For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Guest Booker DVD series is an idea from KayfabeCommentaries.com where a famous wrestling booker is given the task of booking a promotion or territory form a particular point in time with the idea that things didn’t go exactly as they did in real life and this is their chance to show us what they would have done were they the booker at the time. The first DVD featured Kevin Sullivan booking the WWF from the beginning of 1984 but without Hulk Hogan, who, for whatever reason, never made the big jump from the AWA. It’s a very interesting DVD, and while some of Sullivan’s ideas seem a little out of place, it still gives a lot of insight into the mechanics of booking and you still learn a lot of things about the art of booking that you probably won’t learn anywhere else.
With the concept explained, I shall set out the premise for this version of ‘Guest Booker’;
In late 1989, the NWA and Ric Flair were making a play to bring Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard back to the company, but there was also talk of other names being courted to jump to the NWA, specifically Ted DiBiase, Curt Hennig, Bret Hart, The Rockers, Roddy Piper and Randy Savage. Of course, we know that the only name of all of those to jump was Arn Anderson; Blanchard would have jumped back too but Jim Herd withdrew his contract offer when Blanchard failed a drug test for cocaine, which coincided with his decision to leave the WWF.
But what if Tully and Arn had returned together? And what if those other big names had made the history altering decision to jump to the NWA as well? How would things have changed?
Well, this is where Guest Booker comes in, and I book the NWA in the 18-month period from August of 1989 to the end of 1990.
There will be six sections to this piece:
The NWA World Heavyweight title
The US Heavyweight title
The World Tag Team tiles
The US Tag Team titles
The World TV title
New Arrivals
Hopefully this will inspire some intelligent debate about booking, and give us something to talk about.
I've been watching a Ted DiBiase compilation, covering his time in WWE, and the one thing that stuck out for me is that it became clear how Ted managed to wear his neck out to the point he suffered the herniated disc in 1993 that ended his career. In all of his matches with Randy Savage, when Savage would snap his throat across the top rope, Ted would take the resulting bump by falling backwards and then arching up using his shoulders and forcing himself to roll backwards, with all the weight going on his neck. He'd do that at least once or twice a match with Savage, and considering the run they had he had to be doing that an awful lot in 1988. And it's not just in that spot in the Savage matches that Ted takes the bump; whenever he goes for his missed reverse elbow off the second rope, where he faces away from ring, he takes that same bump when he lands. It doesn't look like a dangerous bump, and it looks very ordinary today, but watching those matches and knowing that Ted was doing that night after night for six years, and what the end result was, it makes you wince a little every time he takes that bump.
I know wrestlers gain career ending injuries from all sorts of bumps, some more crazier than others, but this was an ordinary looking bump that Ted did almost every night of the year. It makes it a little different, the bump being an ordinary one that he took nightly, rather than a crazy one he did once in his life.
