Episode 588: The Hostile Land Of Dixie

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Like a midnight and the rock and roll.

He's in a fight for wrestling soul using a racket and some mind control.

Jim Cornette!

The keys to the future, held by the past.

And with Tag T partner Bariah at last, he sends this message out by podcast.

Jim Cornette!

Well, he's never fake a phony.

He never backs down from a fight.

He never wins the pony.

Cause his mama raised him right.

It's time

to prepare

your mind

to get the experience.

Get the experience.

Get the experience of Jim Cornette.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome to another thrill-packed episode of the Jim Cornette Experience.

Today, what happened on AEW this week, you tell me, and we'll both know.

Plus, more on my adventures in the hostile land of Dixie.

Kata, that is.

And miscellaneous tomfoolery for everyone in joining me.

Hawaiian Brian, the podcasting lion, the king of the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, Mr.

Co-host to you.

He never went way down south on Dixie.

The great Brian last, everybody.

Aloha, Jim.

A pleasure to be here once again.

I did not go down on Dixie.

I might have gotten a push like Hernandez if I had.

Oh, now he was a fine, upstanding person.

He did not partake in any of that thing, but uh, there's never been a Jewish Hernandez, it would have been a real switch on things.

It, uh, well, you could have been the Hernandez brothers,

the Hermanos Hernandez.

I thought that was Japanese or Japanese Jesus Christ.

I thought that was Spanish for Herman for the Hermanos is apparently his brothers.

Is that correct?

Do you know anything about this?

Oh, no, I thought you were right the first time.

It was for Japanese Jesus Christ.

Okay,

it was Jesus.

All right.

Anyway.

Come on, we're going to have fun today.

Hot and wet.

Way down south in the land of cotton panties.

You know, I went out to dinner the other night.

I told you I was going to do this, and I indeed did, indeed did that.

I indeed did it.

Went out to dinner.

It was Stacey's mom's birthday.

She's a lady, so I won't mention how many.

But she wanted to go to Outback Steakhouse, which I haven't been in a just a blue moon, as Mama Cornette used to say.

And I'll tell you, when we were traveling, if I was by myself, I wouldn't go to the trouble of sitting down somewhere and eating and expending that much time.

And, you know, I could be in my underwear.

But if Stace was with me, we would always, on a long trip, we'd find a...

an exit with a Hilton property and an outback steakhouse.

And that would just make everything swell.

And boy, I ate my just, I don't even have a simile.

I was so frazzled after I ate that.

I was full for two days.

It didn't stop me from eating more the next day, but I didn't want to.

I had to make myself.

When's the last time you went to Outback Steakhouse there, Matey?

Outback Steakhouse, Jesus, I don't know, 2002,

three?

Oh, come on.

It's not a place I regularly go to.

What do you did?

You don't love the Outback Steakhouse.

you don't love a good shrimp on the bobby mate come on you the bloomin' onion

do you ever see that movie shrimp on the barbie with cheech marin after him and chong broke up

like marin or whatever you want to call him he goes to australia and he falls in love with a rich girl and she falls in love with him and then everyone does uh

I forget if it was Lombada or Manana.

There's a dance at the end and they all do it.

The end.

I'm going to tell you, if there was a, if a Cheech and Chong movie came out after 1979,

I probably missed it.

After the first one?

After the first one, I probably missed the rest of them.

Well, no, I haven't been to Outback Steakhouse.

I remember they had a steak.

Yeah, that's a...

It's a movie called Carlito's Way.

What's it about?

Well, it's about this guy named Carlito and the way he does things.

No, it's a one.

They've got a...

where do i start they're a fine establishment they're upstanding people they're very very consistent i've noticed from restaurant to restaurant you can get the occasional sob in every crowd as they used to say but uh they're very and also now

guess what they got they got the bloomin' chicken

They take the big old chicken breast and they flatten it out real good and they and they roll it and bathe it in the bloomin' onion batter seasoning frying mix or whatever the fuck you might want to term it and then they fry it that way and then they give it to you with the bloomin' onion sauce

it was amazing and a bunch of fine appetizers including the kooka burr wings that are just different from

from just any other wings you're going to have.

But nevertheless, and then we went over next door to Grater's Ice Cream and had, and I had some, I splurged and I had some ice cream too.

In a cup.

Well, it was more of a bowl-type-shaped apparatus.

It wouldn't, I wouldn't call this a cup.

Was everyone else getting cones like a normal person?

Well, they got the little cup that I guess you would call it, whereas I got a, it was a long, oblong thing that looked like a battleship.

But Sam.

Sam over at Grators listens to the podcast, by the way.

He's a fine young man.

He's one of the go-getters of the younger generation.

Hello, Sam.

Out there working to get ahead.

Hello, Sam.

One of these days, he's probably, he's going to own the place.

Which place?

Well, the whole plan, the whole daggum deal.

He'll take over Graters.

And he'll own the store.

He'll own the plant where they manufacture the ice cream.

He'll own the cows that make the milk.

He'll own the goddamn strawberry trees

where they grow the strawberries and

the sprinkle trees.

He'll own, are they bushes?

Where they grow the sprinkles.

He'll own all that stuff.

He's getting an early start.

I better be nice to him then.

How's he going to accomplish all this?

Well, he's getting an early start.

He's a young man out there in the working world now,

earning his way and learning a trade.

He's learning the ice cream trade.

The fuck, you got to admire the gumption.

You think he'll ever take a step up and go to custard?

I don't don't know.

Custard is a tricky business.

It's about the eggs.

Because some people, you know, and see, that's the thing.

They shouldn't have named it custard, to be honest with you, because if you just ask anybody walking down the street, hey, you want some ice cream?

Yeah, everybody's face is going to light up, right?

But if you ask somebody, hey, you want some custard?

Well, that just sounds like shit.

It sounds like a hundred days ago.

That's what it sounds like.

Well, it rhymes with mustard, first of all, and who wants mustard on a hot day?

And then custard?

What do you make custard out of?

And what's happened to it?

It sounds like it's some kind of fermenting process or a curdling.

Custard and curdling is not that.

So then

it just sounds just nasty.

Like it would coat your mouth and it would taste like a fucking dirty Dalmatian just pulled his foot out of it.

You know what's weird?

on this topic of ice cream that you brought up custard if you look at the grocery aisle, the things that you think are, I mean, that must be ice cream.

It's a cone,

and there's ice cream that looks like ice cream there, and it's wrapped in chocolate.

It's a frozen substance.

But it doesn't say ice cream anywhere on the package.

They're not allowed to call it ice cream because technically, however, they're concocting it,

it's not the proper ingredients of ice cream.

So it just says like frozen dessert treat.

Yes, a frozen dessert treat, or it's like American cheese.

Kraft American cheese as a pasteurized processed cheese food.

A cheese food.

I never even picked up on that one, actually.

Yeah.

And that's as if it's some of the tastiest stuff.

Actually, I just, a regular roll ice cream is a little bland.

Now that they've got the

the dessert treats that they can put all kinds of extra shit in there.

Well, they're just swell.

You just take a spoon to them, some bitches.

Anyhow, we got a big show today.

Can't you tell?

Right.

I'll have you know.

I want maybe later on you can tell me what AEW

should start giving out study notes

and after the shows, or maybe even before the shows, so you could follow along.

And maybe even do some charts and some history.

Here's what you need to research so you know everybody's standings and relationships in Japan from 15 years ago and a third match on the card.

And also some pie charts would be good, I think.

Pie charts are always good.

So we can kind of analyze what the fuck is going on with these people.

There's a million of them.

They run around like ants in one of those.

Did you ever

did you ever wonder?

Probably not.

Did you ever have in school back

before they

had actual

money to spend on things, apparently?

You'd get the ant farm thing where you could look through the glass and see the ants doing their thing.

We didn't have it in our school or any of the classes I was in, but they were still, they were still a thing, but it was kind of in its last days, I think, as being a cultural thing.

Sort of like the wrestling bear went out about the same time.

But

yeah, they look like ants to me now.

It's an ant farm over there.

And we're also going to talk about the

last week on the program, we just started the TNA agent report thing.

It's getting closer to the point where I get fired.

So we'll do a little bit more of that and et cetera.

But I found something else.

I teased you with this, Brian.

Hear me?

I'm rattling the papers.

I teased you with this earlier.

This was a letter.

And this is the era where I have the originals because we we were faxing everything, right?

It's like to from pages.

Um,

Rick Bassman, you recognize that name, right?

I do,

and it's funny you bring this up.

Every,

I don't know, every year or so, someone will post something like, Hey, look what he said, he's responding to Jim Cornette, he's challenging Jim Cornette, and I'm like, Oh, yeah,

yeah,

I thought he'd been,

I thought he had had some type of ill health, been hospitalized, put in a home

somewhere or something.

I haven't heard about him in years, but because this is from 2004.

Okay.

But for the people who don't know, and that's probably a lot of you,

his claim to fame was the picture with ultimate warrior and sting.

He's the guy

in the, in the early, a, mid 80s, 84, whatever it was, he had some kind of gym in California and Los Angeles, and he was looking to somehow get in the wrestling business.

You want to get in the wrestling business, kid.

And he had

Sting and Warrior, Steve Borden and Jim Helwig were two of the bodybuilders that he recruited from the local Southern California gyms to try to it.

The early publicity pictures, and you've probably seen them, Brian, is him with these four muscle guys, right?

It was like Power Team usa or some kind of

and anyway

the other two

flaked off somewhere whatever the who knows

and

staying and warrior the future staying and warrior said let's get your out of here yeah so let's get the out of here because they they sent pictures out

And bless Jerry Jarrett, he'll take some green talent.

It'll work for cheap and a heartbeat.

And that's when they went to Memphis and began their careers.

But he, Bassman,

like, I think, got him tights and had pictures taken in a ring was the total of his,

because you've seen the early video of Staying a Warrior.

And anyway, then later on, he

set up some kind of wrestling school out in California, Los Angeles in the 90s.

And

he was involved in some of those inside pro wrestling secrets documentaries that were going around where they showed everybody how to do everything.

Before that,

it was somewhat frowned upon still in that environment, let's say,

years ago.

But also,

I'm trying to remember the timeline.

But before I even had any sideways issues with him from OVW,

I'm thinking it was probably 97-ish or something.

The first time I'd ever seen him in person, I believe, this fucking guy shows up at a TV we're doing out there, the WWF television.

And one of the dark matches, they've got two guys from whatever he's running.

And one of them, man, I'm trying to think of his, it's a Howard,

Tom Howard was his name.

I remember him, yeah.

And he was, he was a big guy with a nice physique, you know, two 30, 40, whatever he was, and blonde hair, kind of like, you know, early sting, maybe.

And

he would, you would look at him and say, well, he should be a Viking instead of Ludwig Borga, and he's not a psychopath, right?

And he could do some shit.

He was pretty good.

But his partner was this big cartoon muscle.

He looked even bigger than the early pictures you see of Warrior.

I didn't know how the fuck

that they didn't have to custom make this guy's guy's fucking clothing from scratch.

He was just ridiculously big.

And they're going to be a team.

And I was like, ugh.

And then there's Bassman.

He's going to go out and manage them.

Their manager, Ricky B,

this little bald peanut-headed dip shit is like five foot fucking two or whatever.

And he's out there with this cartoon muscle guy port.

And Tom Howard's doing some shit.

And he's trying to make the most of his time.

And there was two minutes of Tom Howard,

where if you thought, you know, wow,

he might be worth something.

But it was weighed down by the other five minutes of this fucking muscle guy might have had three wrestling lessons, and the manager didn't know how to manage, and nobody knew who the fuck he was or what he was supposed to be doing anyway.

And

but then

in the late 90s,

Bruce started going, Bruce Pritchard, brother Bruce, brother love,

started going out there and visiting his school.

And

the only explanation I give you is one time he said, well, he flies me out and takes me out out there.

He was, it was a life, a vacation for Bruce to go from Connecticut to Los Angeles to look at guys at a wrestling school so he could go out in LA and be

winded and dined by Rick Bassman.

And I'm like, I tell you, I'll stay here.

You bring some bitches to me.

But anyway, and

to be fair,

they did find Cena and they did find Victoria

because they were in LA in a gym, right?

That's what Bassman kind of like, he got in the wrestling business the same way the people who buy a McDonald's franchise get in the restaurant business.

You know, it just, here I've got a gym, good-looking people in California.

Come here, and

I'll teach you absolutely nothing.

But he was also doing a deal where he was signing guys to contracts where if they got a deal and they got a career and made money, he got part of their money.

And there's several people, I won't mention any names,

were

actively for a while trying to get out of that.

So then,

while we're here, I'm here in OVW, right?

This was,

I'm going to say, again, early 2000s, not sure the exact year, but we're running already, we're running the shows at Six Flags, Kentucky Kingdom.

And

Bassman's deal out there at one point had had a developmental contract, but I don't even remember why they canceled it, but they canceled it for something else that he was doing or was going on.

But we hear from our people at Six Flags over here, Kentucky Kingdom: hey, we just got this brochure in the mail from

somebody,

and they're saying they can bring us wrestling.

And there's a picture.

This is when Cena was here as a prototype.

So

I'm thinking it may have been goddamn,

it had to be 2001, right?

Maybe 2002 before he left.

And it's his picture is on the fucking cover of the brochure while he's wrestling here on their shows.

And I said, what the fuck?

And

anyway, come to find out,

Bassman and his gimmick school out there had sent brochures to every Six Flags amusement park in the country.

claiming that he had an affiliation with WWF, he did at one time, but he didn't currently at that point, and put the most recognizable fucking piece of talent that he had produced on the cover, which was still just a guy in developmental for us at OVW.

So I called the office and I told Bruce, I said, this little fucking peanut headed piece of shit.

Number one, he's saying he's still hooked up with you guys.

And number two,

he's fucking with our six flags people.

And whatever Bruce did, I then called the number on the brochure,

which I assume was Mr.

Bassman.

And I told him something effective if he ever got in contact with our, you can do whatever you want with Six Flags New Jersey, motherfucker.

But if you ever contact our fucking people again,

they will find you in a ditch.

So

I've always had a fond, you know, relationship with this guy, right?

Yeah, you haven't even gotten to the letter yet.

It's all right.

He's a great story.

So anyway, I didn't remember that this happened until again,

looked at this letter, but the letter is to Tom Pritchard.

And

I still don't remember all of it, but apparently it happened because I'm responding to it.

And this is from April of 2004.

And

it says, dear Doc, Dr.

Tom.

To say I was stunned to hear of Rick Bassman's business offer would be an understatement.

So I'm responding on papers.

There could be no misrepresentation of my stand on this issue.

Professionally, I think it's a wonderful idea for the OVW champion and myself to travel to UPW and in some heel way protecting the credibility of the champion and promotion, screw the UPW champion out of the title.

with an angle afterward to shoot a rematch for the following week.

In that match, as a professional, the OVW champion would put the UPW champion over clean after my interference had been foiled by any UPW babyface, parentheses, S, or faces.

Before the match via the internet, I could in my own inimitable way convince the internet marks that no matter what they think about wrestling or think they know, I hate Rick Bassman.

And shit would probably take place at the event that I was bringing a seven-foot giant, Matt Morgan, to humiliate the UPW champion.

During the week, as a visiting wrestling school trainer, it would be natural for me to conduct seminars, explain psychology to the local students.

So that was the offer that he was trying to pitch.

Hey,

because I probably knocked him at that point somewhere, called the office audio for something.

Hey, what about if he brings the OVW champion out and we do an angle with his guy and my guy, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

So I'm responding to the idea that he is pitched with what I think is a very professional response, correct?

Thus far, yes.

Well, I continue.

That's as a professional.

Personally, this little Cretan has so much heat with Danny Davis and myself that I cannot begin to describe it.

Exposing not only the business, but how it's worked on national TV documentaries and trade-at-home tapes.

I forgot about that.

He was doing that too.

Taking percentages of the boy's hard-earned money after they paid him to go to his school, etc.

And again, the six flags.

Who is this little fart that he is qualified to run a wrestling school to begin with?

He's never taught anyone anything except how to write a check, and he would not even be a blip on the wrestling radar screen if not for his habit of smartening up everyone in the world and running a fast food wrestling school.

Anyway,

and if I did conduct a seminar, my advice to everyone there would be to run from this shyster as fast as you can and try to find a legitimate school.

