Day: November 4, 2004

2 more cuts to come!

Place your bets! Time is running out! The end is near!

Those of you who had Rico (WWE.com) on your betting sheets, go to the pay window!

I can’t believe we all missed Rico. Probably because he’s useful and they seemed to try with him quite a lot.

What the heck is going on this week? Jazz, Rodney Mack, and Stamboli (WWE) (1 for 3!) are gone. Are they going to have B-Shows after this week? Are they going to introduce nine new people in a week?

I’m sure it has to down with the 90 rollover dates all coming up around the same time (and maybe to get this out of the way before Christmas?), but I don’t remember WWE ever releasing this many people at the same time. And again, I don’t think you’re saving a lot of money getting rid of these three.

I don’t know if it’s a concidence or if Ace just hasn’t gotten to the other roster yet, but that’s 7 RAW guys and 2 SmackDown! guys. (A-Train was a RAW guy. You just don’t remember.)

For RAW wrestling women, we’re now down to

– Lita
– Trish
– Molly
– Victoria

A four person division! (with Stacy and Ivory or Maria on the outskirts.) That’s really not quite worthwhile of a title; if I didn’t think I knew better, I’d say they’re one Molly cut from ditching the division.

Edit: I’m so not updating the roster lists till this week is over.

By a wonderous combination of faulty mapquest directions and a brain on the way to shut down, I arrived about an hour late to Lucha Va Voom. You’d think I’d know my way around Chicago by now.

Between the ROH show (slightly lost), the IWA-MS show (mega lost), and this show (almost in the wrong state lost), I don’t think I can drive to wrestling events alone any more. I don’t think I can drive ANYWHERE I haven’t been alone any more, because I can think of three other times I’ve gotten directions yet gotten really confused and frustrated. Should’ve sprung for GPS in my car.

I was thinking “I should’ve taken the train” until the downpour hit after the show; that’s not quite bus weather. (OTOH, not paying for $20 parking and getting their an hour late might have been worth rain.)

The show, despite getting lost and leaving my camera in the car, was pretty awesome. I’ll have more to say when I know what I missed, but I had the world’s greatest seats – practically on the ring apron. It was seriously so close I could’ve been tagged in, and everytime they hit the ropes, I conciouslly leaned back because they were that close to hitting me. Awesome seats.

I was thinking I was going to get one Exotico match, one minis match, and one Stellar match and as luck turned out, I got there just in time to see all three. (So I’m thinking I missed two undercard matches?) The comedy was funny, the stripping was entertaining and the strippers pulling off moves was cool. I’ll try to be more coherent here later.

JTRON! GERTH! My plan was to try and figure out who you were based on fuzzy recollections of photos before the show – next time I’ll just tell you my seat number and hope you’re smarter than me. Because I’m pretty much a moron.

UNLESS you bought a Rayo mask and went to the bar in between intermission and were showing off your new screen saver on your phone and then I probably should’ve stopped doing double takes of “is that who I think it is?” and shouted “HI, we’ve never met but you may know me!” I need to work on my icebreakers in that vein.

I was the clumsy dude in the Red Sox WE BELIEVE hat. I’m totally on my way to a man of a thousand baseball caps gimmick.

Now what am I going to do with this El Santo mask?

I yelled “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” at my computer when I saw the latest bunch of cuts, by the way. Even if you don’t agree that Gail, Nidia and Chuck are useful, you can laugh and the complete lack of even short term planning going on

– Chuck gets a higher profile match than usual and mic time, a first since jumping to RAW
– Gail attacks Lita to help Trish (you do it with someone else or you do the same as the Shelton/Vis stuff if you know she’s gone on Monday)
– Nidia is going to be on Heat THIS SUNDAY unless they cut things

I don’t know the slightest things about these people, so this is baseless speculation, but I’d guess Chuck shows up in a lot of those legend reunion type shows and gets occasional TNA work, Gail wrestles a bit north of the border and is a recurring name on women-only shows for now, and Nidia only shows up spordically.

They’re not saving a lot of money with these cuts; Palumbo had to be working cheap to be kept around since they could have anyone or no one for his spot, Nidia started with the big Tough Enough contract but had to redo it to be kept around, and you didn’t have to wind up Meltzer much for him to go on about “women wrestlers are getting paid under six digits (before expenses) and are stuck riding four to a car just to break even.”

Maybe you can turn 3 full time cuts in to 5 developmental deals, but I don’t really know (or know which five people you’d give deals to.) I think this is move, as opposed to last cut, is more a deck clearing move to open up spaces for new characters to be booked horribly.

Since everyone’s guessing, I’ll throw out Stamboli, Danny Basham, and the offical release of Linda Miles as the next threesome cut. Though I was guessing Maria takes Ivory’s place based on Monday, so maybe her too?