POST IT NOTES
**We have a special FREE edition of the POST Wrestling Audio News Update for those who want to sample. We release several of these per week for Double Double & Espresso members at the POST Wrestling Café.
**Rewind-A-Raw is live at 11:05 p.m. ET tonight with Wai Ting & John Pollock and we will go through all the news from the weekend and review Raw from Indianapolis.
**Evan Husney returns on Tuesday to preview the final episode of “Who Killed WCW?”, the recent passing of Jamie Kellner and how they attempted to speak with him for the series, and lots more notes from the season.
POST SCHEDULE
Tonight: Rewind-A-Raw with John Pollock & Wai Ting
Tuesday: POST Interview with Evan Husney of “Who Killed WCW?”
Tuesday: upNXT
Tuesday: The Double Shot – “Who Killed WCW?” Ep. 4 (POST Wrestling Café)
Wednesday: Pollock & Thurston
Wednesday: Rewind-A-Dynamite
Thursday: MCU L8R – The Wolverine (POST Wrestling Café)
Friday: Rewind-A-SmackDown with Wai Ting & Neal Flanagan (POST Wrestling Café)
Saturday: Collision Course (POST Wrestling Café)
Sunday: UFC 303 with John Pollock & Eric Marcotte
Sunday: AEW Forbidden Door
WRESTLING NEWS
**WWE Raw airs against Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final tonight between the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers. The game will attract a massive audience in Canada, and it could impact Raw in the U.S. It’s a big story with the Oilers coming back from a 3-0 deficit. After tonight, the sports competition will lessen except for MLB’s Home Run Derby on July 15 and the Summer Olympics running from July 26 until August 11. Raw will include a men’s and women’s Money in the Bank qualifying match including Chad Gable, who was announced for the match, replaced by Ilja Dragunov after the Wyatt Sicks attack, and placed back into the match over the last week. The focus of the show should be the follow-up involving the Wyatt Sicks, which was the biggest angle shot last week and will have immense curiosity out of the gate but long-term it’s a crap shoot to see if this type of story connects. Below are the segments advertised:
*Money in the Bank – Qualifying Match: Chad Gable vs. Bronson Reed vs. Braun Strowman
*Money in the Bank – Qualifying Match: Shayna Baszler vs. Kairi Sane vs. Lyra Valkyria
*Alba Fyre & Isla Dawn vs. Katana Chance & Kayden Carter
*Karrion Kross vs. Kofi Kingston
*Bron Breakker vs. Ludwig Kaiser
*Drew McIntyre to appear
**WrestleTix reports that over 10,600 tickets have been distributed for Raw at the Gainbridge Fieldhouse tonight in Indianapolis.
**Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final from this past Friday led to Friday Night SmackDown registering its lowest audience in Canada in nearly two years. The Oilers vs. Panthers game averaged 4,760,400 viewers and nearly 1.6 million in the 25-54 demographic. The sports programming lineup was loaded as SmackDown aired head-to-head with the NHL game, the Toronto Blue Jays vs. Cleveland Guardians, and a CFL game between B.C. and Winnipeg. The result was SmackDown averaging approximately 109,000 viewers and 32,000 in the 25-54 demographic. The figures were nearly in half from the previous week of 205,800 and 66,100 respectively with SmackDown posting its lowest audience since July 2022. In the demo figures, Dynamite edged out SmackDown by 2,000 viewers last week while SmackDown topped AEW by 43,000 viewers overall.
**Long-time German broadcasting fixture Günter Zapf has died. He was a key figure within Germany as he was affiliated with WWE for nearly twenty years alongside Carsten Schaefer, which lasted until March 2013 when he left to pursue other opportunities and was replaced by Sebastian Hackl. After WWE, he did commentary for Lucha Underground and had been calling AEW programming for DMAX along with other sports duties including the NFL and Major League Baseball on DAZN and Premiere. Zapf also did work for wXw providing voiceover work.
