Episode 587: Trips

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Like a midnight tender rock and roller.

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

He's Jim Cornet.

The keys to the future held by the past.

And with tag team partner, Barion 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 perform

your mind

and get the experience.

Get the experience.

Get the experience of Jim Cornette.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Jim Cornette Experience.

Today, AEW takes a trip to Mexico.

Hulk Hogan takes a trip to the hospital.

Tony Khan takes a trip to Never Neverland.

And we're going to take a trip through time and check out the way I critique wrestling to the office, not the fans.

And joining me for all this and more, Hawaiian Brian, the podcasting alliance, the king of the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, Mr.

Co-hostU.

He's as famous as Siskel and Ebert, but he looks more like Rex Reed.

Be great, Brian.

Last, everybody.

Aloha, Jim.

A pleasure to be here once again.

The first edition of the show for the summer.

It's the first summertime edition.

Yeah, I got a problem with that.

I've got a problem with this summer already.

No, no, there was one good thing.

I walked out of the garage today,

walked, just looked out to my right outside my garage door and came face to face with the first deer of the season.

Usually you would see the deer earlier on, but it's been so rainy, I assume they've been staying undercover.

But the cute little thing, it appears that we have finally got back on the deer tour.

Because

I hate to say this, but you know, I think I mentioned sometime last year that our lineage of having deer and babies and deer the next spring and babies and et cetera

had come to the end of the line after spring 2022.

I suspect the traffic from these people that don't know how to drive on this little country road may have brought an end to the family line

but now it appears that we're because we were

before when there was forest across the road from us and farm in the back of us we were part of the the the deer trace as they call it where the same families go in the same directions to the same places every year did you know that there's a there's a pattern to this thing

I didn't know anything about any of this, you being a part of the deer race or whatever you're talking about here.

No, the trace.

Oh, excuse me

the early settlers including daniel boone

followed the trails that the deer would make through the mountains to the salt licks and the and the rivers and the water sources and they became the early trails that the pioneers came through to settle kintuck but nevertheless

our family line came to an end and we stopped being

you know, the home and the part of the tour there.

And it hurt my feelings.

but now they have they have come back and i'm getting them a big tub to put some feed out out back for them by the creek so that they'll feel more welcome

so that's the positive thing

but otherwise now do you know what our forecast is after it's rained and rained and rained and rained after that i think it's lime disease

No, no, no.

Actually, get a big tub and encourage them.

That's the worst thing to do.

Oh, come on.

They're back

by the back by the the creek

back by the creek and then they can be in the wild back there i don't mess with their it's gonna be cripple creek when all those ticks start fucking biting you going up cripple creek

well that's why i tuck my pants in my socks the thing

but nevertheless our weather forecast now is heat and humidity followed by heat and humidity.

Temperature, it's not even going to get below the mid-70s at night.

It's going to be in the mid-90s every day for the next week with high humidity.

The dew points are going to be in the 70s, and the heat index is 105 plus every goddamn day.

And

that has brought a, am I screaming?

Yeah.

See, here's the problem.

My fucking bad ear for the past couple of weeks, and I've been trying to will it into just popping or stopping this nonsense.

But

I'm echoing in my head a lot of times.

I cannot, I get drippy with the high humidity.

I got the nasal congestion, which is, I can hear out of the ear most of the time.

That's going to be the name of the

album's going to be drippy with the high humidity.

Well, drippy with the high humidity is it's a goddamn condition that people have, especially as we get older.

And if I try to blow my nose, then my ear squishes and pops.

If I try to

in some forceful way, clear my throat of the aha,

then, oh, then my ear rings the rang

when I stand in the shower.

It, I hear a telephone ringing because the water is falling.

No, I'm serious.

You have the tinnitus in some respect with your i do

super hearing

so i can't

i can't sniff or then it's it's like i'm sucking air in through my ear and it

through your ear i may have to get this looked at have you tried cleaning your ear

wouldn't

how do you how do you oh great one you try to put it back in my court i'm asking

how do you clean your ear

well there's lots of different ways you could do it.

The doctor will tell you if you take a q-tip and you stick it into, you're not only pushing the shit into your ear, but also you can fucking,

I don't know,

cut your carotid or something in there.

Don't stick things in your ears, kid.

You use the q-tip on the outside of the inside of the, you know, and get the gunk that may be hanging around, but you can't.

Are you doing that?

You can't.

Like the ear, it's like if you're on a plane.

This is what my ear is.

If you're on a plane and the ear partially stops up, I've had that too in this ear

from flying all around the country trying to entertain you people, putting my life on the line.

Now I sound like Ron Wright.

Now I'm all crippled up and I just need somebody to help me with my ear transplant.

Maybe you can get some kind of tool to like stick it in.

It's not a Q-tip.

You can just like kind of drag out whatever's causing the switch issues.

I don't know.

What would you suggest?

An auger?

I'm not actually a bandsaw.

What type of tool?

No, I wouldn't say that.

Am I going to stick a tool in my fucking?

I'm not allowed to have power tools anyway.

You know, on social media now, that's one of those things because I know a few people that have gotten the ad and I got the ad where they start showing you at the inside of an ear and it's for like a device that you stick in your ear as a camera so you could see everything that's happening in there.

Well, what the fuck?

Maybe you could use that.

No, no, what good would it do you?

Do you know what it's do you know what it's supposed to look like?

Well, they give you examples like your ear should look like this.

No, they give you examples.

Here's my cousin, cousin Jerry's ear.

It looks like this.

And, you know,

cousin Pearl, well, when she was a kid, she used to stick BBs in it.

So don't do that, kids.

What's the,

it's like.

There would not be a market for doctors if we normal people knew what this shit was supposed to look like to begin with.

How you, you, can you read an x-ray?

Otherwise, then if you see a giant fucking separation in a goddamn bone, that's a clue.

But the fine points of that shit.

So what are you going to do about it?

You got to do something.

Well,

I'm hoping it pops.

And every once in a while, I walk through the one, the

back room in the house there where we got where we got all the windows so we can see our

backyard with the deer running around in it.

There's, I get an echo, especially when I say to something to stay, like, hey, hey, hey,

in my head here.

Oh, boy.

I don't know how loud I'm.

Maybe the problems are deeper than I thought.

No, it's not an out of it.

Getting an echo of yourself like you're in a cave.

Well, no, I mean, in my head, not, you know, it doesn't sound like it's echo, but it's because the room doesn't have a lot of sound baffling.

So it's worse.

It's more pronounced there, is what I'm trying to say.

Anyway,

so have

some type of sympathy for me here as I'm coming to work.

And, you know, not impaired.

I'm, well, it may impair me in my job today.

I'm saying, I'm already trying to set the expectations low, motherfucker, is what I'm trying to do.

So have sympathy.

I'm in pain.

Successful mission.

You set the ball real low.

All righty then.

So I'll try not to scream at you, Brian, but you don't make it any easier.

I got an email here

from Shay, who is

actually

from Israel and is one of the only,

well, I'm trying to figure out how to say this properly.

We sold one.

of the deluxe Midnight Express box set rocket launcher packages with the Midnight Express scrapbook and everything a couple of years ago.

And he's the one person person in the country of Israel that bought one.

Bought a rocket launcher from Jim Cornett.

You hear that, FBI?

No, the rocket launcher packet.

Come on, this.

I'm trying to lead.

It was because of our finish, but I'm trying to lead with this because it's a profound email that we want to send best wishes to.

And already, you're just bringing it down into the gutter.

I used to be the one with the dirty mind.

But Shay says, Dear Jim and Brian, I hope this email finds you both well.

I'm writing to you from Israel.

And I'll be honest, I'm tired of being part of history with pandemics, taxes, and wars.

As an Israeli, I feel like in the past five years, I've experienced a lifetime's worth of events.

I wake up at night to air raid sirens and have to run to shelters while putting on clothes, leaving behind so many important things in my apartment because I can't take everything with me.

Sometimes I even leave my glasses behind because I'm so shocked in the moment waking up from sleep and not paying attention to what's happening around me.

That said, I'm trying to remain somewhat positive despite the Iranian threat that has increasingly begun to impact Israel.

And that's partly thanks to you both.

And he's, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your podcast, Shay.

You don't have to, but we appreciate it.

But he said, I'm currently studying for a master's degree in communications.

And those precious moments when I can listen to your show to escape and rest are becoming smaller and smaller.

So Jim, if you see that, he goes on and he told me about the rocket launcher package.

But Jim, if you see this and Brian, it would be so meaningful to me to hear a wish for peace from you both on the podcast.

I wish you both and everyone listening.

Peace, quiet laughter, and lots of good wrestling, unlike what we've been getting lately.

Thank you from Israel, Shay.

Shay, thank you, first of all.

Yeah.

Stay safe, you and your family.

Yes, we do.

Obviously, how do you,

we haven't got to the point yet over here where we have to wake up in the middle of the night from air raid sirens and run to shelters, thankfully.

And I can't

accept, you know,

I'm bad enough with the tornado warnings.

If it was actually, okay, now they're directing the tornadoes, that would be what he's going through now.

so this it's horrible i got air raids too shay it's called jim singing

oh come on

all day and night

we wish you peace and love

peace and love

imagine there's no

anyway shay we we love you um stay safe and uh please find lior and hopefully lior's safe if he's out there we haven't heard from him in a hot minute but uh lior who was an incredibly popular performer, singer-songwriter, lyricist.

Yes.

Humorist.

An interpreter, the likes of which has not been seen since Sinatra.

Yeah, we hope you're out there, Lior.

We hope you're safe too.

And I'm even going to overlook that you just used the phrase hot minute.

What are you on goddamn TMZ now?

Hot minute?

That's not a TMZ turn.

Turn.

Term?

That's not a term.

Turn.

It's not their term.

It's a term for soul.

It's a worm that's turned.

Hot minute.

You sound like one of the cool kids.

Look here, my computer that Hotchkiss Featherbottom got for me says that a heat statement is in effect.

Heat statement.

Yeah, it says heat statement in effect.

See more.

I'm clicking now.

Oh, there's a goddamn screen coming up.

Last time I saw a heat statement.

Well, now it just gives me a heat.

It doesn't need anymore.

Oh, come on.

I'm trying to find it.

It just gives me another page to look at news what the it was it was clickbait is what it was

it from

no it's this goddamn thing on the bottom of my computer screen it's one of these official from micro icons here from microsoft is it from microsoft well i don't it does it just says heat statement in effect where sometimes it gives me the stock market and sometimes it gives me the weather well who's issuing the statement is my question well that's what i tried to click on and find out did it get

Why are you making this more confusing than it is already?

If you get the stocks, those are pretty well defined.

A score is a score.

Who's making a score?

Well, no, it just says like the fucking

overall scheme of things, like the green up, down, whatever, you know, and you click on it for more.

And now it says news for you.

But

I'm not going to fall for that again.

Anything about the Diddy trial?

No, goddammit.

There's no damn Diddy.

No damn Diddy.

Man, they just have pictures of all the machine guns and baby oil and astroglide.

You just.

In those different places?

Now that's what it was.

He was oiling his guns with the baby oil.

Ketamine, ketamine pops, all sorts of shit.

This guy was a real...

He was really doing it.

I guess that's the only way I could put it.

And

again, we'll see how Vince McMahon fits into this whole thing.

That's what I'm waiting for.

Have they brought his name up in the Diddy trial yet?

No, they have not brought his name up did you see that vince mcman the rumor was he tried to buy made an offer for

was it the bare knuckle fighting did you yes the the the pbfl or kl what what are those acronym pro bare knuckle fighting whatever the

yes apparently he did and

didn't they say no they said we don't want to do business with you

by the way where do they do business Where is it legal that bare knuckle fights?

I guess it would be a state without an athletic commission, right?

Like, where could you do that?

I guess I don't.

And I'm

again, I'm wondering why he would pick that as his first little foray into the sports and entertainment, quote unquote, world, because

it's not around a lot.

Not a lot of people talking about it.

And you would think you would run into

in any major market, some pushback, especially with what Vince might

fucking recommend be done with it.

But

again, on the other side of the thing, we make a living hiring people to batter each other in the face with their bare fists.

We don't want to do business with that guy.

The fuck?

You got to wonder, was it we don't want to do business with him?

He's a pervert.

Or was it we don't want to do business with him?

He will bastardize the integrity of the sport of bare knuckle.

Oh, and we have integrity about the way that we give our fighters brain damage.

Well, look at

Google this thing.

Now you got me curious.

Did they put out some kind of statement of

spurning him or just it didn't come to pass?

What are they talking about?

Hold on.

I just Googled Vince McMahon bare knuckle.

I hope these are.

Oh, well, at least it wasn't Vince McMahon moose knuckle, but I'm still not sure what you're going to get.

Trying to see if there's anything here.

I have an article from Essie Scoops.

Speaking with Justin Barroso of Undisputed, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship, founder and president David Feldman recalled McMahon meeting with him in the hopes of striking a deal.

He's a great guy.

His whole team is great.

But the timing wasn't right for us.

He's Vince McMahon.

If I were him, I'd want creative control too

oh he was awesome very complimentary and he was very serious to do business which is the nicest way of saying we wouldn't sell to him

what do you think of that exact line i'd want creative control too yeah i would want it too

well of course he came in and said yes i'm gonna run this thing and i'm gonna concoct new and different ways for these people to get in bare knuckle fights.

See, that's what I want.

That's what I'm waiting to see.

Creative control: is he going to start putting gimmicks on whoever he has and whatever he's able to actually acquire?

It's all about acquisition.

He's not going to start anything from scratch.

They're looking for something to buy and vincify.

What the fuck is it going to be?

Well, and here's another thing that's just running through my mind that it's all blurted out as I usually do.

Bare knuckle fighting is not pro wrestling

by several stretches.

But at the same time, Vince McMahon, one would think,

what would his terms have been?

Would he have some type of non-compete

with

the

TKO group?

And what fields would that entail?

Because

would they just say, we don't want you to do any wrestling?

Or

why would they want him doing MMA?

Or is he under any type of arrangement?

Has that been established with any validity?

Well, I think this would be more of a direct conflict with MMA than WWE or wrestling.

Well, yeah, that's the point.

We haven't heard anything about a non-compete.

Of course, it's not just that he used to own it and used to be there.

He still owns a chunk of it.

You know, it may not be.

It's down to like 5% or 6% now, but that's only worth a few hundred million.

Still,

imagine if Tony Khan owned that much of WWE.

It'd be a story, just the idea that he has it.

That'd be a funny move, by the way, if Tony Kahn just owned it.

