Your Daily Source to Wrestling News
While appearing on Busted Open Radio, Jim Ross confirmed that he will be doing the play-by-play commentary for the upcoming WWE Women’s tournament which will take place this summer.
.@JRsBBQ confirms on @BustedOpenRadio he will be calling the WWE Women’s Tournament this summer on the WWE Network! pic.twitter.com/316uktvFza
— SiriusXM Busted Open (@BustedOpenRadio) May 19, 2017
This Sunday, Backlash will grace our screens. Many bemoaned the event’s lackluster build-up. Jinder Mahal is challenging for the WWE Championship. The women’s division is caught in a six-man tag team match that doesn’t look too promising. Many would even say that Smackdown has lost its groove. While it may be true, Backlash still looks exciting. Hopefully the event sets in motion a return to action and excellence for the blue brand. Even if it doesn’t, it looks like it will be hard to be disappointed with Backlash.
This doesn’t sound too exciting, I know. Erick Rowan’s wrestling skills are quite pedestrian. It’s hard to imagine him having a match on pay-per-view. Yet here he is. The reason this match has a lot of promise, though, is because of Rowan’s opponent, Luke Harper.
Harper was on a roll on the Road to Wrestlemania. For a while, it seemed like he would be added to the WWE Championship match between Bray Wyatt and Randy Orton. He wasn’t, but fans were behind the big man, and it wasn’t hard to see why. He had an organic face turn in a well-crafted story (that bombed in the end, but it was good for a while), and he is a skilled athlete. He’s tall and heavy, but he can perform frankensteiners and suicide dives as if he was significantly lighter. He was given time to develop his character, and the fans loved it. Combine all of this with Erick Rowan’s unsettling Talking Smack promo, an you have a match with a surprising amount of potential.
Rowan is the potential perfect counterpart for Harper. Harper will shine in this match, which is what many of us want to see. Hopefully their styles can mesh well and they can deliver a good match.
People often talk about Cesaro or Sami Zayn being underutilized. They may be, but at least they appear on TV regularly. Not Breezango, though. Last month, many people even forgot they existed. Fandango has been on the roster for almost a decade. How many Fandango matches can you name?
Both Tyler Breeze and Fandango are criminally underrated performers. Wrestlers like Dolph Ziggler have praised Breeze’s skill. He was part of a 5-star match, for goodness’ sake. As for Fandango, he’s not even bad in the ring. He’s more than capable of having good matches. Together both men work well, and their charisma and charm works well. They’re also quite funny, and it’s nice to see them getting such a high-profile match.
However, standing in their way is the Usos. Many people didn’t like them, but the Usos are quite skilled at this whole “wrestling” thing. Look back at their matches with American Alpha over the Tag Team Championship. Those were TV matches, but by god they felt like PPV quality matches. It’s insane.
The two teams had an exciting contest last year on the Battleground pre-show, so there’s no reason for them not to have another good match.
Eric Bischoff is joined on today’s show by his co-host Nick Hausman.
Bischoff opens today’s show speaking about the tweets sent out by Rip Rogers and Randy Orton last weekend. He says that for the most part, he agrees with the points made by both men. He says that he has always liked Orton and he has a lot of respect for Orton personally and professionally.
On the other hand, for as long as Bischoff can remember, veteran performers have had an issue with the young wave of performers that were making their way into the business.
When he was working in WCW, veteran performers in their late 30s and 40s at that time were complaining about guys like Chirs Jericho and Rey Mysterio Jr., because those guys were bringing a new element to the wrestling business and it was different compared to what the veteran performers were accustomed to. Bischoff says that this cycle appears to repeat itself in 5-7 year cycles.
There was some drama today on Twitter after Lana liked the following tweets made by former WWE Diva Melina:
Fans saw Lana liking these tweets and took it as her dissing Sasha Banks. Lana sent out the following tweet in regards to the backlash from fans:
Sasha then sent out the following tweet in response to Lana:
Sasha, Summer Rae and their friends then started using the “#BL2017” hashtag, which means “Block Lana 2017” after Lana tweeted on how she would block anyone who left negative comments for her:
WWE posted a gallery of unseen photos from various shoots by WWE Superstars. Finn Balor shared the photo below on Twitter teasing a possible Bullet Club reunion with Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson.
Imagine …. @KarlAndersonWWE @LukeGallowsWWE pic.twitter.com/Azl6FEwe4b
— Finn Bálor (@FinnBalor) May 18, 2017
Erick Rowan posted a cryptic photo of a female wearing a trademark Wyatt Family mask. This has led to online speculation that that individual pictured could possibly be the long teased Sister Abigail character that Bray Wyatt is always talking about in his promos.
As of this writing, we haven’t heard of any plans for WWE to have a Sister Abigail character, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there won’t be plans in the future. We will keep you posted if we hear anything.
Jericho welcomes Jinder Mahal to the show.
Jericho mentions that Mahal appeared to come out of nowhere to become the new number one contender for the WWE Championship. He says he was told the day before winning the 6-pack challenge on Smackdown Live that he was going to become the number one contender. Concerning his run as an enhancement talent prior to this, Vince McMahon told him that WWE’s audience has a short memory and Mahal says, “I guess we’ll all find out about that”.
Mahal says he got pretty down on himself emotionally after being released from WWE a couple of years ago. He was drinking a lot and his weight ballooned to 260 lbs. He realized that he needed to change his lifestyle, so he began dieting and getting into shape, and soon enough WWE came calling. He says that Impact Wrestling actually called him about coming to work for them as well, but he chose to come back to WWE.
He says that during those two years he was very negative and was working the indie scene and just didn’t care. As soon as he started to care about himself and his wrestling again, everything changed and opportunities started to arise again. He says he’s remaining very positive now, and he keeps a daily planner of his goals. One of his goals is to have the best body in WWE, and another is to win the WWE Championship.
Summer Rae has been out of action since August after suffering an injury and is finally ready to return to action.
Dave Meltzer reported on today’s installment of Wrestling Observer Radio that Summer is ready to return and was backstage at television last week. It’s being said that the reason she hasn’t returned on television is because the company needs to find a spot to place her.
The feeling is right now that both RAW and SmackDown have enough active females so they need to find a place to write her in on television. It’s unknown which brand she will end up on. We will keep you updated.
Dave Metlzer discussed Paige’s status with WWE following her suspension and neck injury on today’s installment of Wrestling Observer Radio.
Meltzer mentioned that she is still under contract with the company and is still recovering from her recent neck surgery. He noted that she would not be used again if not for the WWE Studios production, Fighting With My Family.
Meltzer did not indicate exactly when the company plans to bring her back. If we hear anything new, we will keep you updated.
Russo opens today’s show speaking about the notion that WWE’s stockholders wouldn’t want WWE to return to attitude era-like programming. WWE consistently uses the excuse that they’re a publicly traded company now, so they can’t produce that type of programming. Russo doesn’t understand that at all, because wouldn’t their stockholders want WWE to produce whatever type of programming that makes them the most money?
Russo says that he’s bored with all the political correctness on WWE’s programming today, and he wonders what happened to all the sexiness. It’s not like they were showing women strip naked during the attitude era, they just embraced their beautiful female roster. He doesn’t understand why WWE can’t continue to do that type of thing today.
Russo says that everything old is new again, and some of the biggest sitcoms from the 90s are making a return such as Full House and Rosanne. The attitude era is 20 years old now, and he knows for a fact that there are a lot of fans who enjoyed that era. He has heard from numerous fans that they only subscribe to the WWE Network to watch the old attitude era programming.
