POST IT NOTES
**Wai Ting and I are back tonight with Rewind-A-SmackDown for members of the POST Wrestling Café. We will chat about the show from Brooklyn tonight and catch up on all the latest news from the past few days.
**The POST Wrestling Christmas Jingle Contest closes on Monday at 9 am Eastern, so you can post your submission on the thread in the POST Wrestling Forum and the Christmas Show will be released Tuesday on Christmas Eve.
**I wanted to recommend the interview with Dominic Garrini from Thursday’s Hangout. Garrini was involved in a tag match this past August at a joint show from GCW and Black Label Pro with Kevin Ku against Tom Lawlor and Erick Stevens. During the match, Stevens suffered a concussion and Garrini shared his experience of dealing with an injury on the fly similar to the TLC match from this past Sunday. I really enjoyed this discussion as Garrini was very open about certain concerns and protocols along with the importance of experienced officials in the ring to help navigate that type of problem.
**The Rocky Maivia Picture Show comes out Saturday with host Nate Milton. This month’s show features a review of ‘The Tooth Fairy’ starring Dwayne Johnson from 2010 with Jimmy Korderas and myself as the guests. On the show, I also share my experience of flying to Los Angeles for a press junket to interview Johnson when this movie came out.
**On Sunday, WH Park will be joined by wrestler Daniel Makabe on Thunderstruck to review the February 1997 match between Jushin Thunder Liger and Shinjiro Otani. WH will also join me Sunday night for the final POST Puroresu of 2019 with a full preview of the two Wrestle Kingdom cards, the WON Hall of Fame class of 2019, and WH’s year-end awards.
**In this week’s edition of Five Questions, Phil Chertok discusses the fallout from UFC 245, the potential directions for Kamaru Usman and Alexander Volkanovski, Jose Aldo fighting at bantamweight, Rory MacDonald signing with the PFL, and this Saturday’s featherweight fight between Frankie Edgar and Chan Sung Jung in South Korea.
POST VIDEO
POST SCHEDULE
*Tonight: Rewind-A-SmackDown (Patreon)
*Saturday: The Rocky Maivia Picture Show with Nate Milton and guests Jimmy Korderas & John Pollock (The Tooth Fairy)
*Sunday: Thunderstruck with WH Park & guest Daniel Makabe (Jushin Liger vs. Shinjiro Otani, Feb. 1997)
*Sunday: POST Puroresu with John Pollock & WH Park
WRESTLING NEWS
**AEW sold out the Wintrust Arena on Friday with tickets immediately scooped up for the Revolution pay-per-view on Sunday, February 29th in Chicago. The venue has a capacity listed at 10,000, so you would assume the configuration would be around 8,500. There was a pre-sale that took place on Thursday ahead of the public on-sale today. The card is being presented in conjunction with the C2E2 convention that weekend in the city that AEW will part of. There are no matches announced yet, but the television would suggest that Chris Jericho and Jon Moxley will headline the show for the AEW title. This will be the company’s fourth pay-per-view under the AEW banner with Double or Nothing, All Out, and Full Gear in 2019.
**The NWA sold out GPB Studios for their next pay-per-view that will be named ‘Hard Times’ and takes place on Friday, January 24th. They will also be doing tapings at the studio on Saturday and Sunday that weekend.
**Friday Night SmackDown takes place from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York tonight and airs on Fox at 8 pm Eastern. The SmackDown crew will be off the road until Thursday when they resume house shows after Christmas. This year, it was the Raw talent that lucked out as they got an extended break and have been off since Tuesday. Here are the announced matches for SmackDown:
*New Day vs. Shinsuke Nakamura & Cesaro in a non-title match
*Bayley vs. Dana Brooke in a non-title match
**Today was a big on-sale day for AEW and NXT. Aside from the pay-per-view, AEW was also putting tickets on sale for their February 19th episode of Dynamite in Atlanta and the February 26th show in Kansas City. NXT TakeOver: Portland tickets were going on sale today, as well, which takes place on Sunday, February 16th. Of all four shows, the Atlanta one was the most ambitious with AEW running the State Farm Arena, which is the major arena in the city and will need to be a big episode of Dynamite.
