On a day like this it is difficult to find the words, so I will keep this short. A lot of innocent people in Paris lost their lives to senseless acts of violence. They didn’t deserve it. It is hard to fathom why this happened.
All of us at F4WOnline.com send our condolences, prayers and positive thoughts to those who were effected by this tragedy in Paris.
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Dave, Bryan and Filthy Tom Lawlor will be up after UFC tonight with a full rundown and analysis of the show, plus a look at all of the weekend news! Sign up for full access to this, the other 7,000 archived shows, the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Figure Four Weekly and more!
Joint statement from UFC and Etihad Stadium, the location of tonight’s UFC Rousey vs. Holm event tonight:
Etihad Stadium and UFC jointly send their thoughts and sympathy to those impacted by the terrible incidents which occurred in France.
Regarding tomorrow’s scheduled UFC 193 card at Etihad Stadium, officials from Etihad Stadium, UFC, and Victoria Police have come together to review all major safety protocols and procedures prior to this major event. This risk assessment and planning process takes place before all events held at Etihad Stadium, and the venue, promoter and police will remain diligent in this process in light of today’s tragedies in France.
We have been advised by Victoria Police there is nothing to suggest that tomorrow’s event will in any way be impacted by the events in France, it is important to note that precautions are being taken to ensure a safe and enjoyable experience for all in attendance.
We’re looking for reports on today’s WWE show in Nottingham, England, NXT in Orlando, ROH in Milwaukee (A.J. Styles & Young Bucks vs. Jay Lethal & Donovan Dijak & Joey Daddiego, Michael Bennett & Matt Taven vs. Bobby Fish & Kyle O’Reilly for tag titles plus Survivor of the Fittest matches with Mark Briscoe vs. Christopher Daniels vs. Hanson vs. Kenny King, Jay Briscoe vs. Frankie Kazarian vs. Ray Rowe vs. Rhett Titus, Adam Cole vs. Michael Elgin vs. Moose, Dalton Castle vs. Silas Young vs. Adam Page and Roderick Strong vs. Cedric Alexander), NXT in Orlando and House of Hardcore in Philadelphia shows.
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We’re also looking for reports on yesterday’s WWE shows in Newcastle, England and Bologna, Italy, yesterday’s NXT in Winter Haven, FL and Wednesday’s show in Rome at Dave Meltzer
We’ll be doing polls this weekend on both UFC 194 and the Tenryu retirement show.
UFC SATURDAY NIGHT FROM ETIHAD STADIUM IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRAILA
Fight Pass at 6:15 p.m. Eastern time
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Ryan Benoit vs. Ben Nguyen
Steven Kennedy vs. Richard Walsh
Steve Montgomery vs. Daniel Kelly
James Moontasri vs. Brendan O’Reilly
FS 1 at 8 p.m. Eastern
Richie Vacuik vs. Danny Martinez
Anthony Perosh vs. Gian Villante
Kyle Noke vs. Pete Sobotta
Jake Matthews vs.
PPV AT 10 p.m. Eastern
Jared Rosholt vs. Stefan Struve
Uriah Hall vs. Robert Whittaker
Mark Hunt vs. Antonio Bigfoot Silva
Joanna Jedrzejczyk vs. Valerie Letourneau for strawweight title
Ronda Rousey vs. Holly Holm for bantamweight title
TENRYU RETIREMENT SHOW FROM SUMO HALL IN TOKYO AT 1 A.M. EASTERN LATE SATURDAY/10 P.M. PACIFIC TIME
Jushin Liger & Ryota Chikuzen & Gurukun Mask & Shigeno Shima & Dragon Joker vs. Onryo & Kuuga & Taru & Minoru Fujita & Yasu Kubota
Great Kabuki (he famous one from the 80s) & Kai & Buki vs Great Kojika & Jun Kasai & Toru Sugiura
Shiro Koshinaka & Arashi vs. Taiyo Kea & Yuto Aijima
Ricky Fuji & Sanshiro Takagi vs. Kikutaro & The Winger
Meiko Satomura & Tomoka Miyagi vs. Dash Chisako & Sendai Sachiko
Yoshinari Ogawa & Kendo Ka Shin vs. Nosawa & Kennichri Arai
Koki Kitahara & Ryuji Hijikata & Kotaro Nasu vs. Katsuhiko Nakajima & Hikaru Sato & Kazuki Hashimoto
Riki Choshu & Tomohiro Ishii vs. Akitoshi Saito & Ryuichi Kawakami
Yoshiaki Fujiwara & Yoshihiro Takayama vs. Minoru Suzuki & Kazunari Murakami
Suwama & Yuji Okabayashi vs. Daisuke Sekimoto & Kazuyuki Fujita
Genichiro Tenryu vs. Kazuchika Okada
This show features world champions from three different offices, Big Japan (Okabayashi), NOAH (Suzuki) and New Japan (Okada).