So that actually there's, again, there's a page too.

Personally, there's no amount of money on earth that would convince me to in any way lend credibility to Bassman's feeble attempts to ruin the wrestling profession.

But as a professional, in the words of Ted DiBiase, every man has his price.

You want to hear this?

Oh, let's hear what your price is.

Yeah,

this is like one of those Heyman pitches.

Well, I offered

Jim Cornet and the OBW champions live appearances, the trip, angle, promotion of same

matches and seminars.

Because I believe he also pitched, well, you can do a seminar while he's out here.

And all ancillary elements is $50,000.

A cashier's check for 50% of the money would have to arrive in my hands at least two weeks prior to the dates, blah, blah, contracts, cashier's check, balance on arrival, cover Matt and Matt Morgan's talent fees, transportation, lodging, and meals, all of which we would arrange on our own.

And if there, any part of this arrangement would be reneged on, a seven-foot giant would wreak some type of havoc and I would explain it on the internet for the rest of time.

And I said, as I'm ambivalent about the answer either way, I will await your reply if any of this proposal.

I don't have any other paperwork on it, so I don't think I heard back.

See, Matt Morgan needed someone like this to talk for him on TV, even though he could talk.

But you're building this up.

I want to see Matt Morgan go out there and start talking about what's this.

Anywho, so that

It's always something.

Every time I stick my hand in the pile here, I find something to remind me of somebody else that tweaked me off at some point in time.

It's so interesting, too, because obviously he would have known that he tweaked you off before he said whatever he said to Tom Pritchard.

So that Tom Pritchard ended up as the intermediary or whatever you want to say in this, the liaison, attempted liaison in this situation.

Yes.

He had to know that, but it makes you question then anything after that.

And it makes you, you know, there are other people out there.

How much of what they say is

what you do, just saying what you think and what you do, versus,

you know, hey, we're actually working an angle.

You know, now that, now that we're talking, why don't you come work for me?

Why don't you come

up here on this show?

That's what the Young Bucks, remember that's what the Young Bucks thought years ago?

Well, see, we were never even talking.

I never talked to this fucking guy.

But

I think, as I said,

I think that I had either knocked him or stooged on him in the office recently enough that he had this idea because he's a mark.

You know, it'll get some attention.

Hey, let's do an angle with the developmental and the blah, blah, blah and everything.

And if people will believe it, I say, yeah, I'll make them believe it.

All right.

But anyway.

When I did Yama Pit Fighting, he was representing MMA fighters at that point.

So he was.

That's right.

Yeah.

That's right.

He was doing that.

It just.

Can I tell you something?

How many different brands of jock can he sniff?

I'm sorry.

Go ahead.

I'd put money down that he was leaking stuff to Dave Meltzer because Dave Meltzer Meltzer had some like shit in there that was almost right,

but it was like there was like weird things that were off, almost like someone didn't really know what was going on.

And I was like, okay, who's representing this fighter and this fighter and this fighter and this fighter and knows Dave Meltzer?

And that's why.

Well, I don't think you can actually accuse him of being a leak.

He's more like an open fucking fire hydrant to get attention or publicity or credibility or

leech one of those things off somebody.

But nevertheless,

hey, Rick, if you're you're still alive and they haven't confined you, how are you?

Love to see you.

Never.

You know, you know, the other thing.

Well, the one other thing I'll just say, though, even the offer,

after seeing a, I mean, forgive me for not knowing my UPW history or whatever it is.

Who did wrestle?

Did they have a champion?

Did they have anyone of note?

Was it anything like...

Like CZW had a little bit of a following when Ring of Honor and CZW did their thing.

That's why it worked.

I don't know who any of his folks were at that point in time.

Let's do a cross-country inter-promotional feud between OVW and UP.

He just was wanting to get over with the audio or with the office.

That's what he was in some kind of way, and the office and or the internet.

Not actually like it would sell large numbers of tickets

for any reason.

It was just some fucking markish thing.

Do you you think people

inherently like seeing like a big baby face beat the shit out of a small,

like tiny heel manager?

Even if the person's like smaller than, like sometimes you would see someone small and be like, oh, I hope that person doesn't get hurt.

But if they were a heel,

you know what I mean?

Like if they're a heel, then it's like, okay, I'd like to see him get punted or something.

Yeah.

Do you think that's something that we don't see enough of in wrestling?

Like the tiny.

Like tiny heel manager that you just can't wait to see him get his ass kicked and he does?

Well, yeah, definitely.

I think we should see more that we don't see any of that

i mean a tiny heel manager right there that eliminates poor paul

uh

but but how did it start into this again well

i just said the tiny heel manager i mean when you take his gravitational pull it's hard to get away from him but

No, yes, there should be tiny heel managers or wishy-washy cowardly,

you know,

physically unimpressive heel managers that get the shit kicked out of them,

but not every

small person can be a heel manager that you want to see the shit get kicked out of it.

They got to be good at it.

There's the rub.

Like the brief period of time where Harvey Whippleman was a manager and like kind of the top heel manager in WWF, as crazy as that sounds.

He looked really small because it was Sid,

Kamala.

No, he's really small.

And And he's really small, but it looked really small, but he never took, like, if he took any bumps, I don't remember them.

There weren't a lot of memorable,

like Jimmy Hart.

I could see just, I could see his little kicks, and then I could just see him taking these awkward falls all the time.

Well,

I love downtown Bruno.

Mama says it be's that way sometimes, baby.

Love Harvey, but he was not Bobby Heenan

when it came to the physical aspects.

am I being nice enough?

I don't, sometimes you do, you know, you could have hurt him.

He was very frail, plus, you didn't want to bump him sometimes.

Hildebrand would have bumped.

Well, oh my God, he'd have been a fucking human Super Bowl out there.

But that was, see, the Pittsburgh gods gave Bruno the mouth and Brian the fucking work.

And in each of them, the 135 pounds of the 270 that would have been

you could figure out some kind of way to surgically graft.

Where were we going with that?

We were in Jim's letters, letters to Jim.

But no, but no.

I finished the letter, but we were about the

small managers.

Tiny heel managers.

Tiny, tiny little small, they're almost, you can't see them.

But could Lord Littlebrook have been an effective heel manager?

Like the royal family really didn't take off.

But the idea of a diabolical heel manager but it's also a little person no like mr

evil or what was the guy well no not i'm not saying that's small that's that's mini me no a dr loveless on the wild wild west but see hey

think about this here's the perfect analogy of why what you just said would not work

and i'm agreeing with you it probably wouldn't work Lord Littlebrook didn't take off.

The Royal Family was not meant to be a top heel getting team.

It was Jack Victory and Rip Morgan and

the office, JR.

Everybody loved Littlebrook.

It's a feature thing, right?

But you couldn't bump

adult, not adult, but a goddamn large, normal-sized

giant person

couldn't be bumping a little person, even if they got that kind of heat.

And that's the thing in the wild, wild west.

Jim West beat the shit out of 15 people every episode.

He never once punched Dr.

Lovelace, Lovelace.

Never struck him, never physically fucking manipulated him because that, no,

then that's bad.

It's bad heat.

So you, but you can have a small,

if it sounds like the world's largest midget.

You can have,

you could have a small

normal size person, the smaller, the better.

But if they cross into the little person territory, you can't touch them.

So take a yardstick, these some bitches, before you hire them.

That's what I'm trying to say.

Is that it?

Thank you for the clarification, yes.

Well, I just wanted to be clear on these things.

Damn it.

Anyway, you know what's clear, and let's move on because I got something I want to ask you about.

Is that we're

currently up and running now at jimcornet.com and Cornet's Collectibles.

Hotchkiss Feather Bottom is back in the game again, baby

as as they say on the knee replacement commercials uh he and his family appreciate as i said the well wishes and the condolences over the past couple weeks but i've got him back in the salt mines

or the action figure mines or whatever it may be and uh

we can you can now order with uh complete

peace of mind from jimcornet.com that your order will be processed in a

hotchkess is pumping them out so if you'd like hotchkiss to pump you then get on jimcornet.com and go to cornettes collectibles and purge he'll he'll pump for any purchase

and all and they can get shirts now for for the shows possibly where they are currently listening to us right now on whatever platform that might be by some

element of the internet witchery, Brian, tell them how they can get the new shirts.

That's right.

You can pump yourself up with some fine

kearney t-shirts available corny t-shirts available uh wherever you find your favorite t-shirts on the shop app look for jim coordinate look for arcadian vanguard go to arcadianvangard.com directly to get a whole line of shirts drive-through logos travis echel artwork more to come and of course the easiest way go to youtube any of the videos has a link to the store you'll see various t-shirts underneath Click one of those and support the show.

Tell everyone else to go to hell.

Well, no, I mean, you can tell them to fuck off or kiss their ass or just, you know, wherever the, whatever fits best.

The road to hell may be paved with too many people trying to get in there now.

You may want to just tell them to fuck off.

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Speaking of the road to hell, um,

yeah, our friend Colin Thompson over there, he's the major domo over there at Cast Media.

Well, he's got a new front man now, like Roy Welch used to put in the new territories he'd open up.

But nevertheless, we've given some updates on him, and you can find the deposition videos where he looks so uncomfortable on the Arcadian Vanguard YouTube channel.

Just go to that and you'll see a bunch of deposition videos.

But he's obviously

he's back in the game.

He's got a plan.

He's going to reorganize himself.

He wants to get back heavy into the podcast business.

And so we have

been mentioning the press release he put out where he said he wants to be a beacon of transparency and truth and try to avoid the mistakes he's made in the future.

And so, in the interest of that transparency, something you can see practically through like it ain't even there.

And part of this little bankruptcy deal that we've been involved in with him, not part of the other little lawsuit that we're involved in with him, but he has to supply a,

is it monthly, Brian?

Is this the period of time we're talking about?

A monthly report?

Every month.

Every month, he's got to supply a report on how much came in and how much went out and how things are going.

And maybe this might be if you're looking to get in business with Colin Thompson or invest in his,

you know, in maybe he, hopefully he can make a ton of money here and pay back the $6 million he owes people, us amongst us, being two of them, of those millions of dollars.

I hope he.

just tears it up, but you know, maybe if you're thinking about doing business with him, you can listen to this and we'll keep you updated every month or so on

how he's doing.

And

Brian, you know how to read these documents better than I do, but did I give a halfway decent summation of what we're talking about here?

You did.

I guess just a couple of things before we get going with this, and this is, again, public record.

So it's not like we're exposing anything that anyone can't access.

We just have inside information and could talk about it.

I think a couple of important things to note.

One, we mentioned previously that it wasn't known to the public that he was working with a company called James Media.

He told the bankruptcy court that Cast Media

was

an operations consultant running the operations of this company, as well as getting ad sales money.

And we've seen the details.

We have the contracts.

And yes, see, and let me just jump in.

That was another fun thing about this whole long,

grueling bankruptcy process that made Colin take his jacket off so many times was that we were able to find out that there was not just

a level of incompetence, which there was, but there was also a level of things that we could take action on.

And we got that information during the course of what toward the end of some of it came in of this proceeding.

That's right.

That's right.

We found out that we thought things may have happened, and it turns out it did happen.

And it turns out it was a specific person.

It wasn't just cast media did something.

No, it was a specific person.

And thankfully, this is one of those areas, the state of California actually has something where people like Jim and myself and actually other podcasters, there are other people who invested money.

I mean, anyone really, can

bring action against the actual individuals who

committed the fraud.

did the deed,

did doing the thing, whatever you want to say.

Stepped out the back, Jack.

I brought up the James Media thing.

He's now listed on their website as the chief operating officer, colin at jamesmedia.club.

Is James Media still representing like Frank Sinatra and Queen Elizabeth and major names?

According to his website, here we got Pod Save America, we got Call Her Daddy, we got Club Random with Bill Maher, Joe Rogan Show, the Trevor Noah, What Now Show, the Adam Carolla Show,

Jordan Harbinger or Harbinger, whatever this guy's name is, Lady Gang, Theo Vaughn, Sarah Silverman, Julia Lee Dreyfus, Jim Rome.

What percentage of those people know that they're on the James Media website?

Have we got that information yet?

What percentage of those people have ever heard of James Media?

But we'll get to that.

Again, there's going to be a lot more in the future, but let's get back to cast media and let's get back to the monthly report.

And,

you know, I hate to steal a line from you, but I'm going to, and I hate to say I told you so.

Uh-oh.

Like we told the judge, the plan he confirmed is dead on arrival, in our estimation.

Sure enough, cast media for the month of May, the month that just passed, May 2025, as soon as the plan got confirmed, lost $25,572 for the month.

Now let's break this down.

Break it down.

And there may be some other issues with some of the things that are checked here, but we'll get to that or the lawyers will.

The opening balance on all cash media accounts for May

had $108,228.50.

So that's what they started with.

Total cash receipts, how much they received during the month,

$34,711.30.

Total cash disbursements, the money going out,

$60,000.

Go!

$283.50.

The net cash flow is negative $25,572.20,

leaving cash on hand at the end of the month of $82,656.30.

Well, now

did just cousin Brian,

That just don't add up.

And now, but here's the thing.

If he's not giving anybody that he owes the money from the $6 million from beforehand,

you're not giving him any money.

Well, then who's where's all that $60,000 going?

What does he do with that?

Well, let's get that information here.

And of course, none of this includes

the filings that were just made, I believe.

None of this is in here.

The filings that were just made to the court by his bankruptcy attorney and the trustee

asking for their money.

Oh,

he hadn't paid the lawyer.

Well, he's been paying installments, and we'll talk about it.

He's been paying lawyers for a long time, but I mean, apparently, not they're needing to ask for their money.

But it's just more money coming out of the general pot that was sold to gullable

creditors, as you're going to get something.

You're going to get nothing.

Let's go back to this.

How much have you paid in the last month in professional fees related to the bankruptcy case?

$20,000.

And that all went to, we believe, his lawyer Leslie Cohn in Santa Monica.

Fine city, Santa Monica.

How much has been paid in professional fees related to the bankruptcy since the case was filed?

Up to this point, he had paid $134,148.27.

He claims that they have unpaid bills of $28,132.28.

However, money owed to him, or excuse me, to Cast Media,

$88,279.88.

If we go down here to the breakdown, here's the money that came in

from subscription sales via Apple for people that subscribe to whatever fucking awful content in my estimation he's trying to get people to pay for.

And if you don't believe me, go read the reviews of every one of his shows.

People think it's AI.

People don't even think it's real people anymore.

That's how bad the quality is.

But anyway, subscription sales to Apple, $3,637.58.

Soundstack, advertising sales.

This would probably be programmatic sales.

$753.11.

You know,

there's people that stand in front of stores with those sandwich board signs that make more money in the course of a week than he got in a month from his all right, micro dose, which I believe would be a five.

Yeah, he's he needed to do that during the deposition.

Well, they are a sponsor apparently of his programs and they paid two thousand six hundred and twenty-five dollars in the month of May.

Here's one payment from James Media for advertising sales:

twenty-five thousand

four hundred

So the attention-getting sum of money that I've heard so far has something to do with these James Media folks.

Yeah, James Media, which all of a sudden popped up as a company in the summer of last year.

And then we believe Colin testified that he was out in California meeting with them right after that.

And

Cast Media, although Colin Thompson is now listed as your chief operating officer, isn't that the guy you want running your operations, especially your books?

Colin Thompson secured a deal with them, he says, for Cast Media, but now his name is listed there.

But they paid him that.

Podcast one

advertising sales

$103.77.

Now, to be fair, there's a little more from them.

Advertising sales from James Media, $1,976.48.

And one more time from podcast one,

$133.40.

Boy, that podcast one relationship has really paid off for him with a gold mine.

Yeah, and again, he says here he's expecting a lot of money.

And I believe it has here

from podcast one.

He's expecting a lot of money.

You know what?

A lot of people expect a lot of things, but as Mama Cornette used to say, and I paraphrase, expect in one hand and in the other and see which one fills up first yeah podcast one apparently according to this owes him twenty three thousand four hundred and forty four dollars over 91 days

negative 737.37 between 61 and 90 days eight thousand dollars between thirty one and sixty days another nine thousand between one and thirty and it says your current is twelve thousand

well sounds like podcast one find finder fee type of things and stuff like that pile up.

Yeah, or maybe the shows just don't have an audience and aren't generating the income.

