POST IT NOTES
**Rewind-A-SmackDown is LIVE tonight at 10:15 pm ET for all members of the POST Wrestling Café as Wai & I review SmackDown, chat all the latest news, and then open the phone lines for the duration of the show covering any/all subjects. The podcast version of the show will be available for Café members late tonight.
**Wai and I are back on Sunday with a special Café bonus show reviewing the two NJPW Castle Attack cards. Wai will also have a show with WH Park on Sunday reviewing the penultimate episode of WandaVision for Patrons.
**You can leave feedback, questions, and memories of WrestleMania VI on the POST Wrestling Forum. The April 1990 event featuring Hulk Hogan vs. The Ultimate Warrior will be the subject of Rewind-A-Wai #81 next Tuesday for members of the POST Wrestling Café.
POST SCHEDULE
Tonight: Rewind-A-SmackDown with John Pollock & Wai Ting (LIVE at 10:15 pm ET for all Patrons)
Sunday: NJPW Castle Attack POST Show with John & Wai (Patreon)
Sunday: Rewand-A-Vision with Wai Ting & WH Park (Patreon)
Monday: Rewind-A-Raw (LIVE at 11:15 pm ET for Double Double+ Patrons)
WRESTLING NEWS
**I want to make mention of two Go Fund Me campaigns that have been launched over the past week. After his sudden passing, a campaign has been launched for the late Joseph Hudson a.k.a. Jocephus/The Question Mark. The initial goal of $15,000 has already been surpassed with funds going towards his burial and medical costs. Additional funds raised will go into a trust fund for Hudson’s 10-year old son.
The second Go Fund Me is for the family of Tom Cole, who sadly took his life on February 12th at the age of 50. In the description, it noted that the autopsy found a tumor the size of a golf ball in Cole’s frontal lobe and he had been scheduled for an MRI the following week. Cole had an incredibly difficult upbringing that was further affected by his abuses he alleged during his time in the WWF. He was able to persevere and had three children that he leaves behind and his wife Jen.
**AEW put tickets on sale today for the Revolution pay-per-view on Sunday, March 7th, and sold out with approximately 1,100 tickets released for the show at Daily’s Place.
**CyberAgent, the owners of Pro Wrestling NOAH and DDT, have announced a major card for June 6, 2021, featuring all the promotions under its CyberFight umbrella. This would include sister promotions Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling and Ganbare Pro for a mega show at the Saitama Super Arena. They have stated that each promotion will have matches on the card along with inter-promotional matches as well as matches involving the GHC Heavyweight Championship, DDT’s KO-D Openweight Championship, and Tokyo Joshi Pro’s Princess of Princess Championship. The event will stream on CyberFight’s Wrestle Universe streaming service.
**Dark Side of the Ring has confirmed that one of the episodes in season three will cover the “Collision in Korea” shows from 1995. The upcoming season is scheduled to feature 14 episodes including the season-premiere covering Brian Pillman. They have not announced a premiere date yet. In April 2015, SI.com did an oral history on the shows in North Korea.
**As the NFL negotiates its media rights renewals, SBJ’s John Ourand reports that the league and Disney have reached a broad agreement for a renewal that will see a 30 percent increase in the NFL’s package for Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl. This came after Ourand had reported one week prior that the sides were at odds and believed to be off by $1 billion in negotiations prior to the two coming together for the renewal, which has yet to be signed but said to be close. The deal would also include ABC being brought back into the regular rotation to host the Super Bowl, which the network has not hosted since 2006. Ourand reports the pending renewal will be worth $2.6 billion per year and an announcement could be made next week.
