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Originally Posted by Observer A stipulation has been added to Zack Sabre Jr. and YOSHI-HASHI's match at Kizuna Road next week. Sabre is set to defend his Revolution Pro Wrestling British Heavyweight Championship against YOSHI-HASHI at NJPW's Kizuna Road show in Sendai next Tuesday (June 25). After a challenge that was issued by YOSHI-HASHI, Sabre's spot in this year's G1 Climax will also be on the line as part of the match.

Originally Posted by PWI All-time great wrestler "Beautiful" Bobby Eaton of The Midnight Express has been hospitalized since last Friday with cardiac issues. Eaton woke up that morning with his legs and other parts of his body swollen, so he went to the emergency room and has been hospitalized since then. Eaton's long-time friend Jim Cornette took to Twitter to correct reports Eaton had suffered a heart attack, noting instead that congestive heart failure led to fluid buildup in Eaton's chest, legs and other parts of the body, forcing Eaton's heart to have to pump harder to make up the difference. Eaton is being treated with new medications and diuretics. Cornette noted that Eaton's heart rate is down and that his Pacemaker is working fine and that the situation is improving.

Originally Posted by Observer The 1986 Crockett Cup is now available on the WWE Network. WWE added the tournament as part of this week’s Hidden Gems content. It features over four hours of footage, including the tournament itself which was eventually won by the Road Warriors. It also has two non-tournament matches including Jim Duggan vs. Dick Slater for the UWF North American title and Ric Flair vs. Dusty Rhodes for the NWA World Heavyweight title. This was the first of three Crockett Cup events that were held in the 1980s, with the second and third being held in 1987 and 1988. The Super Powers (Nikita Koloff and Dusty Rhodes) and the team of Sting and Lex Luger won the tournament in the following years before being abandoned in 1989.

Originally Posted by Fightful The Wrestling Observer reports that Rusev recently asked for time off, which is why he hasn't been on television or live events as of late.

Originally Posted by Fightful Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer says AEW is in talks with a Canadian broadcast partner.

Originally Posted by Fightful The Wild Card Rule was extra wild this week as eight SmackDown superstars were on Raw and seven Raw superstars were on SmackDown. When the Wild Card rule was first implemented, it was stated that only four superstars would be allowed on the other brand, and any uninvited guest would face repercussions. Thus far, no superstar has been reprimanded for showing up on the competing brand without an invitation. Speaking to Sporting News, Kevin Owens gave his thoughts on the Wild Card Rule. "I guess the whole point of the wild-card rule is to add a sense of unpredictability to all the shows and I guess it definitely has achieved that because you never know who is going to show up where," said Owens. "The wild-card rule itself was very loosely defined when it was first announced and it's been loosely enforced since it's been announced (laughs). I guess it was supposed to be four guys at first and now, really, 10 guys show up one night, three guys show up the next night, whatever. But like I said, I think the whole point is to give a more unpredictable feel to the show itself and its definitely achieved that."

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter AAA ran one of its major events of the year, Verano de Escandalo, on 6/16 in Merida at the Poliforuma Zamma, before almost 6,000 fans. There were about 14,000 Spanish language viewers and 7,000 English language at the peak on Twitch, which was during the Young Bucks match. It should be noted that Hugo Savinovich, who does the Spanish broadcasts, is tremendous. Even if you don’t know Spanish, he gets the excitement over to where it’s worth listening to. Of course if you’re a newcomer, the issue with the Spanish, like with the Japanese announcers, is if you don’t know the language, they can’t help you with storylines, match story and other issues. Still, when TripleMania comes, the Spanish broadcast is still the option to take. There were some technical issues early, including video packages with no audio, bad crowd micing, entrance and ring mic issues. The show is the final major before TripleMania, so the key issue in the main event was building interest in the Blue Demon Jr. vs. Dr. Wagner Jr. mask vs. hair match which takes place on 8/3 at Arena Ciudad in Mexico City. Cain Velasquez makes his pro wrestling debut on that show. They are working on a major international match for this show involving AEW talent. AEW talent will not be appearing on the AAA shows on 9/15 in Madison Square Garden or 10/13 at the Forum in Los Angeles. The latter show was just announced this week. The funny thing is AAA held a press conference to announce the Los Angeles show on 6/19, but kept the press conference secret. Think about that for a second. The Los Angeles date goes head-to-head with a WWE show in Anaheim.