**POST Wrestling has reached out to the Kansas City Police Department and the prosecutor’s office regarding the arrest of Charles “2 Cold Scorpio” Scaggs earlier this month. Scaggs is facing two felony charges after a stabbing at a Kansas City gas station, which Scaggs states was done in self-defense when he got into an argument with a customer when Scaggs was working as security. The Police Department tells POST, “The victim had numerous cut and stab wounds and was transported to the hospital for treatment. The suspect was arrested at the scene”. A police report should be available in the next week or two. Scaggs was arrested on June 15 but posted bond and is due in court next month, according to TMZ.
**Fightful Select reports that WWE creative team member John Swikata was recently promoted to lead writer of SmackDown with Ryan Callahan parting ways with the company. A former writer at WWE shared with POST Wrestling that Switkata has been with the company for over ten years. Callahan has been at WWE since 2014 and became a lead writer on Raw in 2016, the lead writer on SmackDown in 2020, and then became vice president of SmackDown in February 2023.
**Kayla Braxton has stated she is leaving the wrestling industry as she enters her final week at WWE. There was speculation regarding Braxton going to AEW and she is denying that’s the case or going anywhere else in the industry. Braxton will wrap up her nearly eight-year career at WWE with this Friday’s edition of SmackDown at Madison Square Garden.
**Paul Levesque was on with Pat McAfee to promote the agreement with the Indiana Sports Corp, which will bring future editions of the Royal Rumble, WrestleMania, and SummerSlam to Indianapolis. Levesque spoke about the pending move to Netflix in January 2025 and in time, their entire international programming will move to Netflix once existing deals expire.
"When we move over to Netflix in January we will be on in 80% of the world outside of the United States immediately..
It's a MASSIVE deal and the international market is so big" ~ @TripleH #PMSLive https://t.co/GuHnPEPv3o pic.twitter.com/Y5ZKF5z8eT
— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) June 24, 2024
**The G1 qualifying tournament began this past weekend on the NJPW Soul events. In the A Block qualifier, YOSHI-HASHI beat Chase Owens and Callum Newman defeated Yujiro. In the B Block, Oleg Boltin beat Toru Yano and TJP defeated Satoshi Kojima. The semi-finals occur on July 3 at Korakuen Hall with KENTA vs. Callum Newman and Tomohiro Ishii vs. YOSHI-HASHI in the A Block qualifier, and Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Oleg Boltin and Taichi vs. TJP in the B Block qualifier. The winners meet in their respective finals on July 5 to determine the final member of each block in this year’s tournament. This will be the first year since 2006 that Toru Yano isn’t in the G1.
**The NJPW Soul tour doesn’t resume until July 3, so in theory, all the participants for Forbidden Door should be available this week for appearances on Dynamite and/or Collision. Both shows are being taped in Buffalo on Wednesday night. Rampage was taped last week in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
**Congratulations to NXT performer Shawn Spears and wife Cassie Lee (formerly Peyton Royce) on the arrival of the couple’s second child, Harley Dean this past Friday.
**Yuma Anzai retained the Triple Crown against Hideki Suzuki in the main event of All Japan’s Dynamite Series event at Korakuen Hall on Monday. The attendance was listed at 1,235 with the following results (Courtesy: Purolove.com):
*Triple Crown: Yuma Anzai © over Hideki Suzuki at 22:06
*Elimination Match: Jun Saito, Rei Saito & Naruki Doi over Ren Ayabe, Ryuki Honda & Rising HAYATO at 15:00
*All-Asia Tag Titles: Seiki Yoshioka & Musashi over Dan Tamura & Hikaru Sato © at 16:30
*No DQ Match: Yuma Aoyagi over Kuroshio TOKYO Japan at 19:18
*Hokuto Omori, Kuma Arashi, Cyrus & Harley Jackson over Kento Miyahara, Suwama, Shotaro Ashino & Ryo Inoue at 9:25
*GAORA TV Championship: Fuminori Abe over Seigo Tachibana © at 12:20
*Ayano Irie & Mii over Natsuki & Nagisa Shiotsuki at 10:13
**The segment everyone is discussing is Jeff Jarrett’s speech from Collision about entering the Owen Hart Foundation Cup. A three-minute version aired on the program with AEW uploading the unedited nine-minute version. This will go down as one of the most memorable segments of Jarrett’s career with the raw emotion of reliving Hart’s death from 1999 and the years he went through without processing that loss and undergoing therapy where that was addressed. In a coincidence I never realized, his wife Jill died on the same date May 23, 2007, from breast cancer, so it’s an incredibly eerie coincidence. Jarrett also spoke about losing his good friend Toby Keith earlier this year and used the lyrics, “I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was” as inspiration for the tournament, which he vows to win. Jarrett will face the wild card entrant in the opening round, which would make sense for Collision on July 6 in Southaven, Mississippi (just fifteen minutes away from Memphis) where Jarrett would be the ultimate babyface in that arena and trying to win the match for Owen. The booking is going to be so interesting as Jarrett was considered a sentimental addition to the tournament but after that promo, he has everyone invested in him winning even though it’s nearly impossible to imagine.