**Friday Night SmackDown is advertising that Bianca Belair will make her WrestleMania decision on tonight’s show. The following matches and segments are being advertised:
*Bianca Belair makes her WrestleMania decision
*Rey & Dominik Mysterio vs. Otis & Chad Gable
*The Street Profits vs. Sami Zayn & King Corbin
**The biggest match in NJPW Strong’s history is tonight as the long-awaited match between IWGP United States champion Jon Moxley and KENTA airs. The show airs at 10 pm ET on NJPW World with the following matches scheduled:
*IWGP United States Championship: Jon Moxley (champion) vs. KENTA
*Chris Dickinson vs. Ren Narita
*Brody King, ACH, Logan & Sterling Riegel vs. TJP, Clark Connors, The DKC & Kevin Knight
**205 Live will feature the following matches airing at 10 pm ET on the WWE Network:
*Curt Stallion & Mansoor vs. Ever-Rise
*August Grey vs. Tony Nese
**NJPW runs back-to-back nights at Osaka-jo Hall this weekend for its Castle Attack shows. The first show airs late tonight at 2 am ET featuring the grudge match between Kazuchika Okada and EVIL. The bigger show is the second night, which airs Saturday night at Midnight ET (9 pm Pacific) featuring a rematch from Wrestle Kingdom between Kota Ibushi and Tetsuya Naito with only the Intercontinental title at stake. Naito has been struggling with a knee injury that removed him from several shows on the recent tour. The bar is exceptionally high, although the knee injury gives the match a story that can allow them to work the body part and keep the high impact stuff to select moments. Sunday also features the vacant IWGP junior heavyweight title decided in a three-way with El Phantasmo vs. BUSHI vs. El Desperado as their junior heavyweight title picture was thrown into disarray this week with the news that Hiromu Takahashi is out for six months with a torn pectoral muscle. Here are the line-ups for both events:
Castle Attack Night 1 – Late tonight at 2 am ET on New Japan World
*Kazuchika Okada vs. EVIL
*Jay White vs. Tomohiro Ishii
*KOPW Texas Strap Match: Toru Yano (holder) vs. Chase Owens
*Tama Tonga vs. Hirooki Goto
*Tanga Loa vs. YOSHI-HASHI
*Hiroshi Tanahashi, Satoshi Kojima & Hiroyoshi Tenzan vs. Will Ospreay, The Great O-Khan & Jeff Cobb
Castle Attack Night 2 – Saturday night at Midnight ET
*Intercontinental Championship: Kota Ibushi (champion) vs. Tetsuya Naito
*IWGP Junior Heavyweight Title: El Phantasmo vs. El Desperado vs. BUSHI
*NEVER Openweight Championship: Hiroshi Tanahashi (champion) vs. The Great O-Khan
*IWGP Tag Team Championship: Guerrillas of Destiny (champions) vs. Hirooki Goto & YOSHI-HASHI
*Kazuchika Okada, Tomohiro Ishii & Toru Yano vs. EVIL, Jay White & Chase Owens
*Will Ospreay & Jeff Cobb vs. Satoshi Kojima & Hiroyoshi Tenzan
**This weekend’s Ring of Honor syndicated program features the ROH title match between Rush and Shane Taylor, along with ROH tag champions Jonathan Gresham & Jay Lethal vs. Kenny King & Dragon Lee.
**The next nine days are an extremely important stretch for AEW culminating with next weekend’s pay-per-view that airs on a Sunday for the first time. First on the agenda, is this Sunday’s live special on Bleacher Report airing at 7 pm ET as an educational tool to alert fans to watch AEW on a Sunday night. Unlike B/R Live, this special will air on BR’s social platforms and has a worldwide reach rather than limited to those domestically in the U.S.
Wednesday’s Dynamite is built around several attractions, the largest being Shaquille O’Neal wrestling a match on TNT with Jade Cargill against Cody Rhodes and Red Velvet. The strategy appears to be to get the most eyes on your product to sell the pay-per-view to and one would think they would have something noteworthy to leave the show with a lot of buzz. It was this strategy utilized in December when all the promotion built for “Winter is Coming” led to a big audience and then, delivering the surprise debut of Sting that kept those fans engaged for the next week’s show. The signing of Paul Wight has already generated additional interest for next week’s show with Wight’s first AEW appearance and the curiosity of seeing him in a non-WWE environment for the first time since 1999. This episode of Dynamite will also test the crossover potential with an outside celebrity and what level of promotion AEW receives from sports outlets and the internal push from TNT on the novelty of Shaq wrestling.
The Revolution show is built on several factors from the curiosity of the unknown with the Exploding Barbed-Wire Deathmatch and how AEW will pull it off compared to past iterations from FMW and other groups. Then, you have the first match involving Sting since 2015 and leaning on the nostalgia of that character, which was amplified this week with a tremendous brawl involving the four street fight participants. The Young Bucks vs. Chris Jericho & MJF doesn’t feel like a big marquee match, but they did shoot a big angle this week and with the proper promos on Wednesday could enhance this one by getting the grudge aspect across.
**Author and reporter Kristian Pope recently passed away at the age of 49. Pope authored several books alongside Ray Whebbe Jr. including The Encyclopedia of Professional Wrestling and Professional Wrestling Collectibles. Pope began watching wrestling in 1982 following the WWF and Georgia Championship Wrestling before becoming a reporter at outlets that included the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dallas Morning News, St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the Wilmington News Journal in Delaware. In 2001, Pope and Whebbe Jr. spoke to Alex Marvez in 2001 about the Encyclopedia they co-authored and the impossible task of condensing the history of the industry to 176 pages.
**Neither AEW Dynamite nor NXT finished among the top ten sports programs in Canada this past Wednesday. It was a stacked night as the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors were playing, plus the Scotties Tournament of Hearts (Curling) is ongoing and is a big deal in this country. The tenth-ranked sports program did 137,800 viewers, so both shows fell below that figure.
