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I don't think Batista's contract has expired yet, so it may be several months before he his legally able to join TNA. Yeah, though it's a given that TNA will heavily court him to come to the company ASAP.

What rovert is talking about: Bye bye Batista, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out of WWE

Wasn't he brought back as a favour to Booker T who was training him at the time?

Yeah, they are the mods in the moderated part of the board, but given that Dave and pretty much everyone else mostly posts in the non-moderated part of the board anyway, they might as well get rid of it.

Someone else will need to refresh my memory on the details, but wasn't there some kind of obscure Turner accounting practice which artificially bumped WCW's net revenue up during the boom years? Something like crediting them with being paid money from some other branch of Turner which technically wasn't income, but was counted as such anyway. That's one reason why the 96-98 years were such vastly better financial statements than all the others.Two things changed:1. Early in the Nitro era, Bischoff got TBS and TNT to pay rights fees to WCW for the TV shows. If this had been done before, WCW would have never had a year in the red. 2. Certain wrestlers were being paid by other divisions of Turner Broadcasting for creative accounting reasons, hence the relatively small amount of wrestler contracts that the WWF procured via buying WCW's assets. EDIT: Slickster beat me to it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but surely these practices continued after 1998? It help explains the rapid rise to profitability of WCW under Bischoff, but it doesn't explain their even faster decline.

TNA hilarity from Dave:

Well, Matt Hardy was basically fired for publicly whining about his messy break up with Lita, so it's not like WWE would be above firing Mickie James for going through a messy break up with their top star. I agree that it's not the whole story (WWE management also wouldn't be happy about her country singing career outside of the company either), but it's part of the story and I think deserves to be mentioned.

Fans Threaten To Riot At PPV Due To Mickie James Release

There's more to it than that. Dave Meltzer a few months ago teased that the impromptu move to Smackdown and the whole "Piggy James" ritual humiliation angle was to send her the message to get over John Cena, after they had a messy break up around the time Cena got married.

Good god I hate the IWC's love for Shelton. Wont be able to move for the crying the next few days. Has anyone ever done so much in a match (MITB) and never gotten over one iota extra as a result of it. The Mickie furor is going to be a million times worse. I remember when Molly Holly was released (well, actually she quit) There were multi-page threads everywhere demanding the boycott of WWE. To be fair, WWE's recent treatment of Mickie James has been pretty shabby. Not that it warrants a boycott of WWE or anything though.

Agreed that Eric is trying to bait Dave with that blog post like he's tried to bait Wade over the bisexual angle. Dave's review of Eric's book was late 2006, so it won't be in the online archives. I wouldn't call it a review per se, more of a WCW history series like the history of the WWF series, which like that series fizzled out before we got to the end of the story. What was written was very good, though there would probably be few surprises to a long time subscriber to the Observer.

Eric Bischoff's blog - Who You Gonna Listen To? I still don't really get the heat between Bischoff and Meltzer.

I think Punk will always have some locker room heat because he carries himself with an air of confidence that rubs up important people (certain road agents, Triple H, Undertaker, etc) the wrong way. So yeah, I agree that there's a ceiling to how high he'll get pushed. I think Chris Jericho and Rob Van Dam had the same problem, maybe Booker T too.

Looks like Dave and Bryan got Todd to stay by giving him his own fortnightly guest appearance on Figure Four Daily.

I think what Dave is saying, sek, was that neither was that big of a deal to the CBS executives and if Strikeforce gets cancelled on CBS, then it will be due to the poor rating for the show more than anything else.

I'm not sure Shawn's better than Finlay at getting "others over in the ring". He's certainly good at getting himself over and the match over, but rarely did people come out of a feud with him considerably stronger than they came in. While Finlay at times has been a go to guy to groom green and limited workers for a better spot on the card.

More than just "rumors", Jason Powell has reported that Jim Ross has had a business meeting with the Carters recently. Of course, I don't doubt that's partly a ploy by Ross to get a better deal from WWE. Still, even with word leaking about that meeting I doubt WWE will offer him everything he's looking for (i.e. being their PPV play-by-play man). So I wouldn't write off Ross going to TNA completely, it depends whether he makes the smart long term financial decision to stay with WWE or opts for the short term ego fix that TNA offers.

I think people forget how much doom and gloom there was in late 2004 about the state of WWE business, before they sort of lucked into the red hot Batista babyface turn angle (which to their credit, once they realized that they had something hot on their hands, they ran with the ball and didn't drop it), and they elevated John Cena and followed through on his push despite hardcore fans vocally rebelling against it. Business is much better now than it was in late 2004, but they haven't got anyone on the main roster who has been as well protected as they were AND are as charismatic and have the same look (vitally important for WWE's top decision makers) and ring presence. I suppose as long as Cena stays healthy they should be OK. Without him the company would probably be in pretty rough shape now.

Being able to wrestle a great big dome match is certainly a feather in Shawn's cap that Finlay doesn't have. I don't think it's the end all be all though. Kensuke Sasaki could wrestle a great big dome match with the right opponent too...

Well, unless Ross wants his job.

Coliseum video must have spent the last 15 minutes of their 1993 Year in Review video shilling the songs on that album.

To be fair to Savage and DiBiase, it was a different era and they had different roles than Shawn. Tougher schedule, squash matches predominated TV, much fewer PPVs, they typically had less time, they had to play second fiddle to Hogan so they couldn't show him up too much, etc. Part of the reason Shawn had more MOTYC for the WWE than most other headliners is that he was given more opportunities to steal the show than anyone else.

Dana White blaming Showtime for the CBS brawl and Kevin Iole lapping it up is amusing too!

I'd forgotten about that, but yeah, it was hilarious.

Wrestling fans in missing the point shocker. Simmons isn't running a campaign on cleaning up pro wrestling, he's running a campaign on Linda McMahon being unfit to be the Republican nominee for U.S. Senator of Connecticut due to her sleazy past. Which I think is a valid point to make given that Linda McMahon only started caring about politics when the company she was CEO of was investigated by Congress.