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The following are several excerpts of this week's PWTorch Newsletter #1111/1112 double-issue. If you've never seen a PWTorch Newsletter, this will give you an idea of how it goes above and beyond typical web content and why we've been a thriving business for more than two decades with thousands of subscribers worldwide!

EXCERPT OF PAGE 2 BUZZ WITH JASON POWELL, a weekly feature packed with news that's stolen by unscrupulous websites within hours. Get the full original version as a PWTorch VIP member:

"Booker T refused to put over Matt Morgan at the TNA television taping last week. The company had been in the midst of contract negotiations with Booker T leading up to the recent tour of Germany, but his behavior overseas and at the television tapings last week appears to have put an end to any serious discussions. Booker, who has been described as a cancer by numerous people within the company for several months, was a headache throughout the TNA tour of Germany. He was especially bad when he received the booking plans for the Impact tapings and found out that he was supposed to put over Matt Morgan clean. Booker threw a fit on the tour bus. He badmouthed the company repeatedly and stated that he could return to WWE at any time. Dixie Carter and Booker had a lengthy meet at the tapings last week and all indications were..."

Page 2 continues with more extensive details on Booker T, plus the Mick Foley controversy behind the scenes with the reshooting of his match after his proposed alternate finish bombed, talk of a multi-time marijuana test failure not being punished, and a lot more insider tidbits you'll find nowhere else (except sometimes stolen and not credited and distorted elsewhere on the web).

EXCERPT OF WADE KELLER'S "END NOTES"

Bruce Mitchell wrote a column for this special double-issue based on a response to a thread about my all-time dream roster in the PWTorch VIP Forum last month. Here's the list I created. As a qualifier, this was off the top of my head and didn't involve looking at a list of all great wrestlers in history. That said, there's not much I'd change about it looking at it six weeks later. I'll list the dream roster here and add comments not in the Forum post while adding a couple wrestlers (italicized). These are listed in random order.

HEAVYWEIGHTS

Jerry Blackwell: A great bump-taking "big man" who sold me tickets with his heel (and later, babyface) promos. A childhood favorite who sticks with me today as someone who proved that a promotion full of top guys with the same bodytype is selling short a lot of potential big drawing wrestlers with unconventional bodytypes that today wouldn't get past Triple H's bullying and snarky comments backstage.

Nick Bockwinkel w/Bobby Heenan: Again, my childhood coming into play here, but students of the industry's history wouldn't argue that this was among the top two or three heel wrestler/manager pairs in history. Bockwinkel's bump-taking and overall selling for babyface opponents was as good as it got in the industry. He'd draw today, and Ted DiBiase Jr. should aspire to have a career and style in the realm of not just his father, but also Nick.

Ric Flair: This is a given for just about any dream roster. The only reason to leave Flair off is if your promotion wouldn't feature promos, would feature only world class lightheavyweight style work, or was based around women or hardcore style.

Steve Austin: The hottest burning superstar in pro wrestling history.

EXCERPT OF FIVE-HOUR "TORCH TALK" WITH ERIC BISCHOFF, of which six pages was published in this week's PWTorch Newsletter:

Keller: Let's look at an isolated decision that didn't necessarily lead to the demise of WCW, but a lot of people point to it as leaving a lot of money on the table, which is the decision to put Hulk Hogan vs. Goldberg on Nitro on three days or four days notice in the Georgia Dome and book the match after most of the tickets had been sold before that match was announced. That was a match that might have set a pay-per-view record. And it never happened again...

Bischoff: And, by the way, and accomplish what? Taking that argument because people like to point at that as a big flaw, I left all this money on the table, an example of what was wrong with WCW. Big frickin' deal. Had we had done that, how would that have changed the outcome of where WCW is today?

Keller: Well, actually, I'm removing it from saying it would have changed the outcome. What I'm saying is isolated as a decision at that moment, how do you justify either then or now or both a one week ratings jump because the ratings went right down the following week. You did get a jump from Goldberg-Hogan, but they went right back down the following week where they had been on average the previous five, ten weeks.

Bischoff: I would say the justification is - and I don't remember exactly what my thinking was at the time, I'm kind of looking back and subjectively or objectively guessing now - a lot of the things I did that many people, including you were initially very critical of, giving away main events on free TV, pay-per-view quality matches on free TV, hot-shotting just for the sake of ratings - all of those things are the things that changed the industry to this day.

Keller: And a lot of them I actually complimented. A lot of them, like you say, sometimes your memory's not just there. I loved it. I thought calling out results ahead of time showed balls and an energy level and a determination that didn't violate any rules in my head. I thought it was fantastic. I was at the bar after Nitro at the Marriott watching you watch the replay and told you I thought it was a fantastic show. I think everybody was in agreement that that first Nitro was better than anyone anticipated. Your brashness as an announcer was heralded as giving Vince McMahon the kick in the ass that he needed to get his stale product going. I mean, there's no doubt, Eric, I criticized you for a lot of things. I doubted that Nitro would work and I certainly wasn't alone on that. You blew us all out of the water with that first Nitro. And you got a lot more credit, in fairness to you, from people you think are your top critics than you remember. I think you'd be surprised at how much credit you got at the time for a lot of the things that worked that were against the grain and against tradition.

Bischoff: All right. Correction is accepted and thank you. Really, thank you. But that's the same formula. The idea that we would pull a card like Hogan and Goldberg out of our back pocket spontaneously, throw it on free TV, when we knew we'd have the 40 or 50 thousand people, we knew that would give us the type of energy that people came to expect out of Nitro. It was a happening show. You didn't know what you were going to get.

