Austin Returns On Raw, & More - March 8, 2011

Welcome to the "JBL's return last night put a William Regal sour looking face on me" edition of The Wrestling List.

Well, all of the returns can't be good. However one was and that was the return of Stone Cold Steve Austin. Michael Cole brought out JBL as the surprise referee for Cole and Lawler at WrestleMania. It was then interrupted by Austin who took out JBL and then he signed the contract to become the special referee. Austin then poured beer on a very upset Michael Cole. He got in the ring and did the toast tease with JBL followed by a stunner. More celebration from Austin and the classic mess with the camera guy moment where he started chasing the camera guy on the ramp. It looked like he was having a lot of fun out there. You could see the huge grin on his face when he walked toward that first ring corner during his entrance. So, in 2011, we're talking about Austin but we're also talking about Rock. Cena had his followup promo to last week's Rock segment. He went with a hip hop type theme this week instead of the rap. Cena held up his own version of Rock's new shirt that said "I Bring It Via Satellite". He basically told the Rock to just show up for a change. The segment ended with Miz attacking Cena and laying him out while he boasted about himself to Cena and also introducing himself to the Rock over the camera. Really thinking we'll see Rock next week from St. Louis. Just my prediction. Speaking of who is in St. Louis, Trish Stratus will be on the show as it was announced by the Raw GM that she will take on Vickie Guerrero. Always going to be happy to have Trish back on TV. Triple H and Undertaker continue their war of words back and forth. Probably better expect that more than anything. Undertaker is really banged up and word is that his arm is past the point of no return on fixing it. He has been working through it and putting off surgery. It's been so long that it can't be surgically repaired now. That was the story going around and then Kevin Nash confirmed it in recent comments.

Other notes from Raw. When I saw Austin putting up fingers on the entrance, I thought, well, so much for PG again. Then, I noticed the director moving those cameras in closer on him when he raised his arms so you couldn't see it. I have got to say that Undertaker walking out to that Johnny Cash song really does add something different to that entrance. Did you hear the fan yell "Houston" at R Truth just as he was about to yell "Dallas, TX"? I laughed at that which is playing off of Truth messing up a few weeks ago on yelling where he was at. I am enjoying the taped pieces with Shawn Michaels talking about Triple H and Undertaker. I have to say that I laughed at the new commercial with Randy Orton just popping up and hanging out sitting in the house with the family.

Last night's Hall Of Fame inductee was named and it wasn't as surprise as this name has been talked about for a while now. Sunny. Tammy Sytch is going into the WWE Hall Of Fame and rightfully so. I'm a long time fan of hers going back to her Smoky Mountain days. I remember reading so much about her in the Apter magazines back in the day and there was a lot of talk about her. So, I bought a Smoky Mountain Wrestling tape to see what all the talk was about. I became a fan of hers and of Candido's. Needless to say that I was very happy when she jumped over to WWF. She was one of those managers that wasn't afraid to mix it up physically and verbally. She then was put into the tag team ranks with her story of that she would jump with whatever team had the gold. I thought that was a lot of fun and yes, I jumped to whatever team that she did too. LOL. 1996 was the big launch of Sunny when WWF had their site on AOL. They would post downloadable pictures of her on the site and she became the most downloaded person on the internet. It was a huge deal at the time. Sunny was the launching pad for the future divas. She opened the door for women like Sable and Marlena to be a female star attraction in the company and not just be sidekicks. She ran into personal problems which really hurt her career in the late 90's. In the last several years, she has made a comeback after going through such terrible adversity including the loss of Candido. Things are going much better in her life and it's great to see. This is a woman that deserves the Hall Of Fame honors. She was a trail blazer for women in this business. The original WWE "diva" as far as the line of them that happened from the late 90's on up to today. Yes, there were women before her that opened the door for her obviously but she took it to another level as well. Happy to see her go into the Hall Of Fame.

Things are getting ugly in a war of words between Hulk Hogan and Bret Hart on Twitter. Wow, UGLY. No love lost between those two.