But let's go here to

what he spent money on.

Excuse me, what cast media spent money on?

Fiduciary maintenance, $25.

Was that an

overdraft fee?

Well, that's what that was from East West Bank.

Colin Thompson for reimbursements.

His East West Bank went south.

I'm sorry.

I'll be at two shows on Friday.

For reimbursements, the contractor, Colin Thompson, received $712.61.

A freelancer, the production cost for Sarah McLaughlin,

two times in a row, $1,300.

Abby Newhouse, another freelancer for production, $1,800.

Colin Thompson, contractor, CEO CEO

for April 13th through April 26th,

$6,923.08.

And I think that's an important thing to note.

Contractor.

He's no longer an employee of the company he owns and is the chief creative officer, I believe, of.

He's a contractor.

Well, he's this is some kind of fucking AEW EVP kind of shit.

He's working for himself.

Well, like that old country song, I'm My Own Grandpa.

Leslie Cohn Law, legal services, $20,000.

Ouch.

He's on a payment plan, I would imagine.

Google Office Expense Software and Apps,

$789.60.

There's someone named Connor M.

Powell, a freelancer for production.

He received

$2,750.

And then this next one is in italics, so I'm not sure exactly what that signifies here.

$2,888.38.

Colin Thompson, reimbursement as a contractor, $216.97.

And then again,

second time this month, $6,923.08

for being the CEO from April 27th through May 10th.

So he's paid himself about $3,000 a month of running a company that's going in the hole and is just trying to come out of bankruptcy.

No, he's paying himself a lot more than $3,000 a month.

Well, I mean, you know, just in those, no, did I say a month?

I mean a week, $3,000 a week.

Yeah.

In those, just in those $6,000 payments.

Office expense, software and apps, $65.

East West Bank, an analysis of the activity, $116.80.

Yeah,

it cost us a lot more for the people that analyzed his activity, but they did a better job of it.

Jared Einson, a consulting content development person, $3,500.

So it looks like he's trying to develop some new shows.

QuickBooks for software and apps, $235.

Colin Thompson reimbursements, $1,122.91.

Again,

he has a company card, doesn't pay rent, lives with his father-in-law, doesn't pay anything on the card that he already took for himself from the company.

Why?

What are the reimbursements?

But anyway, that's for another time.

And then finally, for Colin at least, contractor CEO, May 11th through May 24th, $6,923.

So he paid himself now three times within the month.

Jesus Christ, I thought, wait a minute.

How could you get three two-week periods out of the same month?

Has he changed the calendar?

He's the master of funny math.

Maybe we'll have to ask him that question.

Abby Newhouse, a freelancer for production, $1,200.

And finally, Connor Powell, freelancer production, $14.93.99.

Well, it doesn't sound like there's anything free about them either.

You know whose name wasn't there?

The new CEO.

Hmm.

That's interesting.

Wonder if it's an honorary title.

Yeah, well, we'll see because the next month will be the first month that it would have to be reflected there that what is listed here as contractor to be CEO,

that should no longer be what Colin's job would be.

So that would be there for Colin.

And then we should see the CEO's name and how much he's making because that's what they needed was another expense on the books, was another person to pay on the books.

That's a CEO and executive, too.

So by the way, if this guy's an executive and he's getting paid like $500 a month or something, you can make this guy's a jerk off.

If he's getting $2,000 a month, you're going to say, this guy's a jerk He's a CEO of a media company that's trying to pretend that they're bigger than they are.

But that's the

main points of the monthly report.

Again, what's there and what isn't there is important.

And the month before,

when he had to impress upon the judge that they could meet the requirements to get their plan confirmed, all of a sudden there was a whole bunch of payments coming in, including $10,000 from his lawyer, Sackler Entertainment, for content development or whatever he said he was doing.

All of a sudden, that was there that month.

Who knows?

We'll find out more.

And again, it's important to note: we are suing Colin Thompson and his co-conspirators and Podcast One and Live One

for everything that they did to us.

And

we're not going to stop until.

So let's keep playing.

Don't stop till you get enough.

Ow!

You know, Brian, last somebody else had enough,

had enough they couldn't take no more over there in

Saudi Arabia.

Did you see the CM Punk trended on Twitter?

The video, the memes were everywhere.

He's just an atrocious person.

Apparently, from what some people saw, he just flat out just football punted a kid trying to get an autograph from him.

Of course, what other people saw was him patting a young man on the shoulder.

How can there not be a happy medium?

Maybe he just slapped the kid lightly as he went by.

It says, Smarten up, kid.

I believe he just patted him on the shoulder, though.

He definitely kind of wanted to have some distance, it seemed like.

You didn't think so?

No, I think he was reaching out to go like, hey, kid, how you doing?

He didn't want the kid to walk in front of him, blah, blah, blah.

But let's set the scene anyway, anyway, because

it's not a perp walk.

It's the walk you make when the people that are there to take you to the goddamn promo room or the press conference or whatever, like, okay, here we go.

And they got the fucking badge around their neck or whatever.

That was the here are the wrestlers.

Parade them through to all the rich people that we allow to be here.

Whatever he was going to, and I don't, I don't say bad, but the

backstage pass, the laminate thing around the neck and the fucking t-shirt with the fucking logo on it.

They're taking them.

And I can't remember who was in front of it.

It was Orton was in front of him.

And they're walking through like an arena hallway.

And it's not like there's a screaming throng of people there.

It's mostly empty, but I guess there's a few people standing around.

But they're walking through the hallway.

going to wherever these people are taking them to go.

And there goes Orton.

And then here comes Punk.

And Punk has one of the guys with the laminate.

Yeah, here we go.

And the little kid comes up and he's wanting to say hello or whatever.

And as the camera is panning,

I see Punk reach out like, hey, kid, pat him on the shoulder.

And,

but then the camera loses them.

But I also see the fucking

guy with the laminate reaching out, doing the arm thing, like, okay, kid, we got to go to the thing.

Nobody was struck.

Nobody was goddamn assaulted.

And that's what attracted my attention to it was when I saw on Twitter, first thing when I turned it on, is CM Punk Shoves Kid.

And I'm like, what?

What fuck?

And there's no, there's no shoving.

There's no violence.

They're they.

And they walk on past, and everybody's gone to the deal.

He didn't have time to stop and chat, unfortunately, because they were doing the hustle walk.

I don't know,

you know, how else anybody got anything else out of that, but there were memes

of, you know, like Punk drawing back with the karate stance or whatever, and child's point of view trying to ask for Punk's autograph.

What the fuck?

He's doing, he's being hustled.

The thing is, there was, it was one kid and I knew there was no one around him.

It just seemed like, where'd that kid come from?

So it stands out.

He was probably the fucking son of the guy that was setting up the goddamn concession stand who knows but it wasn't like it's funny if it was the prince's son and then punk gets arrested over there i i thought the prince's son would have had long flowing robes and somebody carrying his train this kid was dressed as a normal

everyday fucking small street urchin on you know on the

periphery of the event did you see punk just oh my god someone just sent this in Punk apologized on a stage there to the people for his tweet about Saudi Arabia.

Told them it wasn't about them.

It was about the Miz.

What did he?

Oh, oh, I thought he had tweeted something lately.

No,

no, he apologized and said he woke up in a bad mood.

It wasn't about Saudi Arabia.

But look.

How much are they paying him?

How much is he getting for this?

But wait, it was just about he just wanted the Miz to suck any kind of dick.

Just any, just any kind of dick, Miz.

It has nothing to do with the murderous kind of of dick yes but but back up a second oh now he's holding a sign that says fuck Khashoggi

No way

oh back up a second oh because oh he's wearing a headdress

but he could be chief thundercloud he's being sold by Ken Patera to the Arabs

Jerry Blackwell, Ken Patera, CM Punk,

Sheikh Punk.

The honorable Sheik Punk.

I had told a punk.

I was going to ask you something.

Now I'm like, no, I know what it was.

Did he just divine himself?

Does the average

person in Saudi Arabia, even average wrestling fan, know that...

What, 10 years ago or five years ago, whatever it was that he tweeted to the Miz and fucking knock saudi arabia i'll play you the audio like a common well i have the audio here let's uh let's check out the audio it is interesting to note like punk apologizes for nothing

here he is all of a sudden on a stage there and uh let's play the audio right now

this this guy wants me to apologize for him

for a mean tweet i wrote six years ago hey listen

legitimately had nothing to do with saudi arabia i woke up and I was crabby and I wrote a mean tweet to the Miz and I apologized to the Miz and sir, what's your name?

Mohammed?

Here, watch out.

I'm going to step right here.

Mohammed, I sincerely apologize to you and all of Saudi Arabia.

Okay?

Well, there it is.

He apologizes.

To Mohammed the fan and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Well, besides the fact that they were chatting shut the fuck up lightly in the background they were trying to bleep so some of his apology was garbled there but i apologize to muhammad and the kingdom of saudi arabia and please give me back my passport please

okay please

i i understand he's over there they've said because again my question is does the average person

Or was it just that the fucking prince and his royal train carriers,

So he tweeted bad about us.

So they said, oh, you got to apologize in front of people, whatever.

I can understand apologizing to the prince and the kingdom and the little people down at the bottom of the

valley.

But why did he have to apologize to the mids?

See, that's the crime.

No,

somebody had to

go

go and say, okay, there's certain things that you need to say to smooth over our relationship with the.

And he's, again, he's over there.

What's he going to fucking do?

That's why

I've never been an advocate

of

a proponent

of going into situations like this where people can do their own thing to you.

Well, and actually, we're in one right now.

It's bad enough we're in the United States right now where you can be kidnapped off the streets, but at least you can understand them when they tell you why they're doing it.

This is going to fire up the AEW punk haters.

Like, this is going to fire them up because

this is also right before we are recording this right now, or obviously right before,

actually, not even right before.

well over a day before the night of champions event.

But

they're going to cheer Cena and they're going to be punk hold on now if in the next day again we don't know how media necessarily works there

social media is a thing in some form i don't know how the con the company the company the country the oil fields i don't know how they restrict it

will the fans if they see cm punk not just apologize to muhammad the fan but apologize to the kingdom apologize to muhammad himself no he's apologizing to the kingdom so i mean there i know but what if what about if he had apologized not to muhammad the fan but to muhammad muhammad i apologize to muhammad well no one's ever done that before

see hey

break new ground

or you could say it's clabbering time muhammad no what if he rode a camel to the ring

uh i didn't i'd think he was lawler in the mid-south coliseum but here's the

The thing I'm thinking is overseas audiences traditionally cheer for people based on not only star power, but lingerie, how long you've been a star, how much of an icon you are.

And because they're getting to see Cena and it's the retirement tour and everything, and

there is a segment that hates punk with every fiber of their being and can't stand that anybody doesn't think he's anything other than just a slimy, no-good, disreputable, gum bumping sack of snake feces.

And with that mixed mixed together, do you think

it go the Cena way?

The scenic route.

Or apparently you don't.

You know?

Again, Cena got cheered for the pipe bomb, but that's in the States.

Not like they haven't seen it over there.

He's the bigger star.

Here's the question I have for you, and I don't know the answer off the top of my head.

Any of the Cena appearances over the last six years, did he make several of the Saudi shows?

I don't remember.

Oh, good lord.

I don't know off the top of my head.

Because that's the other thing.

If it's his first time there, obviously.

Well, it's his last time there, one way or another.

Well, at least for wrestling.

Who knows?

Maybe a big party somewhere.

First time last time.

Hey, they may, the prince may bring him over on a private jet to

get him to apologize to Muhammad sometime.

We'd like you to send over more wrestlers to apologize next time.

Yes.

Can we get

some fresh apologies on the next super show?

This could be Punk's new gimmick because now he has another thing to apply.

Now he can apologize.

And by the way, I didn't push that kid.

I didn't even see him.

I thought I was being taken by a dwarf.

I know a lawyer in Greensboro that can get him off for the same thing happened to me.

The kid's dad sued.

I've told that story before, but I can refer Punk to the attorney because we, you know,

goddamn it.

Anyway,

you know, Brian, sometimes it makes me just want to

just

throw it all away, just get away from all this madness and pursue my dream.

Build me a new business, plant it in the ground and watch it grow.

into an empire from scratch with a new dream that I have that has nothing to do with wrestling and all about

the all-purpose solvent, the formula that can dissolve anything.

I just can't figure out what to put it in.

Folks, if you've got a dream, if you wake up every morning thinking I could leave all this hustle, bustle, hurry, scurry, riffraff of the world and my job that nobody appreciates, and I could break away from this.

burdensome life and this family and this wife and these kids and that mother-in-law and holy mackerel the neighbor i'd like to kick him in the ass.

Just get away from it all and have your own private island.

You got to start somewhere, don't you, Brian?

You got to start somewhere.

And I say,

you start with your dream and you go to Shopify and let them do the rest.

They can do all that stuff from then down to purchasing the vacation home on the private island in the South Seas.

They can do it and just give them a dream.

Just say, I have a dream and they'll do the rest and they'll send you a lot of the money.

It's amazing what they do.

They've built international conglomerates like Schmundlem and Schming,

and they can do the same thing for you.

Because folks, Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, 10% of all the e-commerce in the United States of America.

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All the way down to the little mom and pop shops just getting started.

As soon as pop gets mom to sign that insurance policy, double indemnity on accidental death, you can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates.

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Amazing is the word.

Amazing as in it's not happening.

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Get the word out like you've got a marketing team behind you pushing you every step of the way, giving you an elbow and a ribs.

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Oh my God, it's painful, especially when I hold my arm.

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So no, they didn't.

I sent them a picture of it.

Who?

Who'd you send them?

Well, you know, Elda, I said, hey, what can you do about this?

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What the fuck is that?

Didn't hear that?

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No, I heard it, but that's not, it's not a cash register.

No, it's like,

it's like a hamster going up and ringing a bell to get more seed.

I guess what is the start there?

Is it you throwing change in the jar?

What is that?

I think it's the rat that's pulling a rope on the little desk bell on the hotel desk.

You see, it's like a hotel desk with a.

I hear coins, like coins at the very beginning.

Like Vince McMahon.

Three coins in the fountain.

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Listen to this again.

See, I don't know what's going on there.

There's a variety of things happening.

Possibly somebody's trying to get the traffic lights changed so they can walk at the crosswalk.

Shopify.com slash cornet.

Well, Brian, last week, I guess it was on the program here, we started another thing that I found in my files: the TNA agent reports that I'd sent out weeks before

my departure from the company.

Terry Taylor had asked for them, wanted to be honest,

tell us just like you'd tell us in person, Jim,

and on the matches that I was directly involved in producing and in my overall thoughts on everything else that happened at the taping.

And I guess if people want to catch up, it's on YouTube.

You can go back and watch or watch, listen to last week's experience, or you can go to YouTube and listen to the clip but it's the agent report we did the pay-per-view and the first TV after

hard justice uh 2009

was the pay-per-view and then the TV afterwards and that's kind of what we're doing here we're reading through what I was telling them

that I thought was going on with their television show as of that period of time.

This was after

Jeff was gone and then Savio was gone and then Road Dog was gone and then Dutch was gone.

And

I'm trying to

not only be the lead producer, but also as Jeff had asked me, try to not let

our friend go too far and the whole thing go to shit, right?

So I got a lot of people I'm trying to make happy here.

Have I summarized that?

I think so.

And just something to point out, after the first one, first installment, the first two different things that we did went up.

Matt Morgan was on the YouTube page making comments about this time because you talked about him.

And we have something here from the Cult of Cornet Facebook group.

Well, now, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Don't, don't, hold on.

Don't gloss over that.

Matt Morgan was on the internet making comments.

A lot of times people would think, oh, what's he have to say?

He's bitching.

No, he was very complimentary and kind of was validating what we were saying.

I just wanted to not gloss over that, but go ahead.

This was posted in the group on Facebook by Doug Dirdle aka Doug Williams

color me oh okay color me surprised to hear Jim talk about the six-minute street fight myself and Nick had with beer money and TNA on the experience I remember it specifically due to the following exchange after the match

and he wrote me any good

and then your response no but you got the best out of it that you could

I took it as a compliment with a smiley face emoji.

So, we hear from some of the talent you've talked about in these

already.

Oh,

it was a

trying time.

And we were all trying, but there were forces beyond our control.