Sunday has Insane Championship Wrestling in Glasgow, Scotland with Drew Galloway vs. Grado in what will be the most attended show from a UK based promotion in 33 years, as well as the second day of the Lucha Underground tapings in Boyle Heights, CA.
Raw will be live Monday night from Greenville, SC. The show will feature the quarterfinals of the WWE championship tournament. The quarterfinals have Roman Reigns vs. Cesaro Alberto Del Rio vs. Kalisto, Kevin Owens vs. Neville and Dean Ambrose vs. Dolph Ziggler. It’s possible all of these matches will be on Raw, or that some may be taped for Smackdown.
Smackdown tapings are Tuesday night in Knoxville.
Figure Four Weekly:
Figure Four Weekly (10/2/15): WWE 2K16 Review
2K Sports and Yuke’s turnaround WWE video game series with a reinvigorated title boasting huge roster.
Wrestling Observer Newsletter:
Exclusive news on WrestleMania, how SummerSlam has changed due to the Seth Rollins injury, updates on Rollins, notes on the WWE title tournament and what key stars besides Rollins and Randy Orton are now unlikely to wrestle at WrestleMania is the lead story in the new issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.
We also look at the different potential finishes of the WWE title tournament, how it looks to be progressing, a look at the Royce Gracie vs. Ken Shamrock fight and look back 20 years to their two previous fights, lots of notes on the fight, and the back story.
We also look at WrestleMania tickets, the Wayne Rooney angle, Dwayne Johnson and Dave Bautista update, More on Alberto Del Rio’s outside business and his angle in Puerto Rico, Undertaker week, WWE make more network predictions, notes from the next Madison Square Garden show, notes on Raw this week, Ronda Rousey talks WWE Divas division, what WWE star is ready to return from surgery, plus notes on all the WWE & NXT arena events of the past week and business note.
We also have our monthly business rundown of WWE and TNA, to see how both groups are doing as compared to the same period last year, as well as a breakdown on how every different WWE main event is drawing over the past month.
CLICK HERE FOR A FULL WRESTLING OBSERVER PREVIEW
The latest Wrestling Observer: November 16, 2015 Wrestling Observer Newsletter: Seth Rollins injury, Wrestlekingdom 10 matches
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If you are a new subscriber ordering 24 or more issues, you can get one free classic issue of your choice sent to you today. With a 40 issue subscription, you can get two free classic issues sent to you today. We’ve got coverage of every major PPV event and world wide spectacular, every major star switching promotions, histories of companies like FMW, Rings and New Japan, retirement and obit issues of every major star who fits into those descriptions over the past 11 years, as well as our biggest issue every year, the annual awards issue, and our most controversial issue of every year, the Hall of Fame issue.
Click here for the most requested Wrestling Observer back issues.
FRIDAY DAILY UPDATE
WWE
The Bellas were in Paris yesterday. The were within 6km of some of the attacks. They posted on their twitter and instagram.
Fusion has an article blaming WWE for the political rise of Donald Trump. Trump hosted two different WrestleMania events in the 1980s and also appeared as a cornerman for a Bobby Lashley vs. Umaga match which, at the time, was the biggest-money WrestleMania event in history. Trump had his hair on the line against the hair of Vince McMahon, which, of course, led to Vince being shaved bald.
Danny in the UK wrote in to talk about the “WHO ARE YOU?” chants at the Raw and Smackdown shows for guys like Braun Strowman and Tyler Breeze. “We do not use this chant because we don’t actually know who he is, it’s more of an insult for someone who is new or rather insignificant. It has been popularised at football matches here for example if a big club such as Manchester United played a smaller club such as Doncaster Rovers, everyone here knows who Doncaster are and where they are located but they would use the chant as an insult towards the smaller club. The NXT show will be awesome when it comes to the UK and the crowd will be on fire.”
Information on the next WWE Performance Center All Access weekend in January is up on the WWE.com website.
Here’s a column on Hulk Hogan speaking about the potential of John Cena someday turning heel.
Steve Austin got a mention in this WSJ article about podcasting. (Thanks to Nick DeLeon)
Smackdown was up slightly this week to 2.3 million viewers from the 2.1 million last week.
UFC/MMA
Dana White tweeted the reverse angle of the Ronda Rousey-Holly Holm weigh-in staredown/confrontation.
