With ESPN airing their E:60 special tonight on NXT, and WWE developmental, we’ll be looking for your notes on how the different sites covered the special. Send your thoughts to les@sheetsandwich.com.
Big race to break news last night on the premium insider wrestling sites.
First, PWInsider ran with a story that Chris Jericho’s big announcement he’s teasing this Wednesday is that he’s returning to the WWE ring in a houseshow only schedule, based on advertising on Boston’s TD Garden site. This was followed about a half hour later by F4Wonline running a similar story.
Second, WWE.com broke the story about Sami Zayn suffering a shoulder injury, and being scheduled for an MRI on Tuesday to assess the damage, which was very swiftly picked up by PWInsider, WrestleZone and WrestlingInc. This was following about an hour later with F4Wonline picking up the story. PWTorch followed 10 minutes after F4W. Zayn had been out previously due to a shoulder injury as well, but only PWInsider mentioned that in their report.
Tuesday News Update
** One of the best segments I’ve ever heard on the Bryan & Vinny Show occurred Sunday night, when the guys called the ROH Code Line, and went down the rabbit hole of calling up a singles line via referral from Kevin Kelly. It’s really a must listen piece, starting with about 17 minutes left to the show.
** Special treat for listeners of the F4Daily Monday episode with Tom Lawlor, one of the new shows replacing the indefinitely hiatused Todd Martin show, Lawlor commemorated the moment by playing homage to Martin and recording the interview in some sort of wind tunnel.
** Funny moment on the show was Lawlor admitting to being obese as a child, leading Alvarez to probe with for more information, asking “were your parents fat, how did you end up getting fat?” to which Lawlor replied sharply, “I ate too much!” Classic.
** Wanted to congratulate the guys over at Wrestling Week (Doc Young, Les Thatcher and Vic Sosa) on ten years of their radio show / podcast.
** Not sure how many times Thatcher has audibly urinated on air over the years, but I can guarantee it’s more than any other wrestling radio or podcast host.
** PW Torch assistant editor James Caldwell, writing about Smackdown, had a complete rundown of the Smackdown ratings from this past Thursday night tumbling 16% vs the week prior. I could tell he was writing about the Smackdown ratings, because he wrote Smackdown a half dozen times in a relatively short report of the Smackdown ratings. Smackdown.
** Interesting to compare Caldwell’s “virtual-time” Raw coverage with Jeff Hamilin’s coverage at F4Wonline. Caldwell seems to be trying to channel the ghost of Christopher Robin Zimmerman and recording nearly every last detail of the show right down to the music cues and time stamps on commercial breaks—only Caldwell does it without CRZ’s trademark razor-sharp wit, which just makes the coverage seem reeeeaaallly long, and fairly sad.
** Wade Keller had his typical Monday VIP Hotline, with his in-depth WWE Raw review. If you’ve never heard them before, they’re mostly skippable because of how impersonal they feel. He basically reads, verbatim, a Raw recap and every once in a while editorializes what he’s written. Really lackluster, jarring experience.
** Really disappointed by Caldwell’s news of Dean Ambrose being added to the WWE World Heavyweight title match at the upcoming Payback event. Just really bare bones statement of him being added to the match, with no perspective or context offered. Would like to have seen some color added around this addition to the main event coming on the heels of Ambrose, at Extreme Rules, picking up his first pay per view win since the Shield split up. Sell the story of why this is a kind of surprising move from WWE.
** Same story over at PWInsider, too. Only, they had the added bonus of typos to make readers feel even more short changed. “So, the new main event (pending additional storyline twists) in Baltimore on 5/17 is Rollins vs. Roman Reigns vs. Dean Ambrose vs. Randy Orton where the first personal to gain a win is the champion.” I’ll ignore the “first personal” part, because typos happen to the best of us… but don’t they mean “first personal to gain a PIN”?
** These people are PAID for this. This is their job.
** WrestleZone’s Nick Paglino must hang on Dave Meltzer’s every word. One of the lead stories on the site is regarding the Undertaker’s WWE Contract Expiring Soon. In it, Paglino cites “the latest edition of Wrestling Observer Radio” when Meltzer made an off hand remark about being under the impression that Undertaker’s contract would be up soon. It then descends into pure speculation about signing a new agreement “above and beyond the standard Legends deal.”
** On the flip side of the above, there are things like this WrestleZone does really well… aggregating, and curating photos and Tweets from in the building in order to provide a look at what happened during the Pat Patterson Appreciation Night in Montreal after Raw went off the air.