**It was reported in this week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter that Cain Velasquez is scheduled to appear at the Royal Rumble next month in Houston, Texas. Velasquez did a short match at Crown Jewel in October losing to Brock Lesnar by submission and hasn’t been on television since with no follow up from the match. He also did a non-televised tag match in Mexico City last month teaming with Humberto Carrillo against The OC.
**There was a crazy turnaround for the NWA to get the latest edition of Power up on Tuesday night. After Saturday’s pay-per-view, they taped the next episodes Sunday and with a small window, David Lagana and director Billy Trask were up for 38 hours straight to get Tuesday’s season two premiere completed on time. The group taped six episodes over two nights on Sunday and Monday that will lead to their ‘Hard Times’ pay-per-view on Friday, January 24th.
**The final New Japan card of 2019 takes place Saturday morning from Korakuen Hall and streams live at 4:30 am Eastern on New Japan World featuring the following card:
*Togi Makabe, Tiger Mask & Yuya Uemura vs. Tomoaki Honma, Ryusuke Taguchi & Yota Tsuji
*El Phantasmo, Taiji Ishimori & Yujiro vs. Roppongi 3K & Robbie Eagles
*Zack Sabre Jr. & Taichi vs. Sanada & Bushi
*KENTA, Guerrillas of Destiny & Bad Luck Fale vs. Hirooki Goto, Juice Robinson, David Finlay & Toa Henare
*Will Ospreay & Tomohiro Ishii vs. Hiromu Takahashi & EVIL
*Jay White & Chase Owens vs. Tetsuya Naito & Shingo Takagi
*Kazuchika Okada, Yoshi-Hashi & Rocky Romero vs. Kota Ibushi, Hiroshi Tanahashi & Jushin Thunder Liger
**The main event is Liger’s final match at Korakuen Hall.
**Dana Brooke spoke to Justin Barrasso of SI.com and noted that she recently signed a new five-year deal with WWE. She also discussed the sudden passing of her boyfriend Dallas McCarver in 2017 and was only 26 years old.
**Lavie Margolin did some research into the attendance figures of several promotions as 2019 ends. Excluding today’s ticket sales for the two episodes of Dynamite and Revolution pay-per-view, AEW drew 105,927 throughout the year for an average of 6,231 per show. ROH did 45,479 (which shows you how much the Madison Square Garden show played to their total) and an average of 1,082 per show, New Japan’s U.S shows drew 34,435 with an average of 2,648, and MLW drew 16,032 with 1,457 per event.
**Matt Taven had surgery on his right ankle on Thursday. They worked this into his match with Vincent last Friday at Final Battle with Vincent attacking the ankle.
**Killer Kross has been added to MLW’s February set of tapings in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the 2300 Arena. Kross, 34, was granted his full release from Impact Wrestling earlier this week after the two sides had been at a standstill for the last half of the year. Immediately after the release, Kross posted a tremendous promotional video with clips of various talent across the major promotions as potential opponents.
**Rev Pro has announced that El Phantasmo will defend the British Cruiserweight title against Michael Oku on February 16th at York Hall at the promotion’s ‘High Stakes’ card. Oku won the British J-Cup tournament (where ELP was the last one to be eliminated in the four-way final) in November and followed that by defeating Pac last weekend.
**WWN has released tickets and its schedule for WrestleMania weekend next April in Tampa, Florida. The group be running the Bryan Glazer JCC (which is on the grounds of the former Fort Homer Hesterly Armory, which was the home of Eddie Graham’s Florida Championship Wrestling) with the following schedule:
*Thursday, April 2nd: Accelerate tournament at Noon, Conclusion of the Accelerate tournament at 4 pm, Progress Wrestling at 8 pm, WWN Supershow at 11:55 pm
*Saturday, April 3rd: EVOLVE at Noon, SHIMMER at 4 pm, TBA card at 8 pm, Kaiju Big Battel at 11:55 pm
*Sunday, April 4th: EVOLVE at Noon, wXw at 4 pm, TBA card at 8 pm (head-to-head against NXT TakeOver), and an afterparty at 11:55 pm
**EVOLVE has announced cards for Ybor City on January 17th, Orlando on January 18th, and Melrose, Massachusetts on March 1st. The Melrose card will be a doubleheader at the venue in conjunction with Beyond Wrestling.
**Barrington Hughes has announced he has been granted his release from MLW. Hughes had been working with the promotion since it was re-launched in 2017 with his final appearance in a battle royal at the November 9th tapings in Orlando, Florida.
