WWE Diva Candice Michelle

Candice Michelle wrote on her Twitter account recently that she is expecting to return to the ring sometime this month. The problem is, there is reportedly a lot of bad sentiment towards Candice Michelle right now, similar to what caused Vince McMahon to release Mr. Kennedy; her perception that she is often injured and a lousy worker.

So does that mean Candice Michelle is getting pushed out of the door of the WWE?

One company source told The Sun: “She doesn’t exactly help her cause when she’s running around in LA hanging out at bars and going to Dodger games… What happened to rehab and getting back in shape? There are guys on our roster with far worse injuries sucking it up and still coming to work.”

One of the few positive notes though, one of her biggest supporters in the company is said to be none-other than Stephanie McMahon.

When you’re not doing what you’re paid to do, it helps having the support of the boss’s daughter.

With the continuing decline in WWE’s television ratings, PPV buyrates, house show attendance and overall revenue, things have definitely been better in the WWE Universe. In an attempt to cure what ails WWE Chairman Vince McMahon, he is currently on a kick to freshen things up and set WWE up for a proper turnaround.

While many ideas have been discussed, one thing WWE wants to do is get a lot of new faces into the mix. Since WrestleMania, we’ve seen guys like MVP, John Morrison, The Miz, THE Brian Kendrick and Dolph Ziggler getting a lot more television time in hopes that somebody catches on in a big way. Elevating new stars is more of a priority now than it has been since the late 1990’s, largely because Vince many of his top names getting older and knows the key to future success is cultivating new stars.

Aside from elevating these “potential” superstars already on the active roster, WWE is also calling up several names from developmental – with several names from Florida Championship Wrestling now touring with WWE working house shows and dark matches.

Former FCW Florida Heavyweight Champion Sheamus O’Shaunessy worked an undercard match at a Raw brand house show in Youngstown, Ohio over the weekend, beating Jamie Noble. He also wrestled a dark match before this week’s Raw, once again defeating Noble.

Women’s wrestler Angela Fong, another FCW regular, was a ring announcer at a SmackDown/ECW brand live event in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There has also been talks of bringing FCWC standout Eric Escobar on the road soon to take another look at him.

While giving television time to fresh faces is certainly a start – you have to wonder how much of an impact that can have. Things like longer in-ring matches, less goofy comedy, rebuilding WWE’s tag team division and putting on fewer (and cheaper) Pay-Per-View events would also go a long way.

What’s your take on the situation? How would you improved the brand?

In an interview with The Sun, Randy Orton shares his opinion on his match with Triple H at WrestleMania XXV, punting Vince McMahon in the head, why Manu was booted from Legacy and ultimately released from WWE, which wrestler he would add to Legacy, and much more. Here’s some of the highlights:

On his match with Triple H at WrestleMania XXV: “This was a storyline where Triple H needed retribution. He needed to beat the living p*** out of me because of what I did. I handcuffed him and made him watch while I beat up his wife and then kissed her while she was unconscious. Then to top it off after I do that, I knock him out with a sledgehammer to the head. I kick his father-in-law in the skull and put him in the hospital, and do the same to his brother-in-law. I think when all that happens and then you have this match where he can’t be disqualified or he loses the title, you kind of screw yourself. We were not able to do everything that the other guys were able to do. Matt and Jeff Hardy had a hardcore no-holds-barred match. They were able to use all the bells and whistles to beat the hell out of each other. Everyone was expecting Triple H and I to do the same, but we had rules that put a fence around everything we were able to do. We weren’t able to go to the extreme. If anything hurt us, it was that.”

Did he try changing the rules of the match with Vince McMahon? “No, because I was happy with the match. I really was. The crowd in the arena had seen three and half hours of wrestling and, not only that, they had seen some very good wrestling. Shawn Michaels and Undertaker put on a hell of a performance, the Money In The Bank match was crazy and a lot of guys did some death-defying maneuvers. When you do that and then you have this match with two guys who can’t be outside of the ring for more than 10 seconds, you kinda screw yourself. You’ve backed yourself into a corner where it’s going to be hard to outperform the matches that went before you. I think our storyline and what our match was all about deserved to be the main-event match on WrestleMania. But I think that the restraints and stipulations around the match made it harder on us than it should have been.”