He technically could buy 5% of the stock, couldn't he?

Yeah.

Oh, that would be fucking hilarious.

Now, that would make more news than anything else that he could do.

Oh, can you imagine if he starts raising a stink as a concerned shareholder?

Seriously, and he's got friends.

All he needs is a few of these hedge fund guys to get behind him and they could create a whole bunch of problems for that company.

See, that's what I always say.

That's the thing that gets me so mad about Tony.

It's not even the bad booking and the TV shows that make me go to sleep early.

He doesn't fight.

I just wish he knocks him on Twitter.

Yeah, I wish he would.

There's so many ways, he doesn't even have to spend that much of his money that he'll inherit.

There are so many ways to fight back and look good doing it.

Well, back to this.

Yeah.

Yeah, the bare knuckle fighting, it is somewhat in the same genre,

but

would that have been a test case for him to see,

well, you know, I'll be behind this and I'll make some tweaks and I'll, you know,

I don't know, find somebody for a new wrestling company?

Where do you think the

headquarters or where was it founded?

Yeah, it says headquarters.

Where's the headquarters for bare knuckle fighting championship?

According to this, the owner is Triller Incorporated.

Well, wait a minute.

They're about to go out of business, ain't they?

Yeah, we just heard they're losing.

They have nothing.

So hold on.

I who have nothing.

Wait a minute.

Okay, now,

fans, for those of you, because we see, we don't prepare this program.

There's a lot of loose, loosey-gooseiness to this program.

Triller used to be Fight TV.

For those of you who may have, now I got a helicopter going over here.

Don't comment on it, Brian.

For those of you who might used to have ordered independent wrestling on the InternWebs or whatever, Fight TV was around and apparently now it's Triller and it still airs an abundance of the

Indian

niche wrestling or whatever the fuck, but they're

so broke they can't pay attention

and apparently issued a statement, which we just saw, Brian, last week or whatever, that

they're not long for this world or they owe a lot of them, they're going bankrupt.

What was that statement?

You retain these things better than I do because sometimes you care.

I actually did not care at that moment.

I didn't read about it because it was somewhere along those lines: they're not going to be able to.

Here, if you, if you find that, tell me more about the bare knucklers, and I'll see if I can find that statement.

Holdbunks, I found an interesting thing here.

These are the assets of Triller.

They own on streaming and social media, Clicks,

Triller, and of course, Triller TV, which was formerly Fight.

In Combat Sports, Triller owns the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship, the Triller Fight Club, and the Pillow Fight Championship.

What the

what?

I don't know what that is.

But I don't know who their booker is either.

So maybe it'll be worth watching.

Other assets: here are other brands and properties owned by Triller: Thusio,

Amplify.ai,

Fangage,

CrossHype,

Julius,

Flips Media, and Metaverse, and a bunch of other things I'm sure they're working on that.

Yeah, I don't know.

Do you even have any idea what these things are?

Enthusio is a sports media and events company that produces a weekly live sports interview show for a members-only audience.

Founded by Tiki Barber, former member of the Giants, Mark Gershon, and Jared Augustine.

And it appears they've made a lot of moves.

It doesn't say anything about actually having an audience.

So I'm not sure.

But let's go back bare knuckle fighting.

And apparently, well, also, Triller, I've got that.

Actually, this was from our friend Thurston Howell over at WrestleNomics.

He wrote a piece on this.

Somebody sent it to us.

It said, Triller is facing mounting financial and regulatory trouble,

as indicated by a number of filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the last few months.

Triller, previously known as FIGE, key platform for international streaming of AEW Plus, whatever that may be,

and has been a major digital distributator of pay-per-view events for promotions like GCW, TNA, numerous other wrestling combat sports events.

They're at the risk of being delisted from the NASDAQ

due to repeatedly failing to file required financial reports on time.

Jesus, that's always good.

I wonder if they go podcast one.

Well, they might even think we ought to send them a letter too.

Anyway,

an investment was announced, but amended months later.

They announced in January it raised $14 million, Triller did, through a private placement deal.

Blah, blah, blah.

The deal would result in a guy being added as a new board member and sale of shares, whatever the fuck the case.

But in the months that followed, Triller's stock price fell from over $2 per share to under $1.

And maybe they do have something to do with Podcast One.

Then in April, Triller admitted in updated filings that that $14 million deal never closed.

No money was received, no shares issued, nobody added to the board.

They said it was replaced with a new arrangement, a $10 million convertible note.

Bet you get a hell of a a convertible for $10 million.

But it's still contingent on funding.

So Triller hasn't received the $10 million yet.

They failed to file an annual report and a quarterly report.

Apparently, they've also got several books overdue at the library.

They've had two respective delinquency notices from NASDAQ.

And they filed a notice saying, we need more time

for a 10K.

But uh, yeah, this is a lot of they're sounding

oh, the NASDAQ delinquency notices.

Well, you know what?

When you're a ruled delinquent, that can stay on your record forever.

They gave Triller until June 16 to submit a plan about, what is your plan here?

About how it will regain compliance.

And if it's accepted by NASDAQ, Triller will have until October 13

to catch up.

Triller hosted an investor dinner at U.S.

President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago.

Oh, there must be the event was billed as a landmark opportunity to share the company's vision with over 100 South Florida investors,

underscoring a sharp contrast.

between Triller's public promotional efforts and its unresolved SEC compliance issues.

So they're trying to get a bunch of rich, stupid people who hang out with a criminal, hey, give us some money for this fucking penny stock we got here.

We've lost our ass and we need help.

And I also think it's wanting to get the attention of the administration or the Trump family.

That's the only reason you would book it there and do it there.

You know who else just did that?

Podcast one.

I swear to God, they just hosted a statement at Mar-a-Lago.

And it's like, and it wasn't even when Trump's there, except probably that's out of their price range.

You know, it's like no one's there.

So they're doing it there for the investors in West Palm Beach or whatever.

Who's on the list that we're going to be having deposed?

It might have been there.

I'd like to ask you.

I can't answer that on the air.

And ask that.

Oh, by the way.

Cast media update will be on the drive-through this week because we have a packed show here today and we're working on some stuff.

The lawyers are working on it.

And also, we haven't even...

Well, we haven't even gotten to the show yet because we're dick and rabbit.

By the way, Triller, apparently, this was now, I don't want to give any misinformation.

This was, I think, the end of May, 61 cents per share, down from $21 in 2022.

What's their market cap?

Does it say that?

I don't see those words, but I would say it's a dunce hat at this point, their market cap.

Because why would Vince buy the bare knuckle?

Why don't he just buy Triller if it's dirt cheap?

God dude, would you want to buy something like that?

All of a sudden he has the rights to AEW Plus?

He just wants to have some guys come over and bare knuckle fight.

He would all arrest this mess.

I'll name this toy Bare Knuckle.

No, let me give you some background here.

The bare knuckle fighting championship is an American bare knuckle boxing promotion based in Philadelphia.

Oh, apparently at the fuck J.J.

Binns Arena.

I don't know where they're doing this in Philadelphia.

The promotion was founded in April 2018.

He didn't want people to pull hair.

Fuck.

And it's presided over by David Feldman.

It is the first promotion to hold official state-sanctioned and commissioned, wow, bare knuckle boxing events in the U.S.

since 1889.

And it has information here about their launch and their broadcast partners.

And

who are their broadcast partners?

Pay-per-view events were initially carried worldwide on Fight.

Oh!

And then it was announced that the Zone would begin streaming their events.

That year after the trailer acquisition, Fight announced that all events would be included for fight plus subscribers and then in september of last year it was announced that bare knuckle fighting championship and the zone formed a three-year agreement which will allow the zone to broadcast the bare knuckle events starting in october uh-huh uh the insiders say that uh many employees of Dazone voted for this under threat of being beaten up with someone's bare knuckle.

Here's something interesting, just because you talk about Vince McMahon

non-compete and whether there is or isn't and what is competing with not just the companies but the people there.

Listen to this part.

Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship was involved in controversy after the death of boxer Justin Thornton, August 20th, 2021, at BKFC 20.

He died as a result of a spinal injury suffered during his debut.

Thornton had been on a five-fight losing streak ahead of the fight.

The matchmaking and regulations were criticized by ufc president dana white who said is anybody shocked i mean in bare knuckle fighting i'm not a big fan we've been putting on fights for 25 years i've done over 7 000 fights with no serious injuries in the ufc

that if they weren't in the ufc i don't i think we might have to go back and micromanage that but another time we shouldn't be talked about in the same sentence as bare knuckle boxing you can make that point so there's already been a death at one of their events.

And

yeah, they've had a lot of events.

See, that's the thing.

Vince is like, geez, you guys are way behind schedule.

You ain't getting nearly enough fucking publicity.

Let me take over and change some of these rules.

Here's where they've run this year.

The Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia, Mohegan Sun, Uncasville, Connecticut, Newcastle, England.

The Kiva Auditorium, Albuquerque, New Mexico, the 23 ECW Arena, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Oh, God, no.

Yeah,

that's here.

The Hard Rock Casino.

So they're running a lot of the same places other people run.

Dubai, Dubai Tennis Stadium.

They were in Perth, Australia, Hollywood, Florida, Birmingham, England, Fort Worth, Texas.

I guess you could see some of the things going back to Vince.

It's not wrestling and it's not WWE, but some of the things he would know.

in terms of running arena shows or running a regular schedule, some of those same elements are there at least.

And maybe he is again.

This is somehow,

I've said before, some way or another, something will come to his attention.

Somebody will show him something, or he'll see something on television.

And so he's probably been looking around or fishing around for something that kind of involves somebody having a fight in some type of ring or

stage area.

And

I think for anybody, still, and I still say this, thinking he's going to get into wrestling,

he will not have a substandard product and he can't get the stars.

But something like this, I can see all joking aside, that, yeah, he can figure out a way to market these fucking guys.

They're going to go pummel each other.

And that's what Eddie's probably thinking about television.

And

he's seen a tape that's given him an idea or someone has suggested something that's.

This says that Shane is in his ear.

That's what this says.

I don't know, not necessarily.

Another person besides Shane McMahon could have had this idea.

And

because again,

Vince had more of an affection for or an ear for boxing.

in the 90s than he did

MMA or what would become UFC or whatever the fuck.

So this is kind of,

and it appeals to Vince's weird dynamic, boxing without gloves.

It's more manly, pal.

I can see this before I can, you know,

this would have been an easier sell for Shane, even probably, than that fancy Dan MMA.

And they said, no.

They're owned by a company going bankrupt.

And like, nah, we don't want to sell to you.

We don't want you to have creative control.

See, that's the thing.

It was going to be Vincified.

It would have been, here is the garbage man, and here is the butcher.

Like, just everyone has a dumb gimmick.

We've sprung these people from prisons all over the world.

You know,

that, and you know what else?

We're going to give them, we're going to give them medieval weapons.

And the other thing is, you wonder if Vince McMahon buys a league or something with organized sports like this.

Would he try the move of owning people's names, of giving people new names just so the company would have that intellectual property?

Is that baked in?

Is that something that he mentally,

you know, is he going to go back to everything that was in his formula before, even if it's a real sport?

How did he, as a

means to an end, as they say, he might accept some adjustments now because he probably realizes he's 80 or whatever the fuck and he doesn't have time to retrain everybody in a new field in his image so he'll skip he won't stand put on every fucking hill but uh it'll it'll anything that it

anything he's doing is going to be heavily vincent vincerific

you think kevin dunn will be there whatever it is

well as long as he doesn't have a dentist appointment that day

yeah

if they're going to do tv they're he's vince mcvan would have kevin dunn involved in some fashion.

So prepare for

a lot of 60-year-old handheld guys to probably be called back into action.

I wonder if they could find a truck that's old enough for Kevin to be able to still figure out how to work it.

And one last thing on the topic of billionaires and promotions.

It's kind of off everyone's radar, even though every now and then we've been, especially lately, getting more and more questions sent in about it.

And I don't ask because I know you don't watch it.

But wow, women of wrestling, wow.

Their owner is Jeannie Buss, and her and her family just sold the LA Lakers for $10 billion.

Did you say billion dollars?

Billion dollars.

Her dad bought it for like $67 million in whatever, 1977, 78.

I forget exactly when.

But she's going to have a lot of money, and

she's already been throwing money at the moment.

One basketball franchise is worth as much as the WWE and

fucking couple rooms in the main house of the UFC.

Yeah.

That's insane.

It's the Lakers.

I mean, I think there are also specific franchise.

You know, she didn't sell the Colorado Rockies or something.

She sold the Lakers.

There's the Lakers

Yankees.

I mean, there are certain teams.

I know there's a variety of teams.

That's what I'm saying to you.

One basketball team, $10 billion.

What are we doing about hungry children?

It is is worth $10 billion though to basketball team.

God damn it.

Teach them to play basketball.

That seems like the best thing to do.

It's a lot of money.

It's a lot of money in basketball, it turns out.

Yes,

I've heard that.

There's all kinds of money in basketball.

Kids start dribbling.

But anyway, so

your point is they now have $10 billion.

Is she going to want to do more with her thing?

Again, she's been throwing money kind of of at the wall.

Does she want to do more with her thing?

I think she's there with an age.

Or perversion.

She is a good-looking woman, I have to say, even though she's, you know, not young anymore, but she's a good-looking woman.

But my point was,

she's been throwing money at the wall.

I mean, they've been airing that show in syndication at various times in various places.

Apparently, it does well, kind of like how Glow did, although it's not as silly and goofy, even though David McLean's involved, I believe.

But if she's been doing all that while owning the LA Lakers and being, you know, front and center as the owner, even though it was really, I guess, her family, is she going to now want to spend more money or do more with this other project?

Will this kill the other project or will this cause her to have more attention on the other project?

And

whatever you want to say about women's wrestling, at some point, there needs to be a national all-women show for it to really get a fair chance.

She has something out there.

It's not the WWE or top-of-the-line AEW talent, but I don't know.

It makes you wonder what kind of player she could be if she wants to spend money.

But she could sign all these substandard girls away from AEW and they'd look better than the girls she's got now.

And we'd all be happy because we wouldn't have to watch them and they could help her show.

Just what's her name, Jeannie?

Jeannie, call Tony.

Jeannie call us.

Oh, but that's that's that's too good

because Jeannie's master was Tony Anthony nelson but in this case tony could serve genie

and she could just say here i'll just buy all your girls off of you and there you go and he could come away with a nice sum of money that he could

waste on another gymnast that's the big thing for everyone that loves women's wrestling thinks there needs to be more women's wrestling and i've been a big fan i've been a big booster of the women in WWE at least and uh you know anna jay uh for a while now the only way it's ever really going to get a chance is not to be shoved in the middle of the show with the male stars, it's to be on their own.

