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SHOULD TNA MOVE IMPACT, MIKE JOHNSON: GUN FOR HIRE, DID CENA INJURE THE ROCK, WHY RAW HAS IMPROVED AND MORE

By Mike Johnson on 2013-06-06 10:00:00

Do you think Trish Stratus actually asked Stephanie McMahon to induct her into the WWE Hall of Fame or it was something forced upon her?

No, I believe Stratus legitimately asked McMahon to do it.

I have recently been watching the WWE Netflix content. I was watching the NWO The Revelation and I have a couple of questions about it. Was there still any heat on DDP for being the middle man that brought in Nash and Hall to WCW? The dvd made it look like Hogan was at the point where we have John Cena is now. Do you think we could ever see John Cena ever do a turn like Hogan did. Doing his superman return to the ring and then turn on the good guys? I know its been done but we all know how WWE like to recycle ideas. If i was to turn John Cena i'd do it this way and on the biggest stage too. Thoughts?

I don't see WWE turning Cena heel anytime soon. Maybe one day, but not anytime soon. I've never heard of there being any heat on DDP for helping his friends get high paying gigs in another company. Anyone and everyone would have done the exact same thing.

I subscribe to another wrestling website as well as PWInsider.com and I came across a discussion of MLW. Over the course of the discussion, a guy named Mister Saint Laurent was knocking Mike as not being a true journalist and claiming he gets paid to rip people online. Since there's no way Mike could respond to that in that forum, I was curious as to who this guy was, what his relationship to MLW was and whether Mike wanted to respond to any of his claims? The entire thing seemed to be based on what Mike wrote about the MLW sale years ago. Was he simply parroting Bauer?

Saint Laurent is a Florida independent wrestler and booker of a small promotion called "I Believe in Wrestling." He's also worked for MLW's Court Bauer in different capacities. It's amazing to hear he's knocking me as we've never had anything but cordial conversations, but that's the pro wrestling world for you.

Ironically, he just sent me a press release yesterday, looking for publicity for a project he works on. Amazing how timing works out, isn't it?

As far as his claims, I've never, EVER been paid by any promotion to ever knock another one. That would be silly and would receive a very quick "F that" response from me. Any opinion I've ever written has been 100% my own - not even Dave Scherer influences what I write, and he owns this place.

Let's make this perfectly clear. The only writing work I've ever done for any promotion since the day PWInsider.com lanched - and this is going back nearly a decade since I've done this - was a few articles written on (as irony has it!) the MLW.COM website back in the day about characters and storylines in the promotion.

It was an offer made to me as I did similar work on the ECW website and quite frankly, in the early days of PWInsider I wasn't making a ton so the extra few hundred that came in over the few months it was done helped finance travel and road expenses as we worked to build the website.  I was in a place in my life where I was physically, emotionally and financially recovering from a car wreck that left me having to reset my entire life, so the extra cash helped a lot at the time and the writing gig was separate from this website.  So, the silly thing about Larent's statement is that the only promotion that ever paid me to do any writing (and none of it was knocking anyone else) was the same promotion he worked for. 

Again, it should be that noted that NONE of that writing bled onto this website or was reprinted here in any way, shape or form and if you go back and check the archives, no one was more hard on MLW than yours truly - from the booking to the TV product to the H2Wrestling promotion that never launched out of MLW's ashes despite a lot being written on it by yours truly. If anything, in hindsight, I gave too much attention to the H2 promotion, but you can't change what was done in the moment.  By the same token, I was also harder on the MLW TV product than I should have been back in the day, which I realized after going through some old tapes earlier this year.

But perhaps my writing is where Laurent's issues lie - that I was honest and fair in my views of MLW, good and bad, where his loyalties lied with Bauer. I wouldn't blame him for being loyal to his friend, especially when it's a friend that's paid him for many years now.  Perhaps he thinks I should have been loyal to Bauer personally, but that's not what reporting it about - even if I personally liked Court.

In any event, the idea I am a "gun for hire" ripping anyone for a quick buck is one of the funniest things I've ever heard.  Someone grab me my six-shooter!  I am hardly walking around waiting to knock people and anyone who reads this site on a regular basis knows full well my style of writing. Anyone who actually believes what Laurent wrote has to so wrapped up in the wrestling mindset that they doesn't see the forest from the trees.

As far as his shots, they go with the territory and are beyond laughable. I have been fair and I have criticized everyone from WWE to TNA on down to ROH and CZW. If you are going to really be honest about what you write, you have to be fair, good or bad. The second you aren't, you are wasting everyone's time, especially yours.

One can only assume that Bauer had no issue with anything I wrote at the time as I would hear from him from time to time as late as his departure from WWE, where he wanted to let me know he had chosen to leave the company and for some time after.

As far as the sale of MLW, as I wrote back then, the only person who's ever claimed he sold the rights was Bauer. I never found any outside evidence of WGO Properties existing and I don't know if anyone else ever did ever. I was unaware of if and when MLW reverted back to his hands and to me, the most surprising thing is that he WWE never ended up with the tapes, especially when Bauer was in their employ.

I haven't spoken to Bauer in a number of years, so whether what Laurent wrote about me is how Bauer feels is something he'll have to voice himself, if he isn't too busy with whatever his projects are these days. He knows where to find me.  Laurent didn't bother to, despite knowing where to find me (and having numerous conversations with me over the years related to everything from Guns N' Roses to wrestling), which is the only thing I find sad about the entire situation.  The rest is complete comedy, and I'm going to Mosey on down to the Saloon now.  Gotta find Mad Dog Tannen before he has a chance to shoot Doc Brown.  Adios!

Raw has been better over the past few weeks. We’ve gotten longer and better matches, better storylines and slightly better booking. Is there anything in particular than can be attributed to this improvement?

They fired their head writer and without someone pushing the show to be dominated by soap opera elements, you have to fall back onto wrestling. The format and quality will change back and forth, literally by the week, based on Vince McMahon's whims at that moment.

So The Rock wrestles John Cena twice and he gets injured in both matches. At Wrestlemania 28 he tore a hamstring and at this year's Mania he tore his abductor muscle plus suffered a hernia. The Rock wrestled CM Punk twice this year and he never got injured. Is it me or does it seem like Cena is careless in the ring with The Rock?

I've yet to hear anyone that's attributed the injuries to John Cena. If anything, Rock came back for the last run far too muscular, to the point where it killed the in-ring quality of his work and his cardio, which could have been a more likely contributing factor.

You recently answered a question of mine about what TNA could do to propell through the glass ceiling. Do you think that possibly moving Impact to Wednesday nights, that they could attract a larger audience seeing as though Thursdays are usually when college kids go out and aren't wondering what's on TV. Or possibly take out more commercials during RAW and only show footage from the big arenas they run (perception is everything and it makes the company seem big time). It's just mind boggling to me when I think about it because I do believe that TNA is the better product than the WWE and that far less people watch it. I get the WWE is this gigantic monster but, they were a monster back in '95 when WCW came along too. I feel like TNA is doing everything they can right now and as a pro wrestling fan, it's disheartening that they can't poke through the 1.0's-1.1's.

The last thing they need to do is move that show to another day. Thursday is considered a PRIME TV viewing night. Why move the show?

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