast as Klondike Mike, a babyface lumberjack character. Some of my earliest memories of professional wrestling include Shaw as Singh and The Great Gama forming Karachi Vice to take on the likes of Owen Hart, Chris Benoit and all of the other babyface stars in Calgary, so he’ll always hold a special place for me for his work. I was a big fan of Singh and Gama and it’s a shame that Shaw was unable to get past the stage of goofy gimmicks on the national level as he was a truly talented big man in his various stints in the smaller regional promotions. The condolences of myself and the entire 411 family go out to Shaw’s wife and children, his family, friends and fans during this difficult time.

— Touching back on local promotions in my neck of the woods after discussing PWG earlier, NWA Championship Wrestling from Hollywood is set to debut this Friday night with an hour-long special about the history of the National Wrestling Alliance before the official debut of in-ring action from the promotion the week after. The shows are set to air in the Los Angeles-area on KDOC 56, and are going to air in the same timeslot as Friday Night Smackdown, which is set to leave the channel as it heads to its new home on SyFy. Headed by former ROH booker and current NWA World Champion Adam Pearce, the promotion also boasts talent like Joey Ryan, Rocky Romero, TJ Perkins, Scorpio Sky, Colt Cabana, Blue Demon Jr., Claudio Castagnoli and more, it looks like this could be another attempt by the NWA to try to gain some measure of legitimacy nearly two decades after the end of their reign as one of the “Big Three” of professional wrestling. Much like the NWA Wrestling Showcase show that used to run on some obscure network on Dish, I don’t see this working as some sort of large-scale comeback for the NWA, but if they try to run it as a local show with a feel like the old-school territories, this could work. There are a couple of preview clips on the promotion’s website and while the clip features Bryan Danielson, who I’m fairly confident won’t be with the promotion anymore, it looks like a solid piece of business. I’m definitely excited to see the debut show and am looking forward to seeing how the shows turn out each week and possibly even getting out to a taping or two should the opportunity present itself.

— Bizarre news regarding Hulk Hogan’s latest project away from his current work with TNA as he is pitching a reality court show that is tentatively titled “Hogan’s Court” and would see Hulk dishing out justice in disputes between siblings. While that sounds like a recipe for seeing incredible amounts of nasty family business aired out in public, which is always entertaining viewing, the show would actually be geared towards a younger audience between eight and twelve years old. Given that children that age would have little to no idea who Hogan actually is outside of their parents saying “I remember seeing him wrestling when I was a kid, he was awesome”, you have to wonder where the appeal for the youngsters would be here, but given that it’s Hulk Hogan there’s a pretty good chance that this is going to get made at some point. Hey, it can’t be any worse than Scott Baio is 45 and Single, MatRats, or whatever other crap that Eric Bischoff has put out.

— I wish that was the weirdest story I had to report on this week, but it sadly isn’t as Nanette Michelle Stone, a 35-year old woman, was arrested earlier this summer on charges that she attempted to pose as the wife of current WWE agent Fit Finlay and use that connection to attempt to purchase lakefront properties. According to the reports, the scam would have a man known by Stone calling the real estate agent posing as Finlay and stating that he could not attend scheduled meetings due to emergencies. Stone also attempted to make a down payment on one of the properties with a check from an account that was closed in November of 2009. She made her first court appearance this past week and plead guilty to two felony counts of forgery, each of which carry a sentence of eight years in prison. She is scheduled to be sentenced on October 8th and is likely to be remanded to Indiana’s Department of Corrections on that day as well. It just goes to show that sometimes people just snap a little bit and go off of the rails. Whether she did it because she wanted an escape from her day-to-day life or whether it was malicious and she was attempting to pull off a scam based on choosing someone who would not be very well-known is unclear, but there’s definitely some connections that are misfiring for this woman and hopefully she gets the help she needs while paying her debt to society.

Well, that’s it for me this week, folks. As always, Larry will have you covered with the 5 & 1 tomorrow and Randle will get you all set for Raw with his News Experience on Monday. I’ll be back tomorrow with the first look at the new NWA promotion and next week with a brand-new Bell to Bell which will undoubtedly feature more news about Matt Hardy, more news about TNA’s troubled TV situation in the UK and whatever else happens in the next seven days in the world of professional wrestling. In the mean time and in between time, we’ll see you all back here next time for the next all-new edition of the Bell to Bell News Report!

If you’re a fan of MMA, be sure to check out Nokaut.com for more of my work.