That's the only way it could ever really work.

And I don't know if it's going to be Genie Buss.

I don't know if eventually WWE will just try to do their own thing, but someone's got to do it and do it well.

It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Anyway,

did we finish what we were talking about?

I don't know what we were talking about, but up to the title.

The Diddy trial.

We were talking about the Diddy trial.

No, we ain't going back to do Diddy.

No Diddy.

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I have got to compliment a new book that I've recently received and just got a chance to start reading.

But Steve Johnson has done it again from the author of the book on Jim Londos.

He and

Greg Oliver has helped him out on this as editor and et cetera.

But

the book is classic characters, and it's not only pieces from the past that Steve and Greg have written over at Slam Wrestling, but fresh research

and some wonderful illustrations.

And I'm enjoying because it's just, it's a bunch of classic wrestling stories, hence the title Classic Characters.

And so I wanted to give our friend Steve Johnson a little mention there.

Because he's keeping me from having nightmares when I go to sleep.

If that's the last thing I'm reading before I go to sleep, I sleep peacefully.

Hey, I just got a couple of books you may like, probably better than that one.

Hold on.

on.

I just got.

I wish you wouldn't just lean away from the microphone.

I just got, I saw this the day after I bought it.

The author was on CBS Sunday Morning.

Desi Arnaz, the man who invented television.

Ooh,

I saw some articles on that when it came out just here recently.

Yeah, no, this looks really interesting.

And again, the feature on CBS Sunday Morning was great.

All those things you think about as being staples of the industry of television, which is now a dying thing, he invented a lot of them from syndication to or having a syndicated package.

He was filming all the shows before anyone was.

And the three-camera shoot for situation comedies.

Yeah.

So I'm really in front of a live audience.

This should be a good book.

And then I just got Comedy Samurai.

Do you did?

Have you got, hold on, before we get to the next one?

Have you gotten far enough to know what

the name was of the cinematographer on the I Love Lucy television show that helped him develop those things.

I have not started reading the book yet, so no.

Carl Frund,

who happened to be the cameraman who worked on some of the original Universal Horror films, including

Frankenstein, I believe, if not Frankenstein Dracula.

I'm an old man, so bear with me.

But he had 20 years later, when they did I Love Lucy, he brought that cinematic expertise to the program to do that kind of live on

set,

live to tape in front of a studio audience with multiple rooms and a set type of

fucking thing for the very first time.

And the other book I got that I think you'd probably like, Comedy Samurai, a memoir by Larry Charles from Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Borat, Religious, all these things.

I'm looking forward to this one too.

So I got that.

Oh, well, you know what?

and the first king of hollywood uh the life of douglas fairbanks ah not a new book but i just i was i was always jealous because he got mary pickford was a dish back in the teens not her teens the teens

uh but i've got a book in my hand also that i just wanted to bring up because now what are you laughing at over there nothing um

the other day

When you delayed our recording, it gave me a chance to stick my hand in one of my file cabinets that hadn't been sorted yet and pull a stack of stuff out and look through for some oddities.

And we talked about a couple of things.

And I have

a couple of odds and ends here that I just wanted to bring up.

And then

I have

for the TNA agent reports, if you want to know how to put,

well,

hold on now.

If you want to know not only how to put together a television wrestling program, but how that I

approach my critiques to the office rather than the fans at large, and it's 15 years ago, but there are a couple of things that's interesting, including,

as I alluded and colluded to you before we went on the air here,

I do know the fucking guy.

that is suing the crew member that is suing

AEW for Moxley breaking his neck or whatever he's accused him of.

And I thought I remembered the name, but then I checked an old email and it was a confusingly similar name.

I said, oh,

that's what I was thinking of, but you'll find out later on in the program.

I've worked with this guy.

It's not like I'm a friend of his and have his, you know, home address so we can go to picnics.

But he's.

Now that makes me think that the guy today has to be

50 years old or getting close.

Unless when I knew him 15 years ago, he had led a hard life.

I don't know what to tell you.

But anyway, I have a book in my hand.

Do you have in your voluminous collection of wrestling memorabilia, Brian, a book called the Roving Camera Photo Book?

I am not sure.

Well, this.

Who put it out?

It is.

Well, it is a.

It's on, it's black and white, and it's on fairly stiff paper.

And it's, I believe,

24 pages, so 12 sheets folded over and stapled.

It's been done at a printer, but it's basically black and white with pin.

And the pictures are like six pictures to a page, more or less, with captions of who is in the photos.

It says a collection of over 120 recent photographs of all your favorite and not-so-favorite grapplers.

And it is the author of the piece, the roving camera photo book, is a young man named Paul Heyman.

Oh, then I have it.

I have it in the file for sure then.

Yeah.

Well, he had to see, you got to look for it because he had to send it because he sent it to me.

But here's the thing.

It's autographed

to James.

That night together.

What did he write last time?

That night with you was unforgettable.

I think about it often.

No, it was thanks for one of the greatest nights of my life.

And it was at Sabatino's, but you immediately, again, dove into the fucking sewage-filled gutter.

But this one

says to James Professional Wrestling's all-time capital letters underlined, greatest photographer.

May the great managers of yesteryear hear your footsteps coming.

Your buddy, Paul Heyman.

Wow.

I didn't know you were so close.

He was, well, and that's the thing.

He sent me this.

This is all his photo work.

It's at the like at the Meadowlands.

And there's Vern talent talent and there's wwf talent so probably meadowlands and the garden and some like mad dog drake some northeast independence

uh

but i think he sent me this after i this was either after the first time i met him or the second time i met him

because of the date of the pictures and the you know that was the day he was sending out the books that was the day that he sent out the one to bill after bill after you are without a doubt the number one photographer of all time the greatest photographer in all of

George Napolitano, I want to send you this book.

You're the greatest photographer of all time.

But no, I just admit you, he was very complimentary of people

at that time, as we've talked about when we've gone through the file with him, of everybody at that point in time, because he never knew who might be complimentary of him back.

I've told you the story.

This is what I was really going into.

I've told you the story about

getting almost sued for the match in Smoky Mountain Wrestling and Rob Moore, who just passed away not long ago, but had been a big wrestling fan for years and years and years and gave me the idea at a fan week that he was at one year for the

match and all that stuff, right?

I actually found the letter from the attorneys and the letter that I wrote back to the attorneys.

Oh, get out of here because we've always heard about this.

And I was there.

I was at the show in Morristown.

It was the last show of Fan Week 94.

Rob Moore came in from Texas just for that just to see his match that he had the idea for.

Yeah.

And then he returned the next year for the whole trip and he was the nicest guy, just a great guy.

And we were all very sorry to hear that he passed.

But we've always heard this story that he almost got you sued, that you had the responded him, but we've never actually heard the letter.

Well, he,

his idea,

and I think I told it, but just to preface everything, his idea was that you ought to have a match.

And now I guess that

there's gauntlet matches.

I've lost track of all the modern rules and things and everything, but his idea was

that two guys start and then the winner of that match faces another fucking guy immediately, John, boom, and they have, and then on and on.

And I mean, at the time in 1994, I don't remember anybody else doing that then.

I guess they've done it since then, right?

But point being, I said, well,

I needed something for Morristown to be different from the we were running Knoxville the same week.

Towns are only 40 miles apart.

So I'll put that in Morristown with some other matches underneath involving people, whatever the fuck.

And we'll call it the King of the Mountain match.

Because I'm running Smogy Mountain Wrestling and it's kind of a king of the hill type of thing and blah, blah, blah, right

from morristown tennessee at the tally ward rec center at the time because we we were out of the east high school that's when they were having their floor done

and uh

but nevertheless it's so in front of i said what did we have that night did we have 750 800 people what was it i wasn't counting i was a kid

Well, thereabouts, but the point is this was not a major promotion in Knoxville Civic Coliseum, but it's something we were doing in Morristown.

And it's Rob Moore's idea.

And I thought it was, and he came in to see it.

Well, about the same time

that we, this is August 12th, 1994 is the date of this attorney's letter.

So I think that may have been the weekend we did it.

But nevertheless.

Dear Mr.

Cornette, this is from Miller and Martin attorneys at law in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

And there's about 40 lawyers up here on this letterhead.

And

if this company is still in business and all those people were there on August 12, 1994, if any of you are still there, fuck you today,

fucking anal ass wipes.

They're on Georgia Avenue, or at least they were then.

But anyway,

Mr.

Cornette, this firm represents Bivin Sports Promotions Incorporated, the owner of U.S.

trademark registration number 1,743,658 for King King of the Hill.

This trademark is used to identify one client's distinctive elimination fight or our client.

They typoed.

This paper was more expensive than the posters that I fucking printed the poster for the event on, and they had a typo used to identify our clients' distinctive elimination fights.

Our client has previously conducted King of the Hill Badman

elimination fights at Morristown East High School.

We are advised that Smogy Mountain Wrestling is scheduled King of the Mountain elimination fights at this same location.

They also made the mistake that we weren't doing, we weren't at East High School, were we?

We were at the Tally Ward.

You were there.

I don't remember now.

I remember the basketball nets being in there.

I don't know.

There was a stage.

The stage, yes.

We were in the Tally Ward Rec Center because we sat on the stage.

That's where the announcer was.

He said King of the Hill, not King of the Mountain, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

But nevertheless, indeed, some of the promotions for these fights have even utilized the phrase King of the Hill.

No, we did.

In our opinion, Smoky Mountain Wrestling's conducting King of the Mountain elimination fights constitutes a direct infringement, unfair competition, likely to cause mistake, confusion, deceive customers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then it goes on for several paragraphs of, you know, in the event that we're going to be choosing to conduct any fights in the future under this mark, likely to be confused with our clients' mark, we'll have no alternative but to seek redress in court.

We would be well within our rights to sue for damages for Smokey Might Wrestling use of the blah, blah, blah.

But we are prepared to make the following proposal to put the entire matter to rest.

If you will undertake in writing not to use the king of the mountain, king of the hill, or any other confusingly similar mark, blah, blah, blah.

We will waive our claims to recover damages by you.

If you should have any questions about Bivens Sports Promotions and the position in this matter,

Douglas T.

Johnson, hey, Doug, if you're still around, you're 90 or whatever, fuck you too.

And Larry Bivens is the guy from Bivens Sports Promotions.

So at any rate, they put down at the bottom of this letter a little thing for me to sign that I agree not to use these marks and blah, blah, blah.

And I'm supposed to sign it and date it.

Well, obviously I kept this fucking letter because I got it in my hand, but I wrote them this letter.

Dear Mr.

Johnson,

I received your letter, a copy of which I've enclosed for your reference concerning your client, Mr.

Biven's objection to our King of the Mountain match in Morristown.

While the differences in our product and your clients are obvious, let me state them here since Dee evidently still doesn't grasp them.

The idea, rules, name, and concept of this match were sent to me by a wrestling fan and old acquaintance in Texas early this year, before I'd ever heard of the King of the Hill fights.

This is professional wrestling with well-known name wrestlers seen on our weekly TV show and followed by the fans, not amateur bad men who sign up at random and are unknown except to their friends and not featured on TV.

It's true.

It is true.

Yeah, in quotation marks is what, whereas Mr.

Bivens conducts a one or two night tournament, this was one match continuing contest where a wrestler faced men one after another, blah, blah, blah.

There was no competition between our business and Mr.

Bivens' business.

Well, since we are at East High every month, maybe it was an East High

and have been for almost three years.

And Mr.

Bivens may have a tough man contest once every year or two.

Not even Ray Charles could possibly mistake, confuse, or be deceived into thinking that Smokey Mountain Wrestling matches and a tough man contest are the same or similar, especially since our viewers watch us every week on TV and know who we are.

The August 13th event was never called King of the Hill, only King of the Mountain.

I still maintain a mountain is bigger than a hill.

Now,

having stated the points listed above, Smokey Mountain Wrestling does agree never to use the phrase king of the the mountain, king of the hill, king of Prussia, or anything else similar to king of the hill ever again for two reasons.

Number one, we don't want to be associated in any way with a tough man contest, even if it would take a complete moron to draw that association, since I personally think tough man contests are embarrassing to watch by their very nature.

And number two, your client, Mr.

Bivens, has to be the nitpickingest, troublemakingest, shit disturber I've ever seen, and nothing could possibly be worth the aggravation of having to deal with him again.

By the way, please ask your client to get busy and send letters threatening legal action to every person who has attended grade school for the last 100 years, since they are all undoubtedly guilty of using the phrase king of the hill while playing the game, which is three days older than dirt.

And I sent a carboned copy to Larry Bivens.

So that was actually

the resolution of that that legal matter.

What was that filed under?

94?

No, this isn't.

That's what I'm saying.

These are stacks of papers and things that I've kept.

How do you write the file on the file folder, letter to pest in 1994?

And then you would have more file folders because everything is its own thing.

I got,

remember when I've told you about the wreck

that I had when I was in the WWF and I flew to California and was on the way to co-host Raw and the fucking semi hit me.

Do you remember that?

Or are you just indifferent to my suffering?

No, we do remember that.

We talked about that on the show a while back.

I do remember that.

Well, here's the letter I sent to that lawyer.

And folks, if you haven't heard it, you can look it up on YouTube, I assume.

What is it?

Jim Cornette's near-death experience being run over by an 18-wheeler in California while on the way to host Raw?

Would that be how it's labeled?

It would definitely have Cornette in California in there.

I don't know about what else.

Yeah, well, anyway,

from Knoxville, I'd gone to flown into San Francisco to

go to, as it turns out, I believe, Stockton.

I couldn't remember it was Sacramento, whatever the fuck.

Stockton to do color on Raw.

And on the highway, I got hit by an 18-wheeler.

and

fucked up the rental car and I had to go to the Oakland airport, get another rental car and fucking got there like 45 minutes before showtime or whatever the fuck, before cell phones.

Well, then

Hertz had sent me

two things happened.

The

lawyers from the company where the guy was driving the truck for had sent me something to sign that they wanted me to sign.

But at the same time,

they didn't really send it.

I'll explain in a second.

And Hertz had sent me a letter saying they wanted me to pay for the damages to this rental car

that I got run over in.

So, would you like to hear the letter that I sent to the lawyer of the truck company that fucking run me over?

Yeah, let's hear that first.

Well, no, this is it.

Oh, I thought you said you had a letter to Hertz, too.

Well, no, everybody got this.

