**WWE NETWORK THREAD**

Ric Flair shows a previous interview where Orton was holding Ric's young son David to illustrate how close he thought they were and why he's so furious.

Later, Orton says, "If your kid had a bounty on him, I'd have dropped him on his head too."

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Mid-South has four babyfaces come out (Crusher Darsow, Magnum T.A., Jim Dugan & JYD). Butch Reed will defend his title against one of these guys and wants the audience to pick. JYD narrowly wins the crowd vote over Dugan, but then Reed says he's disqualifying three of those guys (Darsow, Dugan & JYD). Bill Watts says it's only because he dominated Magnum TA last week and knows he can beat him.

Reed defends against Magnum, but they bring out JYD as special referee. JYD basically beats Reed for Magnum. All Magnum does is cover him for the three count. Way to bury a guy you just gave a belt to I'm thinking.

But wait, the burial is not done. To end the show, Dugan and Magnum defend their tag belts against Reed and Jim Neidhart. Reed pins Magnum clean to win the titles.

Magnum came out of this show looking worse than ever, but now holding the territory's top singles belt.

Jumping off the top rope is a disqualification in Mid-South.

Leaping Lanny Poffo makes his debut in late '83. He does a backflip off the top rope as his finishing move, which Bill Watts explains is okay because he's not jumping on his opponent, he's doing a backflip onto him.

It's a really simple anecdote, but I still love hearing about Owen giving the Brain his proper respects before he left the WWF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVQ8Yfoo...

[YOUTUBE]GVQ8YfooU7o
[/YOUTUBE]

There seems to be such a near-unanimity to the praise for who Owen was as a person. It's just a shame that he ****ed up his reaction to that Austin accident so badly, because it's really the only thing I know about him that doesn't reflect well on him.

Made me miss the Brain so much more seeing that. Still one of my great regrets is never meeting him.

Owen was a remarkable family man. Wrestling was a means to an end to build a life for his wife and kids. Had seen some stuff where Owen very clearly could have been a world champion but wasn’t willing to do the above and beyond that would separate him from his family even more.

The Jake/Savage Rivalry on A&E last night was a great watch. One of the all time great wrestling stories.

One of my favorite stories is Randy having Jake make the snake bite himself before biting Randy to prove it was devenomized.

What I didn't know was that Randy got really sick afterwards (104 degree fever according to his brother) and the cobra died.

That story is great. Truly next-level paranoia even by Savage's standards, where he basically thought Jake might be considering murdering him in the ring.

This is incredible.

Jumping off the top rope - forbidden. Flipping off the top rope - that's fine

I wonder if Edge and Christian LARPing as Los Conquistadors to get around a suspension and win the tag titles is a throwback to this story. Hilarious in any case.

The absolute highlight of the Dark Side on Earthquake is Haku being shown the Shockmaster for the first time.

He was 26 when he debuted! Looked at least a dozen years older.

Which also means he was much younger than I realizes when he passed away.

Having Dusty join the nWo was so stupid.

It seems odd to me that Vince must have felt like Ted DiBiase inherently needed a second in his corner. The Virgil pairing was a good one and didn’t take any of Ted’s own mic time up, but when it finally ended, they felt it necessary to put him with Sherri and then with Jimmy Hart. Given how clearly capable he was on the stick, it doesn’t feel like it was all that necessary.

Found this online. Apparently 79 total members over nWO’s life.

I didn’t watch WCW much during this time, but Eric Bischoff becoming the mouthpiece of nWo struck me as the beginning of the end of the stable. After that seems like any hamnegger could join.

Two weeks later, Mid-South strips the title from Nikolai Volkoff (that's right, Magnum had already lost the title) because the Reed/Magnum match was not sanctioned and gives the belt back to Butch Reed.

In the very next segment Butch Reed is to face JYD with a special referee. They're holding a ref's shirt in the ring and Watts says "Let's see who this shirt fits". Dusty Rhodes comes out. The shirt does not fit him. He doesn't even attempt to put it on.

JYD wins the title. 4 different champions within 2 days.

Next match features Jim Neidhart with a tag team partner other than Reed and no tag belt. This show is almost confusing. Not to mention Watts can't seem to pronounce the names of anyone he hires correctly. Neidhart is pronounced Needhart.