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Tickets aren’t on sale to the public yet, but fan club tickets to the Tokyo Dome shows on 1/4 and 1/5 had a ridiculous demand. There was a fan club lottery this week to get first tickets and people who were in the lottery noted to us that “nobody” even got floor seats for either show. Last the demand was high for great seats, but fan club members all could at least get the floor if they wanted it. Most people who wanted the floor ended up only getting the lower deck of the stadium. One ticket outlet with fan club memberships noted that for this to happen, the orders had to be up conservatively ten times the fan club ticket demand of last year. .. Kota Ibushi was back in action for the start of the new tour on 6/14 in Numazu. Aside from a black eye from the head-butt, there were no signs of anything different from usual. He’s been working the multiple-person matches so he can play it safe until G-1

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Davey Boy Smith Jr., quit the promotion. He hasn’t been happy for some time. There were more a lot of small issues and frustration about not being used as well as things that build up from the past. There were issues because on the night before WrestleMania, he wanted to go to the WWE Hall of Fame because they were inducting Jim Neidhart, who is part of his family, as well as Bret Hart a second time. New Japan was running MSG and he kept asking whether he’s booked on the show so he could make plans either to do the Hall of Fame or not. Even as late as two weeks before the show he couldn’t get an answer. He also told them he’d rather go to the Hall of Fame for family reasons than be an afterthought on the show or used in a meaningless way. He ended up working multiple shows in the New York area that week but not the MSG show. New Japan let him work the Dynamite Kid tribute show that Satoru Sayama and Hisashi Shinma put on but there’s heat between Massao Hattori and Shinma. Several months back, Smith had pitched an idea of he and Lance Archer doing a tribute to Dynamite on a New Japan show where he’d score a pin after a Dynamite Kid style diving head-butt. Gedo turned him down and told him he was too big to do that move and instead wanted to do the angle where stallionie T would go nuts and get DQ’d for a chair shot. The idea is that they wanted to turn stallionie into a wrestler who at times would just snap, basing it off the Ken Shamrock WWF character. Of course that fell apart when stallionie and Barreta didn’t sign new deals and instead signed with AEW. He had also asked for New Japan’s permission to work Impact and didn’t get permission. He asked what the problem was and they said “Fucking Jeff Jarrett and TNA,” and were still mad about how Okada was booked. Smith told them that Jarrett was long gone, and that he was going get a big push. The people at Impact were very high on him. New Japan told him he couldn’t go. Somehow this turned into a miscommunication because when Lance Archer asked about them getting more dates this year, or that the team would be focused on more, the office told him they thought Smith was going to Impact. Except they had just told him he couldn’t do so. The office said that’s what Gedo told them. He ended up signing with MLW where he’s supposed to be put in a title program with Tom Lawlor, although MLW knew that New Japan had first dibs on his dates. There were reports he was going to ROH, but that’s not the case. He’s working MLW. With him no longer working New Japan, that could, like what happened with Michael Elgin, open up the door for Impact, although we’re told there has been no recent discussions with him with that promotion. Impact did have big plans for him originally.

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter PWG announced its 7/26 show at the Globe Theater in Los Angeles. Tickets will go on sale this week. What’s notable is that there is a ton of AEW talent on the show. The show features Flip Gordon vs. Trey Miguel, The Dark Order (formerly Super Smash Brothers) vs. Trent Baretta & stallionie T (a match coming directly off the AEW PPV angle), MJF vs. Darby Allin, Puma King & Laredo Kid & Black Taurus vs. Flamita & Bandido & Rey Horus (a genuine top flight Lucha Libre trios match), Jungle Boy vs. Joey Janela, David Starr vs. Brody King and Dezmond Xavier & Zachary Wentz defend the PWG tag titles against LAX in a ladder match. Eight of the wrestlers on this show are under AEW contract. Right now no decision has been made regarding whether they will be able to continue working PWG once television starts. The contracted talent won’t be allowed to work elsewhere, aside from Chris Jericho, Kenny Omega and Jon Moxley, who can work in Japan. For whatever reason, basically that PWG has a certain rep that elevates talent by being part of the shows, nobody except WWE bans its talent from PWG. Even ROH, whose full-time contracted talent can’t work anywhere else in the U.S., PWG is the exception. AEW hasn’t made a decision on this subject

