There is a lot of internal debate in WWE about what to do with the World Heavyweight Title at Unforgiven. Many of the higher-ups are very pleased with C.M. Punk’s performance as champion and are quite happy to keep the belt on him. Another plan that has been discussed involves having Kane emerge as the champion so that they can run a title feud between him and Rey Mysterio, with the idea being that Mysterio would thus be established as a top guy on the Raw brand just as he was on Smackdown.
Raw has been ending promptly at 11pm in recent weeks on the orders of the USA Network. They are running Olympic coverage that has to start promptly, then tennis programming as well. The usual over-runs will start again after the US Open ends.
Harley Race was at Raw last week as the US representative of NOAH, having helped set up Takeshi Morishima’s dark match appearances. Morishima’s involvement with WWE came as a big surprise to the wrestling media in Japan, who usually know about such things well in advance. John Laurinaitis, who spent most of his career in All Japan and has many connections in the country, almost brought Morishima to WWE in 2006. Paul Heyman had wanted Masato Tanaka to be hired for ECW but that fell through, so Morishima became the back-up plan. NOAH didn’t want him to go to WWE though, so nothing happened. Since then, of course, Morishima and NOAH have established a working relationship with ROH. It seems that WWE also wants to establish relations with NOAH as they are opening a full-time company office in Tokyo. It remains to be seen whether or not NOAH would be happy with their top guy going to WWE, since he would in all likelihood not be pushed anywhere near as highly as he has been in ROH.
Jesse Ventura is in talks with FOX about hosting a daytime court TV show, debuting in fall 2009.
Credit: Wrestling Observer Newsletter, 25 August 2008 (subscribe here)