Oh, Dixie Land, I'll take my stand.

Anyway, so would you like to pick back up with another one of the episodes of Impact?

This was 448,

and

that was the episode number.

And no, I don't think they had done 448 of them.

No, they'd have been on for 10 years in 2009.

I don't know what their numbering system was, but I went with it.

Okay.

The first match, Suicide,

who you will remember was a masked wrestler that at least at a lot of points was Frankie Kazarian.

I think, right?

You remember?

I think so too, yeah.

And then I think they had somebody else do it if he got hurt or whatever the case.

But anyway, Suicide versus Samoa Joe.

And then it was to be the Pope D'Angelo De Niro, Elijah Burke, and Chris Daniels were to get involved and turn it into a tag team match.

Suicide and Daniels, Joe and Pope.

Suicide versus Joe was good.

Joe worked hard again, but Pope and Daniels' involvement came a little too quickly.

It all happened at the same time.

The fans didn't know and liked it.

The cause was Pope not knowing he needed Pope street clothes and having to go shopping that day, which delayed everyone getting together until late in the day.

It wasn't a big problem because the fans couldn't tell, and the show was heavy anyway.

The tag match was good and got everything accomplished it was supposed to.

They jumped their spot, right?

And sometimes it happens, but they saw their their cue was A will body slam B and B accidentally body slammed A and whatever the fuck.

Right.

But

the problem was

Elijah Burke shows up, his debut, he's got all his fucking gear.

He doesn't have goddamn clothes to make him look like Huggy Bear on Starsky and Hutch.

So he had to go out and find some shit because our friend Mr.

Russo, who I will call by his Christian name during the course of this, so that everybody knows exactly who to point a finger at.

He's, oh, yeah, you didn't really got to do that.

Oh, shit.

So you had to go out and buy shit, right?

Anyway, comments on that one.

On that match, I don't remember the match.

I don't think I watched it, but

I mean, it's interesting to hear your perspective as, I mean, technically, you're the agent.

You're filing an agent's report.

Were you the agent for the match?

Yes.

These that I'm talking about, I was the agent for the match, and then I have other random thoughts on other stuff because I was the agent in the truck for everything as we covered.

And by the way, we mentioned that Matt Morgan comment on YouTube earlier.

It starts with this: I don't think fans understand how difficult it was for Jimmy to turn to these agent reports, knowing the head of our creative was an absolute moron.

Well, that kind of gives you the tone of the thing.

Anyway,

Rhino versus Jesse Neal.

Do you remember Jesse Neal?

I remember the name.

I hadn't thought of the name in forever.

I don't remember the person.

I remember the name, though.

Well, and as a matter of fact, you know what?

Google him if you can, if he's even Googleable at this point for a second, because he got badly injured.

He was a young rookie.

I can't remember how they found him, but it's another thing.

Oh,

everybody, Dixie was high on everybody.

Let's get this kid over.

I really, again, I don't remember where they found him or how he got trained or whatever.

But he started out and got badly hurt and couldn't wrestle anymore.

And they said, well, you've got a job for life as a producer or whatever the fuck.

And then not long after that, they fired him.

And I don't know whatever happened to him.

I hadn't thought about him either.

I looked up this or looked at this paper.

Can you find anything on him?

Wikipedia, I'm just scanning through, there's a lot.

Whoever entered the stuff here is a big fan of his stuff on the indies.

They entered a lot about it.

Oh, yeah, he was frightened.

They found him.

He was already working indies or whatever.

Well, while you find that, I will say the quick match, but exactly it was laid out, no problems.

Rhino is still a babyface to the fans because they tried to switch him heel.

But this mistreatment of Jesse got him a little heat.

I know Jesse is supposed to be a rookie, quote unquote, but he continues to wear a sweatshirt and gym shorts to wrestle in.

The deal was that he was brand new and they had introduced him some kind of way in a

typical Russo Markish.

I said, I feel it makes him look outlaw or indie, and folks just switching on our show makes us look Bush League.

If he needs to wear tights, if people are expected to buy him as a pro

on a program of this level, anyway, more on Jesse Neal.

Here we go.

Jesse Neal revealed in an interview with Brian Alvarez that TNA Wrestling refused to pay his hefty medical bills stemming from the neck injury he suffered at the May pay-per-view event, Sacrifice.

The injury, what a hell of an event to get hurt on.

Yeah.

The injury occurred during the conclusion of the match, pitting Inc.

Inc.

against Mexican America when Hernandez executed a dominator-like finisher on Neal.

Oh,

an MRI showed he had a bulged disc after being spiked into the mat.

Oh, geez.

You remember it now?

No, but what I'm fixing to get to here in just a little while

is going to tie in.

Neil parted ways with TNA last month after organization officials asked him to relocate from Florida to Louisville, Kentucky.

to further his wrestling training at Ohio Valley Wrestling.

That's when they had made a deal with Danny Davis.

He was unable to comply with the request because the money they were offering, quote, wasn't even anything close to live on.

So there's a little bit of info.

Yeah, well,

that's one that's been forgotten is how they dealt with him.

He was, you know, well thought of at one point until, oh, shit, this might cost us money.

I wonder if they gave him an action figure.

He wasn't around long enough to have one.

And that, what pay-per-view sacrifice sacrifice that would have been since he was just starting here.

They said I was about to finish.

That would have been 2010,

right?

There's not a date on this, so I couldn't tell you.

I'd have to look it up.

But he, yeah, but it wasn't long.

Anyway, the next match, and then we'll get to something here in a minute.

Matt Morgan, Scott Steiner, and Booker T versus Hernandez, AJ Styles, and Sting.

Good

tag.

Everyone was easy to work with.

Booker did everything I asked of him, which was very little and nothing more.

Wow, what's that?

What's that about?

After his recent talking to's, he was not going to cause any problems and instead came off to everyone as if he was humoring us with his presence and was clearly disinterested.

Whoa, what the fuck's going on with Booker T?

Everyone knows his MO and just worked around him.

Jesus, right?

Well, I mean,

here's the thing.

Certain people

that came from the WWF,

Kurt Angle set aside completely because he was a case by himself.

He was just a maniac with working, injured, hurt, do the best ever.

He's an Olympic champion, whatever the fuck.

But other people that came from the WWF at the E, whatever, had different ways of processing what the fuck they walked into.

And in some cases, it was sit back and just bilk them for all the money that they can.

In other times, it was, oh, we're going to try to do a good job here to not embarrass ourselves.

Mick Foley was always, oh, I want to pitch in.

Booker at first.

came in and was going to change the world, baby.

And then when he realized it was a fucking disorganized shit show,

he just checked out and started auditioning accents for his acting career.

He had a British accent one week and a Jamaican accent one week.

And

then he just, you know, it was like, ah, what the fuck?

This shit doesn't make any sense.

That was the whole

air that he had.

This doesn't make any sense.

I don't give a shit.

What are you going to do?

And then they talked to him every once in a while, as I referred to.

It wasn't me.

I wasn't giving him the talking to.

And then

he, you know, because

it was hard for a while.

Dixie and or Terry Taylor, I don't know whoever, because Jeff was gone.

But

he at first he questioned everything because there was a question for everything.

But a lot of people realized the parameters they were working under and just let's take it and make it better.

But he didn't,

he didn't want to take it and make it better.

He just would ask what all the fuck was wrong with creative every time all the time, bogged down.

Why would we do this?

How would we, what the fuck would that be about?

Why would we say a thing like that?

None of this shit makes any sense.

So let's make it better, not just bitch about it.

Blah, blah, blah.

He wasn't right.

Like I said, everybody processed it in different ways.

What now?

He wasn't wrong in a lot of cases.

No, he wasn't wrong, but he was goddamn pain to get anything done with while everybody else is sitting around going, all right, let's figure it out then.

And that's because he was, you know, gob smacked at why.

Yes, well, look at this fucking idiot over here.

That's why.

Now let's figure it out how to fix it.

And then

when he got talked to for fucking over-questioning everything, then he just sat back and said, what the fuck, and practiced accents and whatever.

Anyway,

however, going on

with the description: in this match, my priorities were Hernandez being super mech, furthering Morgan's story with Angle and making AJ as strong as possible since his first match back from nearly quitting after all his setbacks.

That was a storyline thing.

And as we've mentioned, Hernandez, they wanted him to be a Latino superstar as a single when they broke him away from homicide, or yeah, from homicide.

And he had never been pushed as a single before, and he had actually

not worked before TNA for any major league promotion at a high level.

So he still needed some work, but he was in his 30s and time was running out.

So we needed, they wanted me to

especially invest in Hernandez.

Anyway, continuing, I deliberately had Booker and Sting start so we could shine Sting a little and Booker couldn't pull any shenanigans with him.

Then had Steiner, who understood the situation.

It was my veteran anchor, Sean AJ, then saved Hernandez and Morgan for the spotlight of the break spot.

Everyone, including myself, has always told Matt as a giant, he shouldn't let anyone manhandle him like I had Hernandez do, because then it meant something when he did.

Sean gave, and Sean Hernandez is his name.

Sean gave Matt a 15-second delayed vertical suplex,

then hit his Air Mexico dive for the break, so he was gold.

Then I had had AJ sell for the Heels Heat.

Sting actually offered to sell and give Hernandez the tag,

but I explained that I see AJ as a Ricky Morton who gets over by selling and then triumphing over the long odds, and especially in his first match back from his losing streak.

I wanted AJ to do most of the work

in this situation.

AJ hit a great hot tag, parenthetically not the WWE simultaneous tags that suck, to Hernandez, who cleaned house and looked strong doing it, breaking into a six-way sting.

And Booker got tangled up with the referee and took him to the floor with him.

AJ and Steiner went where they were supposed to on the floor.

This left Matt and Hernandez in the ring.

As Matt stopped Hernandez, Steiner, who I put in this position because I knew I could rely on him to be there, came in with the chair.

And Matt said, no way I'm falling for that again.

And as they argued, Hernandez blasted him into a double knockout and tagged AJ in for the flying press and the pin on Morgan.

The babyfaces got over and left.

Morgan laid out Steiner and Booker, and we went off the air with Morgan and Angles staring each other down.

It's there was a lot of different stories that we had to tell in that match because of the pay-per-views

ongoing that we had monthly, where we were trying to build those people and those issues.

But at the same time,

that we had a creative director that was just booking all the top stars in big fucking matches every week for ratings.

So you had to straddle that

balance beam.

So looking back now, because I mean, you're talking about a match, and the people you're naming are guys today that are either freshly retired or like staying, even though he was an older guy.

who are still active, but maybe towards the end of their career like AJ.

I don't know where Hernandez is.

I have no idea what,

if he's still wrestling somewhere, I don't know what I doubt he is because we haven't heard anything.

But looking back now,

was it that he wasn't the right guy?

Was it just the booking?

Was it more than the booking?

Did he have a ceiling?

Like, they obviously wanted him to be their big star for at least a time.

If George Scott in 1978 was booking, could it have happened?

Like, was he the right guy for that?

Or what do you think?

Yeah,

he was the right guy for the spot.

In most ways, he was a little early.

And I mean, I'm not all done with Hernandez here, but I'll jump ahead.

I'll jump ahead in this after the random thoughts, because here's what

I was trying to get done.

The bottom of the report, also, I spoke to Hernandez about coming to Louisville sometime in September for a weekend to watch tapes, get in the ring with sparring partners, and have a personal course in selling and promos from myself and Danny Davis.

He's all for it.

He only asked that it be private as he doesn't want it on the internet that he is being sent for training.

And I wholeheartedly agree we can keep it quiet here, but everyone in the TNA office that needs to be aware of what we're doing needs also to know it's not for public consumption.

I'm going to meet with Danny early next week to get information on when the arena would be available and request two specific individuals to work with Sean.

So please send a DVD of all of his recent matches and promos.

And when we get the date nailed down, I'll pull some stuff from my library also.

They had,

as I said,

and here's another thing.

He was from Texas and he is of Hispanic origin, but he was not actually not only not fluent in Spanish,

but I don't think he spoke it at all when he got started.

They wanted him to learn because he was, you know,

he hadn't grown up in a house where they spoke Spanish.

But they were also, they wanted to send him to Mexico

where they thought that, you know, he might get more ring time.

But I explained that the problem is, again, if you want to teach somebody how to work on American television, the last thing you want to do is start them out in Mexico.

Right?

So he might get some fucking ring time, but who knows what the fuck he's going to learn?

I was trying to lay his stuff out.

He was incredibly strong, just incredibly strong, and could demonstrate it like a Dr.

Death or a goddamn Road Warrior animal.

But at the same time, he had a few snazzy moves he could do, the splash and the flying slingshot shoulder block for a guy that size.

That was impressive.

And so I kind of did what, what, you know, in a lot of his little angles and the things before people, several people might get him down

is choreograph a burst of 30 seconds or a minute where he would just fling people one after another and make a big impression.

And then I wanted to be able to teach him how to sell without dying and staying immobile as a big, powerful giant.

You can't just take the guy down and hold him in a leg lock.

He needs to to be selling and fighting and off balance and et cetera.

And I thought that might be better

done in, you know, in Louisville here where we could take some time with it because we didn't have any ring time down there.

And the clock was ticking because he was in his 30s.

So that's why he's not wrestling.

This is 15 years ago.

He was in his late 30s.

That's right.

I hope to God he's not still wrestling.

I forgot he was that old.

So, but he was the right guy if we could have taken more care with him, If the booking helped him and if we could have brought him up speed in the ring, he was a tremendous person,

really wanted to get better and had gifts that you couldn't teach, being as strong as a goddamn ox and being able to move at that size

and having the dedication to want to learn.

And the trip never happened, right?

No, that's the thing.

I'm about to get fired, as I mentioned.

And

that's one of the big reasons why Hernandez never happened.

Because,

you know, then Dixie had all kinds of other shit to worry about.

And Russo didn't know anything about how to get a fucking guy like that over.

So, you know,

he was too serious for Russo.

And

anyway, well, let's, so thoughts on that, and then I'll go back and finish this report.

Well, no, I have no other thoughts.

I've asked you a few questions.

We can keep moving.

But

that's the thing is when you said Hernandez dropped a guy's head, I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ.

You know, he didn't do it on purpose and he didn't do it from being unprofessional or not caring, but he could have used,

he could have used some reps in the training center, as they say.

That's what we were trying to do.

And to teach him to think also about as a single.

And as a top guy, he was very humble and he didn't think like a fucking main event guy because he'd he'd never been in that position before.

Anyhow, if any of you millionaire main event wrestlers want this treatment, one-on-one treatment with Jim and Danny Davis working with you for a weekend,

it ain't cheap, but get in touch.

Well, no, well, Danny Davis would have to do it on the beach down near Pensacola.

It ain't cheap at this point, it ain't cheap.

And if you could do, if you can do yard work and we'll clean out the creek,

uh, rest of this report in the World Elite interview.

Now, this is another group

again russo is taking eric young was from canada and sheik bashir who was sean davari was from wherever the he was supposed to be from in the middle east and they had a japanese kid

and i think and the the a the brits they are friends the brits they were in it for a while just the world elite group of everybody that's from another country on the roster whether they're elite or not honestly in some cases

But I said in the World Elite interview, Bashir gets a ton of heat in his promo and takes Vince's material, makes it his own, and adds great stuff.

Eric Young mostly recites what is written for him and does it so slowly that in the truck, we were cueing the crickets.

And I'm not.

Eric Young will be a bone of contention here as we work our way through these last days.

Eric Young was a nice guy.

Eric Young was a good hard worker.

Eric Young was a very good in-ring guy.

Eric Young was not an exciting promo.

And Eric Young had been presented as an underneath comedy babyface

that was

when he would do his entrance, the pyro would go off and it would scare him and he would fall down on the ramp.

Every show for like months and months.

And suddenly, as I mentioned, because he was Canadian,

Russo wanted to put him in the top fucking heel group he's putting together of these guys.

So anyway, Bashir, in my opinion, is the key to the World Elite Heat and by far the group's best promo.

I had a long talk with Hernandez about this promo.

He is still nervous about speaking.

and was also smart enough to know that if he goes too far with the USA flag waving,

because he was supposed to come out waving the fucking american flag even though he's the latino super and of course it not as bad as it would be now but still it was we're trying to go in another direction here right let's not confuse people

uh he's concerned that he could be seen as a latino uncle tom that was a quote unquote

to his people because ultimately if the Latino people have a superstar, he must be Latino first, first, American, second.