Oh,

but But here's, it explains it.

Dear Mr.

Sellers, not Peter Sellers, but whatever.

Enclosed, please find a copy of a letter you sent to me last month asking me to sign a form.

However, there was no form enclosed with that letter because this dumb fuck had sent me something.

I wasn't going to sue him.

But he didn't enclose it.

And I hadn't made up my mind yet anyway, right?

And also, please find enclosed a copy of a letter that I received from Hertz about the rental car that was damaged.

And I sent him a copy of the rental contract, the report that I filled out, the cops thing, the whole nine yards.

I says, please read all this and then finish this letter.

So doon, doon, doon, doon.

Okay, rest of the letter.

A.

I was driving down the interstate, minding my own business when a 10-ton truck changed lanes without seeing me, hit me in the rear end, spun me around, pushed me sideways down the interstate at 50 miles an hour and sent me sailing into two lanes of traffic sliding backwards.

It was a fluke of nature.

I was not struck by several more vehicles in the oncoming traffic.

After pulling out of the slide and getting off the road, I had to sit and wait for the police, drive a crippled car to the next exit, stand in the pouring rain, using a payphone, spend $25 for a cab to the Oakland airport, rent another car,

and go on to Stockton, where I arrived less than 45 minutes before I was to co-host a live television program on the USA goddamn network.

I was scared out of my wits, and it's a miracle I wasn't injured or even killed.

If I get one more letter or phone call from anybody, because Hertz wanted me to pay, if I get one more letter or phone call from anybody involved in this melee indicating that it might cost me even one more postage stamp out of my pocket, Please be assured that I will file suit against every individual corporation and insurance agency involved in this fiasco for any type of damages, compensation, and relief that my attorney can imagine in his wildest dreams.

Beautiful.

Never heard from them again.

It seems to be a thing.

People are saying it seems to be a thing when you did the letter about the penny difference.

You never heard from them again either.

Yeah.

Well, because.

But, and I know people are saying, why didn't you sue them?

Because I could have actually sued him.

I could, I had shit wrong with me that I could have sold physically, but then I was,

I couldn't stop bumping in Smoky Bound Wrestling.

And if I was going to bump in Knoxville, I might as well bump in the WWF where I'm still getting major money for it.

So

I didn't have time to take off work to work the insurance deal.

But anyway,

Brian, what is it,

if indeed you do know any more than I do, about apparently Bubba the Love Splooge,

who has in the past been friends with, of course, with Hulk Hogan, but

after a series of events, they probably don't speak a lot anymore, but he was telling everybody

this past week that Hogan was on his deathbed.

Pray for him.

The time has come.

Uncle Bean

is near death, and we're all going to get an Orange Grove in California.

The one that got my attention was,

you know, saying that Hulk Hogan was about to die.

And I was like, whoa, that came out of nowhere.

And then a couple other people said, you know, well, actually, I mean, he's 70-something years old.

So, I mean, we could hear that any day.

It's not like it's, oh my God, he's in the prime of life, but still.

Every Monday, he screams at me to buy his beer while a falcon or something flies by.

So we didn't hear anything about that.

And, you know, as I start looking into, oh, what's going on?

Then I see that the source is Bubba the Love Sponge, former best friend of Hulk Hogan.

They had a bit of a falling out when Bubba was taping Hulk Hogan secretly

have sex with his wife.

The sex wasn't secret.

The taping was.

I was about to say, now you worded that in a somewhat unwieldy fashion because he was secretly taping him publicly fucking her.

Well, it wasn't.

Actually, that's not because it wasn't in public.

It was in their house, but it was public knowledge.

Well, it wasn't public knowledge.

It was knowledge in the house.

And

but it was secretly taped.

It was only supposed to be a house show.

There was never supposed to be a recording of this.

That's why Hogan didn't put on his best performance.

That's right.

Free use fornication of some sort there.

But Bubba the Love Sponge apparently went on his show this past week and said that he had a source.

Let me see if there's an original article here.

I have the TMZ article saying it's not happening,

but well, yes,

the denials came soon after, but people were somewhat up in arms at the time, thinking he had gotten some type of tropical malaria or something and was literally hooked up to machinery.

Apparently, Bubba said, allegedly, Hogan is in the hospital, and I heard people say he may not make it.

The source was pretty darn reliable, in his own words.

However, Hulk Hogan's people spoke to TMZ, have an article here, Hulk Hogan Hogan deathbed rumors bogus, brother,

at hospital for neck and back issues.

Hulk Hogan is not on his last legs.

TMZ Sports is told the WWE legend was hospitalized to address lingering neck and back issues this week, but he is by no means on his deathbed.

The speculation started when local radio guy Bubba the Love Sponge went on.

Wait, wait a minute, hold on, hold on.

Is he still on the radio?

And it says local.

I guess that means he's still on in Hogan's backyard.

That's where, that's how it began.

Yeah, he was in Florida originally, you know, but I didn't think he was still on anything at this point.

Hadn't he suffered like homelessness and loss of teeth and all that other stuff?

Or is that somebody else I'm thinking of?

I'm not sure.

He went on the air and stated he heard the wrestling icon was in bad shape to the point where his loved ones were getting called in to say their goodbyes.

Well,

it wouldn't take long, and you'd only need a couple of dimes.

He said that his source was rock solid, but things could have changed since his last.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

I thought he was pretty reliable at the start of the thing.

He's gone from pretty reliable to rock solid.

Rock solid.

A rep for Hogan tells us the 71-year-old isn't close to death.

He's just dealing with more of the same ailments he's had for years.

In fact, we're told Hogan's back to moving around again.

Of course, we previously reported.

Hold on, hold on.

They're trying to perk people up with the fucking health update that's positive that he can move again.

He ain't turned over today.

My God, it's a miracle.

How is that?

I don't know, of course.

How's that positive, brother?

TMZ previously reported Hogan underwent a neck surgery just last month in the the middle of all of his negative publicity.

But by all accounts, it was a big success.

Hogan has had countless procedures done to try and fix what his body went through in the ring during his legendary run, but he has been able to tough it out.

And

yeah, this comes on the heels of the last TMZ story about Hogan trying to buy Hooters.

with his real American beer.

But apparently Hulk Hogan not on his deathbed.

He'll be around for people people to boo for many years to come.

And apparently, Bubba still

employed somewhere.

Awesome Kong slapped the shit out of him with TNA.

God damn it.

I was.

Were you there?

It was like, no, that was like three months after I was.

We'll get to that in a minute.

Three months after I was gone, but it was just, it was when the

Hogan-Bischoff regime

came in.

Yeah.

came all over them.

Came in.

And now both of them deny any creative control over the whole thing or whatever the fuck.

But Bubba was still friends with Hogan at the time.

I, you know, don't know where that was in the overall timeline of the scandal.

And so they put, as I recall, they put the fat fuck on TV a couple of times, had him like do backstage report of whatever the fuck.

And he had said,

blurted out some offensive thing on his show somewhere at Awesome Kong, who also lived down there in Florida.

Apparently, her, I think she did, but she heard it, heard about it, and she just stormed up on him at a tape and started slapping a shit out of him.

And I think they ended up, that's they either suspended her or fired her.

But then, of course,

the other guy wasn't back too much longer either.

But

yeah, they had an incident.

Yeah.

Well,

what do you think about the fact that he's the one breaking this news?

And it's not even true.

After everything they went through, and again, they're not friends from everything we've heard, they're not friends at all anymore.

Well, that's probably why he did it because he

probably knew, oh man,

not only will people pick up on this, but I can really get under his skin because then he's going to have to have a bunch of people deny it and he's going to have to, he's

picking at an old fucking enemy.

They're obviously not close friends anymore.

And under the circumstances, if you were a normal human being and not a publicity-seeking, you know, guy named the Love Sponge,

how many times has he been cummed on, the love sponge?

But if you weren't a publicity-seeking

whore for attention, you wouldn't comment on the guy's precarious near-deathness after what has gone on previously unless you wanted to fuck with him or you're just gloating over it.

But I think he probably went to fuck with him.

You know, it's also a good way to find out who your real friends are.

Like once that rumor gets out there, who calls, who doesn't?

Well, and again, that's another thing is, you know, again, I don't think there was a lot of

they weren't jamming the switchboard at the hospital either way, were they for Hogan?

So I think it's, it it might be a heel program at this point.

Both parties, both entities are full of shit, and it's just a question of which one you are more entertained by their bullshit.

But Hogan still, he still has some, after all of this, he still has people.

Oh, but goddamn, it's Hogan.

I hope he's not dead.

Well, no, he's just

making us coming up.

He's rolling over now.

So any day he'll be up and about.

He didn't sell the elbow drop.

You think he's going to sell this?

But you know what?

You know what could have possibly affected Hulk Hogan Bryan and his career?

I'm glad we talked about this right now.

I'll just bring this up.

You know, he's had the back surgeries and the back problems, and that's what he's talked about.

The most has been the most painful.

You know,

he was misaligning himself

all those years in two different ways.

I bet you can guess one of them.

The big leg drop on those hard rings back in the old days when

they made them out of concrete and

rebar, as Hogan has told many times.

And, you know, not only was he throwing his spine all out of whack when he was doing that leg drop in the ring, but out of the ring, Brian.

You know what the problem was there, don't you?

The problem with Hogan?

The line?

The problem with his hip, his back.

Yeah, I meant that.

He was all misaligning himself because he had,

back when he started making money, he had a big fat wallet stuck in his back pocket.

And he was walking around with that thing and it was misaligning him.

And then he'd do the leg drop and the matches and that boy, there's all she wrote.

That's why he's had the back problems.

If Hulk Hogan.

Instead of sticking all that money and all those business cards from the Hollywood agents back when he was a big superstar, instead of sticking that all in that old-fashioned wallet and sticking it in his back pocket and throwing off his entire physical alignment forever, as any chiropractor will tell you,

if he'd have been dealing with the folks over at Ridge from day one, he would now be the world's champion over 70s gymnast.

That's how much difference it would have made because he wouldn't have had all those millions and millions of dollars in cash he used to have weighing him down in the ass.

Well, again, I don't know if one thing necessarily correlates with the other, but I guess what we can do is say that going forward, Hulk Hogan should probably think about not carrying around a big wallet or even having Jimmy Hart carry it around, but finding a minimalist way that is effective and efficient to carry around his cards and his ID.

Well, I think it's a maximist.

It's not a minimalist, but it's a maximist because it makes the maximum out of the minimum.

And you always want to make the positive out of the negative and the maximum out of the minimum because that makes the world go round.

And folks, folks, our friends, and right now,

if you go to ridgeridge.com, you can see what I'm talking about.

But they have invented some handy-dandy things to make it look like you're not the goddamn elephant man walking down the street with a bunch of lumps in your pockets.

And that was my problem.

I've had the same wallet, Brian.

The old-fashioned leather wallet that folds over since about 1987.

And I still have it.

I never get rid of anything.

But I don't need it it now because the problem became

that I've graduated to a life where I don't really have to go out in public wearing pants.

Allow me to explain.

I could hide my big old fat leather wallet in the back pocket of my pants when I was wearing dress pants because they're dark, they're black, they hide a few bulges, and they're a little saggier to begin with.

And it's got that back pocket.

And, you know, if your ass is wide enough, it doesn't make the wallet look too big.

But

now that I just go out wearing sweatpants or in this weather shorts, if I put my big old fat leather wallet with everything that I've ever owned, or every cart, or every scrap of paper that I've ever had for the past 25 years in the front pocket of my sweatpants or my shorts, I look like I have some kind of giant hernia

or some type of growth that needs to be removed or at least medicinally treated in some fashion.

Do you have that problem?

Well, I got rid of my big fat wallet.

I don't mean a real growth.

I mean anything that looks like that.

You've told me about your growth.

You don't need to go into that.

I've gotten rid of my big fat wallet years ago because it was too much.

Oh, I thought you got rid of the growth.

I got rid of the growth and I decided it's time for

what replaces a growth.

It's time for something that won't be a big bulge.

It's time for, that's not really great either.

It's time for an easy way.

I'm not going to carry cash.

I got my cards.

I got my ID.

Leave me alone.

Ridge.

Well, no, you see, you got to, Ridge is what they've done is they have, they have, and also your keys.

Now, here's the thing.

Stacy immediately grabbed the key holder, unfortunately, before I got a chance at it.

So that's why I got the wallet.

But we're probably going to order some more of each of these things because

If you're tired of having a bunch of keys all jangling in your pocket like a set of loose brass knuckles.

It's like carrying a pocket full of BBs.

You can never get a hold of them.

Or you got the big fat wallet, but it's got a bunch of unnecessary stuff and it's laid out in such a fashion that it just, it's just, it's terrible.

It'll hurt you chiropractically.

And Ridge has come up with this incredible wallet where you can just

put your cards in there and they fan right out.

It's got a strap that you can put your cash under that my my god you could use that for some kind of industrial clamp cash you could use it for cash well no but i'm just saying it's it's very tight your ain't going nowhere secure like of course it boy i'll tell you what wrap that around your balls and that'll fix you up don't do that let's just make sure we say don't do that but anyway this this thing is the size of a a credit card and about

my god that's a hardly a quarter of an inch thick.

Yet again, it expands, and you can put all your cards in there, and you hold the thing, and you got it, and boom, it'll clip right in there.

And it's hard.

So that way, your cards are not going to get bent and damaged.

It's the last wallet you're ever going to have to buy, also, because you can jump up and down in the street on this thing with both feet.

and you would not damage it.

Go ahead, get one and try.

Jump up and down.

You'll break your leg before you'll hurt this thing.

It's made with premium materials like aluminum, titanium, and carbon fiber.

It's got the modern design, holds up to 12 cards plus the cash.

Got a lifetime warranty, 50 plus colors and styles to choose from.

And Brian, this is a new thing that's come up since the last time I got a wallet 40 years ago.

But what is RFID blocking technology?

What the fuck does that mean there, cousin Brian?

rfid

blocking technology hold on i'm what is a digital pickpocketer

you're safe from them i don't know i guess they they only have to get use one finger a digital pickpocker what it does is it uses

what it does is it uses uh materials and special fabrics to disrupt radio waves, preventing unauthorized access to data stored on your chip, in your card or your passport or any other item.

Well, son of a bitch, is that why these people keep coming up to me and just holding these fucking little metallic wands down around my crotch area?

They're trying to read my card.

But anyway, folks,

does it give you peace of mind knowing that all the Ridge wallets have that technology that we just found out about that I didn't know was a thing that could be done?

Well, fuck you, digital pickpocketers.

