Once again, the internet’s biggest dirt sheet writer is passing off his personal speculation as news. In the event that any of you read the following text, please remember that this is one man’s speculation:
Batista‘s contract with WWE has expired and he is a free agent. TNA did make an offer to Batista but with the large amount of money they have spent on bringing in other big names recently, they couldn’t come close to matching what he had been earning in WWE.
There is no way for this dirt sheet writer to know whether or not TNA made an offer to Batista or whether or not TNA’s balance sheet is able to handle the cost of acquiring him as an asset. In addition, there is no way for this idiot to know the dollar amount of any offer made to Batista. Again, there is NO NEWS about Batista and TNA – only speculation. And it seems like the negative speculation is coming from this one source alone.
Be careful what you read on the interwebs, folks.
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The dirt sheet rumor writer shows his ignorance with his assumptions. No one goes to TNA for a bigger payday anyways. It’s about work schedule. Why would TNA try and pay someone as much as WWE?
TNA runs 2+ tapings a month vs WWE’s 5+. WWE tours over 20 days a month vs TNA’s 5-10. Even with the “balance sheet” in the positive, they would not be making Batista an offer to top the WWE. It would be based on a number of dates, which would be much less dates than he got in the WWE.
If Batista goes to TNA it will be for a smaller workload which he knows also means less money.
I agree 100% with William. Plus, how does he know his contract expired and there’s no 90-day compete clause? Pure speculation and a cry for attention
William, Jarrett,
I couldn’t agree more with you both. This is what this guy does – he gets his opinion and spin on a variety of possible news items and passes it off as news. It’s shameful, really, but most wrestling fans don’t bother to verify the information or think critically about what the dirt sheet writer is putting out there.
All you have to do is really think about any of the fluff this guy puts out there and you can see that there are holes all over his “stories.”
Joe
Wow. I hope you’re not talking about a news item posted by Dave Meltzer from F4WOnline.com, because if you are then this is pretty embarrassing. If that’s the case – you chose to get the summary that some kid posted online of an article that sounded nothing like the paragraph above. Below is the FULL article directly word-for-word from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. Meltzer interviewed Batista at the Strikeforce show:
We spoke with Dave Bautista on 6/16 after the Strikeforce show and was surprised at how negative he was toward WWE. Instead of saying he left to pursue other goals, he made it clear he left because he was unhappy with the direction of the company, and wanted to get out.
When I asked him if he sees that as similar to Chris Jericho where he may go back in a year or two, he just said he doesn’t want to be compared with Jericho. He didn’t say he wouldn’t go back, but said he no plans to do so and wasn’t looking at doing so now.
He joked that he’s in Los Angeles looking for work, and said he’s open for offers whether it’s MMA or acting. He’s had discussions about doing a reality show, but that hardly puts him in select company. I don’t think MMA would be a good idea for him to debut at his age. He never wrestled after high school, and that was more than 20 years ago. He said he’s been doing martial arts regularly since he was a kid, but there’s no background in boxing, kickboxing, BJJ or wrestling. He’s training at the Affliction gym regularly and has dropped considerable weight, so he is probably in better shape. I’d guess him at 255, maybe 260, still big and muscular but hardly the monster he looked like in the ring. He was moving around fine after suffering a hairline fracture of his back taking the stunt bump Attitude Adjustment off the roof of the car to a gimmicked part of the cage in the final spot on the 5/23 Over the Limit PPV in Detroit. He was originally booked to finish up at house shows this month, but with the injury, that ended up being his final match with the promotion. His contract has expired and he is a free agent. There were offers from TNA but because of all the money TNA spent on big names with little return so far this year, their budget is stretched thin and they couldn’t come close to matching what he’d been earning.
The loss of weight would probably be better for both fighting and acting.
The complaint he had with pro wrestling was the PG direction, saying the kind of wrestling he liked was the era of Steve Austin and The Rock, and you can’t do that stuff anymore. It was questioned what Batista did during his career that he wouldn’t be allowed to do now.
He was talking with Strikeforce CEO Scott Coker after the show but it just the two guys introducing themselves to each other for the first time. The one thing is, I just don’t see him getting the kind of money he would want in MMA, because he’s been making in the $2 million per year range and that’s why any kind of leaving other than a sabbatical at his age (41) doesn’t make sense unless he’s just sick of it and has saved enough money to where that’s not an issue. With the kind of years he’s had the past five or six years, he could have saved a big nest egg but he does live large. He’s got a finite number of years left and he’s exceedingly unlikely to be able to come anywhere close to that kind of income doing anything else.
The two possible booking ideas that could draw curiosity numbers certainly on television, but not nearly as certain on PPV, would be fights with either Herschel Walker or Kimbo Slice.