Here’s the entire thing complete with Ronda’s fiery promo after their altercation at the weigh-ins.
Ronda Rousey was announced as the cover athlete for EA Sports UFC 2 in an extensive trailer talking about how she grew up loving EA Sports games and now gets to be on the cover of one. EA Sports’ site has a list of the new features in the game, while Shaun Al-Shatti at MMAFighting has an interview with game director Brian Hayes.
Ronda on Thursday said that Miesha Tate’s best bet for a title shot was to just wait around for her to retire. She’s been talking retirement a lot lately, and she claimed she had more miles on her body than Miesha did with all of the surgeries and arthritis she said she was battling. She said if Miesha just waited around, she probably could face Holly at some point in a title match. As far as Holm getting the title shot and not Miesha, she noted she’d already beaten Miesha’s ass twice.
To keep her geek cred solid, Rousey talks her love of Star Wars.
What about Rousey the retired buffalo farmer? There is no shortage of outlets trying to come up with any angle for a story.
UFC announced they now have an app for Amazon’s devices.
Tim Kennedy continues is call-out spree. Both in the calling out for a fight sense and the calling out to accuse fighters of using steroids sense.
A couple of fights recently announced for upcoming UFC cards – For UFC 195 in Vegas on January 2nd, unbeaten Brian Ortega takes on Diego Brandao in a Featherweight bout. For Fight Night 81 in Boston, the loaded FS 1 show headlined by the Dillashaw/Cruz Bantamweight title fight, Lightweight prospects Beneil Dariush and Mairbek Taisumov square off.
Ray Sefo of the World Series of Fighting announced Jake Shields vs. Jon Fitch for the vacant WSOF Welterweight Title on April 1st. The last champion, Rousimar Palhares, was stripped of the title following the fight with Shields earlier this year where he held onto a Kimura too long and allegedly raked Shields’ eyes. Shields was so upset after the fight that he punched Palhares, which ended up with him being disciplined as well.
Other Wrestling
Rey Mysterio called into Busted Open Radio Friday on the anniversary of Eddie Guerrero’s death. On being ready to be World Champion at the time he got the title, Mysterio said, “No, especially not under those circumstances. I guess my career was heading in a different direction. We had just finished our feud with my son, Dominic, and the great story that Eddie put together and how much passion he threw behind that, that character that he was. He was ready to move on with Batista and I really don’t know where I was going, but that changed direction completely for, I believe, for everyone. So I really wasn’t ready at the time, but of course you’ve got to make the best out of it. This was a big opportunity for me and the people knew. The people knew that it was going down for Eddie. I was put on the spot, but I was there representing Eddie.”
Remember Glacier? He did an interview talking about Dusty Rhodes, Lou Thesz, his WCW run, and more.
Slam! Wrestling has a article from wrestling memorabilia collector Dr. Bob Bryla on the 1916 vintage Pacific Coast Heavyweight Championship belt being found.
New Japan’s Tama Tonga recently chatted with Chad Dukes.
Jimmy Hart guests on the Expat Sports Podcast.
Pete Gas joins the Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling podcast. On Shane McMahon returning to WWE: “I think it’s one of those things where you don’t want to live in your Dad’s shadow. To be honest with you the only person who can truly answer that is Shane. It will always be in his blood to be in the business, whether or not he ever comes back. I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you. But he’s one of those guys that truly loves the business, he loved everything about it but maybe it was something he had to prove to himself.”
The ESPN 30-for-30 documentary Prince Of Pennsylvania that focuses on the Schultz brothers is now available on Netflix.
Marc Mero is doing motivational speaking.
Maryland Championship Wrestling results (11/13) in Waldorf, MD: G-Fed and The Hell Cats defeated The Kings, Oakley Woods w/Colonel Calihan defeated Rayo, Tessa Blanchard defeated Renee Michelle, MCW Rage TV Champion Brandon Scott defeated Money Green, The Bruiser defeated Paul Jordane, Kimber Lee w/ The Dixon Line defeated Mickie James for the MCW Woman’s Championship after Amber Rodriquez interfered, Lio Rush defeated Eric Chapel w/ Kevin Eck in a no DQ, falls count anywhere match, MCW Champion King McBride defeated Sonjay Dutt to retain. Ric Flair appeared on the show as well. MCW runs Saturday with Ric Flair, Tully Blanchard, JJ Dillon, Baby Doll & Tessa Blanchard on the show.
SDW returns to the Richfield American Legion with a Holiday Spectacular on Saturday, December 19.