What about the wrestling fan population who have grown tired of Triple H: “Yes, there is that minority of people out there who have seen enough of Triple H. I’ve had fans come up to me and beg: “Please kick Triple H in the head.” He’s a huge babyface, probably the ultimate babyface. But no matter what the character is, there’s always going to be that smart group of people who want to see the guy on top shot down. Just like right now there’s probably guys telling Batista to beat the hell out of me this Sunday at Judgment Day.”

Any thoughts about going easy on Vince McMahon when booting him in the head: “Did you see that kick to Vince? It didn’t look like anything was pulled did it? They replayed that thing from every angle and he definitely ate a big piece of my boot. When I’m kicking Vince in the head, if it doesn’t look good on live TV, people are going to think: “Oh, he didn’t want to kick him too hard because, deep down inside, Orton knows that is his boss so he took it easy on him.” So I did the opposite. I kicked him harder.”

Extras: “I want everything I do in the ring to be as crisp and as perfect as humanely possible. I calculate my movements to where it’s going to be the best for that moment. So when I kicked Vince in the head, the only thing going through my mind was: “I’m going to kick this b*****d in the skull as hard as I can. Here we go. I’ve been waiting for this one!”

Why was Manu booted from Legacy AND The WWE: “Manu had some respect issues. There are a lot of different reasons he wasn’t good for Legacy, but the reason he’s not with the company anymore had a lot to do with his backstage attitude. His father was the great Afa, of the Wild Samoans, and Manu had been in the ring since his early teens. Now, in his early 20s, technically he’s been in the ring for more than a decade – but not really. Really he’d only been in the business a month by the time I knew him. He carried himself like he had been in the business for 15 years. He thought he knew everything. He thought he deserved a first-class seat when we went overseas. He thought he didn’t have to pick up in the lockeroom after the show was over, like the new guys do. He didn’t feel like he had to pay his dues, because he’d already paid them. What he doesn’t understand is that wrestling once a week for 10 years doesn’t count. When wrestling is all you do, when everyone in the world knows who you are and you’ve held titles and main-evented PPVs – that’s when you start to get to the point where you might deserve a little something extra. I don’t think he applied himself in the gym or when it came to his diet. He just thought: “Hey, my dad is Afa, the Wild Samoan, so I get a job. I deserve to be here.” He just didn’t get it.”

Who would make a good 4th member to Legacy: “If someone came to me and said we need another guy in this group, I would go with Harry (Smith). Right now though, I think we’re fine. I feel like everything is running its course. It’s going smooth.”

Well there you have it. Randy Orton’s opinion on quite a lot actually. What’s your thoughts? Props for kicking Vince McMahon, but what about letting Triple H Take Retribution like that?

Ric Flair has been interviewed by ScrippsNews.com and Flair was saying he’s just itching to get back in the ring. “I want to wrestle again,” said Flair. “I watch WWE and I can still do better than 90 percent of the guys there. I weigh one less pound than the day I retired. I still work out really hard and I wrestle my kid (Reid) all the time. It’s not like I haven’t been in the ring.”

And then of course there’s the financial aspect to getting back into wrestling. Flair dishes out $22,000 a month in alimony payments to 2 ex-wives, but is getting big money offers to return to the ring. “People in Europe are offering me a fortune. I’m tired of signing autographs. I can make more money wrestling. I love the business. I was thinking the other day about the reason why God gave me this health. I don’t hurt anywhere. I haven’t lost any strength. I’m just like I was 10 years ago. I keep thinking, ‘Why am I signing autographs when I can still take backdrops?”

Flair has even gone as far as sending Vince McMahon a text message recently asking him why he wasn’t a part of the 2009 WWE Draft. Vince reportedly responded by reminding Flair that he’s retired. At this point, the only thing holding him back is the blessing from WWE and Shawn Michaels. “I respect Shawn and WWE so much that I wouldn’t do anything to disrespect them. They would have to give me full approval (to wrestle again). They put me in a special place. I think it’s going to be a long time before we see something come across again like what they did for me (with the retirement ceremony). I didn’t think it would be that big a deal. We’ll see how this turns out.”

Flair’s son Reid was arrested yet another time last month (this time for DWI and felony heroin possession) and the Nature Boy spoke candidly about Reid’s drug problem. Ric and Reid had been working on a reality TV show project, but that is now on hold. “It all depends on how he gets himself put back together. The biggest thing about that is that it’s a disease. It’s not so hard for me to say that after being at an outpatient clinic with him where they talk about a chromosome deficiency causing stuff like that. It’s curable, but he’s going to have to work real hard at it. He’s doing that.”

