POST IT NOTES
**Rewind-A-SmackDown is live at 10 p.m. ET as Andrew Thompson joins me to review Friday Night SmackDown from Madison Square Garden. We will also cover the latest news including AEW Dynamite ratings, Survivor Series in Chicago, and more. POST Wrestling Café can watch the show live and have been sent a link if they want to call. Tune in tonight at 10 p.m. ET!
**The annual POST Wrestling G1 Climax Contest is open and free to join. You can submit your picks at POSTwrestling.com/g1.
**Aniello De Angelis has a review of the new AEW Fight Forever game posted on the site.
**Due to several conflicts, we will not be doing a UFC 290 show this weekend but there will be coverage on the site.
**John Siino & Kate from Montreal are back this weekend with Collision Course on the POST Wrestling Café to review the episode from Regina featuring Samoa Joe vs. CM Punk in the semi-finals of the Owen Hart Cup.
WRESTLING NEWS
**Earlier this week, Jerry McDevitt of K&L Gates released a statement to Wrestlenomics addressing WWE’s change of law firms representing them in the case filed by MLW. Representatives from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Warton & Garrison LLP will be taking over the case on WWE’s behalf and was noted that the new firm had previous work representing WWE in the lead-up to the merger with the UFC. McDevitt tells Wrestlenomics that he is planning to retire by the end of this year and with the expectation that the MLW case could last years it was best to change:
As you may know, since early 2022 I have been working towards retirement. I had hoped that the Court would again dismiss MLW’s lawsuit as it did the first time. When it did not, and it became obvious that the case would run into at least 2025 in all probability, I advised my client that I would be wrapping things up by year-end and that it would make sense for them to secure counsel who can go the distance on the case now that discovery will be starting. There is also the chance that I might be a witness given the allegations. I will be 74 this January and it just seems like the right time to make necessary transitions.
McDevitt’s history of representing WWE goes back to 1987 when he was involved in a case where Jim Neidhart was accused of punching a female airline attendant on a flight, which he denied and McDevitt got him acquitted. His highest profile case involving Vince McMahon was in 1994 when McMahon was acquitted of steroid distribution charges with the case profiled on Dark Side of the Ring including a rare on-camera interview with McDevitt. In this week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter, it noted that McDevitt is considering writing a book about his 36-year history representing WWE, which would be fascinating, to say the least even though it wouldn’t be a tell-all.
**WWE has a full house at Madison Square Garden for Friday Night SmackDown with 13,175 tickets distributed at last check. It should be another big number for the show with the show promoted around The Trial of The Tribal Chief Roman Reigns and should lead to the set up of the SummerSlam match for the championship. It is also Edge’s return to WWE programming after being drafted to SmackDown. Below are the announced matches and segments for tonight:
*The Trial of the Tribal Chief Roman Reigns
*Edge appears on The Grayson Waller Effect
*AJ Styles vs. Karrion Kross
*United States Championship: Austin Theory © vs. Sheamus
**AEW Rampage airs tonight at 10 p.m. ET on TNT with the 100th episode of the series that launched in August 2021. The marketing of the show was only announced on Wednesday and would expect a larger push for the 200th episode of Dynamite on August 2. Rampage is coming off its largest audience since early April and it’s a significantly stronger lineup tonight including a rare match involving the Young Bucks on Rampage. Below is the lineup:
*The Young Bucks & Hangman Page vs. Evil Uno, John Silver & Alex Reynolds
*Blind Eliminator Tournament: Matt Hardy & Jeff Jarrett vs. Sammy Guevara & Daniel Garcia
*Blind Eliminator Tournament: Big Bill & Brian Cage vs. Trent Beretta & Matt Sydal
*Hikaru Shida vs. Marina Shafir
**Week 4 of AEW Collision is in Regina, Saskatchewan with the first singles match between Samoa Joe and CM Punk since 2005. The show is coming off its poorest performance of the three episodes and it’s hard to imagine this show not providing a bounce back given the superior lineup. It will be airing the UFC 290 prelims on ABC & ESPN, so we’ll what a viable UFC lineup provides in terms of competition. The following matches have been announced for Saturday’s show on TNT:
*Owen Hart Cup: CM Punk vs. Samoa Joe
*Owen Hart Cup: Ricky Starks vs. Powerhouse Hobbs
*Owen Hart Cup: Athena vs. Willow Nightingale
*Title Eliminator Match: FTR vs. Jay White & Juice Robinson
**Of the five episodes of Raw in the month of July, three have surpassed 10,000 tickets distributed (paid and comps). This past week’s show in Baltimore had 10,343 tickets distributed with the Observer reporting 9,100 paid. The July 17 episode in Atlanta is at 10,115 and the July 31 show in Houston is at 12,161. This Monday’s episode in Buffalo could hit that mark if it moves 1,600 more tickets by show time. The other show is July 23 in Tampa with 7,551 tickets out. (WrestleTix & Wrestling Observer)
**ROH has confirmed that the main event for Death Before Dishonor on July 21 will be Claudio Castagnoli vs. Mark Briscoe for the ROH Championship. The card is set for the CURE Insurance Arena in Trenton, New Jersey, and goes head-to-head with AEW Rampage and Friday Night SmackDown.