So, I tend to disagree with a lot of Eric Bischoff says lately but I do tend to agree with him on a statement that he had made recently on his Facebook page. He said that the number of PPV's needed to be dropped down in TNA and how a PPV a month worked in the 90's but just doesn't work now. This has been talked about a lot in recent years with PPV buyrates. I know I've had this conversation with a bunch of you over the years. Remember back in the day when we had the big four PPV's in WWE. It was WrestleMania, SummerSlam, Rumble, and Survivor Series. Later, King Of The Ring was added. WCW back around that same time was running Wrestle War, Great American Bash, Halloween Havoc, and Starrcade. The shows felt important. Keep in mind that WWF was running Saturday Night's Main Event shows just about every month. WCW was running Clash Of Champions shows. My question is would the business be better off maybe running a PPV every other month and just scaling back a bit? From a WWE point of view, I'm not sure it would work cause their bottom line is really focused on needing that monthly PPV money. They're not going to budge off of that. There have been a lot of WWE PPV's over the last few years that just felt thrown together at the last minute and have no hype to it at all to make you want to buy it. However, WWE loves that PPV money. WWE knows how to make money and my only complaint is their fix being to raise the PPV prices every year or so. From a match build point of view, I think they could make PPV interest higher with a lower number of shows. Revenue wise, I just don't think it would work for them. However from a TNA point of view, we don't know their buyrate numbers because they don't release them. I can't think that they are something to be jumping up and down about though based on their ratings. I think TNA could be in a good position to gamble. Scale back the number of PPV's. If anything, maybe just do some random TV specials with a Clash kind of feel to them. It would be different and then you don't have to worry about building to a PPV every single month. You can build to a smaller number of PPV's on these shows. On another note, TNA really needs to get out of that Impact Zone more. A change of scenery does them good because it just makes the product feel different.

Bret Hart has been answering a lot of questions from fans on Twitter and it has been a lot of fun to read. He is very honest. Just thought I'd throw out some highlights on comments he has made. He and Shawn Michaels do stay in touch are on good terms. His favorite PPV that he was on was the Calgary Stampede show with the awesome crowd reaction from the Canadian crowd in 1997. His favorite match: Austin at Wrestlemania 13. His least favorite was against Backlund at WrestleMania 11 which he says is because of the match stipulation instead of the opponent. He talks about his problems with the match in his book by the way. This next one goes back to the war of words between he and Hogan this week as he was asked if Hogan ducked him back in WWF and Bret says yes, he absolutely did. Bret talks in his book about how he and Hogan were set to face off against each other at SummerSlam 1993 and how the match was all set to take place including them talking about it. Hogan then left and dropped the title to Yokozuna at King Of The Ring. Bret wasn't happy about it at the time including the happenings of WrestleMania IX and apparently still isn't. He did also say that Hogan and Bischoff needed to be tarred and feathered as to what needed to be done to help TNA. This got the Hart/Hogan war of words started but it got way personal after that. His favorite match that he wasn't involved with is the Lesnar/Angle match from WrestleMania XIX. His response to Michael Cole was him saying that Cole does a terrible job of putting over the talent and that he couldn't lace Jim Ross's boots. On who he would like to wrestle today, he named Orton, Cena, and Sheamus. His favorite angle that he was involved in? The USA vs. Canada angle with the new Hart Foundation in 1997. Yeah, that was awesome!! His favorite time period as champion was 1997. One of his favorite matches of all time was his match with Diesel at the 1995 Survivor Series while he also pointed out that the table wasn't gimmicked. He was asked if he holds any ill will to Goldberg for the kick that ended up ending his career and Bret said that he never had any and had great respect for Goldberg while saying that what happened was an accident. Favorite female wrestlers? Melina, Nattie Neidhart, Beth Phoenix, and of course Gail Kim. He was asked about if he would like to induct Shawn into the Hall Of Fame and he said he would like to but Triple H makes more sense. Bret said that Cena is one of the hardest working guy sin WWE history. He put over Miz and Punk as guys that he enjoys from today's product. Interesting comments from Bret.

Have a great week! Take care and God bless!!