**Kurt Angle spoke with Conrad Thompson on The Kurt Angle Show about his retirement match with Baron Corbin at WrestleMania 35. He discussed their time being cut because Triple H and Batista went long and Angle understanding what his position was but was disappointed.
**Tony Khan spoke to TSN.ca regarding AEW and gave the following answer when asked about the current set-up at Daily’s Place during the pandemic and the potential of going to other places:
We’re looking at COVID data as far as new infections and the spread of the disease and keeping an eye on it and trying to gauge when it might be safe to return to touring and doing indoor shows, because we’ve really only done outdoor shows for the past 10 months. The whole time we’ve been doing these shows, we’ve never done anything where we felt unsafe. We’ve always felt like we’ve put the fans in a good, safe position outdoors where there’s 99 per cent less chance of transmission between people, putting people in pods, also, and not overcrowding it. I just think I don’t want to do anything now, after we’ve been doing everything right for so many months, and rush to make a bad decision. I think it’s important to do it slowly.
**WrestleCon has moved its on-sale date to next Friday as they finalize details. The group is running a scaled-down convention on Friday, April 9th, and Saturday, April 10th with the option of adding a third day on Sunday. They are limiting the number of people on-site to 320, which is 20 percent capacity with social distancing guidelines in effect. The talent appearing will be wearing masks (including for photo ops) and some might have plexiglass. This year, they are only doing the convention portion with no live wrestling cards.
**WWE Network Documentaries will be releasing a documentary on Sunday, March 7th on the WWE Network and all its social media platforms profiling female amateur wrestler Heaven Fitch. The documentary, narrated by Beth Phoenix, profiles Fitch joining the men’s high school wrestling team and winning a state championship in North Carolina. Stephanie McMahon-Levesque will provide the introduction to the film.
**MLW has added a match between Calvin Tankman and Laredo Kid for next Wednesday’s edition of MLW Fusion airing at 7 pm ET on Fubo Sports and its YouTube channel. The show will also feature Jacob Fatu defending the MLW World Heavyweight title against Jordan Oliver.
**The WWE stock closed at $49.40 on Friday.
**Three matches have been announced for Jimmy Lloyd’s D-Generation F as part of The Collective: Remix on Thursday, April 8th with Jimmy Lloyd vs. Starboy Charlie, Nolan Edward vs. Daniel Garcia, and Myron Reed vs. Dante Leon. The show takes during WrestleMania Week at The Cuban Club in Ybor City, Florida and streams on FITE TV.
**BetOnline has released odds for WrestleMania 37 with the Roman Reigns vs. Edge match listed as a Pick ‘Em with both listed at -120. For AEW Revolution, they have the following odds listed:
*Kenny Omega (-500) vs. Jon Moxley (+300)
*The Young Bucks (-250) vs. Chris Jericho & MJF (+170)
*Hangman Page (-300) vs. Matt Hardy (+200)
*Darby Allin & Sting (-400) vs. Brian Cage & Ricky Starks (+250)
*Miro & Kip Sabian (+120) vs. Orange Cassidy & Chuck Taylor (-160)
MMA NEWS
**Here are the results from Friday’s UFC weigh-in prior to Saturday’s Fight Night card at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas:
MAIN CARD (8 pm ET on ESPN+)
*Jarizinho Rozenstruik (254.5) vs. Cyril Gane (247)
*Nikita Krylov (205.5) vs. Magomed Ankalaev (205.5)
*Montana De La Rosa (126) vs. Mayra Bueno Silva (125.5)
*Jimmie Rivera (135.5) vs. Pedro Munhoz (135.5)
*Alex Caceres (146) vs. Kevin Croom (145.5)
PRELIMINARY CARD (6 pm on ESPN+)
*Alexander Hernandez (156) vs. Thiago Moises (155.5)
*Angela Hill (116) vs. Ashley Yoder (116)
*Sabina Mazo (135.5) vs. Alexis Davis (135)
*Vince Cachero (135.5) vs. Ronnie Lawrence (135.5)
*Maxim Grishin (210.5*) vs. Dustin Jacoby (204.5) – Grisham was fined 30 percent of his purse for missing weight
**ESPN’s Ariel Helwani reported that UFC flyweight champion Deiveson Figueiredo will engage in a highly-anticipated rematch with Brandon Moreno this June. The report states the rematch is scheduled to take place Saturday, June 12th, and is expected to be UFC 263. The two had one of the best fights of 2020 in December at UFC 256 with the two fighting to a majority draw. It capped off an exceptional year for the 33-year old champion who went 3-0-1 including two victories against Joseph Benavidez. As soon as the fight in December ended, everyone was clamoring for the rematch, and made sense to do it next.