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Sami Callihan is done with MLW ... However, according to MLW, Callihan did $2,700 in damages to the building in Waukesha, WI, where the match took place. Bauer said he broke a new $15,000 bleacher and other property at the venue, dinged a garage door pretty bad, and the company had to pay $2,700. He said that Callihan was legitimately fired over that. Callihan also spit in Jim Cornette’s face during the show. Everyone has a different story about this. One story is that it was an angle because they believed people would believe in heat between the two since Cornette went nuts on his podcast months ago on Callihan because of the angle that went awry where Callihan hit Eddie Edwards with a baseball bat. At least some if not all of what happened between the two of them dating back to April was meant as an insider angle, which is why it all aired on television because it if wasn’t, it would have ended immediately and would have been edited off television. Another version is that the spit thing wasn’t edited off but wasn’t planned either, but after, by playing up the Sonny Kiss thing, they thought he was shooting his own angle, played it off inside the company as a work nobody would overreact to it, and had talked to Cornette about using their internet heat to their advantage. But at this point everyone concedes whatever work they were doing turned into a shoot and right now the heat is real, because Callihan really believes Cornette got him fired and Cornette will always react to people trying to run him down publicly ... It was noted by one person that Cornette went backstage to check on Callihan after the match with Warner and they hugged but as far as what Cornette was really thinking only he knows. People who were around Cornette said he was fine, never brought up or acted mad about being spit on to anyone after, and the belief is that if he thought it was legit, he’d have reacted completely differently. Another person backstage said that as far as he knows, the spitting was a shoot, but Cornette brushed it off backstage and laughed about it, saying he thought it was good heat and smart for Callihan to do it. There were definitely people expecting Cornette to react differently and they had Davey Boy Smith Jr. and Low Ki there after the commotion to break it up if there were any problems, but there were no problems at all. Callihan was really mad when he got to the back after the match according to one person there.

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter WWE had expressed interest in Fatu. Everyone believes he’s going to be a superstar and both AEW and WWE are aware of it

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Here’s an interesting trivia note. In the history of U.S. and Canadian pro wrestling, there have only been two shows that weren’t main roster WWE events that have done $1 million live gates. And the two events came on consecutive days just miles apart, which were the NXT show at the Barclays Center on 4/5 (which is actually WWE but not main roster) and the NJPW/ROH show in Madison Square Garden the next day. WCW hit $900,000 but never cracked $1 million

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Because Juice Robinson is moving to Japan, he not scheduled for any future ROH shows. They are hopeful of bringing him fall in the fall but if he’s living in Japan, he’ll probably do every tour going forward in Japan. He told ROH officials he was very upset about reports that he didn’t like working there

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter There’s been a lot of talk regarding Rush when his contract expires here at the end of the year. The two key points are that Andrade, who was not happy in NXT and WWE for a long time when not being used, is happy now, has a good relationship with Charlotte Flair, is getting a push and making money. So the attitude of being negative to his good friend about coming has changed. WWE has obviously wanted Rush for some time, but the second issue is he’s still under contract to CMLL until early 2021

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Regarding AEW television, the date is still not finalized but we were told it is 100 percent it will be either Tuesday or Wednesday nights, which everyone pretty much knew but was never said officially. Right now Wednesday is in the lead but the reason nothing is said is that there are a lot of decisions on the TNT side that still have to be made. International TV deals can’t be finalized until TNT makes those decisions so that’s where all of that stands

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Regarding why Hikaru Shida isn’t on Fyter Fest, she is touring Japan and the date was in the middle of her final tour before moving to the U.S. Riho is also finishing up soon in Japan and moving to the U.S

