At last Sunday’s house show in Sydney, Australia, Xavier Woods suffered an injury in a tag match against The Revival. Following an Irish Whip, Woods would drop to his knees resulting in the referee stopping the match and signaling the X, as you can see below.

@SeanRossSapp @davemeltzerWON ref threw up the X, xavier woods injured pic.twitter.com/QPpf09qZYU

— vince (@lauharrier) October 21, 2019

Woods was later seen leaving the area on crutches, and unfortunately it has been confirmed he will require surgery for an Achilles tendon tear. He will sadly miss up to a year from the ring. The recovery process is reportedly arduous, but hopefully, Woods can come back at his best. He does still have his hugely successful YouTube channel to occupy himself, and it is possible that down the line, he could make appearances at ringside with the rest of New Day.

AEW Dynamite has beaten NXT in the rating on week 1, week 2, and week 3. Now they’ve made it 4-0

AEW Dynamite had 963,000 (down 51,000) viewers and NXT had 698.000 (down 13,000) viewers.

While the ratings are down again for both shows, it was the first NBA telecast of the season and competition from the World Series. Overnight ratings indicated the local market numbers for Washington and Houston, the World Series teams were terrible. Obviously, that is to be expected.

AEW Dynamite featured Kenny Omega vs. Joey Janela, Jon Moxley vs. Pac, and the semifinals for the tag-team title. NXT had Matt Riddle vs. Cameron Grimes, NXT North American Champion Roderick Strong against Keith Lee and Dominik Dijakovic in a triple threat match, and an appearance by Finn Balor.

It should be noted that next week is possibly Game 7 of the World Series, so another drop could be possible.

In a recent interview with Barstool Breakfast, Chris Jericho, was asked about his worst storylines.

His response is below:

“There have been some bad storylines. I remember with Chyna, they had us be the co-Intercontinental Champions, where we shared the one title, which is ridiculous. That was a stupid story. There was another one when I was actually the World Champion, where it was Jericho vs. Triple H, and Stephanie McMahon was like my manager, I guess, and they were playing the thing like I was pussy-whipped by her, but I wasn’t banging her, so it was kinda like just being a bitch. And like her dog pooped on the floor, and I had to clean up the shit…”

You can watch this excerpt and his comments on getting advice from Ric Flair below.

 

Final Fight Championship, an MMA organization based out of Croatia with a headquarters in Las Vegas, recently partnered with Vampiro to launch a new wrestling promotion called “Lucha Fight Club Las Vegas.”

Vampiro described the promotion in a recent podcast conversation:

“We’ve got an arena built in the real hotel. We have residency there. When you come there, it is an actual TV studio built with a store outside the arena. In that store the idea is to do meet-and-greets and crazy things. We have obscure toy vendors. We have obscure comic books. We got the craziest merch line that is going to be coming.”

“We have Playboy girls. We have actors. We have musicians. To me, I’m a hardcore punk rock guy. What’s the most successful in our industry as far as musicians are the festivals in Europe. I just want to have that festival environment. You are not just coming for a boring wrestling show, not that wrestling shows are boring. You’re getting a lot of shit for your ticket. That’s cool for people. Something different.”

Unhappily, Vampiro would announce on Facebook that the promotions upcoming show “A Nightmare At FightDome” was being canceled, and the promotion and the school were going on hiatus.

 

In total, the promotion run 3 shows and the school was open for just 2 months. The promotion had received initial criticism for using Dr. Wagner Jr.’s image on the event poster despite not having him booked.

Vampiro, though, has been dealing with a much more serious situation after he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He did have a GoFundMe set up to help him with treatment but for an unknown reason closed it before reaching his target.

WWE’s yearly video game was released today, and #FixWWE2K20 has been trending all day on Twitter. The game is taking a long time to load, regularly crashing, has worse graphics than previous years, and is filled with bugs.