Can't do that no more not with people carrying their their goods and their cards and their valuables around in a ridge wallet they've got over a hundred thousand five star reviews

and as i said they've uh the key fob is amazing because you clip it into the thing and you just fold them out one at a time and it folds up neatly and if you had to with the key thing if you were going to just for a short stay not for a long term but you could probably take this key thing and keep the keys to your you know, a safety deposit box or a getaway car and you could, you could secrete it on you and boom, if the feds close in.

No, no, again.

You could be off to Guatemala or a South Seas Island or somewhere.

Avoid Guatemala.

That's amazing, but you, you, and you wouldn't be one of jangling around in your pocket.

But I'll tell you what, they have got.

Your pockets organized here.

The people at Ridge have literally reached into your pockets, felt around,

determined what was in there, and figured out a way to organize it all to where you don't look like you've got balls of testicles the size of fucking satchel bags.

And you're never going to lose this stuff because with the ridge air tag attachment, you're always going to know where it is.

You're not going to have the bag flips, you know, like Kevin Sullivan calls them, a bag flip.

When automatically the boys used to carry bank bags, you go, oh my God, where's my bag?

And you'd reach for it.

I do that in the car with my wallet in the console.

Every 45 miles when I used to take trips, I'd be going down the road.

I'd open the console to make sure my wallet was there.

Stacy, bag flip.

You're never going to lose this thing.

You can strap it right onto yourself.

You can keep it close to your heart, heart, heart.

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They're going to ask you where you heard about them.

And please tell them that we told you because you're going to you're going to thank us when you don't lose your and you don't look like you have lumpy legs why you could you can stick this thing you can almost stick this thing in the gap of a young man's teeth in the front that's how thin it is

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You can also fling this thing like a fighting star in martial arts, Brian, and you can

ward off attackers that way.

Once again, we welcome them to our show, our friends Ridge.

Check them out for those of you looking for a new solution who are sick of your old wallet or just an easy way to carry your keys.

Ridge is for you.

One more time, Jim.

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All righty, well, Brian, we talked earlier about

giving you

people an example of how I criticize wrestling to the office instead of to the fans, and whether there's

there might be subtle differences, but also imagine we've been pulling stuff out of the file cabinet.

And

I must preface why I have TNA agent reports with

what it was and what the time period was

like.

This was from August of 2009.

And for anybody who was a fan of TNA wrestling back then, there were more of them then than there are now.

That was what, a couple of months after Dixie had gotten mad at Jeff Jarrett and sent him home,

and he was no longer running the show.

And then

I can't remember in what order it happened, but then suddenly Savio Vega as an agent or producer, whatever terminology you want to use, was gone.

And Road Dog, Brian James, was gone.

And Dutch Mantel,

who was a member of the creative team, and

you know, really a guy who

everybody went to

write a step underneath Jeff to get advice or instruction or whatever.

He's gone.

It was like an Agatha Christie novel, right?

It's like every time you show up, there's one missing fucking person.

So, of course, there I am, the 110 soldier.

And while all these people were disappearing,

Dixie was taking more

interest in what was going on and coming and paying more attention.

Imagine that.

I'd been there for three years, and I know she'd owned it for longer than that.

And so she starts,

and then she starts trying to listen to people around her.

And you know who was around her.

I will use the name Vince Russo just to avoid

confusion in this segment that we're doing here, so everybody knows who it is.

But normally we would just call him by his noum de plume shit stain.

And my old friend Terry Taylor was there.

I found some paperwork related to him.

We'll probably do a next show or two next week.

But anyway,

now Jeff has also called me

at home

sometime when he realized that Dutch was gone and whatever.

And

as I've told a story, he basically said, can you take care of this thing for me?

Don't let him go too far.

Right?

So now I've got that on me.

And at the same time,

the television crew, Keith Mitchell was the producer.

Dave Sahati was the director.

They either obviously pretty much call the shots for the technical crew and et cetera that they used,

but they also, because of the fact that they had lost

the experienced producers and the experienced producers that they had, to be honest, as I've said,

Sabio's accent wasn't truck friendly.

So they had at the same time asked me to not only produce the main matches on the pay-per-views of the televisions, but sit in the truck to advise them on all the matches.

So I've got a bunch of people telling me to do a lot of different shit here at this point in time.

When you say they, who is they?

Who asked you after Jeff has gone and Dutch is gone and everyone's gone?

Who said,

Jim, we need you to step up?

Keith, well, different people.

Jeff calls me and says, Keep an eye on him and don't let him go too far.

That's different because he's not there.

He can't assign you a job.

Yes, no, Keith Mitchell, who was the producer, and Dave Sahati, who was the director of the show, said, Can you please not only agent the main matches, but sit in the truck for all the other agents or producers' matches as well to tell us what's going on

because they were either inexperienced or,

and as I said, in Savio's case, heavily accented, but he was gone and they were wanting me to tell them what they needed to be watching for in the matches as part of my job as producer.

Keith Mitchell had been doing this a long time.

He had worked for a lot of different companies.

I mean, what's that like?

Oh, he

worked for world-class in the early 80s.

Yeah.

But anyway, he still needed a translator.

Yeah, he still needed a translator.

Well, but no, it wasn't that he could.

I think he could speak Spanish.

I don't think he can speak Savio's version of English.

I meant in terms of the booking, he needs someone to

agent the matches, someone to say what to do.

I mean, it's everything.

Well, because it doesn't matter how much experience you have.

Here's the thing: the director is calling the shots for a

depending on how many at a production this level, a five or six camera shoot, but something involving WrestleMania could be a 20 camera shoot.

You can't do that and just on the fly know that a guy's going to suddenly appear from stage left wearing a hood with a fucking ball bat or the guy from the chainsaw is going to drop in right now.

or cue the music or whatever the fuck that's it's

there's a lot of things going on in the truck and the producer has to help

the match producer has to help the show producer and the director understand what the fuck is about to go on before it goes on so they don't miss it

but anyway

so then terry taylor calls me and says well jim dixie wants reports from all the agents because now she's taking an interest, right?

Oh, shit, I got nobody to run this.

And that's where old Russo was attempting to,

he got more power for about six weeks there until Hogan and his buddies showed up.

But anyway,

so they want agent reports.

And I said, Terry, okay,

who's the audience?

And do you want a report that

everything's fine?

Or do you want

how I really feel and let me put some thought into it?

Is this going to because I've, for 20 years, I've on and off done agent reports and i don't know they've ever done it again no we want we want you to tell us what you think just like you tell us that the show's in person

and so we have it all on paper so everybody knows what's going on put it in writing all right

but but it's only supposed to be for the office you know it's only supposed to be for the agents and the producers and the the creative team if i could stop you real quick where are you at this point in time with terry taylor i mean obviously things would change a little later but were you already thinking that, you know, he's kind of a snake, even though you've had this relationship and known him for years or were you cool?

No, well, I know,

you know, I knew that he was somewhat of a

tattletale in some respects, but at the same time, no, we didn't have any problems until I'll get to that in a week or two, because I also have the letter that I sent him after he called to release me.

And I had the call with Dixie.

Then they slandered me in the press.

And I have that.

We'll get, this is an evolving story.

But at that point, it was five.

It's Terry Taylor.

He's working talent relations.

Okay.

This is what you want.

Here we go.

Because at this point, to be honest with you, Jeff ain't there.

So I have little confidence that this is going to go anywhere.

Dutch ain't there.

So I don't enjoy the tapings anymore because at least we can sit and talk.

And I'm doing twice as much work for the same money.

That's why I would, when

Terry called me to let me go, I said, well, I guess we're real far apart because I was about to ask you for more money.

But anyway,

so if anybody remembers, this is the hard justice pay-per-view from August of 2009 for TNA.

And it will highlight some of the issues that we had.

But this is also legitimately,

I can't say everybody did it this way, but this is an agent producer report for the office

on the show that we had just done.

So it might carry some interest for some

wrestling fans out there.

And who does it go to?

Well, this went to Terry Taylor, and then he sent it to whoever the fuck was supposed to get it.

So it's not like I'm, you know, goddamn mailing these things out like a flyer from the 4-H club.

Well, that's my question.

You're not emailing, you know, Dixie, Russo, Terry Taylor, this person.

No, I said, I've embedded Terry Taylor.

You want the agent report?

Here's the agent report.

You work in the office.

I don't care if you set fire to the fucking thing, right?

But anyway, because I figured that's what they were going to do.

But having said that, do you remember when they had Rob Terry, the big British kid, the huge, huge, jacked-up bodybuilder?

I forgot about that guy.

Well, unfortunately, everybody else has also, because he got this spot, you know, but nevertheless.

He was with Doug Williams and Brutus Magnus, who now is Nick Aldiss, and they were the contingent from the United Kingdom, and they were heels.

And

Hernandez,

remember the LAX team of Homicide and Hernandez?

Hernandez is a bit, Sean Hernandez was his name.

And he was the guy that they wanted to be.

And this was a pet project of Dixie's.

And it had validity to it.

That's what I heard.

I heard he was a pet project of Dixie's.

No, no, no, no.

I know the guy.

He was no.

You've heard that too, though, right?

You've heard people say that.

Well, yes, but because of her other

actions, but he was a nice, honest fellow.

But point being, she wanted a Latino superstar, right?

Super Mex, Hernandez.

He's a babyface, and the heels are fucking with him.

So what

the problem was here was as an agent and a producer, and I've mentioned this before,

I can't determine who the,

you know,

what, who the matches are

or who's going over.

I have to take the structure from the creative team

that's laid out and get there some way by producing the match.

And it got increasingly harder without Jeff or Dutch involved to make any sense out of a lot of this.

And we were either being confronted with stuff that either the talent would say that they really didn't understand or couldn't do,

or that they would try to do, but it wasn't their fault that they couldn't do it because it

wasn't doable for them at that particular time.

And so we were trying to put these things together: Rob Terry, big Rob against Hernandez.

Now, remember, Rob Terry was greener than goose shit, and Hernandez is a big

muscle-bound guy trying to get over as a kick-ass baby face, and he's never been a single before.

So

the report was all these guys were on time, great attitudes, took all suggestions and understood my explanations.

I appreciate Vince letting me put this together per my layout idea on my last report because he would book these matches and then we would have to figure out how that it didn't kill anybody involved to do them.

So I said, I told them honestly, they may very well be a pay-per-view main event in 2010, but I felt a regular singles match right now would be a disservice to one or both.

Rob has yet to win even one singles match in TNA, so he remains an unknown quantity to the fans.

His look pegs him as a top guy, but his experience level may expose him without an experienced opponent to carry him and make him a monster.

Conversely, Hernandez is not that guy because at this stage of his push, he needs to physically dominate.

The Brits, Doug and Brutus jobs were to bump for Hernandez so Rob wouldn't have to, then get their heat back by winning their tag team match.

With everyone understanding and agreeing to their roles, I told him they weren't doing a match, but some show biz to get Hernandez his case back and get where we need to be.

Because apparently they had.

What was in the briefcase?

God damn it.

Who knows?

They'd stolen a case from him.

He had something that they stole from him, and he needed to get it back.

It was a briefcase that entitled him to something somehow.

So anyway, Hernandez nailed his promo.

The Brits did their jobs and Big Rob was right there.

And Hernandez went over in a five-second decisive fluke to get his case back, doing what he said he'd do without hurting Rob's image.

The fans enjoyed it.

And all was well.

Billy Gunn helped me to demonstrate the physical aspect of what I was asking for and was a big help.

Good job by all.

And the young guys got a nice lesson in psychology with Rob, especially being grateful and gracious.

I find

when we explain to the young guys reasons behind things and how to think about their positions, they respond well.

Have I changed any at all

now that I'm reading this for the first time in 15 fucking years?

You're nicer.

Now or then?

Then, now, now.

I don't know.

I was kind of

polite then.

But anyway, does this.

There was no one to really just destroy, though, in terms of, I mean, I don't remember the match or anything, but

it's not Orange Cassidy versus Speedball.

But the point is

that

with a professional production,

because I mean, they do these in the WWE and going back to the days when Jack Lanza and George Steele used to phone in their report and record it.

And Finkel would get in at six o'clock in the morning and type it up for everybody.

You always have reports.

You always

try to keep track of what's going on.

And sometimes they're listened to and sometimes they're not.

But what kind of reports do you think they have?

in AEW?

Maybe in WWE under Vince over the last years until he was gone, maybe everybody was walking on eggshells.

It was just like sunshine lollipops.

I would think now there's some element of honesty that's tolerated.

But do they have any in AEW to give any feedback on the talent or the production or et cetera?

Or do you think they're just shooting it as they go?

And again, these are the matches that I personally agented, and then I had some comments about the rest of them, but they gave me Hernandez, as we'll get more into with these,

because

he needed some seasoning and some

instruction

to get to where they wanted him to be.

And he was a great talent and he's eager to learn.

But one of his problems was he was older than everybody realized.

He was like in his 30-something.

And he had never,

besides being in the tag team, had never had a spot.

So, you know, he was kind of floundering with a singles push.

But the next match on this card that I worked with,

Brian, this is 2009, right?

August.

Kevin Nash versus Mick Foley.

Now,

I don't remember

where Mick was in retirements at this point.

But this was what, 10 years after the

Super Bowl had the thing where he got fucking hammered in the head with chairs 15 times?

And

remember by what, 2002?

He was, I believe, he had been done in the ring in the WWE.

And then they made him a

big deal to come in.

He wasn't going to wrestle, I don't think, at first.

And then

they had him wrestling.

Whatever, this is 2009.

And I know people are, well, if he was only 45 at that point,

or whatever the fuck, but

it was Mick.

And,

you know, he's had his physical issues, as everybody knows.

And Nash,

this was not,

you know, he's older than me, I think, now.

So he was almost 50 at this point and with multiple injuries, right?

So.

This is the problem when you have a mark as Booker.

And Russo wasn't the same kind of mark as Tony Kahn is, where he's

almost a fangirl about all these things, like the flying and the gymnasts and the, oh my, the belts.

Russo was a mark

for his own shit.

And his own shit was the attitude era.

And that's all he knows how to fucking do.

And that shit gets old quick, but what gets old

as well is the people that did it, right?

So

they had booked a match and at the

booked a match between Kevin Nash and Mick Foley.

And at the production meeting,

Russo had sat there and blurted out this match that he saw them having in their head.

And I don't know if you can imagine, but he just envisioned that this was raw

from 1999 for Cactus.

I don't know what he was envisioning for Nash because I don't know if Nash ever did any of this shit in his life.

