SoCal News & Notes 11/01/2018

In today’s news and notes we have the latest on PCW Ultra, EWF, the saga of the Central Coast, Lucha Underground, Ground Zero, and a listing of this weekend’s shows. Click for today’s update.

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PCW Ultra has announced the roster for its next event, Believe, on December 7, 2018. An angle was set up at their Possessed event last week, where Light Heavyweight Champion Shane Strickland challenged heavyweight Champion Penta El Zero M. The match hasn’t been officially announced yet, but it appears that would be the main event.

The other names announced for the event are Women’s Champion Tessa Blanchard, Tag-Team Champions Warbeast (Josef and Fatu), Hammerstone, Sami Callihan, MJF, Border Patrol (JR Kratos and Colt Stevens), Eli Everfly, Jake Atlas, Brody King, Lil’ Cholo, Delilah Doom, Heather Monroe, Taya Valkyrie, and ACH.

This will be the PCW Ultra debuts for MJF, Colt Stevens, Lil’ Cholo, Delilah Doom, Heather Monroe, and Taya Valkyrie. I believe this will be the Southern California debut for Stevens as well.

Road Warrior Animal will also be there taking part in the meet and greet and likely having some involvement in the show as well.

Tickets for the event are on sale now at PCWUltra.com.

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Friar Juan Roman is out of the EWF Heavyweight Championship Tournament and will be replaced by Calder McColl.

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There has been a lot of drama on the Central Coast between Cen Cal Pro and Vendetta Pro. According to one of Cen Cal Pro’s promoters Dominick Balsamo, after Cen Cal Pro debuted a few years ago, Vendetta Pro promoter Billy Blade (Billy Traughber) became upset and tried to get wrestlers to drop from the shows and talked bad about the promotion online. Cen Cal Pro’s promoters then registered DBA’s under Vendetta Pro’s name in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties, in order to have what they felt was some sort of leverage Billy Blade. Really at that point Blade should have contacted a lawyer as I’m sure registering business names with the sole intent of hurting an established business is actionable, but he didn’t.

Cen Cal Pro insists they didn’t want to hurt Vendetta Pro, but just get Blade to back off them. Some sort of peace was made and Cen Cal and Vendetta Pro began running inter-promotional angles. Blade asked them to drop the DBAs and Dominick Balsamo along with Sledge and JD Horror who were involved with the running of the promotion at the time agreed. Dominick Balsamo claims his father, Dennis Balsamo, who is an attorney in Arroyo Grande and CEO of Cen Cal Professional Wrestling Entertainment Inc., declined to drop the names. Blade however, has a text message from Balsamo that he posted on his Facebook saying “It’s done. Been done for awhile [sic]. I had asked my dad to email the release statement to you as proof. I guess he forgot. I’ll ask again.”

Earlier this year Vendetta Pro lost their regular venue in Santa Maria, the Radisson Hotel, and hadn’t run in the area in months. After doing a free wrestling event at a farmer’s market in Santa Maria, Cen Cal Pro decided to run a more lucha libre focused promotion in the city regularly. Knowing the Radisson was available and had hosted wrestling before with Vendetta Pro, the reached out and were able to secure dates there.

After booking the Radisson, Cen Cal Pro claims they reached out to Billy Blade to see if he wanted to be involved in the show, but according to them he flipped out. They claim he contacted wrestlers and trashed Cen Cal Pro and tried to get them to not work the shows (we were able to confirm with three wrestlers that they did receive messages that were negative towards Cen Cal Pro from Blade via Facebook messenger, but all claim they were never directly asked to not take a booking.).

Vendetta Pro then returned to Santa Maria on October 19, and Cen Cal Pro felt that the show was only being run to hurt their draw and sent a cease and desist to Blade. As Vendetta Pro has used the name for years, and could easily show prior usage before any DBA was filed, there is really no way Cen Cal Pro could legally stop Blade from using the name.

Dennis Balsamo also e-mailed Mega 97.1 and La Buena 105.1, two radio station’s Vendetta Pro promotes with, to cease running any spots with the Vendetta Pro name as he owns it and has not given them permission to use it.

Instead of consulting with an attorney, Blade met with Dennis Balsamo where an agreement was offered to Blade that if he and a few other people associated with Vendetta Pro such as Joseph Duncan can go nine months without harassing the promotion or talking bad about them, they would release the name. Blade never signed the document.

After Vendetta Pro ran their October 19 event, Cen Cal Pro debuted their new promotion, Planet Lucha the next night at The Radisson. Cen Cal Pro states Blade’s mother, Cindy Bolding, showed up and caused a scene, forcing them to have her removed from the venue. Blade claims his mother left on her own accord. Cen Cal Pro sent another cease and desist after their event.

At this point, it appears Blade is finally seeking legal advice, so there will likely be more to the story soon.

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Lucha Underground had 62,000 viewers this week. Despite this being the first night of Ultima Lucha, which is the promotion’s biggest shows of the year, it was down 18,000 viewers from last week. Most of the drop can likely be attributed to the show being on Halloween night, as ratings were down across the board.

Unless the show gets a huge rating next week, it likely average under 100,000 viewers per episode for the season. Right now it is at about 98,000 per episode. Season two averaged 120,000 and season three averaged 103,000.

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There will be Lucha Underground hats in select Lids stores. There will be Lucha Underground, Johnny Mundo, and Pentagon Dark hats.

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Ground Zero announced the first two first-round matches for its championship tournament on December 8. Tyler Bateman is facing Douglas James and Jake Atlas is facing Dom Kubrick. Bateman was actually the number one seed, which a big deal was made about in the match with B-Boy as the winner would get the top seed, but Douglas James would not mathematically be the number eight seed, so I’m not sure what the seeding actually did for anyone.

B-Boy, Andy Brown, Delilah Doom, and Eli Everfly are all in the tournament as well.

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Tomaste fractured his jaw during his match at the October 27 Ground Zero event.

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This week’s shows:

11/1:

FIST Combat presents November to Remember in La Mesa, CA

Bar Wrestling presents Day of the Dead in Baldwin Park, CA

11/2:

Millennium Pro Wrestling in Moorpark, CA

EWF in Covina, CA

MicroMania in Barstow, CA