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter WWE sent out a marketing study regarding future WrestleManias. They were asking people who have traveled to WrestleMania in the past who are in their data base what cities they were most interested in going to, as well as how much money they estimate they spend in merchandise, transportation and tickets. The cities they listed as under consideration for future WrestleManias were London (notable that the city is under consideration), Chicago, Jacksonville, Las Vegas (those three cities listed in a row are interesting, if it was just Chicago and Las Vegas you wouldn’t think twice but a number of people who got the survey immediately saw Jacksonville lumped in and saw the unique coincidence), Santa Clara, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Toronto, Miami, Orlando and Tampa. Tampa on the list is weird because they are going there next year and one would think you wouldn’t be thinking about going back for many years to come.

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter Regarding the WWE move to FOX, while I know a lot of people are using the current Smackdown ratings and feeling it will bomb as a network property and be moved to FS 1, and while nothing is impossible, FOX does not see it that way. FOX noted the value of a show is a combination of it value in retransmission rights (how much they can get carriers to pay for the station based on the product) and value to advertisers. Wrestling has virtually no value, in the sense nobody is paying more money to buy transmission rights to FOX stations because WWE is on the station. Their belief is they can get the ad rates up for wrestling based on the size of the audience and that wrestling still gets low CPMs (basically ad revenue based on size of audience) and that they can grow it. Another key is that wrestling is 52 weeks a year. While FOX’s fall lineup this past year will likely beat what Smackdown will do on Friday nights, that’s first run programming. The last few weeks with rerun programming, FOX has done numbers far lower than what Smackdown would do. On 6/14, FOX ran the U.S. Open golf tournament and did 2,601,000 viewers. But that’s a one-off. FOX feels wrestling will top that, but even if wrestling doubled it, golf ad rates are so much higher than wrestling that a U.S. Open broadcast is more valuable. But that’s not your typical Friday this time of the year. On 6/7, FOX averaged 1,337,000 viewers for rerun programming in that time slot. On 5/31, it was 1,510,000. On 5/24 it was 1,708,000

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter A note that hasn’t been brought up regarding the Saudi Arabia shows going forward is that Saudi Arabia has asked for date on Fridays, and WWE starting in October has FOX on Fridays. Right now for 11/1, the WWE has a listing for a FOX show from Newark, NJ and a show in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and King Saad University Stadium. So that would either mean split crews or they’d have to change the Saudi date

Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter FIt’s notable that New Japan put its U.S. title on a guy who can’t even work for them in the U.S. It’s still up in the air whether Moxley will be recognized as champion or wear the belt at Fyter Fest, which, ultimately is both up to Tony Khan agreeing to it as well as New Japan agreeing to it. He did neither on his independent dates with Northeast Wrestling this past weekend. This shows how much things have changed, and not for the better between the two sides. Earlier this year, when New Japan had the visa issues that kept all of their Japanese talent off an American tour, and AEW was just starting, it was noted that they could have saved the tour in the eyes of the fans by using Omega. Some of the dates were when Omega was under control so they could have used him no matter what. One or two dates would have been after the contract expired, at which point he may have signed with AEW, but AEW had no problems with allowing him to work the entire tour. Of course New Japan didn’t even think in that direction nor have they made a play for Omega so far this year. But it’s gone from wanting to build a relationship to that no longer being the case.

Originally Posted by Post Wrestling KENTA recently spoke to Weekly Pro Wrestling magazine in Japan about his departure from WWE and arrival at New Japan Pro Wrestling earlier this month at Dominion ... When he was called up to 205 Live in November 2017 he was excited about the call-up but then things started to ‘deteriorate’. He mentioned the Cruiserweight title tournament in early 2018 after Enzo Amore left the company and the title was vacant. Itami lost in the opening round to Roderick Strong and noted that he could never really figure out who Hideo Itami was due to his lack of in-ring activity. He also felt his in-ring style suffered as a result of being told what to do and not to do and lost sight of his goals there. He added that ‘no good memories come to mind’ on the experience at 205 Live and said he was ‘defanged’ there.

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