But somehow, Nash was going to do a heinous amount of shit to Mick.

He'd throw him through this, he'd powerbomb him through that, and he'd fucking choke whatever.

And

it sounded like a great fucking match, but I thought, Jesus sage, Christ, he's not living in a real world.

So I have to go

and delay the information over to the talent, right?

And this got increasingly more entertaining to come and tell the guys what they were supposed to be doing as

we lost all of our voices of reason.

And instead, you know, we're at complete mercy of this.

So anyway, I will now read my agent report for Nash versus Foley.

We talked at TV about the issues surrounding this match.

In the interest of fairness, I must point out several facts.

While the first match layout Vince gave them was superior to anything that was done,

Mick told me flat out he didn't know if he had that match left in him.

It wasn't that he didn't want to be beaten up that badly, but rather he knew he wasn't the Mick of 10 years ago and might not be able to do that extensive a job of selling.

At least that's the way he phrased it.

But basically, Cactus came to me and said, Corny,

I don't think I can do these things anymore.

And what the fuck am I supposed to know?

The goofy Italian fuck that took one bump and got brain damage

tells you you need to get goddamn throwing through some furniture, motherfucker.

Right?

So, anyway,

in their defense, the following things were good.

Nash worked harder than he has in a long time and bled more than I have ever seen him bleed.

Probably helped by having his son watching him live for the first time.

This indeed was Kevin's son that passed away here a couple of years ago or however long ago.

He was like 12 or 13 then and he came because Nash wasn't wrestling that much anymore

and hadn't wrestled a regular schedule for years and years.

So this was the first time

that his son was getting to see him wrestle.

At a combined age of around 95 years, both guys did work hard and mixed juice was way beyond what he needed to do if he was just phoning it in.

They both went out and got juice.

50-year-old fucking millionaires in a goddamn amusement park trying to salvage this thing, right?

I'm not even knocking Nash this point

the finish if it had come off as described to me would have been much better than it turned out but there was a mix up on how mick was expecting to take the big boot when he turned which led to the tentative and weak looking final move basically

they were bleeding and blown up and i i can't remember whether mick turned the wrong way or kevin thought he was going to turn the other way But the finish was a popcorn fart.

Overall, except for the finish, it was more than I expected from two guys in this physical shape.

We learned a lesson about putting two guys of this age in a major singles match, and Vince already told me we are heading away from that.

So even though this match caused some consternation, I don't think it was the worst thing that ever happened to us.

They were heading away from the over the hill gang until

three months later when Hulk Hogan showed up.

But do you see what we're working with here?

And by the way, it wasn't just Hulk Hogan.

That's the joke.

He brought along the old Hill gang, the nasty boys, and everyone that was around back in the day were all of a sudden on TNA for one night, or at least one night, starting one night.

So it, it, and again, I know this is the guys, this is Mick Foley, this is Kevin Nash.

My heart bleeds for you know them.

They're tough guys, but this is the kind of

shit you had to deal with when you had people that had never been involved in this shit in a meaningful fashion telling the boys what to do.

You're telling Mick Foley to go out out there and potentially get some more brain damage.

No wonder the same thing happened to Daphne.

Anyway,

would you like to hear about the main event, the three-way between Sting and Kurt Angle and Matt Morgan?

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

No problems with these guys being on time attitudes or taking direction.

And that was something they were wanting us to comment on because so many people had pissy attitudes.

No problems with one exception, which I will explain

Even with his personal issues over the weekend, Kurt laid out the majority of the match and switched it on when he got out there.

I would be lying if I said what the issues were, because as Kurt himself has admitted,

there were numerous ones at that period of time in his life.

And I'm not trying to knock Kurt, but this is what was going on at the time there.

Sting forgot a couple of minor spots, but overall was good as he could be.

He's working his ass off, but he's 50 years old, and we have to realize that.

Morgan continues to grow and take major steps by being in with the top talent.

So, of course, they started burying him months later and kept using Sting and Kurt until he was near death.

The one spot that caused people to raise their eyebrows was where Kurt had Earl Hebner roll out of the ring to check on him the second time.

I raised a flag on that before the match and gave Kurt an alternate suggestion on how to get the referee's back turned, but because of all he had going on and not seeing it as a major deal, I let Kurt decide which to do.

In hindsight, it was worse than I envisioned it.

And it was my fault for not insisting.

But after our meeting with Dixie, the point was taken.

Because I can't even remember again, but in some fashion, Kurt buried the referee by having Earl Hebner roll out of the ring and check on him and obviously miss something else that was supposed to go on behind his back.

And it,

and again, in a professional company, these things are noticed if you've buried the referee.

Now it's just, by God, who could even tell?

But if you'd buried the referee and shit that was supposed to be meaningful and it looked bad, well, somebody

Either Terry Taylor or somebody that might be sitting next to Dixie had gone, oh, why are they doing that?

So she came and,

well, why did y'all make the referee look bad?

And

Kurt, well, we had a couple of suggestions, but you know, we'll do better next time.

Uh, the rest of the finish came off well, and Angle and Matt got where they needed to be to move the story forward.

And then, just before we have open the floor to comments, the random

comments on other matches that I was not directly responsible for, because there's something in here that,

goddamn it, makes sense with what we talked about recently uh said the steel asylum x division match was great while the cage is not tv camera friendly we got some awesome shots all the guys worked hard brits versus beer money was a real good tag match only a few baubles that most who were not in the meeting would not have noticed ODB and Diener versus Beautiful People could have been a disaster.

But it was just enough, but not too much comedy for the show.

I'm trying to be polite on the shit that doesn't really matter.

It could have been a disaster.

You didn't have been a disaster.

But it was good.

That wasn't the follow-up to that.

It avoided being a disaster.

Hold on, I've lost my place now.

Oh, Joe versus Homicide was not good for the reasons we discussed on Monday, and we'll get into some of their stuff with not on any of the particular talent, but with the conditions they were

laboring under.

But we'll get to to that later on at some point.

Okay.

Team 3D versus Booker and Steiner was way better as a match that I thought it might be.

And Steiner did some awesome things for a guy his age.

It was unfortunate that fans were injured.

Oh.

But I've been expecting this for a long time, and I've never been a fan of fighting in the crowd.

as Steve Small will tell you.

Steve Small

was the guy that worked for the company that that I don't remember what his position in the office was, but if they got sued, he was the guy and they had a problem with the park or they had some legal difficulty or heat with somebody.

He was the one that had to try to fucking fix it.

I've never been a fan of fighting in the crowd, as Steve Small will tell you from experience and for the exact reason that ended up happening.

We do not need it, and I hope that this will put an end to that practice without lawsuits or major problems from Universal.

Before we get to the last line here, I don't remember what the specific incident was, but they were doing fighting outside the crowd or in the crowd.

And

when I say fans, that means it was a couple.

Somebody probably knocked a guardrail over, kicked a chair.

Who knows what the fuck it was?

I don't remember.

Because I left the company a couple weeks after, and I don't care if they got sued.

But that's in an amusement park.

There's nothing that they ever did on television, on that television program, where any of the wrestlers needed to fight in the crowd to make it any fucking better.

And finally, I said, overall, this pay-per-view was leaps and bounds better from start to finish than last month's stinker.

We didn't have any classics that will be remembered in years to come, but we didn't have last month's worst pay-per-view match of the decade, Jenna versus Charmel,

to leave a bad taste in the fans' mouths.

I thought I was very diplomatic.

I think that's nothing but diplomatic considering, you know, the fact that everything didn't begin with fuck Russo.

I think it's diplomatic.

Well, but in all honesty, it was three pages of fuck Russo because that's what he realized and it couldn't be anything else.

To explain what was good and bad about the program and the matches, I either had a choice of blaming the talent when it wasn't their fault or blaming, and I don't know how far you want to go with these, I got a bunch more, we'll do it in parts,

but it wasn't, I didn't want to blame the talent for being put in positions where what they were being asked to do wasn't going to work.

So we tried to find ways,

instead of starting from scratch and doing something

positive to begin with, which would have been the easiest and quickest and best thing.

We were handicapped by having to take what we were given by Russo

and then figure out a way to make it work in the real world and either not hurt anybody, not make anybody look stupid, or not bury any of the top talent that we were trying to depend on to draw rating and/sell pay-per-views.

And with Jeff Jarrett, who I always considered the head of the company, Dixie Carter's a rich bitch with fucking, you know, hardworking parents,

He's asking me to take care of the goddamn show.

So I'm either going to goddamn show up and just do whatever the fuck anybody wants to do and say yes and let everything be the shits, or I'm going to help the young guys that are working hard try to learn how to do this.

And I'm going to try to keep the older guys.

several of whom were already on substances to deal with their physical issues, keep from having to kill themselves.

and also potentially try to keep the company from being sued.

So as a result of that, Russo realized that in a roundabout way, every month now, I was sending in 10 pages of why he's a complete fucking idiot.

So, because I don't remember the timeline, was it around this period of time where

I mean, it later came out.

It wasn't just guessing, where he was emailing Dixie, ripping you?

Oh, I don't even remember what time period that was, but I think that would, no, that was much earlier on because Jeff was still around.

No, he'd been doing that

since he because he was ripping Jeff in the same email he was ripping me.

So that, see, that's the thing I feel bad about.

When they brought him back in 2006, I blamed Jeff because I still didn't, I just started myself and I didn't realize

that Dixie, you know,

had some fascination with him and gave a shit about who was working on the creative team or whatever.

So I thought, well, why would Jeff do that?

And he couldn't actually come out at that point in time and say, no, I don't want it.

But later on, when I realized, no, it's fucking Dixie's issue.

She's the one that wants him around.

Then it became more understandable.

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But nevertheless, I got a TV show.

Oh.

You want to hear some TV?

Now, this would be Impact, correct?

This would be Impact the next day.

The next day was the Brits and Beer Money in a street fight.

So that was Nick Aldiss and Doug.

God damn.

I started to say Doug Gibson, that goof in fucking Virginia.

What's the English fellow's name?

Now I'm scared it out of myself.

No, it's Doug Ward.

Doug Wayne.

No, Doug Ward.

Well, he worked as Doug Gibson.

No, Doug Williams.

Oh, God damn it.

Marvin Ward.

That's what I'm thinking.

Marvin Ward.

Well, he worked at all those things.

Not very hard.

Anyway, Doug Williams and Nick Aldiss are the Brits, and they're against Beer Money, who are James Storm and Bobby Roode in a street fight.

And

I said to me, this was the gold star match of the three days.

As always, these guys all reported right on time for the match meeting, had great attitudes, and listened to all instruction.

I told him in light of the afternoon meeting with Dixie, she had started having meetings with talent where she

started trying to put her foot down and shit.

Everybody needs to work hard for the rah-rah.

Everybody's, fuck.

Anyway, I told them they had six minutes to go out and get over and burn the place to the ground or just have another routine bullshit weapons match.

I gave them an outline of a street fight that still told a story and gave them a set of weapons for a serious fight, not comedy.

They all had input as to what specific moves would be and made good suggestions.

It was a team effort.

When all was decided, they did exactly what was agreed on and didn't deviate from from the plans.

In execution, this could have been great or a flop.

It was up to them and they delivered.

And here's the line, Brian, and this made me realize that I knew the guy.

I showed Dispenza how I made the gimmicks and fixed the board to break so he can do it in the future if I'm not around.

That has to be Chris Dispenza, the guy that's suing AEW

for Moxley throwing him down.

This was 16 years ago,

and he wasn't a fresh-faced fucking high school kid.

So I'm assuming he's around 50 at this point.

Maybe that contributes to why he was a little more fragile.

They worked their asses off.

Fans loved it.

Both teams were better off after it was over.

So again,

you know, they're booked.

Okay, they got a street fight.

And we've ended up giving them six minutes.

and

i don't know

storm i'm sure i don't know what rude's experience was and

the the guys from the uk i don't know if they were doing street fights then but they just say go out and have a fucking street fight for six minutes and boom so they had to You don't just go out there and hit each other with a bunch of shit that's laying around.

Work spots with the gimmicks so they mean something.

Gimmick them so they don't hurt anybody.

Do something so it gets a pop and pays off because

the heel has gotten his comeuppance rather than just somebody got hit with something hard.

So, and and they're they were very receptive to that because hey, we want to get over

the only ones that were laying on their ass was most of the high-priced fucking talent over 50,

anywho.

So, that makes some sense, right?

Yes.

So, then

team 3D versus Matt Morgan and Kurt Angle in a tables match with Bobby Lashley on color.

I didn't even remember this happened.

And I actually don't even remember what happened.

Once again, no problems with talent being on time.

I think everyone knew to behave, especially at this set of tapings.

So they've just been dressed down.

Bubba set the vast majority of this up as these newfangled table matches are his specialty, but I gave him the finishing sequence and Bubba nor anyone else had any problem with that.

The dust up with Lashley and Angle worked was a good tease for the future.

The match was as good as a tables match can be, even though I'm not a fan, because the inherent problems, i.e., no false finishes and the difficulty of getting the fans in anything not involving the table.

However,

as they were going home, on the last table tease, Kurt was to pull the table out from under Morgan, but his hip went out as he tried.

And this was when Kurt was packing himself in ice after every goddamn match.

And although Matt didn't go through it, his leg hit the table and broke the legs.

I buzzed the ref from the truck to keep him going.

While we got the replacement table after a few minutes of confusion, we got it and they got back on track.

Editing will fix the finished product, but a lesson was learned that furniture doesn't always work with us.

Kurt was in the floor afterward being worked on by the trainer for his hip, which was the same thing that was hurt after last month's pay-per-view, but he was up and walking shortly afterwards.

You know, again,

you know, there was such a big outcry from wrestling fans around this period of time because this is when WWE decided not to bring Kurt Engel back.

And,

you know, the rumors that at least came out were that they thought he was,

you know, one bad night away from death and they didn't want another death on their hands or the roster, however you want to phrase it.

What concerns did you guys have in TNA?

Because he came in there and had some real physical matches, and the stuff with him and Samoa Joe, a bunch of stuff.

Were there the same concerns in TNA, and did they start to dissipate?

I mean, how what was it like with Kurt Angle around this period of time?

He had the complete opposite problem that most of the high-priced WWF veterans had,

and that most of them wanted to sit around around on their fucking ass and not do shit for their money, but he wanted to work too hard.

He was killing himself.

And not

even with the substances, which were a byproduct of,

he was killing himself, but he was just,

I mean,

that's why people win.

Olympic gold medals probably, because they're just determined and they're driven and they're whatever.