MMA NEWS
**Keith Evans, who was an executive at the UFC for over a decade and worked with the IFL and World Series of Fighting groups, has died. Evans was working at TrillerTV+ as its chief streaming operations officer with the streaming service announcing his passing on Monday. Evans died last week at his home in Henderson, Nevada. Evans had a degree in computer science and finance from Utah State University and worked at Bank of America before joining the UFC in 1995 during the SEG era. He became its director of information systems and witnessed the company explode during the TUF boom before exiting in 2006. Evans took a role with the upstart International Fight League (IFL) as its vice president of operations which led to a legal issue with the UFC accusing Evans of disseminating trade secrets within the IFL. The IFL, which promoted a team-based format, ceased operations after two years and Evans resumed his MMA career with the World Series of Fighting (now the PFL) when it launched in 2012 to serve as its chief operating officer. Evans was instrumental in the early days of online streaming when he worked at Go Fight Live, which focused on iPPV events in combat sports including Ring of Honor, which had a disastrous run of shows at the streamer with constant streaming issues. In 2016, Evans joined FITE TV (now TrillerTV).
**Power Slap is hoping to draw on the popularity of Paige VanZant, who will compete for the group this Friday at Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, the night before UFC 303. It was announced during the UFC broadcast this past weekend that VanZant would make her Power Slap debut as the league feels more and more like a subsidiary of UFC by the day even though they are separate companies. They are trying to piggyback off the UFC 303 event and having VanZant on the show will lead to additional MMA sites covering it. VanZant, 30, left the UFC when her contract expired in 2020 and dabbled in professional wrestling training under David “Gangrel” Heath for an AEW run that went nowhere. She also signed with BKFC and lost fights to Britain Hart and Rachael Ostovich in 2021 and made her boxing debut last month losing to influencer Elle Brooke. VanZant is a major celebrity on OnlyFans and is where she makes the bulk of her earnings.
**The UFC main card from Saudi Arabia averaged 27,000 viewers and 13,000 in the 25-54 demographic on Sportsnet 360 in Canada this past weekend. It did not rank among the top ten sports programs on Saturday.
**Episode 1 of UFC Embedded in advance of UFC 303.
**The TKO stock closed at $106.77 on Monday.
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COLLISION COURSE
This week’s card features appearances from NJPW and CMLL talent as we approach the Forbidden Door, most notably Kazuchika Okada vs Ultimo Guerrero.
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REWIND-A-SMACKDOWN
John Pollock & Wai Ting review WWE SmackDown featuring CM Punk’s return to Chicago and the debut of The Bloodline’s newest member.
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REWIND-A-WAI #159: WrestleMania – The Album
In their latest wrestling music review, Wai Ting reunites with Nate Milton & Kris Ealy (Kings of Sport, NWA Podcast) to listen to and discuss WWF’s WrestleMania – The Album from 1993.
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MCU L8R: X-Men Origins – Wolverine
This week in their Deadpool & Wolverine ReWatch prep, Rich Fann & WH Park are joined by “Our Man” Neal Flanagan of The Wellness Policy to review the problematic but essential, X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
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