The bugs include entrance music sometimes playing for the entire match, referees not counting pins, custom created wrestlers having no faces, and winning ladder matches without grabbing anything.

The game’s problems seem to have come from it no longer being developed by Yuke’s, the company that has made WWE’s games for the past 20 years. They were supposedly fired after 2K was made aware they were opening a new studio to create a new non-WWE game. The new game was to be a side project, and 2K were unhappy with this.

Visual Concepts who make the NBA 2K games and are 2K’s in-house developers picked up the game in May, and without time to start from scratch, had to use Yuke’s game engine with limited support from Yuke’s. The below videos show the results.

 

 

 

I can understand 2K not being happy with Yuke’s working on a separate wrestling game, but they really should have let Yuke’s finish 2K20 and have Visual Concepts work on the next installment. It almost certainly wouldn’t be this bad if they had done that.

At Saturday night’s AAA’s Heroes Inmortales XIII event, Kenny Omega defeated Rey Fenix of the Lucha Brothers to win the AAA Mega Championship. It is also known as the AAA World Heavyweight Championship and is the promotions uppermost title.

The match was incredible, and you can watch the finish of the match below.

It’s a significant achievement for Omega, as Fenix had been champion for 420 days. Past champions include El Mesias, Alberto El Patron, Jeff Jarrett, John Morrison, and Dr. Wagner Jr.

Omega has now promised to take the title to AEW in the below post-match interview.

 

“That title, the Mega Championship, you might see it back in Mexico, but you will, I promise you, you will see it in AEW.”

Omega is scheduled to face Jon Moxley on 9th November at AEW’s Full Gear PPV. Could the Mega Championship end up being at stake?

Seth Rollins was on a convention panel at the Fandemic Tour in Houston this past weekend and was asked about a WrestleMania match with Kenny Omega. You can watch his reply below.

“When Kenny’s done playing in the minor leagues over there, Kenny can come work at the absolute top professional wrestling company in the world, in front of the most people, and make the most money, and have the biggest matches, which is with me at WrestleMania.”

It should be noted that Omega turned down a WWE contract to sign with AEW. Calling AEW “minor league” could be seen as a receipt from Rollins as Omega has fired shots at NXT previously. Back in September, in an interview with Sportskeeda, Omega would say the below about AEW vs. NXT:

“Let’s pretend there were no borders. Let’s pretend there were no promotions. Let’s just pretend there’s just one big promotion. If these guys were on the same show as me? They’d be in the dark match. They’d be in the opening match of my main event match.”

Omega would follow up saying:

“You gonna call that a war, you gonna call that competition? Go ahead. Okay, maybe it’s fun for you to do. That’s cool. But we’re different planets. And you’re going to see that right away, when you see 10,000 plus arenas sold out. You’re going to see smiles on fans’ faces. And you’re going to see real stars, not developmental talent. But real stars appearing on your television sets, every week.”

Last night at a Kaoz Lucha Libre show at Arena Coliseo in Monterrey, AAA star La Parka suffered a severe head and neck injuries.

To clarify this La Parka is Jesus Alfonso Huerta Escoboza, the second version of the iconic character. Not Adolfo Margarito Tapia Ibarra, who competed in WCW and currently as LA Park.

The video below (recorded by Roberto Figueroa) shows him going for a suicide dive and hitting his head on the barricade and then the floor. He was rushed to a local hospital.

We understand the 53-year-old luchador told doctors he couldn’t feel his legs and that the injury was initially feared to be a fractured neck.

Thankfully reports from Mexico are the star has regained feeling in his legs over the last few hours, and he has had an MRI.

Our thoughts are with Jesus Alfonso Huerta Escoboza’s family and friends at this time. Hopefully, there is no lasting damage, and he can make a full recovery.

On this past week’s Friday Night SmackDown, Hulk Hogan revealed that Ali would be joining Team Hogan in their match against Team Flair at the upcoming Crown Jewel show on October 31, 2019.