I regard adding Bischoff as a pretty defensible move. Prior to that moment, in kayfabe it made no sense that the nWo had the access to run the show in the way that it was. Bischoff having been a double agent forgives a lot of nonsense from a storyline perspective.

The obvious flaw is him being willing to do business after being powerbombed off a stage through a table by Nash, but I suppose there's a reason that Sollozzo felt that he could get the Corleones to do business by killing Vito.

Related to your earlier DiBiase post, have since read that he was the original nWo mouthpiece, but as the angle grew and grew they felt bringing EB in was necessary.

Conrad calls Bischoff out on a lot of this stuff on the podcast, which Bischoff says he would change if he could again. The point was that they really intended on doing a full NWO show at one point each week and needed enough guys on the roster.

The spot where Piper outs Bischoff was particularly confusing too. I had no idea what he was talking about for most of it.

The notion of them needing a mouthpiece is another one that makes little sense to me. You started the group with three very capable talkers in Hogan/Hall/Nash. I mean, it should always be said that when I'm referring to Nash as a "capable talker" that I'm not absolving him of being annoying as all blue ****, but many teenagers thought that this 40-year-old inflicting his midlife crisis on the world was actually a really cool thing, so it was a successful act despite my correct reservations. Even The Giant wasn't really bad on the mic; he just didn't need to say too much.

At some point, promoters get hooked on the idea of just needing to have something be part of the act because it's what they're used to doing. The correct thought process is, "This guy can't talk; let's pair him with a talker. The correct thought process is not, "We have a good non-wrestling talker under contract; let's force him onto the screen."

So there’s a whole series of these Bobby Heenan shoots, each about 3 minutes long. Well worth watching. Some things interesting: The Brain loved Hogan, hated Warrior, considered Vince a genius, thought WCW was useless/incompetent. His reminiscing about Gorilla got me misty eyed.

The running theme was “wrestlers have a duty to one another to be a team and make the business work in ultimate service of folks making a living for themselves.”

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I had always thought that early 80s wrestling consisted of the territories (all under the NWA banner) and the WWF.

After watching what WWE Network has to offer (Mid-Atlantic, Mid-South, WCCW 81-83), I realize my largest misconceptions were the sheer number of territories (I thought there were far fewer) and their connection to the NWA.

I've since read that Mid-South and WCCW had no affiliation with the NWA. While WCCW was more confusing because they brought in the NWA champion to defend their belt every few months and also mention that their matches were sanctioned by the NWA, Bill Watts and Mid-South never even really mention the NWA, though they do frequently mention things happening outside their territory in the world of wrestling. In fact, Watts mentioned and showed more WWF programming than NWA.

Mid-South and WCCW seems to also have some sort of working agreement where they began sharing talent or had several performers appearing on the other program in '83.

There appeared to be two large (pun intended) exceptions to all of this, who would occasionally appear on all the programs and territories in the network in that era, including WWF. Those two traveling special features were

Andre the Giant, who eventually settled into WWF permanently post-83. Sometimes (as in Mid-Atlantic) I believe they used Andre's name just to get their big guys over without ever even showing up on tv.

Dusty Rhodes

I had always thought that Rhodes was a pure NWA guy, but he's shown up in all three territories (least frequently WCCW, which is strange because it's in Texas) and probably most frequently in Mid-South.

As Mid-Atlantic builds up to the first Starcade in November of '83, they've only announced three matches (Race/Flair, Valentine/Piper, Briscos/Steamboat & Youngblood), I'm surprised that Dusty is not on the card in a prominent spot. There was a short promo from him mentioning that he'll be there in a viewing capacity.

Bret gives Hogan-Andre five stars. I think that's a very defensible POV, certainly more than that initial negative-star nonsense from Meltzer. Tough to imagine that almost anyone in the crowd went home dissatisfied with what they got from that match.

Given that Bret is a self-serious guy who got over almost entirely on workrate, I've always found it refreshing that he's really far from being a purist who only judges things based on people who worked near his style.

As a then 9 year old who first experienced WM3 through listening and watching through the scrambled PPV cable channel, I fully support the 5 star rating.