I explained to him how to bring the impact zone fans into it by saying us and we

and hitting his cadence to deliver his go home line, and he did very well.

He did, however, break eye contact with the heels while telling them off.

And I'll work with him on how to pause to regroup his thoughts without dropping the intensity in eye contact.

Do you notice that some guys do that?

Yeah.

They will, will

they'll be telling somebody off and all of a sudden they might not be sure of exactly the thing they're going to say next so they will stop and turn and they'll walk off like they're so disgusted with that person they must gather themselves you don't need to do that

take a fucking couple of breaths and stare in a guy's eyes

and fucking make it look like you're meaning to gather up some

vehemence and venom and then fucking do your thing.

But when you break the eye or when you break the eye contact and still keep talking, it's even worse.

But nevertheless,

guns, machine guns, that was them, versus Abyss was good for what it was, but it just continues to marginalize the guns to have both of them beaten easily by one guy.

The guns have a lot of talent and are the best in the business at what they do, which is a fast-paced high spot match.

So I feel we should play more to their strengths.

They will never be the main event tag team.

And I may have been a little fucking harsh there, but at that point in time in the field, they probably weren't going to be used that way.

I said, but they can add to our cards.

And

under et cetera, I was very happy to see D'Lo Brown there and hear that he talked to Dixie about a possible agent wrestler spot.

We need a guy like him in the ring, a veteran that's still young enough to go to provide in-ring experience to our next generation while not needing a $500,000 a year salary to be used in the main event.

And if anybody thinks I was undercutting D'Lo, nobody was making 500 grand, but Sting and maybe Angle at that point in time.

I've known D'Lo for 15 years.

He's a dedicated, hard worker who will give us exactly what we ask for if it's clearly defined for him what his role is to be.

He's an intelligent college graduate, a former CPA, and an accomplished worker.

So I was trying to get him as some semblance of sanity

in the ring and in the office.

And

I don't remember whether they brought him in then.

I wasn't there, I may have mentioned.

But

I don't think they brought him in then.

Or, you know what?

I think they've...

I think they made him an offer, but they wanted him just to be a producer and retire from wrestling.

And that was

the fucking idea.

He was a better worker than fucking most of the guys on the roster.

He could actually do the shit in the ring and then tell them what they did wrong afterwards.

But I don't know about that.

As I mentioned, I wasn't even that.

Slam some more papers.

I'm just, I'm trying to find my paper clip.

I don't want to get this stuff out of order here.

Here it is.

This is very important.

Let's see.

Hard justice.

What page is that?

Got to keep this for goddamn posterity.

Do you want me to go any further?

Yeah.

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Must be ET plus free to play.

Void reprohibited.

Alrighty then.

Well,

this is for the following set of tapings

where we did

one, hold on, one, well, we did two nights of taping.

So, how many shows did we do here?

449, 450,

and

451.

So, we did three two-hour shows in two days.

All right, now we're getting to the meat of the matter.

So, the previous bunch of reports that I have read so far here and the last clip, that was the first set of agent reports I did for the pay-per-view and the two days of taping after they had asked me to do these things to begin with.

So now this is the set

of agent reports for the last set of TV tapings that I made

in TNA.

And

I know I've told this story.

I'm hating because a lot of people are going to say, oh, fuck, I don't want to go back to YouTube and hear the story of that, blah, blah.

So I will try to

condense it as much as possible.

Russo had booked another tournament.

Something was going to happen after this tournament.

We might get some insight in these notes.

I haven't read them word for word.

But in the tournament,

and at this point, I was being sent the TV formats

like three, four days beforehand.

If we were going to shoot on Monday, I might get them on Friday, whatever the fuck, right?

And

in this tournament, they were going to have, he was going to have Hernandez end up wrestling Sting,

two babyfaces, Sting and Icon, and Hernandez, as we mentioned, the super mechanic were trying to get over and push as a Mexican superhero.

And they're both babyfaces, and they end up in this tournament.

But, Brian,

Sting earlier on TV in another tournament match, Rhino has gored him and broken his ribs.

And

so now when Sting goes in this match,

he's got broken ribs.

And this was 2009.

This was 15 years ago.

So Sting was somewhere raised 50 years old, let's say.

So he got a 50-year-old man with broken ribs going in the ring against a Super Mech.

It's 300 fucking pounds and goddamn built like a fucking brick wall

and they're both baby faces so hernandez doesn't want to take advantage of the guy's broken ribs but they were going to have him sneak up from behind staying and pin him while the heels were trying to interfere i say you mean to tell me that not only can the

The 300-pound Super Mech superhero that everybody thinks is 20 years younger than Sting, even if he's not.

And he's a babyface.

And Sting's got broken ribs and he's 50 years old, but the guy still has to sneak up behind him while Sting's attention is distracted to beat him.

So you're going to turn our Mexican superhero into a backstabbing fucking prick

and that he couldn't beat the fucking guy up until then that is.

ready for AARP and should have been taken to the hospital.

Am I overstating this, Brian, or do you get the picture?

I get the picture.

Okay.

So

when I'd got that,

I'd done something that I didn't do ever before in the three years that I'd worked there or afterwards since I wasn't going to work there very much longer.

And I actually got on a phone with our friend Vince Russo

to register how that we couldn't fucking do this.

And let's do.

Oh, and I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I left out one important thing.

After he snug up and rolled up, rolled him up from behind.

Then Eric Young was because the heels, the other members of the world elite had done all this distraction bullshit.

There's like four, five, six heels at ringside.

But then Eric Young is going to come from the crowd with a baseball bat and lay both Hernandez and Sting out and then cut a promo over them.

And by the way, at our pay-per-view that was coming up in like fucking two weeks or whatever it was, Hernandez was in a a big match and Sting was in a big match.

And I don't know if Eric Young was on the cart.

And did I mention again that Eric Young had been the guy that was falling down from his own pyro?

Now he's going to lay waste to our top baby faces and stand over them and talk for a while.

So I talked to Russo in the car on the way down with Stace driving so I could talk and write.

And I said, let's do something different

to get to the same place and do a disqualification.

And everybody don't want to do a DQ because he's a mark.

Also, he had read on the internet, oh, disqualifications are cheap.

You know what?

The alternative would have been, don't book the fucking match.

That would have been an option.

But the tournament.

So

we talked for a while and agreed on a finish where the disqualification

would take place somehow, even though nobody cheated because the heels came out and intervened.

And it still got

Hernandez fucking advanced or whatever, but

nobody had to get beat or take advantage of anybody on the babyface side and all, and nobody got laid out with a baseball bat.

So then I get to the taping

and I see the format.

They put it back.

And so in the production meeting, I had to go and litigate this whole thing over again.

What the fuck are we doing?

They will all end up looking like shit with their dicks in their hands if they try to do this, all this interference and this and that with these multiple people.

And you think, and you're making Hernandez look like a prick and an idiot because he can't beat the guy anyway and blah, blah, blah.

And let's put it back.

So they put it back.

And there were a lot of people still in the room going, oh, we don't want to do a DQ because this was the newer generation

of the indie crowd from the 90s who had also learned,

oh, you can't do disqualifications.

Don't book the fucking match.

So anyway, this is that set of tapings.

But we start out

with show 449,

Rhino versus Sting.

Both these guys were no problem whatsoever, very helpful and cooperative setting this up.

And I thought their match was good and the finish was Sting over.

And then Rhino's two gores to crack his ribs.

Told the story perfectly.

Both executed it well.

I didn't have Sting use the blood capsule to bleed from the mouth after the gores because of the high rate of those things looking kabuki-ish.

And the guys as well agreed if he was bleeding from the mouth from cracked ribs, he might need to go to the hospital.

Because that was again,

this is what Russo would just write bullet points on the fucking format match.

Rhino gore sting twice bleeds from mouth.

And

they were both looked at me like, because Sting was even looking at me like,

I'm coming back again to wrestle.

And Rhino's like, you know,

he didn't want to say it, but he's like, if I gored a motherfucker twice, he's bleeding from the mouth.

I think he needs surgery, you know,

so.

We didn't want to goddamn fuck it up at that point.

So anyway, keeping it simple, Sting sold the gore as well, and it looked more real to the fans.

We also asked for AJ not to have to do the save, since it would involve Rhino just leaving the ring with no contact.

And AJ had two matches later in the show, plus a big run-in

in the show closing brawl so the fans wouldn't get tired of him.

Rhino left with the heat.

Good job by everybody.

And again, this is, you know, an hour later after Sting, the icon, has taken these vicious gores.

he's got to come back and wrestlers, 300-pound beast who's a babyface.

And

how do you have a match without taking advantage of his broken ribs?

What do you do to him?

You know, either that or it's, it looks like Hernandez is, oh, this fucking guy, his ribs, I'll, you know, so anyway.

But first, Hernandez has to get there, right?

He's got to

advance.

I'm sorry, did you have any comments on

this?

This is absolutely fascinating.

Keep going.

Okay, so Homicide versus Hernandez.

Obviously, I had high hopes for this match.

Both guys were anxious to get with me and work stuff out.

No problems at all.

I gave them the framework of a match and had them put their moves to it.

I also requested specific things Hernandez do or not do to remain Super Mex.

Homicide worked hard to shine him, and the first part of the match was good.

But it slowed down when Homicide got the heat on Sean's leg.

I wanted him to stay all over the leg like a rabbit nelson royal and he was methodical like a tiny don jardine

this combined with hernandez just not being able yet to sell without dying and losing his aura meant that the match didn't have the passion i'd hoped for

again that's what

you know the big guy bounces the little heel around like a super ball But then the little heel has to be a pit bull.

He has to be aggressive.

When he went after the leg, keep chop blocking, tearing, ripping, kicking.

Hernandez had to keep trying to stand up, pull himself up on the ropes, and get his base taken out, not just lay there in a leg bar, right?

And that's the, you know,

that's the fine point that they needed work on.

Anyway,

the finish was fine.

The story got told well.

As I said in the meeting, the reason I suggested homicide finally accept the handshake, but look so bummed about it, was to not telegraph quite so much the following night's turn.

Any mistakes these guys made were from inexperience in doing these types of angles and not any lack of effort.

I explained to both the next day, especially Sean, in more detail, and they understood.

When you get a chance, please email me.

Open dates on Sean

in October.

Well, this is

the dates of the tapings are August 31st and September 1st.

So dates on Sean in October, so I can see about availability of myself in the arena to give him the clinic.

And I think he may have been,

they may have booked him to Mexico already at that point in time.

He may have had something going on.

But anyway, so now these two guys have to wrestle each other, right?

Because they won their tournament match.

And here we go.

Hernandez versus Sting.

I know that there was a lot of discussion back and forth on what to do in this match.

And to be fair to everyone, there was no way this match at this time could have been a positive thing, no matter how it was done.

We just had to get Sting advanced in the tournament.

I'm sorry.

Sting was going to get advanced.

And I had it the other way around.

Vince and I talked on his original finish because so many finishes happen.

Vince and I talked on his original finish, and I thought what we had was a good way to get out of it.

But when I got to TV and saw the revised one, with all due respect, anyone who contributed to that one, the reason why I argued so strongly against it was because there was just no way those two guys on that night under those conditions with that amount of interference in that amount of time could possibly have performed it.

We kept the original premise of Sting with cracked ribs facing Hernandez to see who gets a title match.

Hernandez didn't want to fight a guy with an injury, but he had to in order to advance.

Just a few minutes into the match, Eric Young, disguised as homicide, came came out and attacked Sting in order to show Hernandez he was on his side, but the referee caught him and disqualified Hernandez.

After the DQ, Security accidentally revealed it was Eric Young who had cost Super Mex his title shot.

With that being the simple version, I thought the guys did a good job getting out of an awkward situation.

Nobody hurt their image.

Security and Eric were right there where they needed to be.

And everybody performed this well to get story over, except

whoever was the costume person that dressed Eric Young up as homicide sunk the ship.

He didn't even have a cap on that big melon head, and his bare arms with no tattoos were showing to the point where live Taz couldn't even call him homicide as it was obvious.

But then there's more.

There's more to go on.

Anyway, we went to break with the reveal and came back with Hernandez in the ring.

He did all right calling Eric Eric Young back out.

And we had it set up for World Elite to attack Sean and him to make a comeback on all except Eric Young before they stopped him.

I didn't like the way the heels fed him.

Doug and Brutus took one bump each and rolled away before Bashir and Kiyashi were there.

Again, they're all over the country, all over the world here, these countries.

It left Sean wandering a bit looking for someone to hit.

The heels got okay heat.

Then the run-ins and brawl with AJ, Beer, Money, 3D, Booker, and Steiner started and was wild and exciting.

So again, it's just like it was 18 people.

I know, I know.

You couldn't.

The next day, I got with Hernandez and World Elite and explained to them that they didn't have the luxury of one of them getting the other one over.

Both their pushes are new.

So they have to get each other over.

They have to make Sean look like King Kong and then pick his bones when they get their heat.

They understood, and in that day's TV, next report, they were perfect.

But anyway, this was this just everybody again.

Does this sound familiar?

16 people have to run in,

people have to be disguised coming over the rail.

And I'm taking

a shit that believe that was the simple version.

That was the like, here can we do it this way so people people will understand it version.

Would you like some thoughts on random matches?

Oh, yeah.

Random thoughts on other matches.

Sabin versus A.J.

Styles was very good.

Christy Hemi's forte in this business is not wrestling.

Doug Williams versus AJ was good.

Our biggest problem on this night was from a production standpoint.

We had delays in between many of the segments.

In one case, we had to hold the truck in the live event to shoot a location promo offline, but in real time backstage.

As a result, the audio had

bleed over

of Pinser promoing the crowd because there was no communication between the truck and offline crew.

Keith and David are working to make sure these segments are done differently from now on, but they still cause a delay for the crowd.

I think we should only do them when absolutely necessary.

We ended up doing a two-hour show and half of another in three hours, 45 minutes, more than real time with no commercials and not rolling in the pre-tapes.

The crowd was tired.

We lost a lot because even though individual matches and segments were good, no rhythm was established.

Dipshit

would stop the goddamn live event while we had it going out in the building in front of the people because one of his backstage promos,

it'll have more impact if it's shot live, bro.

It needs to be live because they've done some other things.

It's got to be.

So he would

hold the goddamn live event up to shoot a fucking location promo offline somewhere in the back, but in

real time

because it would make it fit better that way.

Anyway, random thoughts.

Random thoughts, random matches.

Then I've got one more TV taping before I'm done.

Would you like to hear that?

Yeah, one more.

This is good.

Okay.

There was an in-ring interview with the world elite and Hernandez and Homicide, where homicide was finally going to turn on Hernandez.

Full-fledged, apparently.

And

I wrote, as we discussed in the meeting, I laid this out to be as big a shock as possible when homicide turned.

We had to first not tip off that homicide was in on the plan,

have Hernandez hit and be super mech, surprise him with the turn, then get a heavy heat on Hernandez and have Homicide welcomed into the family by Eric Young.

So again, now homicide's from fucking.

Actually, I think Brooklyn, but

he's Puerto Rican.

So he's going into the world elite group with the Japanese guy, the Canadian guy, the British people.

The fucking, where else was the other fellows from?

Eurasia.

Eurasia.

So anyway, Eric Young did okay with calling Hernandez out.

Or else homicide would suffer.

So apparently, oh, they had kidnapped homicide and they had him down and they said, Hernandez, get out of here.

But he didn't exactly rouse up a lot of fear or suspense.

Hold Eric Young.

Hernandez hit strong doing the spot I gave him where he chucked Doug and Brutus and Rob and Kiyoshi and Bashir from the ring in seconds.

And they all fed him great.

Eric was right there with the chair for him to snatch and then bailed.

We can't let

the baby faces get to Eric Young or his heat will be gone.

He's not a guy they want to see beaten up all the time that badly.

Homicide was right on target with the stiff chair from behind.

Then all the heels got a shot and it was better, though not yet classic heat.

I thought the touch of homicide bearing Sean in the LAX flag was nice heat.

We didn't play any music in the truck so we could hear fans mad and yelling and homicide played off of it and got some heat and good camera shots.

Sahati was very happy.

All these guys did a good job.

They listened and were very diligent in all their segments.