He was not going to let anything stop him from doing doing the goddamn anything he wanted to do, anything he needed to do, anything he was called for to do.

Every night after the pay-per-views, he would be laid on the ground with bags of ice taped to his shoulder, his knees, his hips, his back, neck.

And

this is at a period of time also when it's no secret that Part of the reason why Jeff wasn't there anymore was because Kurt's marriage had not gone well and Karen had been a part of the whole kerfluffle.

And Kurt had personal issues, and

was also obviously as he's talked about.

So, I'm not trying to bury him because I love Kurt Angle.

I think he's an amazing athlete.

We always had nothing but wonderful things to say to each other.

And I loved working with him, but he was going to fucking kill himself.

He was going to break something irreparably, or,

you know, something, you know.

So, not even with the personal problems, just,

and I'm like,

you know what?

I mean, they saw him laying there in ice, packed in ice after every match.

And that's why, again,

you know, I was saying, with this guy, do you want to book him a little less on fucking television?

You know,

just so that he wouldn't have to work so hard so much.

And they, you know, sometimes tried to do that.

And,

but at the same point, when that's what I was trying to do at the time, not trying to be the savior of goddamn

Terry Taylor, didn't want to say he and Russo were buddies anyway, because of the whole God thing.

They have the same delusion and they rode in the same car together.

Me and Dutch, I'd look in my rearview mirror, I'd see Russo and Terry Taylor in the car on the way to fucking Orlando.

And I'm like, how does Terry put up?

But he wanted his job.

That's why.

And that's how he, you know, and so he wasn't going to argue every and everybody else and they needed it or they depended on it or whatever.

But I was not going to just bullshit everybody and say that

the top guys were working hard when they weren't

or that the matches that are booked were should have been pulled off better when they couldn't have been or whatever the case.

And,

you know, sometimes with

Kurt, I I thought they should have said, hey, we can certainly back him off to working one time a month for the summer or the winter or the spring or the fall

or sometime

and just do angles on TV or whatever and light up.

But they, you know,

Russo loved to have all the stars working on TV to weave his Shakespearean magic.

And there's other comments on

this television program that

this is where

Samoa Joe and Homicide had a bad match on the pay-per-view, and they did better

on their TV match and some stuff afterwards.

But the problem was

that Samoa Joe at the time had been diminished.

He'd already had that argument with Nash and etc.

He, they,

they had him wearing the fucking pants, and Russo had him with, remember when he had the tribal face tattoo?

Were you even watching this shit?

I didn't really watch it much, but I remember seeing it because I had to see it because I was a fan of Samojo before then.

Well, yes, and he had to come out with fire dancers at one time.

And the fire dancers, I think one of the members of the fire dancers, he was like related to, but at the same time, he came up to me.

He's like, I'm from California.

I have a college education.

And now they want me to look like a goddamn Bomba the Jungle boy, right?

So

they were down on Joe and he did when he got unmotivated because of disrespect or lack of anybody giving a shit really of what he was doing or just doing his stupid shit.

He'd gain a little weight or he'd slow down.

So they had talked to him.

And I said, in the past year, Joe's gone through a switch from baby face to heel, an in-ring layoff due to storyline, a change in his gimmick, the birth of his baby, and other professional and personal changes.

And it's possibly just lost focus and/or motivation.

His renewed fire and performance on Monday and Tuesday after being talked to hopefully bears this out because I believe he has a lot to offer.

I'm not sure the new pants he's wearing are flattering and the facial tattoo.

wears off in any kind of competitive match.

This may need to be addressed.

I wonder if we could tell him that the most important thing is his physical performance and we could adjust his look if he's not comfortable with it.

Hint, hint.

Very diplomatic.

Pope De Niro, old Elijah Burke, had a good debut with

Consequences Creed, who's now

the New Day fellow, Xavier Woods.

And you had Elijah Burke, obviously, in OVW.

Yeah, well, we brought him into,

he had never wrestled before he came to one of our tryout camps.

And I think he's the only guy,

maybe that we ever took that didn't have any wrestling training whatsoever in a tryout camp.

I said, I've always found him a hard worker with a lot of charisma.

Blah, blah, blah.

But anyway,

there's much more, but we're running long.

But we will get into some interesting things

over the next few weeks, including,

well our friend uh sheik bashir that was that had been uh canceled previously poor old sean davari that had been kicked off smackdown and the upn network he comes in see i don't remember that they brought him in as sheik bashir

yes i think it was abdul bashir wasn't it Did Russo see Martin Bashir on TV?

Is that where he got it?

Well, no,

they had a group of the world elite,

which constituted Eric Young, because he was from Canada, Bashir, because he was from wherever they were saying he's from, Persia.

I don't fucking know.

The guys from England,

because Russo's like, oh, they must all be all foreigners.

So they got to be heels in a group together.

Oh, this was all fun.

This was leading up to

the big finish between me and TNA.

But anyhow, that's, I mean, is this,

odd that you should be asked to turn in comments?

But

no, that's not odd.

But the same thing is every, I found every time you turn shit like this in,

somebody don't fucking like it.

Then you're just hurting people's feelings.

And you never hurt anything back, right?

It was a one-way thing, you sending your notes.

Oh, yeah, no, they don't like grade it and send it back when you miss,

you know, and no, they,

and again, everybody knew

that it was

everybody, and they had brought Scott Damore, I think, was back at that point.

They brought in some new agents.

I think Lance Diamond, Simon Diamond,

his real name's Pat Kenney at 18 names.

I like, you know, various of these guys.

I think they tried to.

I tried to talk them in that time into bringing D'Lo Brown in.

Maybe they did, but a lot of those guys didn't have as much experience and hadn't been in the business long enough as the guys that were in the main events,

as I've illustrated with some of these names.

So they wouldn't listen to them, and these guys didn't want to tell them what to do.

Which, as I've also illustrated in these notes, you were expected to at some point tell these guys what to fucking do.

And at the same time, they wanted their jobs.

They didn't want to tell Dixie that her pet

little

Shakespearean writer there was a goddamn imbecile.

It was fucking her show up.

And the boys, especially the

main event guys, would just do what they wanted anyway.

So we just tried to come up with shit that was palatable for them and still get to the same place they were supposed to.

Whereas the younger talent that still may be in a prominent position but didn't have the stroke,

They would just sit there and look at me like,

what the fuck are we supposed to do?

This doesn't make any sense.

And then we'd figure something out.

As long as Jeff was there, it kept me and Russo from having not only to coexist and actually work directly with each other, asking each other back and forth questions,

but it also gave an ultimate authority to go to when something didn't make sense.

And I was had to tell Jeff,

as a guy who knew, the talent can't figure out what to how to do this.

Or they've, you know, remember the famous incident where the first question everybody asked me was, how can we have a finish to this match when there was never actually a start to the fucking match?

The bell never rings to start the match.

And Russo's helpful suggestion was, nobody will notice.

But that's the only thing that anybody noticed every time I gave it to him.

So you'd go to Jeff and he'd say, do it the right way.

But that was gone.

So everybody knew it was going to be me trying to put these matches together that I'd already been given by a complete imbecile that didn't understand that they couldn't be done and the stories were direct.

So it was a matter of time.

Other than that call after he first left, did you hear from Jeff at all during this period of time or was Jeff completely kind of not talking to anyone?

No, then he was just, he was wherever he was at.

Because he knew it was

at that point a lost cause.

Anyway,

he was probably one of the ones that knew that Hogan was coming, I would think, first.

You know, in the end, we would all hear you say various things and know what you think about Dixie Carter.

And she certainly proved herself to be incompetent, I think.

She was able to fund the thing with her dad's money, but she thought she knew it.

She thought she got it.

She thought she knew the right people.

And nothing ever worked.

Were you already feeling that way about her at this period of time?

Were you already thinking, you know, the problem, like, it's never going to be better because we have Dixie here.

It's not even just about Russo.

It's just about her.

Well,

not really because until this time period, I mean, she would show up.

She wouldn't even come to all the TVs, but she'd be at a lot of them.

And Her big thing was getting there in time to get her makeup done and her hair done.

And she would go out and sit in the impact zone

and take pictures with the the fans and sometimes even holding the belt so she can take pictures with the fans.

And

yes, she's walking around and you don't go up and go, well, fuck you, you know, or whatever your day, Dixie, but

I really had very little interaction with her for the first two, two and a half years because otherwise than try to be polite in the hallway and saying hello, she didn't really interfere

with what we were doing on TV day.

I don't know what she was like in the office in Nashville for the people that went there.

And

I never thought about sitting down and having a long conversation with her because I knew that she didn't understand wrestling.

And

why am I, you know,

other

people wanted to talk to her and get friendly with her because then she's the boss and,

you know, she will continue to employ them.

I dealt with Jeff.

I was working for for Jeff.

I'm not there to be nice to people.

I'm there to work and do this fucking show.

So I would,

you know, nod and say hi and pass comments with Dixie, but I never had occasion to interact with her that much.

And it was one of those deals where I need five minutes or five years.

Anything in between ain't going to do either one of us any good.

And

she had been made aware of the fact that I would just as soon have run over fucking Russo with a pickup truck and then backed over him to pick up the goddamn unbroken pieces from the very start.

And after I

gave my notice to Jeff and Dutch, it was talked out of that and continued to show up there, I told her at the start,

I'll work with him, I ain't gonna beat him up, I'll work with him, but that's it.

We ain't gonna be friends.

And otherwise than that, until this time period where she realized She's getting reports of all the problems with talent and everybody's got a bad attitude and people are showing up late or don't want to do this

and jeff is gone and dutch is gone and all of a sudden she realizes wait a minute

you know they were actually kind of running this thing because yeah russo

comes up with all this

storylines

but if the guys don't want to do what he

wants them to do, they instead of just doing what they want to do, we need to have somebody else to figure out how to make it palatable or talk them into it or do something.

And that's the

service that all the people she let go were performing.

Do you think in her heart of hearts, if she does indeed have one,

do you think she realizes she was wrong?

Do you think she understands how important Dutch Mantel was to the company

and that you were for a time to the company?

Do you think she realizes all these years later, as much as she may personally like Vince Russo, that maybe he wasn't the person whose creative vision she should let her company follow?

I mean,

what do you think?

I don't think that people ask her every three months just to keep track of, you know, how she feels now, but I haven't ever heard that she's ever realized that Russo was a fucking imbecile and it just did damage after damage.

And,

you know, maybe she knows that Hogan and Bischoff were a mistake.

She might have figured that out.

But

I think old Vinny Rue was smooth enough to convince her that he knew what the fuck he was doing.

And she's never

abdicated it, or whatever the correct term would be.

And I don't know

if she realizes that,

you know, she could have been a big, important part of the history of wrestling in a positive way.

if she had provided the money and,

you know, for all intents and purposes after that, just stayed out of the fucking way and don't ever make any suggestions.

But because she fancied herself,

she's like the wrestling version of that ice Barbie at Christy Gnome that dresses up in costumes for photo ops.

She would come as the owner of the company, she'd come and run the knockouts out of the makeup chair to get her makeup done to go out and sit with the marks.

She wanted to be on Real Housewives of Nashville or some shit.

She fancied herself some type of rich, hotty-totty celebrity in Nashville and has that kind of outlook.

So she thought she had to put herself in there somewhere just to make sure everybody knew she was there.

But if she'd have just stayed out of the goddamn way and provided the money,

maybe it would have been a different story.

Do you think it would have worked out better for Jeff around this period of time if he had just plowed her with wine?

Oh,

if you had put a period after just plowed her,

I think you mean plied her.

I don't know.

I think you mean plied her with wine, but

you know, that's the thing.

Jerry Jarrett, bless him, he's gone now, but he swore up and down to me.

He was laughing.

He said, you know, Russo's fucking her.

You know, because he was the first one to have to go through that.

He quit the company that he started to not have to deal with Vince Russo and didn't speak to his own son for years after that.

And he was convinced that Russo was fucking her.

I said, no, of all the rumors, Jerry, I promise you, not because I think she wouldn't, but because I know that he wouldn't have the balls too.

But Jerry was convinced of it.

Is that because I said, you were there at the start.

Why does she think

that he should be involved in anything?

It's like the Vince Shawn Michaels rumors from people who were there.

When they say that they thought there was something going on, it's because of the same kind of attitude.

I can't understand any other reason why this person will be tolerated.

Unless they were fucking, nothing else seems logical.

You tell that person to fuck off.

And, you know, it turns out when they went to, I guess, what's the story?

Jeff went to Dixie for PR because she was a Nashville PR person.

And then she hooked them up with her dad and Panda Energy.

And I guess the real thing was she just wanted a job.

She wanted to be involved with the whole thing.

Well, that's she inserted herself in the middle of the thing and saw a chance to be on television.

But yeah, their original investors had conned them with information and inflated the numbers.

So they thought they were doing.

better than they were.

And they had gone to her for PR for her firm in Nashville or whatever, advertising.

But when they brought up in conversation with her that,

yeah, geez, you know, our investors are screwy and we may be in trouble here with this.

That's when they found out her father was a goddamn multi-millionaire Texas oil man.

And

that's when she said, oh, maybe my dad would be interested.

They're like, who?

What?

There you go.

Oh, well.

Like you said, something we will come back to, your notes, not just from TNA, but you have found all sorts of notes that we will.

Yes, I've got we could we could read for days and it might be more goddamn entertaining than the current day stuff, but uh

going from

from one rich bitch to another is the only segue that I can think of to describe this

next topic.

So we might have to deal with that and just

put one of those over bitch

on YouTube, Brian.

But

have I understood now that Tony Khan has done an interview where he's just saying the ratings are

great

and everything's great

in TNA television land?

Oh, not in TNA.

I don't think he's talking about TNA.

I'm sorry.

I can't tell one vanity project from another.

I'm sorry.

Apparently, Tony Khan, I have video here in an AEW hat, sunglasses, is in Cannes for the Cannes Film Festival.

I thought you said he was in the cann.

Is this the Cannes Film Festival or something else?

There's something going on in Cannes right now, and Tony Khan, of course.

Do you have Tony Khan in the can?

Well, let him out.

Well, Tony Khan's there, and the question of the viewership came up.

And I will say, and I've said this before, we've heard from a couple of TV executives who have both completely shot down the idea they had 500,000 streaming viewers for every episode of Dynamite.

We've heard from people within wrestling, same thing, shoot it down.

I know some people who got in touch with me from the entertainment industry, they shot it down.

And then there was a report the other day from one of the wrestling reporters I saw, I forget who, and I apologize.

Same thing.

If they had, I think the quote was, if they were doing that amount of viewers, you'd be seeing executives doing backflips.