**WWE added a bunch of dates to its live event calendar for September and October with 27 more shows announced. It includes an episode of Raw in Salt Lake City on September 18, Ontario, California on September 25, San Jose on October 2, Omaha on October 9, Oklahoma City on October 16, Dallas on October 23, and Greenville on October 30. Friday Night SmackDown will be in Denver on September 15, Glendale, Arizona on September 22, Sacramento on September 29, St. Louis on October 6, Tulsa on October 13, San Antonio on October 20, and Milwaukee on October 27. Of the live events added to the schedule, there are two that would be considered major-sized arenas with a Saturday Night’s Main Event set for the Nassau Coliseum on September 9, and a Supershow on September 24 in Fresno at the Save Mart Center.
**CMLL’s card at Arena Mexico tonight features a main event Trios with Angel de Oro, Terrible & Niebla Roja against Ultimo Guerrero, Gran Guerrero & Stuka Jr. along with Averno, Mephisto & Euforia vs. Barbaro Cavernario, Hechicero & Templario in the top matches. They will also host a women’s elimination match in the first stage of a tournament to crown a new Mexican National Women’s Champion.
**MLW presents its Never Say Never pay-per-view on FITE+ on Saturday night from the 2300 Arena in Philadelphia. The card will include Alex Hammerstone vs. Alex Kane for the MLW World Heavyweight Championship (with the tease of revealing who the money backer for Kane’s Bomaye Fight Club is), The Samoan Swat Team vs. AKIRA & Rickey Shane Page in a Fans Bring the Weapons Match for the MLW tag titles, Tracy Williams vs. Timothy Thatcher, Delmi Exo vs. Ava Everett in an MLW Women’s vs. wXw Women’s title match, Jacob Fatu vs. Calvin Tankman for the MLW National Openweight title, and Sam Adonis vs. Mance Warner in a Country Whipping Match.
**GCW has its Clean Up Man card streaming on FITE+ at the same time as the MLW show. The Hartford event will be highlighted by Stardom’s Utami Hayashishita taking on Billie Starkz along with Blake Christian vs. Richard Holliday for the GCW title (Holliday just recently started wrestling again after taking a year off due to a cancer diagnosis), Nick Gage vs. Psycho Clown, The SAT vs. Jimmy Lloyd & Wasted Youth, Cole Radrick vs. John Wayne Murdoch, Jordan Oliver & Nick Wayne vs. Gringo Loco & Jack Cartwheel for the GCW tag titles, and Joey Janela vs. Carter Mason.
**West Coast Pro presents Cruel Summer on Saturday at 10 p.m. ET on IWTV from San Francisco with Titus Alexander vs. Vinnie Massaro for the West Coast Pro title, Maria & Riko Kawahata from Marvelous against Johnnie Robbie & Nicole Savoy, Bryan Keith vs. MAO from DDT, Masha Slamovich vs. Trish Adora for the women’s title, Los Suavecitos & Adrian Quest vs. Starboy Charlie, KUSHIDA & Kevin Knight, Robert Martyr vs. Kevin Blackwood, Jeff Cobb vs. Alpha Zo, and Lights Camera Faction vs. Jiah Jewell, JT Thorne, Serza & Kubes.