My gut is the Walker fight has an extremely slim chance of happening for a number of reasons, including I wonder if he’d be offered anywhere near what he’d want, and I’m not sure how Walker would take the idea of the match since he’s made it clear he doesn’t want to be in fights that will be perceived of as jokes. Walker has committed to a fight in the fall. Right now, CBS and Strikeforce have not made any kind of a new deal, and unless they do, a Walker fight would either be on Showtime, or if it’s in conjunction with Fedor Emelianenko vs. Alistair Overeem (provided Emelianenko beats Fabricio Werdum on 6/26 and then Coker can put the Overeem fight together), on PPV.
Walker is 48, and has only had one fight, so age and experience aren’t that far off.
Coker made it clear this week he has no interest in signing Kimbo Slice. Walker is more likely to be facing an unknown fighter like the first guy he fought, which would have less appeal than against someone who is a name, perhaps from another world. Walker made it clear he didn’t want to face Jose Canseco or anyone that was a joke opponent. Walker grew up as a huge pro wrestling fan so I don’t think he’ll dismiss wrestlers as athletes, but I wonder if he’d want to be part of something that would have natural media skepticism built around it, facing a pro wrestler who had never fought before.
Between that and the issue of money, while it would draw more ratings than almost any fight the company could put on, I don’t see it. Plus, Coker is very negative about the idea of booking a “freak show” fight, figuring that’s now the way to build the organization.
Batista vs. Kimbo if done in UFC or Strikeforce would do big television ratings numbers, and for UFC, would do big PPV numbers, but that’s absolutely not going to happen in either organization. UFC doesn’t need to go down that route now that they are profitable already and doing something like that would reflect negatively even though it would draw.
Batista has been approached with an offer from a non-major group which is the offer he hinted around about when leaving WWE. We don’t know the details but the money is apparently big, for a two fight deal which would most likely be two PPV events, and the first opponent is a well known former multi-time PPV headliner.
I also wonder if Batista were actually to try MMA and if he looked bad, if it would have any effect on his pro wrestling career. It may not at all because it shouldn’t since they are two different things. With fans, you’d think people know and get the difference and it shouldn’t mean anything.
But as recently as a few years back, Vince McMahon turned down the creative team for months after making him champion after he reportedly came out on the short end of an altercation with Booker T in front of some of the wrestlers, saying that he didn’t want a world champion who people knew got their ass kicked in a real fight.
When Batista left WWE, the reaction internally was they figured due to all the obvious reasons financially and age based, that he’d be back at some point, probably sooner than later. He didn’t rule it out, but was more negative about it than I expected.
Wow. I’m actually pretty embarrassed for you here, Eddie. Let me make two points.
First, Meltzer is a joke. He writes propaganda that promotes his personal agenda which is sometimes in favor of WWE or TNA and sometimes against. This guy is a complete joke – he’s the type of guy who hangs around a professional locker room hoping to see one of the big, burly athletes who embody something that he can never be. Jim Cornette has a good rant on people like that floating somewhere around YouTube.
Second, Eddie – can you really read the portion of Meltzer’s article that talks about TNA making an offer to Batista and not realize that it’s all assumption and conjecture on his part? If I said to one of my bosses, “The deal fell through because we couldn’t offer enough money on the contract,” they would say, “How much did you offer? Where is the schedule showing how much money is available?”
Further, if one of my clients said to me, “Joe, we can’t complete this project because we ran out of money,” I’d say, “Show me a schedule of your income and expenses so I can see what happened.” In other words – some comments need to be verified before they can be taken as “fact.”
Meltzer writes: “There were offers from TNA but because of all the money TNA spent on big names with little return so far this year, their budget is stretched thin and they couldn’t come close to matching what he’d been earning.”
Let me ask you – when he writes this about TNA, how does he know that “because of all the money TNA spent on big names with little return so far this year, their budget is stretched thin and they couldn’t come close to matching what [Batista’d] been earning?” How does he know that? Did Batista tell him? How does Batista know? I can guarantee you right now that no private company in the history of the world has ever sat down with a potential contractor and said, “We have X dollars in our account – is that enough to sign you to a contract?”
Batista doesn’t know how much money TNA has to play with, Meltzer certainly doesn’t know, and nothing in that gigantic comment shows any verifiable source to substantiate Meltzer’s claim.
So how does Meltzer know how much money this private organization spent on “big names?” How does he know what “return” TNA was looking for in signing these individuals? How does he know that their “budget is stretched thin?” How does he know “they couldn’t come close to matching what” Batista was earning in WWE? How does he know this? Where is the source document? Where is this information coming from?
