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Flair will still be shopping in Macy's while he's BK. I look forward to: "Sure Flair is homeless and eating dog food. But he's not as bad off as people like to think because he's got millions in retirement funds." John

I could swear that Dave has from Day 1 reported that the WWE testing policy is written so the people *don't* have to be 100% clean: Those that are truly tested (i.e. not including The Performer Known As Mr. McMahon) just need a Valid Reason (i.e. Note From Doctor a/k/a A Plausible Excuse) for What They're Taking while Maintaining The Condition To Perform. So you don't want to test for Coke because it's kind of hard to get a Valid Reason for taking some toots or hitting the crack pipe. But loads of painkillers? Just need that Dr's Note, maintaining the ability to perform at the levels the WWE wants, and not taking so much that the test results go off the charts. Same this with all the exuse people like Benoit had for taking steroids: their body wasn't producing enough testosterone or other similar excuses their Dr could come up with. Of course there's also likely the Unwritten Rules of testing: Thou Shall Not Test Triple H & Shawn Without Lots Of Advanced Warnings So They Can Clean Their Systems Out Or even: Fink Can Piss In The Jar For Trip I mean... no one actually thinks Trip has been tested over the years in the same way that Rey has been, right? Or that Vince ever has been consistently tested? Point: Pretty much everything I've said above has been written explicitly and/or alluded to by Dave over the years. He's usually been pretty onto the WWF/WWE testing over the years going back to the 80s, and pointing out the shortcomings. Then again, perhaps Sek's "press" is aimed at the MSM rather than the Wrestling Press. My response is that I don't think the MSM cares about Vince's testing. For the most part, they don't care about Vince or the WWE. They don't cover it all that much, so it just doesn't rate. I don't think any of us expect anything out of it, other than those who lament over the lack of coverage and respect that wrestling gets from the MSM. I don't think that would include any of is here. John

I suspect he was getting $100K per match for the Aussie tour, between cash and expenses. John

I don't think anyone in the Kiel was making Hulk and Ric's appearance fees of today. Seriously, I don't Terry gets in the ring for less than $100K a match on average these days. And he's probably smart: wanting his money up front, with the exception of Vince's PPV bonuses (which I recall Terry not being happy with the $$$ from at least one of them earlier in the decade). John

3500 paid at full price? No. Not without a tv show behind them booking it well. I'm not sure that Flair Fans in Charlotte want to come out to see Ric get pinned by Hulk. Perhaps some other cites, but I don't think the average would get up above 3500. I also wonder what the cost would be on those shows, and where break even is. Hulk always lards these up with his buddies, who aren't working for free. The Nasties and Jimmy Hart were on this one. Bischoff was involved. Adds up. Could Rock-Austin draw 3500 fully paid in 10 cities with no TV? I'm not sure they would. So as much as we would want to laugh at Hulk, Ric and Eric over such an idea, it's just a really tough business model. John

It's likely that Linda will back off her current abortion position and look for ways to walk down the middle (not to disimilar to how Obama tries to). But she'll drift rightward on it. John

Basically Linda has no positions of her own. She's just adopting the teabagger and far right conservative positions. Seriously... that's a boilerplate level response that I could have written. John

Saw the pic he put up of it... my lord does Ric look bad. --> even from someone who bags on Ric left and right. John

Knowing Ric and Hulk, it will be the same match every night. I think the reason to get a handheld would be if they don't double juice for TV, especially Ric hitting the gusher. John

No doubt. But I suspect if you asked him if he leader more from working in the front office or in his 30+ years prior to that, he'd say the 30+ years prior to that. Anyway, my point above is less "Bill James" than "Jamesian", which is what Theo Epstein is. Having a good ownership group that bought into his approach didn't guarantee that the Red Sox would win. But if he had an ownership group that either didn't believe, or cut his legs off at the first sign of "pressure" from the media or within the club (Grady Little), he flat out would have failed. Being a Jamesian doesn't guarantee success. But Theo and his team in the front office proved once and for all that being an egghead/stathead isn't exclusive from Winning In Baseball. Sam Muschnick wasn't a "wrestling man". He was a reporter. I think we all would say he was pretty successful on the promoting/booking/operating/executive/consensus builder level in pro wrestling. I'm not 100% certain that Dave or Wade *specifically* could have been dropped into 1999 WCW with the full faith and support of TW/Turner/TBS/TNT Executive Management and flat out made it fly. While both saw many of the issues that WCW faced at the time, I don't know if they had the vision to get WCW to the otherside of darkness. No doubt they had a vision at the time of how they would have turned things around. Just not sold that it would have been effective. That's also not to say that I had the vision to pull it off, or that Wade/Dave couldn't have. But I suspect that if we set up 10 groups of 5 hardcore fans at the time to figure out the way through it, and Corporate was fully committed to WCW surviving and giving a committment to giving New Management a long term period to fix things, that at least one of those 10 proposals would strike us here as, "Yeah... that would have worked" and infact would have worked. Probably the same thing could be done with the WWE right now. The backstop to it is always: Vince is fucking insane and never will commit to someone else's vision. I think that people inside the business like to project mystical qualities to the "inside". I think what we've seen over the last 20 years of greater analysis of the "business" of wrestling is that people *inside* the busienss don't really have a good feel for the business aspect of wrestling. How do we know this? A. In 1982, how many wrestling promotions in the country were doing good, profitable and/or reasonably decent business? B. In 2009, what's the number? C. Of those companies in 2009 that are doing reasonably well, how many of them have been utterly and completely fucking stupid at times in this history? A > B C = 100% of the promotions that matter As brilliant as Vince as, he's been a fucking moron many times from a *business* standpoint. John

I really look forward to getting a copy of the show that's being taped. Could be a load of Bad Fun. John