So now, you know, we were setting up again

Hernandez in this battle with these

international menaces,

including homicide.

Random thought.

I've got random thoughts, and then I've got more match, but we'll get to that in a second then, I guess.

Random thoughts.

Oh, Devon versus Roode versus Williams versus Steiner.

This never got going for me.

It was supposed to be a tag team gauntlet match.

There was an idea to change it to a four corners match, etc.

The match had already started before we came on the air because the teams were about to get into it.

And they did a pretty good job with the partners in the ring getting worked on to set up their partner's tag on his entrance.

Yeah, this was this.

They've got

the teams aren't out there.

They're like a guy's wrestling and he might be in trouble, but suddenly music plays and his partner comes out.

And you can see how this was going.

And then I said, James Storm, the last entrance, came out on stage as his partner was in the ring selling.

He was wearing a football helmet with two beer cans and slapping two noise sticks together.

I got hot and he came to the truck later and I told him why.

I said, he's better than that than to have to always be silly or funny or wacky.

The fans may like it, but when it's constant or over the top or uncalled for in a situation like that,

yeah, your partner's fucking in trouble, but you're going to write a customized beer cooler to the ring.

I told him the fans want a cool beer money,

like a Tully and Arn type wrestling heel team with personality,

opposite personalities that are, you know,

the oddballs, the odd ducks, partners that can wrestle.

I believe Storm and especially Roode are main event players in TNA.

I'd like to see Storm work on being serious.

And he had a finally, when they let him do some shit, he had a

plenty good run, as I recall,

down there.

Wonder what is he doing these days?

Where is James Storm?

You don't hear from him.

I mean, I'm not advocating for everybody to wrestle into their fucking 50s.

I can't remember how old he is, but this is 15 years ago when he was 30.

Had to be.

Where's his old partner?

What was it, Chris Harris?

Was that it?

Chris Harris.

Oh, my God.

America's Most Unwanted.

Poor fella.

He just

pooped to bed.

Who pooped to bed?

Okay, here's a match.

Kurt Angle and Samoa Joe with Matt Morgan against AJ Styles and Christopher Daniels with Sting.

Wow.

I don't even remember why all those people are friendly with each other.

All six of these guys are always easy to work with and no exception here.

I had a private talk with Joe to to pep him up, stemming from our agent meeting last TVs.

I told him he can't lose focus, whether in singles, tags, part of a group, heel, or babyface.

Just be the badass explosive Samoa Joe, regardless of the situation, and he'll get over.

He certainly worked very hard here and in his singles match with Morgan.

And this was when, remember,

He'd been kidnapped and thrown in the trunk of a car.

We forgot to mention that one last week.

They had him at goofy fake tattoo on his face.

He was wearing pants.

He had been a heel, a babyface.

I don't know what the fuck is going on.

And he just got, again, he a different way than Booker T, who was just, ah, fuck it.

He just was, you know, sullen about it and depressed and needed to pick his fire back up.

Anyway.

This was a real good tag match.

They did the finish with Morgan's quote-unquote miscue

just as laid out.

And both Morgan's facials and his elevator on angle did wonders for him in the story.

And then the following show was show number 451.

Bashir

and Kiyoshi versus Hernandez.

That dreaded Middle Eastern Japanese alliance against Mexico.

Okay, I explained to the heels that they had to make Hernandez look unbeatable for this angle, and they both did it cheerfully.

Even though they had never done a couple of the strongman spots I asked for, I explained them and they did great.

I tried an experiment

for Hernandez selling.

After manhandling both heels, I had him get rid of Kiyoshi and Bashir stop him.

I told Bashir to light him up with chops, punches, and broad arms for 45 seconds and told Sean to sell around the ropes to the right in a circle.

Selling, but staying on his feet, he does better, but he still forgets to swing back that's a rip rogers drill

because

rip in wrestling class would say you know a lot of guys well

i got a tv match but they only let me get a minute of heat you can't get a getting heat in a minute and he would have guys take a stopwatch and click it and he would take a guy in the ring and get heat on him for 60 seconds one minute and in that minute of time he would take that guy and chop him and broad arm him and rake his back and thumb his eyes and run his head in the turnbuckle and boot him in the gut so many times that in the end of 60 seconds, the guy's chest and his back could be black and blue.

And he said, did I get enough heat?

He beat that fucking shit out of that guy in 60 fucking seconds.

And I said,

but at the same time, the guy sells to the right.

Chop, boom, he spins to the right and he grabs the top rope and he's caving holding his chest in.

That's when you fucking broad arm him across the back.

Oh my God, he bows his back out with the pain.

You boot him in the gut.

Oh, he bends over and grabs his gut.

You grab his hair and ram his head in a turnbuckle.

He's spraying, and he's still going to the right around the ring.

And you'll do in 60 seconds, you'll waltz that son bitch around all four sides of the ring

and beat him like he owes you trance.

And that's what we were trying to get accomplished there.

I said,

and Hernandez is supposed to be swinging back or pawing back or trying to throw a blow, but the quicker, the smaller guy ducks it or stays underneath, whatever.

And I said, he forgets to swing back.

Also, no one will mistake Bashir for Gene Konisky.

I mean, you know, I had to put that in.

Anyway, Hernandez made a good comeback and beat him.

Then Homicide and Eric Young appeared and they got good heat on Sean after he just got his hands on homicide for a second.

The driving the spike in the throat with the chair and briefcase looked good, and Sean sold it well.

Okay, again,

I don't know if I would have come up with that spot, so I have a feeling that's one of the bullet points that was written in the format.

Have them take the briefcase and drive a spike into his throat.

Uh, Sean sold it well.

The Alka Seltzer just blew up into foam from his dry mouth, so it didn't work.

Oh, my God.

And then there's a six-man tag.

I wrote nothing.

And then the last match, Samoa Joe versus Matt Morgan.

These guys worked very hard.

It will be smoother when they've had experience with each other.

When Kurt came over the desk on Matt, it really kicked it up a notch.

Daniels and Joe added a lot with their schmaz, and we went to break hot.

On the other side, Kurt and Matt and I had worked out three spots: Matt breaking loose and hurling a security guard, Kurt breaking loose and diving over some guards, and then Kurt putting Matt through the table.

They did all three perfectly, and we got great shots.

Keith and David enjoyed it in the truck.

The only other thing I'd like to mention is that I think Bashir is underutilized in the World Elite Group.

Whereas I said, Eric is the kind of guy people don't want to see get beaten up all the time.

Bashir is.

If Bashir speaks more and his promos do get heat,

then Eric can still be the leader, but make Bashir his general or whatever.

Then Eric doesn't have to carry the whole thing.

The group gets more heat.

And Eric stays the guy in the suit that no one gets his hands on to put in his place until the blow off.

And, you know,

again,

I see what he's reading these things going, oh, fuck.

I'm telling him how to make his shit better because it's all over the page and he's using the wrong people.

Or I'm telling them, well, we shouldn't have had this match now.

But, you know, we shouldn't have had this match now.

They said, be honest.

So I'm being honest and we're trying to work with what we got.

But that's the last thing

that Mr.

Russo wanted to hear was any goddamn coherent criticism with obvious logic thrown in

of the goofy shit that he was doing on TV.

So next week on the continuing installments,

we'll get to the letter that I wrote to Terry Taylor after I got fired.

Oh, we're there already.

We are that.

That was my last taping.

Enough of that.

Enough of that.

We can't have any more of that shit.

Well, it was indeed a hard night's work there at TNA at the Impact Zone, Brian.

You know, every time I'd get out of there, I just think, if I could only just get back to the hotel and lay down in that bed and crank that air conditioning up.

But you know what the problem was when I did that, Brian?

The hotel did not feature the line of mattresses from our friends over at helixleep.com.

That was the problem.

So even though I would have laid down on a bed of rusty razor blades if I had to, and I actually some nights it felt like I was, but that's what would have made the whole experience worthwhile, Brian, is if I could have just dove into a cloud, dove into a box of fluffy ducks, dove into a

fucking hummingbird's ass.

What other things are soft?

How soft is a hummingbird's ass?

If I could have only

heard that before.

Yeah, right in there.

Boom.

It's got a

relaxable sphincter.

If I could have just dove in.

to all any of those things courtesy of a helix sleep mattress, that would have been Shangri-La.

But you can do it, Brian.

You and the people out there, the culticornet, cornet, you don't have to go to a hotel and sleep on a bag of rusty razor blades.

You,

in the privacy of your own home, the privacy, you can order a helix sleep mattress customized just for you, for your likes and preferences, staying away from your dislikes and your grievances.

And you can get it delivered to your home and you can put it on your bed and you can dive into the wings of the angels.

Because that's what if you've got sleep apnea,

well, if you've got sleep apnea, they will apply themselves toward making that apnea go away.

What is the opposite of apnea?

Who is they?

What are you talking about?

The people at Helix, they got mattresses.

If they apply themselves to making your apnea go away, let's not make that record a guarantee because I don't even know what it means.

Well, I'm saying, what is the reverse of apnea?

Non-apnea?

They'll make you have non-apnea.

Well, they got mattresses.

They won't do it.

Well, they won't make you, they'll ask you nicely.

They won't do a thing when it comes to this topic.

Sometimes they'll recommend strongly because that's what you do.

You go to helixleep.com, H-E-L-I-X sleep, if the people don't know it by now,

and you tell the people there, the fine people there, how you like to sleep on your back, on your side.

Are you hot when you sleep?

Are you cold when you sleep?

Do you wake up screaming and dialing 911 for no apparent reason?

Otherwise, than there were voices in your head and you thought you saw somebody in the room.

And then they'll send you a mattress that's that's designed to correct some of these many issues that I just mentioned.

Don't know if I want to use the term correct, but they have mattresses customized.

They will ameliorate.

They will ameliorate then the problem.

If you sleep and you sweat when you sleep, they got a mattress that makes you feel cooler.

Now, certainly that means that they will help the problem.

I'm not trying to just go over my head or anything here.

Now, if you have for some reason, a large bowel obstruction, you put that down on the quiz.

I don't know if they have anything that'll help it, but make sure you put it down.

They'll want to know.

Not one of the inquiries.

Because that way,

if you try to use the guarantee.

No.

Well, if you try to use the guarantee and, you know,

if you've got a bowel instruction, they might need to know if you've had an obstruction bowel on there oh obstruction yes okay obstruction i thought you said they might need to know if bowel instruction no everybody knows how to work their bowels that comes you know you're kind of wired factory setting for well again let's get away kind of do their own thing usually let's get away from the bowels let's get away from the bowery let's go to the waldorf the waldorf of mattresses and of course we're talking about a great mattress you tell them what you like they will give you the mattress just for you well they won't give it to you you got to buy it well you got to buy them.

And we have them here in the house.

You have them over there, Jim.

Yes.

Big fans of this.

We can save you money.

We can save you money on it, too.

That's right.

That's a good thing.

Because the big Fourth of July sale is going on right now.

27%

off.

That is, that's the biggest discount we have ever offered on the fine Helix sleep products.

I don't even know how they're doing this.

They must be.

They must be laundering some money or something.

But

right now, Helix sleeps.

No, they aren't, let alone alone they must be.

They are certainly not.

They certainly launder their mattresses.

Now, you can't deny that.

They'll send you, it smells clean when it comes in.

Helix sleep.

Yeah, I'm trying to say the words.

HelixSleep.com slash JCE is the 4th of July sale.

It's how you get the 27% off site-wide.

HelixSleep.com slash JCE.

Check out the variety of the

Lux collection, the Elite collection, the very specialized mattresses they have, the little teeny weeny ones for the kids.

I mean, if you got the Jimmy legs, just put you want the Jimmy Legs mattress.

Comes with little hooks.

You put your ankles in.

Do not have any beds with hooks.

They don't have a Jimmy Legs mattress with hooks.

It's actually, it's loops instead of hooks.

I misspoke.

It's loops.

It's not, it's not.

We're going to loop back to what we were saying before.

Jim, we have a great deal.

27% off.

There's never been anything like it.

A great time to try Helix sleep.

What's that promo code?

That promo code is JCE.

I guess those little loops on the side of the mattress are for when you want to hang it on a ceiling.

No loops.

We guarantee no loops, and they will not be adding loops.

And again, I don't know, this is the end.

I don't know why you go here at the end, but Jim, let's also end with the link that people could use.

Helixsleep.com slash JCE, 27% off.

Hurry.

4th of July.

It's coming.

It's going.

You hear that music playing.

You know what that means.

Yes.

There's nothing we can do.

There's nothing we can do.

I've tried many times.

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Oh, boy, howdy.

I got to tell you, the AEW program the other night, as I said earlier, they ought to give you study notes, maybe a PowerPoint presentation, some pie charts would be good.

We were talking earlier in the program about the TNA agent reports and, you know, how Mark Bookers book things.

Marks, like Russo, the previous generation, Marx, and like Tony,

they see all these moments in their head and these, wow, this will be great.

These will attack each other in the back and they'll fight and they'll break furniture and this will happen and

they just can't not only restrain themselves from doing it so constantly that it becomes meaningless or figure out the right people

to do it with or

in many cases lay it out so that if it had a chance of being

good, if it was done properly, they leave all the loopholes because they don't have any experience with actually making shit make sense

so

some things never change

we're in the same position except tna in 2009 was doing three times the viewership of what they've got right now

uh but tony khan is the kind of guy that would book the two top baby faces to have a 50-year-old guy with broken ribs roll up the

300-pound beast it's trying to get over.

I know I said it the other way around before, but and also a roll-up with broken ribs, Brian.

I just thought of that.

Is that the finish you'd want to use if your ribs were broken?

Let me just roll this 300-pound guy up.

I may avoid that right over the top of me.

Yeah, I may avoid that one.

But anyway, we were in Seattle for the

come back to reality edition of AEW Dynamite.

They weren't in Mexico anymore, and they weren't in Kansas anymore either.

They were back to

reality.

I think they had, what did they have?

1,800 people in Seattle.

Bless them.

It may have been a little more than that, I think, but in that range.

That's what Uncle Dave said.

Oh, did he?

Oh, I thought it was.

I think that's what Uncle Dave said.

So maybe we ought to take that one with a grain of salt.

Well, we'll find that when we do the ratings, we'll see what the numbers are.

And I thought it was a little higher, but I could be completely wrong.

That counted the people also working a concession stand.

But again, this whole show, it's just people doing things.

They're doing the walk-ins.

Because now, since WWE has their stars walk in the building on camera, they do the walk-ins also.

But apparently, we are to believe it.

Tony Storm just at least the walk-ins in the WWE many times are, you know, you can tell it's earlier that day they came in the building, and then they'll have somebody walk all the way through and go out.

But it was just Tony Storm.

Here she comes in Mercedes Moon

comes in from the blind side and just jumps on her and shoved because Tony Storm has Luther, the butler, with her.

And

Mercedes shoves Luther down, and he takes like a pratfall, and he's never seen again.

Did she give him the fucking vibrating palm strike that the fucking kung fu masters gave Bruce Lee to, you know, get even for him revealing the secrets?

How does this

grown adult

280-pound human waterbed of a man

be fucking wiped out forever by the girl shoving him down?

And then they fight into the arena and they have a fake fight on the stage forever, forever.

And then finally,

six male referees run out on the stage and are

she Mercedes has the hold on Tony Storm and has crank it on her, and they're screaming, please stop, please stop.

There's six men there.

It's a 125-pound girl.

Pull her off.

But are they determined now to, Tony Storm is the only one they've got that's really over over?

Are they determined to just make her look like an idiot too?

And she got saved by Mina Mellons.

And Mercedes was so scared, she backed up 20 feet, grabbed the microphone, and

made a little statement to him.

And Mina was just squatting there next to Tony, like, oh, you hurt her.

Why can't they close up any of the loopholes and any of the logic?

I thought Mercedes had her own writer, Will Wheaton.

Shouldn't he be?

Oh, no,

staying up on it was Will Washington, and he wasn't her writer.

He was Swerves' writer.

I thought she got her own writers, too.

Pepper Day.

Job, I'm sorry.

She has a writer, but I got the wrong writer.

It's Alexandra Pepperday that's her writer.

Shouldn't Pepperday be fucking staying up thinking about ways we can close the loopholes and all this fucking goofy logic?

Well, I don't know.

Here's a loophole.

Let me ask you about a loophole that may or may not close.