**AEW released a tremendous mini-documentary on Ethan Page’s return to Hamilton for last week’s shows and the set-up for his championship match with MJF on Collision. He is one of the most underrated promos of any major promotion currently.
**The WWE stock closed at $107.84 on Friday.
MMA NEWS
**Jens Pulver’s speech is a must-watch from the UFC Hall of Fame as he went through a horrendous upbringing as a child and shared several of those details. Pulver’s book he released years ago is one of the tougher reads because of how brutally honest he was about his childhood and what he overcame. For years, people have been hoping to see Pulver added to the Hall of Fame, so he was the sentimental favorite this year in a star-studded class that included Anderson Silva and Jose Aldo. The highlights of Pulver’s career included an improbable win against phenom BJ Penn at UFC 35 in 2002 when everyone counted Pulver out. It was considered a lamb being led to slaughter on the show, so when Pulver won by unanimous decision, it was a defining moment of his career. He left the UFC as lightweight champion to pursue opportunities in Japan which led to the promotion eventually dropping the lightweight division the next year and didn’t resurrect it until 2006. Pulver came back to the company to coach TUF in 2007 with Penn, where the Hawaiian avenged his loss. It was one of the best seasons of TUF for the sheer number of elite lightweights on the season including winner Nate Diaz, Gray Maynard, and many others. After the loss to Penn, he was transitioned to the WEC and had a big fight with Urijah Faber for the WEC featherweight title in June 2008 that drew a great number on Versus to help establish Faber as a major star in the organization and put WEC on the national radar after it was purchased by Zuffa.
**UFC 290 takes place on Saturday night from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas for its annual International Fight Week event. In the main event, Alexander Volkanovski is a sizable favorite against Yair Rodriguez, although this could be an excellent fight with Rodriguez having made large improvements in his game since entering the UFC and fighting some of the upper-tier featherweights. Volkanovski is among the best fighters in the world at this moment and is coming off a sojourn to lightweight where he challenged and lost to champion Islam Makhachev. Rodriguez became the interim champion during that brief move to lightweight for Volkanovski, but no one is focused on the interim aspect with all seeing Volkanovski as the undisputed champion of the division.
In the other title fight, Brandon Moreno defends the flyweight title against Alexandre Pantoja in their third meeting with the challenger holding a 2-0 advantage. Pantoja submitted Moreno on The Ultimate Fighter in 2016 and earned a decision in a rematch five years ago. Moreno has since had four fights with Deiveson Figueiredo and is on his second reign as 125-pound champion. Moreno is a totally different fighter than the one on TUF, but Pantoja has had his number in the past. The second win was an emphatic one with two judges scoring it 30-26 for Pantoja.
**Perhaps the most newsworthy event is the retirement fight for Robbie Lawler on the prelims. Lawler began his pro career in April 2001 and is set to hang up the gloves at age 41. Lawler has fought a who’s who over the years and established himself as one of the top action fighters in history with a stretch of the year’s best fights between 2014-2016. His first stint with the UFC occurred in his fifth pro fight and was considered a prodigy during the early Zuffa days as he fought three times in 2002 defeating Aaron Riley, Steve Berger, and Tiki Ghosn before losing to Pete Spratt. After losses to Nick Diaz (an incredible fight on the same night where Chuck Liddell fought Tito Ortiz for the first time) and Evan Tanner, he left the UFC and fought all over the U.S. for various groups and start-ups. He came the middleweight champion for the Hawaii-based ICON Sport as well as Elite XC, which gained national attention when it struck a deal with CBS in 2008. Lawler fought Scott Smith on back-to-back CBS cards that year after a no-contest in the first fight and came back to headline a show in July, which was way down from the debut card (which was boosted by Kimbo Slice and Gino Carano competing on the first one). After Elite XC went under, he was picked up by Strikeforce and went 3-5 during his time in its middleweight division and ending with a loss to Lorenz Larkin in 2012.
