September 16, 2002 Observer Newsletter: HLA and the wedding of Billy and Chuck
It was one of those moments that if you were watching wrestling and you had anyone in the room watching with you, you likely wanted to bury your head in a hole. I know I did.
It wasn’t a surprise, or even a shock, as pro wrestling has always been a business where scraping every last dime came before more than a smidgen of class. Raw was coming off two bad shows in a row and its rating bottomed out the previous week. It was facing competition from the season opener of Monday Night Football, a show that has traditionally cost Raw several tenths of rating points. And the loss of ratings was noted in virtually every mainstream discussion of pro wrestling. Moreover, the Raw roster has no depth. And they had no matches or angles that were going to draw. There were no easy answers.
At the same time, the company was thinking it had pulled a p.r. coup with the Billy & Chuck wedding, which never happened, and turned into a traditional wrestling angle.
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Dave Meltzer is the founder and lead writer on the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the weekly constant when it comes to news and reviews in pro wrestling and mixed martial arts for more than 40 years. Dave also co-hosts Wrestling Observer Radio with Bryan Alvarez and had had bylines for The National, Yahoo Sports, MMA Fighting and others.