Vince McMahon VS Barack Obama

Not turn turn this too much into a political thing, but we do find it funny when Vince McMahon has something to say. Over the past few months, the chairman of the WWE, Vince McMahon, has been griping about United States President Barack Obama, basically saying “he’s bad for business.”

The latest issue of Power Slam magazine adds some details on McMahon’s opinion of him, including a behind the scenes story from last year in which WWE television producer Kevin Dunn reprimanded anyone he saw wearing clothing or merchandise in support of the Democratic President-elect.

Here is what was written: “Dunn’s philsophical overlap with Vince extends beyond wrestling.

Like the WWE Chairman, Dunn is an ultra-conservative Republican who supported George W. Bush. In 2004, Dunn earned Vince’s compliments when he proudly flouted company policy to wear a giant “Bush/Cheney 2004″ badge to work on the day after the election. In 2008, creative team sources allege that Dunn, ironically, had anyone who wore clothing or merchandise related to the Democratic President-elect formally reprimanded by the company. Meanwhile, sources backstage report overhearing McMahon and Dunn discussing how Obama’s policies will so badly damage America’s ecomony that periodic cuts in WWE personnel will be required in order for the company to continue to pay their multi-million-dollar executive salaries and stock dividends.”

So have the years of “vitamins” finally gotten to Vince, or does he speak the truth?

HHH - The Game

MSN had a chance for an online interview with Triple H while he was promoting the 500th episode of SmackDown. It was at least worth pointing out some highlights:

On the grueling WWE schedule:
Tripe H started this by saying: Sometimes people say, “It’s so rough, it’s so rough.” It’s not that bad. It used to be a lot worse. But I have two kids and I am home three days a week. But when you do go on the road, it’s hectic. You’re in a different city every day. You fly in to a new town, you do a show, you go to the next town, you sleep, you wake up and do it again. It’s basically just a series of transportation, to the gym, to the arena, to the plane.

On revealing Stephanie McMahon as his real wife:
For story lines and business, we try to keep that stuff separate. But people knew and we joked about it when I was in DX [comic wrestling tag team formed with fellow superstar Shawn Michaels]. The only reason I was apprehensive is where do we go on the flip side of it. Look at it like this: There is the real world and the WWE Universe. So the cat is now out of the bag in the WWE Universe and it now exists there. So anything that has to do with me story-line-wise, you have to be conscious of the fact that I am married into the McMahon family. That throws a different curve into it. So my only concern was it tainting future story lines. Say something happens, and it’s like, “Well, why doesn’t he get that change through his father-in-law?” [Laughs.] We have created a wrinkle in the fabric of the WWE Universe.

On what it’s like working for his father-in-law:
[Laughs.] Well, the good thing is I had a really good relationship with him before I even met Steph. We had a great relationship not only from a talent standpoint, but I used to work a lot with Vince hand-in-hand to create story lines behind the scenes, not just for myself but other guys. But if you have ever met Vince, he’s a complex man and it can be trying. There are times he wants to choke me and there are times when I want to choke him.

Whether he likes being a baby face or heel:
Heh heh, I love being a heel.

Nothing that we didn’t really know about the guy. But good for him.

“All of a sudden, Vince McMahon raised his ugly head and thought we were threatening his company and he’s been doing everything he can to shut us down,” Hogan told the radio station. “We’re just a reality show.”

Hogan said he was intitially worried the celebrities wouldn’t take wrestling seriously because they were paid upfront, but he had a positive experience so far.

Hogan claimed even the great Regis Philbin inquired about being on the series when it was first announced, and now people from “all of the major companies” are calling wanting to be part of Celebrity Championship Wrestling.

Hogan mostly hyped CCW during the interview, but he did find time to take a shot at Triple H and WWE. When asked about the wrestling business’ history of exposing its inner workings, Hogan said McMahon smartened up the public in the 80s when he said pro wrestling isn’t a real sport, and then created the Tough Enough series on MTV. However, Hogan believes the worst offense of exposing the business is Vince McMahon keeping the WWE Title on Triple H for so many years, and that it exposes the wrestling business more than Celebrity Championship Wrestling does. “The biggest expose is putting the World Title on your son-in-law for the last five or six years,” Hogan said. “That’s probably the biggest expose I’ve ever seen keeping Triple H as champion.” Triple H has taken a number of unwarranted shots at Hogan over the years (usually when Hogan’s been out of favor with Vince), even though Hogan was mostly positive when talking about him.