BRUCE MITCHELL'S FEATURE COLUMN, which includes 22 of his dream rosters. Readers are challenged to figure out the theme of each roster, the answers to which are provided at the end of the column:

Dream Roster #1:
Hulk Hogan
Roddy Piper
Randy Savage
Earthquake
Typhoon
Paul Orndorff
Ric Flair
Brutus Beefcake
The Nasty Boys
Jimmy Hart
The Iron Sheik
Abdullah The Butcher
Nick Bockwinkle
Antonio Inoki
Bobby Heenan
Gene Okerlund
Andre the Giant
King Kong Bundy
Jesse Ventura
Rocky Balboa
The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase
Yokozuna
The Rock
Tony Atlas
Sgt. Slaughter
The Ultimate Warrior
The Renegade
Kamala
One Man Gang
Big Bubba Rogers

Dream Roster #2:
Loch Ness
Big Daddy Shirley Crabtree
Mighty Wilbur
Dusty Rhodes
Buddy Rose
Happy Humphrey
Haystacks Calhoun
The Great Antonio
One Man Gang
King Kong Bundy
Andre The Giant
Jerry Blackwell
John Tenta
Bill Kazmaier
Earthquake Ferris
Fred Ottman
George "Two Ton" Harris
Big Daddy
Big Daddy V
Rick Link
Billy McGuire
Benny McGuire
Man Mountain Mike
Mt. Fiji
Gorilla Monsoon
Abdullah The Butcher
Plowboy Frazier
Big Show
Kamala
George Cannon

Dream Roster #3:
Ric Flair
Rick Steamboat & Jay Youngblood
Blackjack Mulligan
Roddy Piper
Masked Superstar
Wahoo McDaniel
The Andersons
Jimmy Snuka
Johnny Valentine
Greg Valentine
Sgt Slaughter
Dick Slater
Harley Race
Paul Jones
Johnny Weaver
The Iron Sheik
Rip Hawk
Swede Hanson
The Bolos
John Studd
The Super Destroyer
Don Kernodle
Jack & Jerry Brisco
Nelson Royal
Ray Stevens
Baron Von Raschke
George Scott
Homer O'Dell
The Infernos
Tommy Young



EXCERPT OF WADE KELLER'S "END NOTES"

Bruce Mitchell wrote a column for this special double-issue based on a response to a thread about my all-time dream roster in the PWTorch VIP Forum last month. Here's the list I created. As a qualifier, this was off the top of my head and didn't involve looking at a list of all great wrestlers in history. That said, there's not much I'd change about it looking at it six weeks later. I'll list the dream roster here and add comments not in the Forum post while adding a couple wrestlers (italicized). These are listed in random order.

HEAVYWEIGHTS

Jerry Blackwell: A great bump-taking "big man" who sold me tickets with his heel (and later, babyface) promos. A childhood favorite who sticks with me today as someone who proved that a promotion full of top guys with the same bodytype is selling short a lot of potential big drawing wrestlers with unconventional bodytypes that today wouldn't get past Triple H's bullying and snarky comments backstage.

Nick Bockwinkel w/Bobby Heenan: Again, my childhood coming into play here, but students of the industry's history wouldn't argue that this was among the top two or three heel wrestler/manager pairs in history. Bockwinkel's bump-taking and overall selling for babyface opponents was as good as it got in the industry. He'd draw today, and Ted DiBiase Jr. should aspire to have a career and style in the realm of not just his father, but also Nick.

Ric Flair: This is a given for just about any dream roster. The only reason to leave Flair off is if your promotion wouldn't feature promos, would feature only world class lightheavyweight style work, or was based around women or hardcore style.

Steve Austin: The hottest burning superstar in pro wrestling history.

EXCERPT OF GREG PARKS' FEATURE COLUMN ON THE HULKAMANIA TOUR OF AUSTRALIA:

Next month, Hulk Hogan's "Hulkamania" tour will take hold in Australia, a country known to have many Hogan fans. The tour, currently scheduled for only a handful of dates, is dotted with recognizable names: Rikishi, The Nasty Boys, Brutus Beefcake, Eugene, Val Venis, Heidenreich, The Godfather, and, of course, Ric Flair. This is something Hogan has always threatened to put together when he's not using other companies for leverage in an attempt to get another paycheck from WWE.

Before putting this tour together, Hogan also had talks with TNA about coming in. The presence of Vince Russo on the creative team and TNA's unwillingness to let him go in favor of the short-term bump Hogan may give them probably led to Hogan pursuing other avenues.

Lord knows Hogan needs the money. He's getting over a bitter divorce with his longtime wife Linda that has cost him quite a bit of money, and it's likely that he has put a lot of money into getting his daughter into the music business, a financial risk that hasn't panned out. Hogan knows he can come back to wrestling and make some good money because, while one wonders what kind of ring shape he'd be in, he's still a name that will draw, likely, for the rest of his life. If WWE wasn't biting as far as having interest and TNA wasn't a real option, this was one of the only options he had left, especially if his Celebrity Championship Wrestling doesn't get picked up for a second season.

With only two national companies at this point, Hogan had a lot of prospective talent to choose from, name talent at that. Wrestlers know that Hogan will draw (well, except in Memphis) and a short tour like the Hulkamania one presents a relatively low risk, even for those, like The Godfather, who have left the business behind for the most part.

===

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