**Impact Wrestling won’t be running new episodes for the next two weeks. On Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, they will be running a ‘Best of 2019’ set of shows including the year-end award announcements. They come back with a show on Tuesday, January 7th leading into that weekend’s ‘Hard to Kill’ pay-per-view in Texas.
**Alex Hammerstone will defend the MLW middleweight title against Aero Star at MLW’s Zero Hour tapings in North Richland Hills, Texas on January 11th. The promotion has also announced that Erick Stevens is joining the company and will debut on this set of tapings.
**The Qatar Pro Wrestling promotion is scheduled to hold a big event in the country on February 21, 2020. They have revealed the first match on the show will feature nZo (the former Enzo Amore) facing Brian Pillman Jr. They are also advertising Alberto El Patron, Matt Sydal, Eric Bischoff, and their head of production will be Craig Leathers.
**The WWE stock closed at $64.95 on Friday.
MMA NEWS
**The UFC holds its final show of 2019 early Saturday morning from Busan, South Korea. The original main event featured Brian Ortega fighting ‘The Korean Zombie’ Chan Sung Jung, but a knee injury removed Ortega with Frankie Edgar taking the vacant spot. Edgar had been getting ready to move down to bantamweight and fight Cory Sandhagen next month but it’s unknown if Edgar will still turn around and fight next month. Below is the full card for the final show of the year from the promotion:
MAIN CARD (5 am Eastern on ESPN+, Fight Pass)
*Frankie Edgar (146) vs. Chan Sung Jung (146)
*Volkan Oezdemir (206) vs. Aleksandar Rakic (206)
*Dooho Choi (146) vs. Charles Jourdain (146)
*Mike Rodriguez (206) vs. Da Un Jung (206)
*Marc-Andre Barriault (186) vs. Jun Yong Park (186)
*Kyung Ho Kang (136) vs. Liu Pingyuan (136)
PRELIMINARY CARD (2 am ET on ESPN, Fight Pass)
*Ciryl Gane (249) vs. Tanner Boser (246)
*Suman Mokhtarian (145) vs. Seungwoo Choi (146)
*Dong Hyun Ma (156) vs. Omar Morales (156)
*Matt Schnell (126) vs. Alexandre Pantoja (126)
*Raoni Barcelos (136) vs. Said Nurmagomedov (136)
*Veronica Macedo (116) vs. Amanda Lemos (116)
*Heili Alateng (136) vs. Ryan Benoit (136)
**Bellator kicks off with consecutive nights of fight cards at the Neal S. Blaisdell Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Tonight’s ‘Salute to the Troops’ main card airs on both DAZN and the Paramount Network with the following fights
*Josh Barnett (251.6) vs. Ronny Markes (250)
*Toby Misech (141.4*) vs. Erik Perez (135.2)
*Alejandra Lara (126.8*) vs. Veta Arteaga (125.7)
*Braydon Akeo (145.6) vs. Tywan Claxton (145.6)
*Chris Cisneros (170.7) vs. Joey Davis (170.3)
Misech and Lara were fined 20% of their purse for missing weight but the fights will take place.
**Bellator continues with Bellator 236 on Saturday from the same location and will air exclusively on DAZN at 10 pm Eastern with the following fights on the main card:
*Ilima-Lei Macfarlane (124.8) vs. Kate Jackson (124.4) for the Bellator women’s flyweight title
*Derek Campos (144.9) vs. A.J. McKee (144.6) in the Featherweight Grand Prix quarterfinals
*Jason Jackson (170.6) vs. Kiichi Kunimoto (170.1)
*Juliana Velasquez (125.1) vs. Bruna Ellen (125.8)
*Cheydon Leialoha (135.7) vs. Raufeon Stots (135.7)
*Nainoa Dung (155.7) vs. Zach Zane (155.9)
**A middleweight fight between former champion Robert Whittaker and Jared Cannonier is set for UFC 248 on Saturday, March 8th at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The news was first reported by the Saturday Telegraph. It’s Whittaker’s first fight since losing the 185-pound title to Israel Adesanya last October in Melbourne, Australia. Cannonier competed at light heavyweight until back-to-back losses to Jan Blachowicz and Dominick Reyes led to the cut down to middleweight. Thus far, Cannonier has been 3-0 at the new weight with stoppage victories over David Branch, Anderson Silva, and Jack Hermansson since November 2018. The UFC 248 card will also feature Weili Zhang defending the women’s strawweight title against former champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk.
