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A PIECE OF MY MIND: THE SCOTT HALL INCIDENT, VICTORIA, LEILANI KAI, MEMPHIS, GENE LIGON AND MORE

Recently I saw where WWE Diva Victoria (Lisa Varon) is already talking about retiring from the ring. I don’t know when that is going to happen. The hardest working lady in the WWE has been on my mind a lot lately. It was fully my intention to write about her and now is the perfect time to do that. In my early days, one of the greatest lady wrestlers was Leilani Kai. She was my friend and I spent a good deal of time with her in arenas and driving up and down the road.

I remember her frustration with having to go out on the road with this new girl and that new girl. It was always "Patty take this girl out and put her over and teach her how to work". In a business where it is all a work anyway, it shouldn’t really matter who wins or who loses. It’s easy to make a statement like that but at times, when it is so clear that you can pretty much walk through the person you are working with, it can be tough to absorb. I felt bad for Leilani, but the truth is, you could make an argument for other girls getting pushed.

In the case of Victoria, it’s hard to make a case for any other girl in WWE getting pushed. She is far and away the best worker. She has a great personality and, from what I can tell, is very humble. She is one of the first to walk up to you and say "Hi, I’m Lisa". She is also saddled with a bunch of girls that don’t only need to be carried they need to be hoisted! In the days when Trish Stratus was around, I believe we were getting the best ladies matches of the “modern” era. In Trish we got the same thing as we got in Victoria. It was two girls who are beautiful and worked very hard. Both succeeded in getting to the top of their field. In Trish’s case, she chose to walk away and that was her prerogative to do so.

In Victoria’s situation, she chose to stay and continue to work and help the company. It is absurd to think that what she gets for her trouble is working with girls who, although they seem to be trying hard, just don’t get it. If you look at it closely, even if they do eventually “get it” I do not think that the skills and ability are there to really achieve greatness or respect for being anything other than beautiful. I give Victoria a lot of respect and credibility for having the stomach to put up with it for this long. I hope that she has saved her money and is putting herself in a position to walk away on her terms.

There has been a lot of time and money put into Vladimir Kozlov. It is pretty clear Jerry Jarrett was banned from TNA over bringing him to the WWE. I have heard that people inside WWE are finally pleased enough with his progress to let him start working top tier matches. I can only hope that someone will be smart enough to use him in such a way that he won’t be buried. It is has to be time for Triple H to start building stars for his future as a leader of the WWE. At some point there has to be that process put in place. In an era where talent is thin and the there doesn’t seem to be the next big thing on the horizon, Triple H needs to help build his families security by firming up the foundation of the company.

It is easy for the typical American to spend all they make now without saving for the future. It is much harder and shows the real character of a person to save and prepare properly for the responsibilities that lie ahead of them. I wonder which route Triple H will take. Will he be a spender or a saver?

In recent days Corey Maclin, the owner of Memphis Wrestling, has decided to make some public statements about the Rasslin Riot website. As with the majority of wrestling related matters that Corey Maclin speaks of, he isn’t qualified to make such comments. It is true that Corey is a business man and a successful one at that. It is also true that he is the only owner of an active wrestling company that doesn’t even have a website. He is "the man" in the Memphis area where professional wrestling is concerned. He could be a real leader, a real maverick. Instead, he chooses to Mickey Mouse his company and just drain every dime out of it that he can. They say the hardest thing in the world is to look at yourself in the mirror. I am not sure who said it, but whoever it was had never met Corey Maclin.

I didn’t have a chance to post my article before the whole Scott Hall incident took place at Legends of the Ring convention. I don’t know all the details and more than likely Scott was rightfully offended at the remarks that were made. I knew Owen only slightly, but I feel privileged having had the chance to work with him. If his name is to be brought up in any way shape or form it should be in tribute to his career or to him as a person. I see nothing even slightly amusing in what happened to him or how it happened. I believe Owen was handling his money well and looking forward to an early retirement with his family when this tragedy struck.

There will always be times in life when someone says something totally ignorant or uncalled for. It is a shame but things like this happen but when they do how people react to it can either make it better or worse. In this case, the way that this unfortunate choice of words by someone, who hopefully just didn’t know any better, made a bad situation worse. I cannot tell people enough that a lot of thought has to go into putting together these types of events. It is a large gathering of some very unique and interesting personalities. In this case obviously, there were some choices made that I am sure, in retrospect, will be looked at and questioned. It is a shame that someone didn’t use an ounce of prevention because it will take more than a pound of cure to heal this black eye.

It was Gene “Thunderfoot#2” Ligon's birthday yesterday Oct 10th. I didn’t want it to go by without being mentioned he is my longtime friend and partner and one of the better workers out there.

It appears that Terry Funk will finally be really calling it a career so I thought this would be a good time to run this picture of Terry and Dory Jr. It was taken at WrestleReunion 2 shortly before their six man match against The Midnight Express. The Funks had Mick “Cactus Jack” Foley as their partner and to my knowledge is the last time that they teamed up. I was proud to have put the Funks together in the ring two times in two thousand and five. It took a lot of work to get them back in the ring together. In talking to Marti Funk it was only two guys that were able to do it in the last twenty years both of them from Westchester County, NY. The other was a man named Paul Heyman for ECW.

This has been a piece of my mind