From the latest Wrestling Observer Newsletter:
Big Show was supposed to return as a babyface on the 7/22 Raw show, but he was unable to get medically cleared. The segment on TV where The Shield beat down Henry and the Usos made the save was not originally planned. Show was to make the save. Show & Henry vs. The Shield in a 2-on-3 match is scheduled for SummerSlam.
With Raw done for next week as well, besides the Shield match, provided Show is cleared due to his knee injury in time (which was expected, since Show was originally to be back this week), the rest of the card is Lesnar vs. Punk and Cena vs. Bryan for the WWE title as already announced matches. Wyatt vs. Kane and Rhodes vs. Sandow were scheduled but haven’t been announced yet. Ziggler vs. Langston was scheduled and they are still programming in that direction. That leaves at most two spots open, one of which would be Del Rio’s world title defense. They haven’t really locked him in with anyone, so I could see it as a multiple person defense since he’s lost non-title matches to Christian and Orton in recent weeks. In addition, he’s facing RVD on Smackdown taped 7/24 in Corpus Christi, and Sheamus also doesn’t have a spot. So he could face one, some or all of the above.
For those who think Henry may be leaving, he’s actually just signed a new three-year deal.
Saturday Morning Slam will be returning in September for its second season on CW. With the numbers of homes that get cable programming having declined, SMS actually reaches the widest number of potential homes (obviously not actual homes) of any pro wrestling show in the country. They usually tape a few weeks ahead so they’ll probably be going back to the tapings in a couple of weeks. Mick Foley will be back as commissioner working most of the Tuesdays shortly.
John Saboor was in San Jose this past week regarding the area’s bid for WrestleMania 31. He’s going to Dallas next for Cowboys Stadium. The company was very unhappy about the photo from Cowboys Stadium which talked about welcoming John Saboor getting out over the Internet. All the publicity about secrets being leaked made the situation a lot more serious even though we’ve been reporting on this stuff weekly and nobody seemed to care. Now it’s like there’s this feeling people are laughing at them in the outside world and it’s become an issue again. The advantages San Jose and Dallas have are the new stadiums and of the top dozen metropolitan areas in the U.S., only Dallas and the San Francisco Bay Area have never hosted WrestleMania. Plus, San Francisco is one of the biggest tourist cities in the country and they like running tourist cities, like New York, Miami and New Orleans, and they want to run in NFL stadiums. The company also loves running buildings that host or are scheduled to host a Super Bowl, so they can do their worked attendance and claim how WrestleMania drew more fans than the Super Bowl. But Philadelphia is geographically closer to so many major markets (New York, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh), so selling out a stadium would figure to be easier. Another advantage of the San Jose bid is that the technology in Levi’s Stadium, which is currently being built, will be the most advanced. The connectivity in a full stadium with 65,000 people would be better than people’s home Internet.
Regarding Orlando, they are renovating the Florida Citrus Bowl, where the 2008 WrestleMania took place from. The renovation will be completed in early 2015, and 80 percent of the stadium will be new at that point.
Right now, the 2015 Mania decision isn’t coming until September, and that’s the earliest, and won’t be announced for months after that.
The Deadspin story on the person leaking the PPV results the past five months was an embarrassment to the company, more because it was picked up all over the world in different newspapers as well as by The Drudge Report. WWE had obviously been aware of it, and obviously didn’t care, because in the big picture, it really meant nothing. They hadn’t changed any match outcomes at the last minute as they had done in the past, figuring they’ve got the story they are telling and if a tiny percentage of the fans know who is winning before the show starts, it’s really irrelevant when you’re running a business for millions of fans. But now the microscope is on them and they are going to be almost forced to change a finish at the last minute for SummerSlam.
Apparently there is a good chance the person who is the subject of all the media coverage on the leaking of the WWE PPV results may have been discovered based on certain information given to me from someone who is a contact from another sport. Without going into detail, we’ll know for sure if there are no SummerSlam results leaked by the guy because the person in question claimed they would never do it again. The person’s role, however, had nothing to do with late betting odds switches and those were also accurate in predicting results at the end. Whether WWE has been able to find out who the person is, at this point, it looks at this point like they don’t know.
The William Hill agency in the U.K., which is the leading place to bet on wrestling, takes bets as a gimmick to get people interested in betting online. They wouldn’t mind minor losses in wrestling if it creates new regular clients who bet on other sports. However, even with insiders who know the results ahead of time placing bets, because of how quickly they’ve tweaked the odds, they have made a profit on WWE shows. It doesn’t take major amounts of money coming in late to greatly change the lines, which is why Orton and Sandow were such overwhelming favorites to win at MITB the last few days all of a sudden out of nowhere when nobody was betting on them early.
The Brad Maddox/Vickie Guerrero deal where Maddox was the G.M. on Raw and Vickie on Smackdown has been planned out for a few weeks. Not sure why this was done, but they haven’t been happy with the Smackdown ratings over the last month or so.
While this is elementary, there has been a call internally to try and create an African American superstar babyface. The idea is to create him both to attract that demographic and to sell merchandise, similar to the role Mysterio played with the Latin community.