**Luke Thomas recently spoke with Eugene Bareman, the coach at City Kickboxing. The group will likely be named ‘Gym of the Year’ in most people’s year-end picks with two champions coming out of the gym this year in Israel Adesanya and Alexander Volkanovski.
**UFC fighter Joe Lauzon and MLW wrestler Tom Lawlor will be doing commentary on the CES MMA card on Friday, January 24th on UFC Fight Pass.
*****
CAFÉ HANGOUT: Dominic Garrini talks concussions, Your Calls, End of 2019
On the final Café Hangout of 2019, John Pollock and Wai Ting welcome pro wrestler Dominic Garrini (MLW, GCW, Beyond Wrestling) to share his thoughts on pro wrestling concussion protocols in light of the Kairi Sane incident at TLC. Plus, a major ratings victory from NXT over AEW in the Wednesday Night Wars.
https://www.postwrestling.com/2019/12/19/live-link-for-todays-cafe-hangout-3-pm-et-feat-dominic-garrini/
*****
REWIND-A-DYNAMITE 12/18/19: Jericho vs. Jungle Boy, Dark Order, NWA Power
John Pollock and Wai Ting review AEW Dynamite’s final episode of 2019 featuring Chris Jericho vs. Jungle Boy, The Dark Order attacks The Elite, The Young Bucks vs. SCU for the Tag Team titles. Plus, we discuss AEW Dark, NWA Power and today’s news.
https://www.postwrestling.com/2019/12/19/rewind-a-dynamite-12-18-19-jericho-vs-jungle-boy-dark-order-nwa-power/
*****
upNXT 12/18/19: The Tides Have Turned
Braden Herrington & Davie Portman review the December 18th edition of WWE NXT featuring Shayna Baszler defending her NXT women’s title against Rhea Ripley.
https://www.postwrestling.com/2019/12/19/upnxt-12-18-2019-the-tides-have-turned/
*****
REWIND-A-WAI #52: WWE SummerSlam 2015
John Pollock and Wai Ting review WWE SummerSlam 2015 from Brooklyn, NY featuring The Undertaker vs. Brock Lesnar and John Cena vs. Seth Rollins.
https://www.postwrestling.com/2019/12/17/rewind-a-wai-52-wwe-summerslam-2015/
*****
REWIND-A-RAW 12/16/19: Des Moines Day Night Raw
John Pollock and Wai Ting review WWE Raw featuring the fallout from WWE TLC including a United States Championship No. 1 Contender’s Match, Seth Rollins’ next opponent, and Bobby Lashley and Lana’s wedding proposal.
https://www.postwrestling.com/2019/12/17/rewind-a-raw-12-16-19-des-moines-day-night-raw/
*****
WWE TLC 2019 & NWA INTO THE FIRE POST SHOW
John Pollock & Wai Ting are joined by Mike Murray to review WWE TLC 2019 headlined by Roman Reigns vs. King Corbin in a TLC match. We also review NWA’s Into The Fire PPV featuring Nick Aldis vs. James Storm for the NWA Heavyweight Championship.
https://www.postwrestling.com/2019/12/15/live-link-for-tonights-wwe-tlc-2019-nwa-into-the-fire-post-show-1030pm-et/
*****
THUNDERSTRUCK: JUSHIN LIGER VS TAICHI
WH Park talks with Sarah Flann (Sarah & Sarah, Journey Through Guerrilla Island) to discuss Jushin Liger’s sole appearance under the WWE banner as he takes on Tyler Breeze at NXT Takeover: Brooklyn on August 22, 2015.
https://www.postwrestling.com/2019/12/15/thunderstruck-8-jushin-liger-vs-tyler-breeze-8-22-15-w-sarah-flann/
*****
UFC 245 POST SHOW
John Pollock & Phil Chertok review the UFC 245 card with three title fights including Kamaru Usman vs. Colby Covington, Alexander Volkanovski wins the featherweight title & more.
https://www.postwrestling.com/2019/12/15/ufc-245-post-show-kamaru-usman-vs-colby-covington/
*****
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