We use to here the same thing tossed at Bill James: it's easy to write books, but Real Baseball was different. We've seen that Jamesians can win in Real Baseball. World Titles. A pair of them. The first problem for a Super Booking Genius hardcore fan to overcome would be a commitment from the Owner. It's vastly more important than the egos of the "talent". If you don't have the full committment of the Owner to the direction you want to go in, then it's not going to work. John

The rant is really long. Of course it's Evil Hulk, so it's important to point out where he's full of shit. In contrast, Our Hero Ric got a nice free pass on his book... and Terry got kid gloves as well. Hulk's bullshit deserves to be pointed out, but a little consistant treatment with the Heros would be nice. John

No tennant. 127 acres is of value, but you have to pay to detroy the current building and clean up the land (i.e. the parking lots, building relating piping, etc.). Then have capital to build on it, at a time when the CRE Loan business is blow up. Then have someone ready to move in, at a time when the MI economy is in the tank and there is existing CRE inventory out there to grab if one wanted it (and will be even more as vacancies increase). Mix in property taxes. One gets the feeling that the "$20M offer" from the prior year wasn't $20M cash at the date of purchase with no other strings attached. The city at this point was literally giving the property away to get it off their books, which gives one a good idea that prior potential buyers were looking for a lot of give backs for whatever they were willing to cough up to "pay" for the land. John

I thought the liver transplant was due to Vince Sr. not letting him turn babyface with the title to become the Stone Cold Superstar with a longer run. John

SuperChico.com linking to Youtube of the clip: http://www.f4wonline.com/content/view/11375 Funny stuff. Ric barely hits him on the first one, and Hogan sells his ass off for it. Jesus does Flair look old. John

That's a lot of complications from Mono. John

Nature Boy Coture vs Brock Von Lesnar

BTW... does anyone having an idea why Yahoo's UFC page has nothing on this since Saturday? TMZ had a piece this morning that's getting quoted all over the place: http://www.tmz.com/2009/11/15/brock-lesnar-ufc-illness-sick The MSM is on it: Minneapolis Star Tribune http://www.startribune.com/yourvoices/70209672.html Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/sports/article/7264...ry-manager-says And others. Strange. They get tons of MMA/UFC hits/traffic to the point of being proud about it. Kind of a big story. John

Dave (or Chico) ran a teaser for the audio show that some other former WWE person was visiting UFC. Anyword on who that was? Don't really want to listen through the whole show to find that. John

Brock appears to be in a bad, career threatening way beyond the original mono: http://www.f4wonline.com/content/view/11346 Major surgery adds a new thing to the mix. The earlier nature of the comments made me think it might be something along the lines of Hepatitis (since cancer and HIV were denied by Dana). Major intestinal disorder and surgery... doesn't sound like Hep at this stage. Not how one would describe kidney failure either, which would be something that's career threatening. I'm less knowledgeable about intestinal issues than kidney and liver. Anyone know what the possibilities of what this is sounding like that could be career threatening? John

That's entirely possible. Not sure how much of that was Shane or other people. As in how much of it was Shane going over to cut deals, or something the staff did under his group. Growth on Int'l TV Rights weren't any better under Shane than they had been prior to him getting put in chage of Global Media. PPV is trickier to track, and it's again a question of how much of that is Shane. Wouldn't disagree with that. It's just difficult to see why Zuffa would worry about a Shane investment when it's a drop in the bucket of the value of the company, and the Brothers needs with respect to Station if it comes to that. It's akin to giving Shane a vanity investment in Zuffa. The reality is that they could get higher rollers to buy vanity pieces, and ones that are likely quite a bit dumber than Shane is when it comes to investing. Nick Cage could have been an easy mark. John

I think we bounced around before the notion of Shane "investing" in UFC. I don't think he has the personal wealth to make much of a dent in buying into the business. Shane only owned 43,407 share of Class A common shares back in July, with an additional 90K or so in options. That's not a ton of $$$. He also has 1,862,733 share of Class B shares which are tied up in a Trust. The current value of that is about $29M, which isn't chump change. But it's also likely not easy to extract from the trust. But more than that, how much of Zuffa does anyone think $29M buys? The market cap of the WWE is $1.15B. I'm not going to say Zuffa is worth as much as the WWE. But $500M relative to some other "sports" franchises that are out there? Even factoring in Shane's salary and dividends and years of making money off the WWE, let's say he has $20M liquid and net that he could put together to invest into UFC. What's in it for Shane to buy 4% of Zuffa even if we value it at $500M? What's in it for Fertittas? If the Fertittas are in financial straights because of Station Casinos (which are kind of hosed at the moment), then they might be looking for big cash. $20M is chump change compared to their needs: Station was carrying a $6.5B debt load when filing BK earlier in the year. They also seem to have smartly put Zuffa in its own silo outside of Station, so the BK issues of Station don't really impact Zuffa. It's just a matter of how much Station's issues impact the Fertittas and their need to cash out what is a valuable asset. Perhaps Shane brings along a lot of investors *other* than his own $$$. But at this point, do any of us really think the Fertittas need Shane McMahon to line up high rollers to invest in Zuffa? Doesn't seem likely. Also doesn't seem likely that they need Shane do get a TV deal. I don't think Shane's rep over the years has been as the guy who made the deal to jump to Viacom, and then jump back to USA. John

Who said that's the "why" he left. I was only responding to the comment that Shane was the sane one in the family. Since we all seem to agree than Linda's campaign is a delusional egofuck, what does it say about Shane's sanity if among the things he's doing since leaving is helping Mom? Perhaps one can write it off as being loyal to his Mom. John

One can work for Mom's Campaign while also visiting UFC HQ. It's not like Mom's Campaign is in the mode of one that's a month out of primary day. The primary is August 10, 2010. John