WWE SummerSlam Tour
One of the perks of where I work, I’m able to listen to my iPod and usually listen to podcast, to help past the time. I listen to a lot of wrestling podcasts, talking news and reviewing classic events, among listening to different podcast of interests I have outside of the industry of professional wrestling.
Anyways, one of the wrestling podcasts I listen to discusses wrestling events that’s ten years old or older. The podcast I listen to is called the Old School Wrestling podcast (found here) and on their 99th episode, the host discussed the National Wrestling Alliance’s 1987 Great American Bash tour (podcast can be found here). Pushing a three hour show, I enjoyed listening to the Black Cat and Dre from start to finish. While listening to their show, I thought of something that inspired this blog.
What if Vince McMahon takes the World Wrestling Entertainment on a similar tour that Jim Crockett took the Jim Crockett Promotions on the Great American Bash tour for a few years in the late-80s? Could a professional wrestling tour be successful in the 2010s?
With SummerSlam being the WWE’s summer WrestleMania, why not give it a different taste than your normal wrestling pay-per-view feel and combine what the Jim Crockett Promotions did and capitalize on a summer tour?
Here’s my idea for the WWE SummerSlam tour: eliminate the June and July pay-per-views and after the May show, build up SummerSlam by the winner of a summer tour gets a shot at the WWE Champion. To go with the SummerSlam DVD sales, why not make it a two-disc sell and on the second disc, put together all the matches of the summer tournament tour, for we receive a snapshot of why the challenger was facing the WWE Champion in the main event.
One thing I enjoyed from my teenage years was when the WWE did for one year only when building up Brock Lesnar in 2002, having him win the King of the Ring tournament and challenge for the Undisputed WWE title at SummerSlam and used the July pay-per-view as a stepping stone between the July PPV and the August PPV to continue building “the Next Big Thing.”
Monday Night Raw and Friday Night Smackdown, as well as WWE’s Wednesday Main Event should host a few of the matches, but shouldn’t be the focus of the three WWE weekly shows. Why not add in a few summer specials on television, similar to what they did in the late-80s and early-90s with Saturday Night Main Events, only for the summer. Maybe call it the “WWE: SummerSlam Special Tour, Episode (insert a number here)” and limit those shows to a couple a year, to make it something special, and make the SummerSlam build mean more.
Could the WWE use their June and July pay-per-views to build up properly to SummerSlam? They hadn’t in years and I don’t have the faith for them to try again. So if they eliminate two pay-per-views and schedule only ten PPVs a year, having three months between the May show and SummerSlam, SummerSlam would mean more since, if booked properly, would mean more since there were months between the paid shows.
I guess you, the reader, might be yelling at your screen, telling me that I answered my question in the paragraph above, saying that even eliminating two pay-per-views, WWE would crap on my idea since their bookers can’t write the storylines that a lot of us loved when we were kids. I’ll give you that. WWE has guys like Zeb Colter (Dutch Mantel) and Paul Heyman, who the books could be given to after WrestleMania and let them book the storyline and let Triple H or Vince McMahon, whoever, guide them and approve and disapprove on where the storylines go.
WWE had everything at their fingertips (or in their hands, depending on how old school they really are) on booking this correctly. I don’t have much faith in their booking abilities nowadays but the little faith that I do have in them, if they treated this like something special, they could make this mean something.
To conclude, this was a fun idea for me to kick around and I hope you guys enjoyed reading it. Let me know if you guys think my idea could work, or what changes you would cause, or if you could simply rewrite my blog and add in your own ideas, what are they? I’m more than happy to hear your thoughts and opinions. Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your day!
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