To suggest that this isn’t Meltzer’s (negative) opinion is really, really outlandish and it really shows a lack of understanding on how the financial end of any private business works. I mean the idiot even says that the big names have given “little return” this year! HA HA! For me, that’s the giveaway! How could he ever know what “return” TNA was looking for by signing these “big names?” How do we know that the core purpose of bringing in Hogan and Flair wasn’t to drive up revenue, but to get in a better position with Spike TV so they could create more programming?
Sure, I use conjecture in my columns as we all do. And I even use my opinion to frame certain news stories as most folks on the internet do. But the difference is that I’m just a guy in New Jersey who is a wrestling fan and an admitted mark (a term I don’t run from) for TNA programming. Meltzer is a dirt merchant who plays off of the generic wrestling fan’s desire to (in Hillary Clinton’s words) “willingly suspend disbelief” when it comes to professional wrestling. In other words, he makes his money off of writing things that seem good enough to be true.
Maybe you’re not a WWE… but, my dear friend, you are certainly a Meltzer mark!
Well, its’s pointless to continue this, as you obviously have something against Meltzer. I understand your feelings and respect them. I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out when he separates opinion from fact but a lot of people do (usually your type who don’t read the newsletter but its summarized versions). I have no problem with that. I just wish you critcized the actual article and not a one-paragraph summary someone else wrote. As far as Jim Cornette goes, he’s been Meltzer’s most popular radio show guest lately, usually running down the stupidity of TNA management (not so much the current one) that drove him to quit the company.
I’m mostly very glad we established you’re a TNA mark. 🙂 I can rest peacefully now and ignore half your posts on this site that have nothing to do with wrestling news. It’s a shame really – I enjoy this website greatly and am a reader here. But I sense the TNA propaganda and interesting biased TNA positivity twist you’ve been preaching lately is reaching “Meltzer-esque” levels (by your view on Meltzer). But since you’ve admitted you’re a mark for the product, I can learn to laugh at the comedy of it, and not take it as serious news/opinion. I’ll just follow the rest of the site, which again, I have enjoyed from day one!
So you finally understand that a website called “TNAStars.com” has an obvious bias FOR TNA? Was that a big secret? Really?
I actually wrote an entire column about how I’m a mark for TNA wrestling some months ago when the site opened so I think it has been well-established that I’m a TNA mark. I don’t hide from that fact just like you shouldn’t hide from the fact that you take Meltzer’s words as fact and view anyone’s opinion on professional wrestling other than your own as inferior. Maybe you don’t realize it, but it’s very noticeable and consistent. I don’t judge you for your air of superiority like you judge me for my want of clarity in the internet wrestling news cesspool, but that’s okay. It’s your prerogative.
If you ever come down off of the mountain, maybe we can continue the conversation like regular wrestling fans. Or not – the fact remains that what Meltzer wrote cannot be substantiated and is obviously opinion by any measure of the word.
I can’t seem to recall any invasion angle so realistic. Scott Hall certainly didn’t beat up the color commentator, the ring announcer, the bell guy, a security guy at ringside, the wrestlers involved in the ongoing match, and the “host” (Striker) of the show. Nor did he go on to break the set. Most invasion angles done have involved well-known wrestlers and the motivation was obvious. It’s one faction (re)uniting against another (ECW on RAW and on Nitro), or a known wrestler coming into a rival opposition to jump ship (Scott Hall on Nitro and many others during Monday Night Wars) or to start another storyline. These guys were mostly unknown to the RAW audience. Their motivation was absolutely unknown. They destroyed the face of the company, some innocent bystanders, and the set of the show – something I don’t recall being done before. It felt so realistic to the audience, that a man sitting in the front row reached over the barricade for the bell to ring it for help as front-row fans were yelling “GET HELP.” Women and children were shown on camera genuinely scared with some crying. The execution by the rookies was tremendous. Again, I’ll be the first to say – that three-hour RAW show was among the worst wrestling television programs EVER, but that last 10-minute angle was IN MY OPINION tremendous because of great execution and a fresh twist on the “invasion” wrestling gimmick.
As far as your last comment, I was honestly unaware of the angle at which you wrote for this site. I was under the impression the site was to feature TNA star biographies, TNA news, and TNA opinions. While it does just that, I didn’t know it would be “fan-based” from a TNA mark’s standpoint. This makes all of my comments silly and pointless, as I was reading this under a serious approach in my all-mighty belief of wrestling that I’m always right about. I’ll just dismiss similar stories from now on while I stop by to read, instead of take them seriously.
You just have to have fun with it and not take this shit so seriously. It’s wrestling – it’s all a show anyway. So believe what you want and how you want to believe it when you stop by and remember that the majority of the bullshit posted online is crap anyway.
Wow. Using the term “Dirt sheet” in 2010. Might as well start saying “groovy”.
Duly noted.