And after all that, Hogan still found more to hype up, saying he will be in New York this weekend with Steve Austin doing promotional work for liveautographs.com, which films celebrities signing merchandise that customers are buying to authenticate the merchandise.

You can listen to the entire interview here.

The Ottawa Sun posted an interview with Triple H today. He gave his candid thoughts on the wrestling business in terms of younger wrestlers, determining the greatest wrestlers, preferring being a bad guy, parenthood, and more.

“I hate to sound like an oldtimer, but sometimes I get upset about the young guys,” Triple H said. “We’ve got guys like Arn Anderson, Barry Windham, Ricky Steamboat and Michael Hayes around. That’s a wealth of knowledge, and they still have to make it mandatory for guys to show up early and go into the ring with them.”

Triple H believes there’s a disconnect between him and the younger wrestlers, saying that a number of them are more concerned about with their iPods or playing Guitar Hero than getting better in wrestling. “When I got into the business, you couldn’t get me out of the building. I had a burning desire to get better. Now, the young guys seem more interested in their I Pods or playing Guitar Hero,” Triple H told the Ottawa Sun. “I see guys complaining: ‘I’ve been here for five years and they’re not doing anything with me.’ I say to the guy: ‘Dude, you’ve been doing the same thing now that you were five years ago. What do you expect?’”

Triple H also gives his take on determining who the best wrestler in the business is. “If you go to the internet, there’s always somebody saying ‘this guy is the best wrestler in the world’ and you’ve got somebody else saying, ‘no, this guy is the best wrestler in the world.’ But it’s not about what they like. It’s what the masses like,” Hunter said. “These guys they’re talking about are wrestling in front of 50 people, not 20,000. And that’s because the masses don’t want to see them.” Triple H then praises Hulk Hogan. He said, “The biggest name ever, if you look at Hulk Hogan, what big move did he ever do? But he knew how to tell a story, how to get fans to interact with his character and keep them entertained. It’s not about how high or how far you can jump, it’s about telling stories.”

Triple H admits he’s rather be doing what Edge is doing by playing a the bad guy on television. He said he watched Dark Knight and would rather play The Joker than Batman. “It’s more fun playing a heel,” Triple H said. “I look at a guy like Edge, and I mean this in the nicest way, he’s getting to do such cool things.”

On moving from Raw to SmackDown, Triple H said the schedule is actually worse for him, but he was willing to do what was necessary for the good of WWE and Vince McMahon. He said, “You know when you get into this line of work you’re going to be gone a lot. It’s really important that the time I get to spend with my family is quality time.”

Triple H also went on to say that being a parent has changed his view on relationships, especially with women. “It’s changed my perspective about what’s important in life,” Triple H said. “I don’t know if it’s softened me up, but it changes the way you look at women. I’m probably going to pay for my past.”

We’ve gotten multiple alerts now that the next time you go to a Wendy’s restaurant, you should take a look at the shirt your server is wearing.

Apparently, Wendy’s staff are now given the option of wearing a new T-Shirt that has a logo on the front “extremely similar” to the WWE Logo.

From our source, the 2 “W” is virtually the same as the WWE logo, but the rest says Wendy’s instead of a red underline. Under everything are the words “Wendy’s Warriors.” It’s most likely just a coincidence, but knowing Vince McMahon, it may just be too much of a coincidence for him to stand by and watch.

If anyone has a picture of the new shirt, please send it to us at news(at)wrestlingdeals.com
(Thanks to Jimmy & Jeff)

According to the WWE, Vince McMahon’s Million Dollar Mania contest is now “suspended for the foreseeable future” due, of course, to the “tragic accident” that occurred during the final minutes of Monday Night’s RAW. The official post is over on WWE.com.

Oviously Vince McMahon wasn’t going to give away 1 million dollars of his very own money every week forever…

WWE Officials also stated that updates, including Mr. McMahon’s medical condition, will be reported at the WrestleMania XXV press conference on Tuesday at 1 p.m. in Houston. The press conference will be streamed live on WWE.com.