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JR's Blog: JR's Moore Location to "Flip" to Sports Grill...Random Thoughts...Q&A Snafu's

Posted: Apr 13th 2009 By: mikeiles

Another great weekend here in Oklahoma even though the rain put a damper on the Sunday Easter egg hunts. I attended the Oklahoma Spring Football Game Saturday along with approximately 30-40,000 fans which was a good time. As we speak, I am preparing to pack to fly EARLY Monday morning to Atlanta to be front and center for Monday night's three hour Raw which starts one hour early at 8/Central. There will no doubt be some that won't have a peaceful, easy feeling Sunday night when they put their heads on their pillows wonder what the "Draft" holds for them.

On the JR's business front, we are flipping our newest JR's Family BBQ in Moore, Oklahoma to a Louie's Sports Grill of which my business partner has 12 already successfully operating. For the BBQ biz to be successful one needs a drive thru and we were unable to build a drive thru in Moore plus we wanted to downsize in this economy. The Moore store seated about 200 and we have learned that keeping our seating to 100 or so works best for our genre. We have several other locations in the Moore area we are currently looking at as well as other locales in Oklahoma City and we still plan on expanding to the Tulsa area in due time as well. By "flipping" concepts in our old Moore location, I will be able to spend much more time in our Norman store at I-35 and Main (exit 109). Hopefully our regulars in Moore, only about 10 miles from the Norman store, will make the easy drive down to Norman and continue to enjoy the best BBQ in the State. We are also preparing to change our menu by adding 4 or 5 Mexican food items to go along with our slow, hickory smoked BBQ and country cooking. Sunday April 12 was the last day the JR's/Moore was open.

So now we own a thriving BBQ joint and an interest in one of the fastest growing sports grill concepts in the country. Financial experts call this diversifying while I simply call it making a smart business decision and not putting all of one's eggs in one basket while our professional politicos figure out how to fix our economy.

So it is all good on our end. We will continue to strategize our BBQ expansion plans and positively move forward.

Got a text Sunday from Steve Austin who is going to be down in Brazil for a few more weeks doing that phase of the movie Steve is working on with Sylvester Stallone. Steve took the book "Oklahoma Shooter: The Dan Hodge Story" with him and enjoyed reading about arguably the greatest combat athlete in America's history, Dan Hodge. Steve aptly described Danny in typical Austin fashion by telling me that Hodge was a "real badass." Indeed he was. I hope that you will check out this book as you will be amazed with Hodge's athletic feats on the world stage.

Regarding our Q&A's, I have updated a ton of new questions as of Easter Sunday. I hope everyone knows that I can't physically answer or address every question and the really long ones generally get erased. Also, the repeat questions get axed as a rule. You also should know that I likely don't have a typical/normal sense of humor and sometimes my answers can be somewhat subtle. If I offend any of you with those particular answers, then I apologize but I usually don't have a clue if I am being questioned by a young, naive kid or a wise guy. Also due to the volume of questions and my workload my answers are usually going to be on the succinct side of things. Don't take that personally and hopefully you understand the situation.

Amazing that the Lesnar-Mir fight for July 11 in Vegas sold out in advance to UFC Fight Club members with the public not even getting in the hunt. One can only imagine what the scalpers will be getting for tickets for this much anticipated fight. I'm not sure who UFC fanatics want to see get destroyed more, Brock or Mir.

MMA fighter Josh Barnett was at Wrestlemania with D.H. Smith and we had the occasion to have a nice visit. Josh is a really bright and talented young man. Well, except perhaps when he said he was "influenced" by my announcing style. Josh wants Fedor and is not intimidated by Fedor's vaunted rep.

Love the speculation on the 'net regarding the WWE Draft Monday night. Everyone seemingly has an opinion which one would think would drive Raw's TV rating up this week. I don't' know this to be a fact but my educated guess is that many of the draft decisions won't be finalized until late in the day Monday.

For the record, I have packed my bags for two nights on the road this week as I fully expect to be in Knoxville on Tuesday for ECW/Smackdown. If I go back to Raw, I would be shocked and if I were you I wouldn't take that option in the office pool.

Pittsburgh's Mark Madden's recent 'net article mentioning that "Vince McMahon should fire Jim Ross" is a really entertaining read. Madden is very creative and clever and I only wish his radio show aired in OKC. Madden was crucial in helping make the Ric Flair biography an excellent read. I don't think he personally likes me, which is cool, but the former WCW broadcaster is still an entertaining and bright guy who gravitates to controversy. Nothing wrong with that.

It's hard to believe that the WGN Superstars of Wrestling program debuts this Thursday. All fresh bouts from all three WWE brands will hopefully make this an entertaining show and will likely utilize all three broadcast teams....who ever they may be.

Last week we had some guests in our BBQ joint in Norman from the UK that flew into Dallas, drove north 3 hours to come to our place to eat and then turned around and went back through Dallas and drove to Houston for Wrestlemania. Norman is 8 hours north of Houston. True story.

Thanks for checking in and, please, if you are a youth writing us on our Q&A please denote such so that I don't make a jackass out of myself any more than I do on a normal basis.

My sincere thanks for those of you that shop with us and help us keep this site alive and well. If you're in our neck of the woods, I hope to see you in person at JR's in Norman.

BTW Backlash has apparently sold out for later this month in Providence. Take Care.

Boomer Sooner!

J.R.

Tags: Jim Ross, WWE, Danny Hodge, ECW, Ric Flair, WCW