If the rumors are true that Tony Kahn sees the value in not bringing Chris Jericho back,

does Luther come back?

Oh, good Lord.

I forgot Luther's not one of the lollipop guild.

He was one of the Canadian contingent, right?

That's right, the Canadian friends.

Well, in that case, I don't, but you know, at the same time, Tony might think that he'll be offended.

But Jesus Christ.

So then,

again, I talked about PowerPoint presentation, notes.

Help me explain some of these things.

The Buckaroos show up on camera, the Hardley boys, Maddie and Nikki,

and

they use their EVP power

to move Osprey and Swerves match up to right now, from later on in the show,

so that they have to come out all unprepared and still tying their shoes.

Have we ever established how, why are they allowed to do these things?

The EVPs, Tony is right there.

Yeah.

He can overrule whatever.

And later on in the program,

within 10 seconds of two guys having interaction, he's booked the match for next week.

So why doesn't he just come out and say, no,

you guys are being pricks and it's my company and that's not right.

So don't do that.

Have we ever gotten a reason why that cannot take place?

No, they beat him up and then no one really cared.

So that kind of went away.

The Bucs weren't getting over as the right kind of heels.

It was the, we don't want to watch this heels, not the, oh my God, they're heels.

I can't wait to see someone beat them up.

Person beat him up and it wasn't filmed.

It was in the back.

It was fucking CM punk.

But,

you know, they've established that Tony's at Gorilla.

They've established just recently with MJF and Shelton, Tony was back there.

Like a ventriloquist dummy, just all of his motions.

So they've established that.

How could they say these things?

And what could they do to make it happen?

And why doesn't Tony overrule it?

They haven't even come out and produced the contract that Tony was stupid enough to sign in 2021 that gave them the ability to do this, that, and the other thing.

They just,

it's inexplicable.

So, anyway, here comes Osprey and Swerve to come out for their match early, and it's against Blake Christian and Lee Johnson.

And I know you're never going to believe this, Brian, but they had a competitive match.

The two top baby faces had all they could handle from these two guys that have never had a television win.

And the Buckaroos came to ringside

for a break.

They went through a break with this, but

they come to Ringside to fucking watch, right?

So then finally, Swerve makes a comeback.

He hit the heels in some fashion, whether a strike or a kick or whatever the fuck, nine times before either one of them fell down.

And when they did fall down, it was he,

he shoved the guy out of the corner so he could run and

kick at him again.

And then he won with a kick to the head.

And then Swerve and Osprey tried to go after the Hardley boys.

But security was right there

and held him back and got in so there could be no violence.

And so then they had to challenge him to a tag match

at all in.

And Osprey had his garbage disposal voice cranked up to high on this one.

But now Osprey and Swerve at their big stadium show in pay-per-view are tied up in a match that won't contribute a single dime to the take.

And they're putting the EVP titles on the line, I think, because of Osprey's voice.

But the announcer has backed it up.

But what does that mean?

If the baby faces win, they're the EVPs, or if they beat the Bucks, the Bucks can't be EVPs anymore.

Is this a way to finish off the whole goofy thing because of the reasons we just said?

It's never made any sense.

Is that how you can get an executive position?

I challenge Tony Khan to a fight.

Yeah, well, yeah, I'll hey, I'll take that one.

I'll fight Tony Khan to run run the company.

I'll take that one, and even at my age.

But,

and by the way, here's something that's going to be a thing we'll talk about.

The security was right there.

They've shot themselves in the foot in another way on this program.

Because indiscriminately, there is no rhyme or reason

to whether security and referees come instantly on the slightest hint of a violent altercation, or

a guy can be goddamn ravaged and have his intestines pulled out through his sphincter by a fish hook for 10 minutes and nobody comes out.

And there's no

rhyme or reason or logic to why either one happens.

They've established that it's because each person or entity is coming up with their own angles and laying their own shit out.

And there's no supervising producer, as I was attempting to be in those

agent reports that we've read, or anybody

thinking about the show overall.

And

you've got to establish

a baseline with here is how we respond to incidents like this.

And it's got to be somewhere about, oh my God, we were caught unawares.

It took us a few seconds to scramble out there, whatever.

But there's ways you can set it up and you can still get your point across, but you just can't take five minutes to do all this goofy shit.

That by the time

when you're trying to get heat in an angle and it takes five fucking minutes and nobody's trying to stop it and the baby face is just laying there,

you ain't going to get any son of a bitch violent enough to come over the rail

in that situation.

The heat does, it's not urgent heat.

That's what they're doing stage plays instead of angles.

And they could stagger their run-ins while I'm talking about it also with the security where you don't, the 12 guys are not just standing by.

Yeah, really.

You know, first, the two or three referees come, holy shit, what's going on?

And maybe the bells ring a ding, ding, ding.

And then a couple of t-shirt security guys are coming down.

Oh, my gosh, we got to stop this.

And hey, Joe and Fred, two more come down.

Then maybe a couple of the fucking job guys with no shirt on, so people in the cheap seats can tell their wrestlers.

And they come down there and get leveled or whatever.

But it's a gradual thing where you're building the scene and you're building the urgency rather than here they all are, they can't do anything over and over.

There's fresh hope coming in.

Things like that.

Anyway,

so what is the

Oblada

is friends with Trent and Rocky,

and

they all have some kind of past, apparently, in Japan with the Buckaroos.

And at one point, Oblada was

in the lollipop guild, but now he's in

the Callus family right now.

That's right.

But Trent and Rocky are in a group in Japan with him.

Chaos.

The Buckaroos suspended Swerve and Osprey

because they attacked the EVPs.

Well, then Oblata came in and introduced them to his friends, Trent and Rocky.

But we know them well.

We've got a past.

What is their past?

Were they all rent boys together in the Red Light district of Osaka?

What was going on?

I don't know what they did, but obviously they all have a new Japan past.

Well,

they were calling Ibushi Kenny's Golden Lover.

And I know that was the

folks, for those of you who live in the normal world, the name of the tag team that Kenny Olivier and his friend Coda Obushi or

Ibushi

The name of their tag team was the Golden Lovers.

Not the Midnight Express, the Road Warriors, the Powers of Pain,

the Brain Busters, the Golden Lovers.

But this is American television.

10 years later,

they've seen Ibushi like three times before he crippled himself and has been off for two years.

Isn't it off-putting to any normal person who would try to watch this program when they're talking about Ibushi being the golden lover of another one of the babyfaces?

Yeah, I don't think it resonates.

I don't think Ibushi resonates, but I don't think it resonates.

Well, Ibushi was about to resonate

because this was his big return

against Trent.

And I mean, he doesn't look as pudgy as he did the last time we saw him.

Remember, we remarked on the pudge,

but he's still, is he 5'4?

I don't know if I would bet on him against the outlaw Japanese girls.

No, he's not that short.

He's not that short.

He looked like the, you know, if the Beatles had come from Nagasaki, he looks like the Pete Best of the group.

Well, again, now you always say that, but you forget Pete Best never had a mop top.

That's why he really didn't fit in in the same way that Ringo did.

But, you know, he comes out there.

He's got his mop top.

He looks like he's in better shape than the last time we saw him, both in America when he was pudgy and in Japan where he broke his feet.

And

he just has no,

how do I, I don't even know, it's not even charisma, no reaction, no, no pulse, personality, yeah, it's just like a guy in a coma walking out.

He has like the reactions of like a character, like a wrestling character in a video game 25 years ago.

Like, they didn't have the graphics yet to give them good reactions.

He just walks out there and he's all dull.

Just

and he gets in there.

And again, I mean, the kicks looked okay,

but everything about this was just, you know,

you know, I don't think Ibushi resonates in American.

I don't think he will.

That's the thing is, after he goes eight minutes or whatever with Trent, and by the way, if Take a shit ain't getting paid what Ibushi is, if I was him, I'd be pissed.

Because again, this gay did little of whatever.

But eight minutes, he wins with a knee lift, and then Oblada comes out and they stared at each other.

Stared at each other.

And

all 1,800 people in Seattle are going, holy shit, holy shit.

Holy shit, for what reason?

Big shit, big shit.

Okada hasn't had a good match yet, and it probably ain't going to try.

And this little short, squat, black hole of charisma

that he's nose to nose with, what do they think they're going to see?

Because they ain't going to see it.

i and then

okada walks out and tony sends the word within 10 seconds next week

okada versus ibushi

what how what in the world is that going to look like

one guy 598 000 viewers

But one guy can't, won't fall down, and the other guy probably shouldn't really hurt himself again.

What do they think they're going to see?

That's a holy shit moment from these two.

That makes me want to see it, but the problem is it'll probably be a big ball and nothing.

I don't remember where they are.

It depends on the crowd too.

But yeah, Abushi has this blah match and then this just they stare at each other right in each other's faces and no one does anything because Abushi's defending the honor of Kenny.

who was previously hurt.

You know, you know what this really is?

If you think about everything right now happening with the Bucs, who are pushed despite how little they mean to the business of AEW, Omega, who's in the middle of a push right now and doing this thing with Okada, his longtime opponent from 10 years ago.

Adam Page getting his run.

Ibushi showing back up for the stadium.

It's the last hurrah

of that gang.

You know what I mean?

It's the last promise.

In terms of age, in terms of everything, it's the last hurrah of that little click of weirdos.

And I think we're going to have to sit through it for a little while.

Well, speaking of a click of weirdos,

the next match was Ricochet

and A.R.

Fox against Kevin Knight and Hong Kong Fuye, who are now going by the tag team name Jet Speed.

Because Hong Kong Fui is speedball, and Kevin Knight was

jet blue, whatever, jet something,

the jet, Benny and the Jets, the jet

and the jets.

Yeah, I guess that's what it is.

So, this was recess for the kids.

And

there's another story that Ricochet is trying to recruit him a group, but then he teamed up with A.R.

Fox and then

walked out on him and left him to get beat.

And

old Spitball still doing his thing.

And so anyway, they win the match.

And then, my God,

they let these two talk.

Actually, Kevin Knight ain't bad.

He's got more oomph, but

old Hong Kong,

Jesus, what a nerd.

I mean, I'm just sorry.

It's just, what a fucking nerd.

And

you just want to slap him with that voice and that face.

And he's doing a promo on the tag team.

They still want a tag team title match with the hurt syndicate.

Explain to me how it shouldn't be against any criminal statute in the country for either Bobby Lashley or Shelton Benjamin to fight this little squidget.

So in a stadium.

In a stadium.

And in the herd business, a hurt syndicate attacks them and beats up the kids in the entrance and set up a table.

And they put Kevin Knight on the table and Lashley choked Hong Kong Fuye or choke slammed him.

Threw Kevin Knight on the table.

And an MVP cut the promo on the babyfaces while they were laying there.

It wasn't as bad as Cena Punk because it didn't.

last 10 minutes and these are preliminary cannon fodder guys.

But then when they go to the ring and cut the promo,

MVP apparently agreed to give them the tag team title match if they can stand up.

And I assume they stood up because they were gone by the next segment.

So,

what the fuck?

Seriously,

they've got a tag team that's over that gets a reaction, looks like a million dollars, looks like grown adult athletes, and

the only thing they can program program them with is children that are so green they can't even take advantage of all the spots that lashley and benjamin are trying to give them

and mvps out there begging somebody does somebody stand up a tag team

my god they

may have to call tna or something well i don't know if that's going to work right now but

I mean, some other company.

That's the problem.

What companies can Tony call?

CMLL and New Japan.

Jesus Christ.

So then MJF did a promo and the fans booed the shit out of him.

But

next week, he's going to be in a qualifying match where the winner goes into the men's casino gauntlet match at all in, where the winner of that gets a guaranteed title shot.

MJF.

Another of their money ball players, if they have any,

is in a meaningless casino bullshit match on pay-per-view

because they can't, they're so creatively bereft at this point that they can't set up money matches for their tag team champions.

They can't set up money matches for MJF.

They can't set up money matches.

All they can do is set up dream matches that the same people

that like this kind of thing buy every month.

There is no growth and they're running out of the dream matches.

And then Mark Briscoe's music interrupted.

And he actually came out and said, Well, you're going long.

I need to get in the ring for my match.

And then he and MJF start going back and forth.

And MJF calls him a blue-collar bitch.

And

Briscoe

empathized with MJF.

The fans actually chanted empathy

because he feels insufficient with his little kosher pickle.

And then the fans chant kosher pickle.

This is a Saturday night live sketch.

I think Mark Briscoe's great.

I think MJF's great.

But they come out, it went too long.

They're being funny.

The fans then amuse themselves by chanting about MJF's small penis.

And then

MVP says, let's just go watch Briscoe do what he does best, which is lose.

So for the first time in history, Briscoe wins.

He won a four-way, Brian.

This is all interconnected.

It's all the same thing going on.

He won a four-way match versus Bandito, Roderick Strong, and Take a Shit

for the number one spot in the casino gauntlet match,

which seems to me like that would be punishment to get the number one spot because then you got to fight all the other guys.

But

who says this is supposed to fucking

be any in any way explicable?

So,

what started at the first of that?

Who was out first?

Was it the

it was

the babyfaces?

Yeah, it depends on what you consider the start of that.

The baby face underneath babyface team team had a match which they won and then they got the shit kicked out of

by the people that they're wrestling on the pay-per-view who did a promo, who then were interrupted by the guy that was in the next match.

And then that guy had a match and won

the chance to be in another match.

Any thoughts?

Very much like Mr.

Show with the transitions from one thing right to another.

You got to appreciate that.

I hear what you're saying.

MJF's a proven draw for them.

Also, he's had great matches on big shows.

Why isn't he in a high-profile match?

If they did put him in one, it would kind of have to happen out of nowhere.

The Hurts Syndicate, they can't put in one because they don't have opponents.

Well, really, MJF doesn't have an opponent either set up for him.

And this

MJF joining the Hurt Syndicate has been one of the only entertaining things, you know, that have actually for a wrestling fan instead of a fucking spot monkey on this show.

But

because their roster of babyfaces is so weak and feckless and impotent and erectly dysfunctioned,

there's nobody you want to see him fight.

So I think, unfortunately, he ends up in this casino gauntlet match, whatever that is, a ladder match.

I think that's what it is.

It's something.

You have to retrieve something.

I don't remember.

Oh, they got to grab the big poker chip.

oh that's right it was a poker chip if he wins it it creates a good dynamic going forward with him and the hurt syndicate and him having this ability to get a title match anytime he wants which obviously is a copy of money in the bank but then

which world champion would he want to wrestle for real moxley or page he's going to go which one of these two

jack offs do i think I can get any kind of a match out of.

And the idea they're setting up something, at least it looks like it with him and and Mark Briscoe,

you know, I don't want to get my hopes up.

It could be promising.

They've booked Mark Briscoe so poorly.

And I think unfortunately they get a little bit of false security that because he's over and we have him lose every week, we could do that with everyone we bring in now.

Just book them, they'll lose, and eventually people will like them.

But yeah, I mean...

The feel sorry heat.

You know, the MJF Hurt Syndicate stuff has been the highlight of the show.

And in a lot of cases, the highest segment of the show.

In a lot of cases, I mean, the Mystigo match was the highest-rated segments of that show.

And it's almost like, like I said before, like the Codyverse.

It exists like in a little universe of its own within the wider universe.

If MJF all of a sudden has title,

title

demands ability.

Yeah, he can get him as soon as he wants if he wins that match.

It kind of ties him into the bigger picture.

But again, who the Hurts Syndicate is going to wrestle?

That's the big question still, but we'll get there, I guess.

Well, and then they, of course, they got to do what the big boys do.

You're going to have a men's casino gauntlet match.

You're going to have a women's casino gauntlet match.

Can't wait for that.

And of course, they had a four-way to determine who was the number one spot in that with Statlander versus Athena versus Willow versus Thunder Rosa.

And the highlight of that for me was

in full view of the referee, Marina Schaefer walks down to distract

Willow,

and Wheeler Useless pops into the ring,

and he and Willow start doing a running spot,

which ends with Willow giving him the pounce, and he fucking flies away.

And then Willow beats Statlander.

But again, it just looks so ridiculous.

And the

overused crutch of the uncreative mind, no DQ.

And let's just have one of the guys run in and do a fucking spot in a girls match in front of the fucking referee, and then we'll do the finish later.

You fucking morons.