Ali would later Tweet that he is donating his pay for the match to charity: water. They are an officially registered charity that is looking to solve the global water crisis.

To clarify some reports, my earnings from the 10/31 event will be donated to @charitywater.

— ALI / Adeel Alam (@AliWWE) October 19, 2019

Ali had previously donated his pay to the charity from when he worked Super ShowDown from Saudia Arabia earlier in the year, which was headlined by The Undertaker vs. Goldberg.

The donation is likely to be significant as payoffs for working shows in Saudia Arabia are some of the highest of the year. This is because the shows are being funded by the General Sports Authority, who are responsible for sports in Saudi Arabia.

The Crown Jewel event is controversial because Saudia Arabia has been accused of human rights abuses and suppressing women’s rights. Daniel Bryan, John Cena, and Kevin Owens have previously refused to participate at the Saudia Arabia shows. Sami Zayn has been kept off the events because of his Syrian descent, and Aleister Black has been kept off the shows because of fear his tattoos could cause offense.

Eric Bischoff probably had a massive smile on his face when he heard that SmackDown’s overnight ratings had fallen for the second week running following the move to FOX.

The decline from last week was 16 percent, dropping to 2.441 million viewers. The only positive is that the show did grow its audience by just over 100,000 viewers between hours one to two.

The show was headlined by Roman Reigns and Daniel Bryan defeating Shinsuke Nakamura and King Baron Corbin. There was also a Miz TV segment with SmackDown’s Woman’s Champion Bayley, who turned heel last week.

Game three of the World Series is being aired on FOX next Friday, so SmackDown will air live on FS1. This will almost certainly result in a further decline, although that will at least be a legitimate reason.

Next week’s show is the go-home show for Crown Jewel and will feature Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair, plus a face-to-face segment with Brock Lesnar and Cain Velasques.

AEW’s third episode of Dynamite had 1.014 million viewers on TNT, with NXT having 712,000 viewers. Both shows were down from last week.

There was no baseball to use as an excuse this week, so both companies will need to study the quarter ratings and viewing patterns carefully.

AEW Dynamite featured Omega and Hangman Page vs. Pac and Jon Moxley, and Chris Jericho defending his AEW Championship against Darby Allin in a street fight.

NXT had Tommaso Ciampa returning to the ring for the first time in seven months, and the main event of Damian Priest defeated Pete Dunne.

It is still too early to know where average viewership will settle, but it should be around 1 million viewers, which is exceeding TNT’s original expectations. NXT, on the other hand, has declined for the 4th week in a row to its lowest rating yet.

Earlier today, the official English account for Stardom, the most renowned Joshi pro wrestling in Japan, confirmed that Toyko News had reported that Bushiroad, the company that owns New Japan, had purchased Stardom.

For those unaware, Bushiroad produces collectible card games and trading cards, and publish games. Their purchase of New Japan led to the rejuvenation of the company so is exciting fans of the woman’s promotion.

1: As reported today on the front cover of Tokyo Sports newspaper, Stardom is now a part of Bushiroad.

Stardom is no longer a corporation and becomes part of the Bushiroad group “Kix Road”. Kickboxing promotion “Knock Out” is also a part of Kix Road.

— We Are Stardom (@we_are_stardom) October 17, 2019

It should be noted that this is not New Japan buying Stardom, not the companies merging. At present, the companies will remain separate, and their streaming services will not combine.

Hiroshi “Rossy” Ogawa will remain CEO of the women’s wrestling promotion and is excellent news for the Stardom wrestlers; they will shortly be signed to full-time contracts. This, though, won’t be the case with AEW contracted talents like Riho and Bea Priestley, due to the New Japan connection.

In an interesting tidbit, WWE also made an offer for Stardom as they hoped for it to be the backbone of their NXT Japan project but obviously missed out. They were also recently rejected by Pro Wrestling Noah who had they had attempted to buy.