**A former UFC heavyweight champion is expected to box on the undercard of the April 17th pay-per-view card featuring Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren. ESPN’s Ariel Helwani and Marc Raimondi report that Frank Mir will make his pro boxing debut on the undercard facing Antonio “The Magic Man” Tarver. The contest will be a ten-round fight, which still requires commission approval in the state of Georgia. Mir, 41, has not competed in MMA since October 2019 and has lost four of his last five fights. Tarver, 52, boxed professionally from 1997-2015 winning multiple titles at light heavyweight and Cruiserweight. Tarver was never stopped during his career where he ended with a record of 31-6-1. The card is being promoted by Triller, which is the same group that promoted the event headlined by Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. last November.
**MMA Fighting has reported that UFC welterweight Ramazan Kuramagomedov has been forced to withdraw from his fight against Alex Oliveira due to illness. The fight is off, and the card currently stands at ten fights.
**Earlier this week, the UFC Fight Night card also lost a fight between Alonzo Menifield and William Knight. MMA Junkie reported that Menifield had a positive COVID-19 test and forced his removal from the card, which is expected to be moved to the UFC 260 card on March 27th.
**LFA 101 is set to take place on Friday, March 12th at the Grand Casino Hotel & Resort in Shawnee, Oklahoma and stream on UFC Fight Pass. The card will be headlined by a middleweight fight between A.J. Dobson (5-0) and Maika Graf (8-1) among the seven fights on the main card.
FIGHT ANNOUNCEMENTS
Charles Jourdain vs. Marcelo Rojo at UFC Fight on March 13 (Entre Rounds)
J.J. Aldrich vs. Cortney Casey at UFC Fight Night on March 13 (Sherdog)
Neiman Gracie vs. Jason Jackson at Bellator 255 on April 2 (MMA Junkie)
Usman Nurmagomedov vs. Mike Hamel at Bellator 255 on April 2 (Bellator)
Impa Kasanganay vs. Sasha Palatnikov at UFC Fight Night on April 10 (MMA Junkie)
Jeremy Stephens vs. Drakkar Klose at UFC Fight Night on April 17 (MMA Junkie)
John Lineker vs. Stephen Loman at ONE on TNT IV airing April 28 (MMA Fighting)
Antonina Shevchenko vs. Andrea Lee at UFC 262 on May 15 (MMA Junkie)
ON THIS DATE
*****
BTWA #6: Eddie Guerrero ‘Cheating Death, Stealing Life’ (2004)
Martin Bushby & Andrew Thompson are back with another round of Wrestling Adventure. This month, they are joined by Neal Flanagan to look back at the 2004 Eddie Guerrero documentary, ‘Cheating Death, Stealing Life’.
*****
upNXT 2/24/21: “What Is Happening?!”
Braden Herrington and Davie Portman review the February 24th, 2021 episode of WWE NXT featuring Adam Cole explaining his recent actions and Santos Escobar facing Karrion Kross in a No DQ match!
*****
REWIND-A-DYNAMITE 2/24/21: Archer-Fenix, Paul Wight signing
John Pollock & Wai Ting review AEW Dynamite featuring Lance Archer vs. Rey Fenix, the signing of Paul Wight, AEW launching another series & more.
*****
SITD 2/24/21: AEW Women’s Tournament continued, New ROH Six-Man Champs
John Siino reviews this week’s editions of AEW Dark, 205 Live, NXT UK, NJPW Strong, Ring of Honor, PROGRESS, Main Event and the AEW Women’s World Championship Eliminator Tournament in under 15 minutes on Shot In The Dark.
*****
DEEP IMPACT 2/23/21: “Sanctioned”
Davie Portman and Andrew Thompson review IMPACT Wrestling from February 23rd, 2021 headlined by Moose vs Jake Something for the newly sanctioned TNA World Heavyweight Championship.
*****
POST MOVIE REVIEW: Rocky Balboa (2006)
John Pollock & Wai Ting are joined by Ed Boxler to review Rocky Balboa (2006) as retired boxer and widower Rocky Balboa attempts an unlikely comeback for one final fight against heavyweight champion, Mason “The Line” Dixon.
*****
REWIND-A-RAW 2/22/21: Elimination Chamber Fallout
John Pollock & Wai Ting review WWE Raw following the Elimination Chamber event, plus NXT going live in Canada, Hiromu Takahashi out for six months & more.
*****
POST INTERVIEW: Ettore “Big E.” Ewen chats Our Heroes Rock!
John Pollock is joined by Ettore “Big E.” Ewen of WWE to discuss Our Heroes Rock, a project that celebrates black history.
*****
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