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And then, Brian, it came time for our main event of the evening.

Is it just me,

or is it a lot of people saying it on Twitter that good old Frank Mortis is getting a lot more big main event matches now that he's publicly been seen going out and dating Mercedes Moon?

Is there nepotism going on?

Is he a nepo bull?

Could it be a nepo beast?

I mean, why'd you go right the bull?

He's the beast more to say.

But he's wearing a bull head, isn't he?

What head is that of an animal?

I don't know for sure, but I know it's a beast.

It might be a bison.

It could be a beast.

Well, no, think about this now.

What kind of animal is that?

That he's wearing the head of?

Is it a bison?

Is it a buffalo?

is it just a regular old bull one of them big old humpback bulls down in texas

and if so is that

the common thread that has linked these two little crazy kids and star-cross lovers together you got a bull you got a camel

and they're made for each other does he do promos have we ever heard him talk and he speak english Or are you going to get one?

I don't know, but he can.

You're going to get that Charlotte Andrade thing where it's like, you can't imagine him ever having a conversation.

Well, but here's the thing.

I want to hear him give a closing argument in Spanish,

but with the bullhead on his head.

In gimmick, but because he's a lawyer, they've established this.

He's a lawyer.

Frank.

So Frank the lawyer,

I want him to dress up in full.

rigor mortise outfit here with the bullhead and everything and then give a closing argument in Spanish.

Man.

I think that would be fantastic.

To answer your question, I thought about it.

I hate to say I did, but I obviously did.

I thought about it a couple of weeks ago.

I thought about it during a Mexico show where he filled in for, it was like all the top heels in the company and him.

It was like Death Riders, Young Bucks, and Beast Mortos.

It's like, yeah, it does seem like since he, since word came out

that he was dating Mercedes Monet.

And I can't wait to read the next issue of Mercedes Monet's Monet Mag for all of that.

hey this time she's not going to be lost in the fucking woods she's going to be lost out in the bull pasture well it definitely seems noticeable now that yeah this guy's getting used in a very nice position for someone that is fine I guess for AEW mid-card

midnight at the oasis put your camel to bed

So Hangnail Page wrestled Frank Rigor Mortis in the main event, which ran, of course, past 10 o'clock, because they all do.

And then Paige beat him with the buckshot.

But then the lights went out.

And the lights were out for a little while.

I didn't time it exactly as to the number of seconds, but Brian, you can vouch for me.

Tell me if I'm

not depicting this correctly, but while the lights were out, the announcers were still talking.

They were saying, folks, we're still on the air.

The lights have gone out for some reason, right?

You can hear the people

murmuring in the arena.

The audio is unmarred.

It's exactly the same as it would be.

We just got a black screen.

Is that a fair appraisal?

Yeah, fair appraisal.

Okay, well, then the lights come back on.

And now, in the middle of the ring, where it's just been Paige standing there when the lights went off, now Paige is down on both knees.

knees, and there are Maddie and Nikki, the Hardley boys, holding each of his hands, ready to give him their little knee lift that they do.

The problem is

in no time during the time the lights were off, did you hear any struggle, any noise, any, who are you?

Any

get down on your knees.

A bump.

Any suck it, bitch, any bump,

any struggle or conflict of any kind.

Total silence from the ring.

And they've established all the microphones are still on.

You can hear the people.

You can hear everything.

And then

when the lights come back on, he's on his knees.

He's looking up at them and he goes, oh my God.

And they look at the people to milk it.

And then they draw back and then they give him the knee lift.

He's a foot taller than either one of these guys.

All he had to do, they're just holding his hands.

All he had to do was stand up, jerk him off balance.

Hey, come here, you little pricks.

No wonder they get the shit kicked out of him every time they get in a fight.

None of these fuckers know how to fight.

But what was that?

He just looks up horrified like, oh, don't do this to me in 10 seconds.

Yeah, that face he made was ridiculous.

It was like they had guns pointed at him.

But also, again, no effort to move

to.

Oh my God, I can't imagine how painful this thing you're going to do to me in the next 14 seconds will be.

How did they get him down?

How'd they get him down?

Why did it make no noise?

Why didn't he yell?

Why didn't he yelp?

Something.

So, I mean, again, how did he get down?

It took them a while i know tony loves it because ecw did it with the lights going out but it's so lame and all the stuff with the bucks is lame and that wasn't even the end of it it somehow got worse oh yeah well then the music plays and here comes dick the boozer and the boar horseman except for claudio who's

they i i read on the internet he internate internet he asked for time off

but he's not injured maybe he's just fed up i don't know but they come out and get in the ring and everybody stands there because Paige is selling dead from this shitty double knee lift.

Again,

these people are hit with chairs and thrown through furniture and dive off balconies and they're up in seconds.

But this little shitty knee lift from these two children that never connects anyway.

And he's laying there dead.

The heels stand there until Moxley brings out a logging chain and puts it around Paige's neck and gets him in a stationary choke

where he's just, he's not throttling him or shaking him around.

There's no motion.

He's just twisting it.

And again, nobody,

nobody trying to help.

As we talked about earlier,

it's either feast or famine.

Either the security is there in a heartbeat or they'll let people commit aggravated mayhem for 15 minutes.

Well, this time we've established that there's not only a bunch of referees, but we've also established there's a bunch of security that nobody came out.

Until finally,

here comes Samoa Joe and Hobbs and Shapupi.

But they can't get in the ring because the Heels

are playing king of the hill and won't let them in the ring.

And then finally, Osprey comes out and suddenly just him, he just dives right in and the heels leave and everybody stands around.

And

everybody's mad at everybody,

nobody really remembers why.

A lot of things take place, you can't process it all.

There's matchups going on, it's pay-per-view, but

we still don't even know what is going to be the point of this briefcase.

When they open the briefcase and the belt isn't there, is it going to lead us into some

fabulous other dimension of creativity what the is going on here that would be interesting they open the briefcase there's nothing in there and then renee comes out wearing the briefcase or wearing the briefcase wearing the belt

you know maybe they could do i thought you were going to say renee would come out of the briefcase now that i'd pay to see i don't know that'd be pretty uh magical she did she did used to be a contortionist in her younger days she was able to be folded up into a small wallet and credit card holder i think despite people claiming that the Moxley title run has been a big success, people are ignoring the fact that.

Who claimed that?

Oh, no, it's, I mean, Dave Meltzer has claimed it.

Other people have claimed it, that his title run has led to a business increase,

not a business decrease.

But it's been a complete creative failure.

AEW's own fans hate it.

And I think fans right now have their fingers crossed that hopefully we're in the last days of it, but.

Well, but then we end up with Paige.

I'm not going to put money on that either.

I'm not, you know, we'll see what happens, but

this stuff has got to go away.

And then after that, we're going to get Paige in the Bucks because that's what we need.

More of that shit.

Maybe they could program Paige with Mina Mellon.

Nick Jackson has never looked like a wrestler.

He's never looked less like a wrestler than he does right now.

He has like no shape to him.

His hair that was always receding has receded.

to a whole new degree right now.

He looks ridiculous.

When you accidentally

drop, he has to wear the full bodysuit like Randy Savage when he got off steroids.

This guy wasn't on steroids.

Imagine what it looks like.

It's just not good.

When you accidentally drop a glob of face lotion in a sink of water, that type of indiscriminate shape where it just kind of

floats around, that's what you're saying Nick Jackson's body looks like?

I think that's part of it, yeah.

The fact that they can't talk, that the promos suck, that the fans don't have the right kind of heel reaction to them.

I think there's a a whole number of things, and

yeah, I think we're I think they're going to double down on all that for one last run for all these people before their bodies break down and they're not worth what Tony's paying them.

Well, they've never been worth what Tony's paying them, but that hadn't stopped him before now.

But again, if I was if I was take a shit, I would say, okay, you're giving Okada how much, and you're giving Ibushi how much.

And

what about me, boss?

I'm still young and able to fall down

For real?

I'd say, if you want me to stay, you pay me now for my future.

Well, he's paying everybody else for their past.

That's right.

If what other place, I'll say this and we'll move along to if anybody watched this fiasco, but

in what other company of any endeavor in the world can you actually get a lot of money, a guaranteed job and a nice contract because you used to be good at the thing that they did 10 or 15 years ago.

Where, how, when, why?

Well, there are talentless executives who always get a second or third chance.

A lot of it's about relationships.

And of course, that's AEW.

Sorry, a lot of it's about relationships, but that was AEW dynamite.

Hey, that guy used to be great 20 years ago.

Let's fucking put him on the team.

All righty, speaking of the team, Brian, before we talk about the Nielsen team that evaluated this broadcast, broadcast, what's going on from the team at the Arcadian Vanguard Network this week?

Another fine week of shows on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network.

Get information at all the shows on Twitter at Super Podcast or on Facebook at facebook.com/slash Arcadian Vanguard.

Of course, every day, get the wrestling news for free.

Get your wrestling news from thewrestlingnews.com or wherever you find your favorite podcast.

No clickbait, no paywall, just the wrestling news.

Also, want to make mention of shut up and wrestle with Brian Solomon Solomon.

He continues his look at NWA champions of the past.

This time, Luthes

talking with someone who trained with Luthes, Mark Fleming.

Mark Fleming.

Hear that today.

Did you ever work?

He worked

Crockett Tapings, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He was still there in 85.

Mark's from Norfolk.

I believe so.

Yes.

We'll hear more from him and hear more about Luthes, S-U-A-W-Pod.com or shut up and wrestle with Brian Solomon, wherever you find your favorite podcast.

And of course, the 605 Super Podcast, the Mothership.

Go through the archive, 605pod.com, available wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

The Mothership.

See, that

sounds like a sale to me.

We're ringing these bad boys up.

That sounds like a reason to give somebody some money to stop.

Did anybody watch the program this past Wednesday before before we go?

Well, Jim, let's go to the ratings.

AEW Dynamite, June 25th, 2025, to answer your question from earlier, according to WrestleTicks, 2,370 tickets distributed in Kent, Washington

from 8 to 10.08 p.m.

Now, wait a minute.

Okay, hold on here a second, though, because I swear, I swear, wait a minute, they did two shows, didn't they?

They did two shows

there in

Seattle at that particular location.

And one of those 1,800 people.

Outside of Seattle.

And I'm, well, how far outside, by the way?

What are you doing?

Like it's 70 miles or what?

Kent, Washington.

I don't know where that is.

Well, that's

Kent, Washington.

They said Seattle on the graphic.

Wait a minute.

Hold on.

Ah, hold on.

I got something.

It It is part of the Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue metropolitan area.

Okay, June 21st, it was the collision and ring of honor tapings in Kent, Washington that did 1894.

And then

the dynamite taping did 2,370.

So to put that together, that's about 4,200.

That's about

one-third of the amount of people that fucking WWE did on Raw the other night.

But go ahead.

Well, let's go to the numbers from 8 to 10.08 p.m.

On average, watched by 613,000 viewers.

Ouch!

We are back to reality.

And now

I still, otherwise, the curiosity factor will let other people figure out why that an extra hundred and some thousand people watched last week, but

the tournaments are all done and over with, right?

Did they have any just they had one competition-free week, and then, boy, they got killed with high-rated programs, or did they just go back to normal without being in Mexico for a big show?

Maybe a mix of things.

It was also the NBA draft, which is a big deal on ESPN.

But let's go to Tony's draft.

These are the quarter hours.

It's getting a little drafty in here.

Now,

we can't even fucking fight the draft now.

I guess that's a strange way of phrasing that, but go ahead.

Well, these are the quarter hours.

These were compiled by WrestleNomics.

Quarter one, 8 to 8:15 p.m.

The Mercedes Monet, Tony Storm, Mina Shirakawa, Ramp Angle,

the Young Bucks backstage promo, and the starter Swerb Strickland and Will Osprey versus Blake Christian and Lee Johnson with picture a picture.

643,000 viewers.

Ouch.

Okay.

Not only are they back down to normal on their average, but

that's one of the lower starts in recent memory, is it not?

It's considerably off the trend, which is slightly above 700,000.

So yes, it is.

But in

looking at it in a positive light, they're not going to drop as far as normal.

They can't.

Will we go to quarter two, 8:15 to 8:30 p.m.?

Continuation of swerve in Osprey versus Blake and Lee.

the post-match with the Young Bucks, a recap, an ad break, the Young Bucks and Don Callis family backstage angle, and the start of Trent Peretta versus Coda Ibushi,

576,000 viewers.

Wow.

Okay,

that is 24,600, that's 67,000.

It's not as much as they usually lose from one to two, but now they've got to come back up at some point in this show just to make their average.

Or is it going to come back up now that people are convinced the Bucs are off their screen or what?

Well, we go to quarter three,

8:30 to 8:45 p.m.

The continuation of Beretta versus Abushi, the post-match with Okada, the Jon Moxley backstage promo, an ad break, and the A.R.

Fox Ricochet backstage angle.

Good lord.

608,000 viewers.

Well, they're doing everything they can to run the people off, but they got back 20, 32,000 again.

Okay, we're safe from the buckaroos now.

Was that the thought?

I don't know.

We go to quarter four, 8:45 to 9 p.m.

The continuation of, or actually, I guess the start of Fox and Ricochet versus Jet Speed

with picture and picture ads and the Jet Speed Hurt Syndicate live angle for the start of it,

623,000 viewers.

Okay, we're going in the right direction again.

Now the Hurts Syndicate are coming up.

I would think that that would mean maybe at the top of the hour, they're going to gain a few.

Well, you mentioned the top of the hour, the big nine o'clock hour, quarter five, nine to nine, fifteen p.m.

The continuation of Jet Speed and the Hurt Syndicates live angle now with Mark Briscoe and an ad break,

644,000 viewers.

And they now officially,

by 1,000 people, the top of the hour at 9 o'clock is better than the first quarter.

That never happens.

Never happens.

I think it happened last week.

Well, and it never happens until the last two weeks.

What was last week?

It was MJF and Mystico.

But for years, for years, the first number was always bigger than every other number on the show

by 50,000, 70,000, 100,000, whatever, because it was always in the eights, and then it was in the sevens.

Now it's in a six

sixes, so they're not losing as much, but they're coming back and doing 1,000 people better than the start at.

the top of the hour and that's that's not usually heard of

well again 10 10 million people on max but let's now go to quarter six nine fifteen to nine thirty p.m.

roderick strong versus mark briscoe versus konosuke tequesta versus bandito with picture in picture

620 000 viewers

well that's not as bad as it could have been they are still that is only there's two quarters previously that were lower than that

Well, we're going at a quarter seven, 9:30 to 9.45 p.m.

Adam Cole's backstage promo, Athena versus Thunder Rosa versus Willow Nightingale versus Chris Statlander.

I don't know how long I can go without seeing you.

Picture-in-picture ads and the post-match with Marina Shafir and Wheeler Yuda,

623,000 viewers.

So they're fairly steady there.

The going home stretch.

We've only got one quarter and an overrun.

Can Frank bring it home?

We'll be going out of quarter eight, I remind you, eight-minute overrun, 9.45 to 10 p.m.

A recap, an ad break, the FTR and Stokely Hathaway backstage promo, and the start of the Beast Mortos versus Hangman Adam Page.

We're picture and picture.

582,000 viewers.

Eight-minute overrun with the Bucs and the Death Riders and Will Osprey and the Ops,

579,000 viewers.

Well,

again, looking on the positive side, for the first time I can recall, quarter eight

had 6,000 more viewers than quarter two.

But then they fooled those people who had bailed out specifically so they wouldn't have to watch the Bucs and the Bucs came back at the end.

So the Buck and the Bucks, the overrun,

the Bucks get the

three

lowest, the two.

We'll be fair, the two lowest quarter hour ratings of the bunch.

It's every time it's the Bucks and it's the Moxley stuff.

If they could only find someone to program the Hurt Syndicate and MJF with that mattered, you'd have something because they're the only thing that ever pops a number.

But that was dynamite

well it was and this is my show isn't it

indeed ka ching

then that means that i can say when it's over

and the sale has been made folks come back

what is it the the drive-through we're going to have the the pay-per-view extravaganza from saudi arabia and hopefully

No other activity will take place besides what's scheduled over there.

And we'll talk about all that.

And next week, more from TNA and all the rest of the gang.

And until then, for Brian and me, thank you.

Fuck you.

And bye-bye, everybody.