It was a mild surprise he was brought into the UFC after Strikeforce shut its doors with Lawler moving back to welterweight and becoming reinvigorated with the sport. He fought his way to a title opportunity after rattling off three wins in 2013 and earned a shot at the vacant title against Johny Hendricks that came down to the final minute of the fifth round where Hendricks secured a takedown. Lawler fought four times that year with rebound wins against Jake Ellenberger and Matt Brown before beating Hendricks in a rematch at the end of the year and completing his comeback and highest place in the sport. His next two fights were all-time legendary wars against Rory MacDonald at UFC 189 (inducted into the Fight Wing as part of this year’s Hall of Fame class) and then beating Carlos Condit in an equally destructive battle for both men. Those fights did irreparable harm for all parties and Lawler lost the title in his next fight to Tyron Woodley in July 2016. Since the title loss, he has gone 2-5 and one of those wins was against Nick Diaz, who had not fought in six years and did not seem prepared during that fight week. Lawler will be remembered as a tremendously entertaining fighter, who survived multiple eras of the sport and is another figure from a bygone era of the sport before it exploded in the mid-2000s.
**Jalin Turner was the only fighter to miss weight for UFC 290 as he stepped on the scale at 158 pounds and missed the lightweight limit by two pounds. His fight against Dan Hooker will remain on the main card but Turner will be penalized with a 20 percent forfeiture of his purse.
**Here is the full lineup for UFC 290 on Saturday night with the prelims airing on both ABC, ESPN & ESPN+ head-to-head with AEW Collision.
MAIN CARD (10 p.m. ET on pay-per-view)
*UFC Featherweight Championship: Alexander Volkanovski © vs. Yair Rodriguez (ic)
*UFC Flyweight Championship: Brandon Moreno © vs. Alexandre Pantoja
*Robert Whittaker vs. Dricus du Plessis – If Du Plessis wins, he would almost assuredly be the next middleweight contender but Whittaker is by far his toughest fight to date and is a big favorite
*Dan Hooker vs. Jalin Turner
*Bo Nickal vs. Val Woodburn – Nickal is a -3000 favorite on FanDuel
PRELIMINARY CARD (8 p.m. on ABC, ESPN & ESPN+)
*Robbie Lawler vs. Niko Price
*Denise Gomes vs. Yasmin Jauregui
*Jimmy Crute vs. Alonzo Menifield
EARLY PRELIMS (6 p.m. ET on ESPN+ & Fight Pass)
*Edgar Chairez vs. Tatsuro Taira
*Marcin Prachino vs. Vitor Petrino
*Terrence Mitchell vs. Cameron Saaiman
*Shannon Ross vs. Jesus Aguilar
*Kamuela Kirk vs. Esteban Ribovics
*****
MCU L8R: Secret Invasion Ep. 3
This week, WH Park and Rich Fann are joined by Daniel Palmer of The MTR Network to talk episode 3 of Secret Invasion, “Betrayed”.
*****
NJPW STRONG Independence Day Review
Karen Peterson & Bruce Lord review NJPW STRONG’s debut in Japan with Independence Day, a 2-day special event in Korakuen Hall highlighted by El Desperado and Jon Moxley in double feature deathmatches.
*****
REWIND-A-DYNAMITE
John Pollock & Wai Ting review AEW Dynamite with Kenny Omega taking on Wheeler Yuta and the Blind Eliminator Tournament begins in Edmonton.
*****
POLLOCK & THURSTON: Chris Hero
John Pollock and Brandon Thurston are joined by Chris Hero to chat about the current state of independent wrestling and lots more.
*****
upNXT
Braden Herrington and Davie Portman review WWE NXT from July 4th, 2023 featuring Diamond Mine vs Dyad in a “Loser Leaves NXT” Match!
*****
REWIND-A-WAI #134: ROH Supercard of Honor 2013
John Pollock & Wai Ting review ROH Supercard of Honor VII (2013) featuring Kevin Steen vs. Jay Briscoe for the ROH World Championship and reDragon vs. American Wolves for the ROH Tag Team Championships.
*****
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