Yeah.

Well, that's the thing.

It doesn't make any sense to begin with because they

went on Netflix without losing

really they were already on the downhill rating slide they've lost some people since then but it's kind of stabilized but they were already losing viewers they didn't lose any appreciable amount of viewers with the netflix switch so suddenly half a million people as many as are watching on television had now just decided to watch this brand new program that

doesn't even get promoted by its platform.

And on that topic, we'll see where we are at the end of the program.

As of now, due to the Juneteenth national holiday, we do not have ratings for AEW Dynamite because this is an interesting episode to see what the ratings are going to be for this one.

Boy, howdy.

Let's go to this audio now, Jim.

Tony Khan and Can talking to Yahoo Finance.

Tony Khan in the can.

It feels like 2025 is, in a lot of ways, the best year we've had.

I mean, we're having a good.

How big is the business?

How many sales do you bring in?

I mean, is it making money?

Like, what do you do?

Guys, we're doing fantastic.

This was a huge year for us.

We grew the business so much with Assimulcast.

We brought in new audience with Max and streaming, but also we've been able to grow our cable audience year over year.

Frankly, that cable and

let me stop it right there.

Wait, what?

There's a bunch in his

statements there that

might take a little while to verify, but I think we can stop on that one right off the bat.

It's demonstrably

factually, statistically correct that their viewership on cable has declined year over year.

Is it not?

By everybody that's done a report on that type of thing?

Have they all been doing

flawed work?

Yeah, WrestleNomics puts out reports.

There's an annual one, but they put out reports all the time about the numbers and the trends.

At best, you could say they've held steady for a bit.

But year over year, there's no way they're up.

And

not even no way they aren't up.

And then in terms of the key demo, I think it's the same thing.

That's down year over year.

So I'm not sure exactly what he's saying.

And in terms of the simulcast adding new people,

that remains to be seen.

And how many people.

But okay, but if

it added a couple of hundred thousand new people, that would only kind of offset the couple hundred thousand they've lost since this time a couple of years ago.

But do you think that Tony doesn't mean to just

make

incorrect and lying statements, but that he's just so used to, so accustomed to saying everything's great and everything's up that it's muscle memory and he doesn't think about what he's blurting out?

Well, the other thing is it is important to try to posture and present everything in a positive way, not just for

wrestling fans, but he's over there in Cannes for a reason, for the business community, for people who want to.

But that's why I was saying he was doing such a good job of saying stuff that you couldn't just Google and find out was bullshit until he got there.

And then he's making broad declarative statements that are completely, easily disprovable.

So he shot himself in the foot, didn't he?

By the way, I don't even know who this interviewer was.

What was the question?

What kind of a you got like sales money?

You got

what kind of are you taking in money?

Are you stealing anything?

Are you taking what do you, how much you got cash in your pocket right now?

Yeah, he was a real professional.

But it's a benefit to someone like Tony, who's a distant number two in terms of how you could publicly present things, again, to the business community beyond wrestling fans and everything that gets on social media,

when you know you have a streaming partner that isn't releasing the numbers.

It's like, are you in the CIA?

Well, they won't say yes.

They won't say no.

He could say anything.

And he doesn't even have to give a number.

He could just shake his head and go, that's kind of what I've heard, which is what he's done in the past.

And he gets away with it.

But let's

go back to the can Lion,

Tony Khan.

Well, actually, our cable audience when we started simulcasting went up, and we have a great audience on Max streaming every week, too.

So we have been able to do that, and we've really maintained and grown a great audience over the years.

uh we say it's we're the best wrestle and i really believe that's true i think we have the best roster of wrestlers in the world it feels like 2020 oh and that's where it cuts off and it loops back

yeah it

you know he does good with the the hype when he speaks in generics you know and and they're not gonna hold his feet to the fire of well is it really great

Is it only semi-great?

That type of thing.

But when he

gives statistics that you can look up and it ain't that way, then.

But again, he's hoping that this is not a wrestling press question.

And he's just hoping people are going to just believe that and not check.

Again, he looks like a maniac.

He's Tony Khan.

That's one of the things that kind of goes against him.

But like you said, it's an interview where clearly he's just allowed to say whatever he wants and he's not going to be called or checked on anything.

And he's taking advantage of that.

And you can't blame him.

Again, he's over in Cannes for a reason.

But a company of growth, I mean, I don't, you know, having Wembley one year skews things for like one year, but if you look at everything else, again, the best thing you could say maybe about this year is holding steady.

Not talking about the cable deal or anything, just talking about the television ratings and the arena shows and everything else.

Well, where are they at?

Time flies.

Where are they at right now in terms of when did they consistently drop below?

700,000 people and stay there.

Because remember,

we did the ratings segment for years and they were at 800 and 700 and something thousand.

But how long has it been since they dropped below that precipice?

It's been a while.

Again, I don't have the exact number.

I want to say it was a little less than a year ago they had gotten into the 500s.

Remember that?

Well, yeah, they've been in the 500s, but

they bounce back and forth between high fives and low sixes.

And then every once in a while, they'll do something

a little bit better, like the, you know, cage match thing they did, or they'll do something a little bit worse because something else is on TV.

But that's, you know,

it's down year over year.

I'm sorry.

It was down year over year before they were streaming anything except pissing out their own window.

Yeah, and then I don't know if you saw, but Dave Meltzer

responded to the response that everyone was having to this interview.

And again,

I'm sure he did.

It's not just us.

Other people pay attention to the numbers.

Other people talk about the viewership.

Other people,

more vociferous than us, have called out the bullshit of the streaming numbers, which Dave was really the one to go out there and champion and get behind, even though it doesn't make any sense that no one you talk to that works in the industry believes it.

But when he got called out for it, Dave started jumping in on Twitter.

And

then he started calling other people grifters for lying to naive fans and trying to make money from.

naive fans because he's the only one who tells the truth.

And if you're upset about any of this stuff stuff with aew now you should have gone back and read the stuff that he was writing about them five years ago he told you everything that was going to happen and you should have just listened to him well and also for heaven's sake

the grifting fans thing i i can't can't stomach anyone grifting fans especially naive fans Dave goes right straight for the stupid ones.

He doesn't worry about the naive fans.

Well,

I'm glad that Tony is, you know, getting a can full of

press over there.

Listen to this.

Someone here, a user named Useless Positivity, quoted back Dave saying, I don't defend anyone, least of all Tony Khan, unless it's something factually incorrect.

And then the person wrote, Freudian slip, you'll only defend Tony when he lies.

And then Dave responded, sorry, Tony Khan ruined your life by creating a non-WWE company and not failing like you spent six years insisting.

I don't even know who this guy is.

I was about to say, is this just some random fan that Dave again, you've insulted my boyfriend, a type of tone to him?

Why does he jump into conversations that he's not referenced in or involved in?

If you had listened to me, you'd have read my article in November 2019 looking at the cable landscape in AEW and

you'd have at least not gone in denial for so long or be mad every week

about

and what is the fellow denying and is mad about because what Dave wrote made it sound like he defends Tony when he lies you know again Dave

did that did he just he proved it every time somebody said goddamn Tony Connie he bakes a shitty meatloaf Milt says, I've been to his house.

His meatloaf is fantastic.

I've never had meatloaf that good.

It's just, it's, it's bizarre.

Here's another one.

Again, someone, I don't have the original tweet here.

Jeff H on Twitter was responding to something Dave wrote.

And I'm assuming it's about Tony.

He can't book.

He said top stars and booked them into irrelevance.

He can't produce a show to fit the time allotted.

He can't get anyone over.

He is running AEW into the ground, and all you do is defend him.

I'm paying attention to 2025, and the Tony Storm gimmick is horrible.

Dave wrote, I cover wrestling facts and analyze them.

I'm sorry when it hurts people.

When AEW was down, I said it was, and why.

When it was up, I said it is, and why.

Same with every company.

I don't defend anyone, least of all him, unless it's something factually incorrect.

Not being able to fit into time slot is factually incorrect.

Those overruns are approved ahead of time.

Running the business into the ground is also incorrect.

Well, again,

we don't want to make this too much about Dave.

There is a segment there sometime in the future.

Is there anyone anywhere near wrestling who has destroyed their own reputation through their own behavior on social media more in the last six years than Dave Meltzer?

It's not even just about AEW or Tony Khan.

It's the behavior.

It's all the tweets.

It's the talking down to people.

Just sounding like a dick.

The lack of self-awareness of realizing you're not smart just because you constantly tell people you're smart, you study, and you know all these things.

I don't know if I've ever seen, there are very few people, like I said, in pro wrestling, not just journalists, who have taken themselves down to the point he has.

And again, I got to think it's affected the business because we've heard a lot.

We've heard from a lot of former observer readers and website subscribers.

Again, more about that in the future.

Well, but now that that's not fair to say, because there's a lot fewer wrestling fans in general than there used to be, thanks to productions like AEW and the like.

People have just said, fuck it, we'll go watch fucking cribbage.

Yeah, well, that's the Tony Khan update, according to him.

And we don't have numbers.

That may be the closest thing we get to ratings.

We'll see how things go.

But according to him, I can tell you, they're great.

Everything is great.

And the streaming has only increased the audience.

That's up year over year on cable.

Yeah, well, I've got to go right now and emit a stream.

So we're going to take a short break and we'll be right back.

and we're back oh i feel so much better all right

brian now that i feel better would you like to start making everybody feel worse and talking about the grand slam from arena mexico in uh aew land their big two and a half

and six minute hour fucking extravaganza or whatever it was they're endless in the states endless in other lands i want to talk about it.

You know, before we get going with the matches and the many, many, many people in the many matches.

Many, many people.

What did you think of the look beyond AEW?

Because it was really more the Arena Mexico look than any AEW look.

It was more like AEW broadcasting a live show from Arena Mexico than AEW Dynamite.

Yes.

And well, it always looks better when you've got a big crowd in a big building.

And they did.

And now

the thing is, they didn't fill the place completely up, but I'm not even blistering them about that because apparently

this was a Wednesday night.

They always run Fridays in Arena, Mexico.

They had some other show.

Did they have like three or four shows in this giant 18,000-seat building all in like a seven or eight day period?

They were, yeah, they had a few things going on.

So you can't fault them.

I don't know how many they did have.

If that,

has the Border Patrol released that information yet maybe you can find that but it was a big crowd it had to be at least 10 000 people

so that looks good and it it had a different look than their

honestly the set they've had lately with the screen and the entranceway so close to the ring sort of looks like the old

game show set type of thing or you know sound stage in orlando tna impact zone type of thing but this was an actual arena now

that fucking entranceway they had with that long flight of stairs, I said, one of these motherfuckers is going to just take a horrible bump or they're going to try something, but they didn't do it, thankfully.

But boy, when you come out in an arena like that with TV lights in your face and all this other shit going on and people, and you're trying to be

yourself, right?

You don't want to look down at these 10-inch wide steps, like 10 or 12 of them in a goddamn row, headed straight down at a 45-degree angle.

I don't know why they did that.

But

did you find any figures yet?

Actually, I do not have any figures.

I'll keep looking.

Well, I figured that there was still a lot of figures there.

Sockface is worse gargling in Spanish than he is in English

because he had to do the bilingual

introduction and he's just so at the start of the thing over the top with the.

But nevertheless, what did you think before I go into this, Brian?

Honestly and truthfully, what did you think

about their choice of having Hangnail Page come out and speak in nothing but Spanish for the first five minutes of the program?

Two separate thoughts, which may not exist together well.

I thought that was really cool for the people there, and that's a really cool thing for Adam Page to appear at Arena Mexico and do a promo in perfect Spanish.

Sounded great.

On the other hand, for the viewers at home,

they may be like, What am I watching?

His SAP on?

I'm not sure what's happening, but it was a long promo in Spanish.

I doubt it ran people off more than

may not run them off as much as the average Adam Page promo.

You know, again, like I said before, this dynamite felt more like

AEW live from Arena, Mexico

versus AEW Dynamite on the road in Mexico.

Well, and that's part of the problem: Tony is a mark

for this type of stuff and wants to be so authentic that he will sacrifice the

viewing experience of

his goddamn television audience.

And

I'm actually impressed that Adam Page can speak Spanish.

He took it in high school.

I don't know how he speaks Spanish, but he speaks Spanish.

But he came out and instead of, again, it's a wonderful babyface thing for the local crowd.

And it's impressive

for the American audience that this guy is bilingual.

Many people would have suspected he was by something not lingual.

So he's showing a talent.

I'm not arguing with that.

I'm arguing with the choice that they made not only for him to never speak any English, but

that somebody had the brilliant idea, probably Sockface, because I'm sure in the production meeting, he pipe, I speak Spanish.

I know all the holes in Spanish too.

So the idea was he was going to translate

in between

remarks what Adam Page was saying to the United States television audience.

And that didn't work

for one reason because Paige never gave him a break to.

And I mean, it's it, he, Paige apologized at the start for, you know, if my

that's what at least Sockface is telling us, if his Spanish wasn't good, so he didn't speak like quickly.

He wasn't talking like Desi Arnaz.

But at the same time,

what a great thing.

Well, I'm just saying, so you know, he wasn't that good, but he wasn't making a statement and then pausing so that the interpretation could be given by Sockface.

And Sockface is doing

like a golf announcer underneath it.

And he just told the people that he's saying that his dick is red and raw, and it appears he's gotten an infection from whatever the fuck he's saying, right?

You couldn't hear not only because Dick was golf announcing it, but because Paige, who had the PA mic, was then talking over it with the next statement.

So it sounded like the San Antonio TV with the English and Spanish announcer standing side by side, except they were calling golf.

And so that's the,

I know it, again, I can't speak Spanish, but I assume if you can, it wouldn't have been hard for him to say two or three things in Spanish and then kind of bring the English-speaking people up to date.

Because even if the idiot Mark Announcer had been able to translate it properly, it's not like you hear it coming from the babyface.

And even though there were 10,000 people there in Arena, Mexico,

there was somewhere around, give or take, 600,000 watching him in the United States that are going, what the fuck?

Are you ever going to tell us what you're saying?

Because the other, you won't let the other guy and we can't understand him anyway.

He's not that interesting when we know what he's saying.

But when we don't know what he's saying,

I was just waiting to see if he's going to fuck up any of the Spanish.

How would he just yell pinga?

What did you expect him to do then?

He would fuck up the Spanish.

Well, I mean, if he fucked up and they started laughing at something or something, you know, like they, oh, he just

said his mother had wings.

I don't fucking know.

And that's another thing.

And again, we don't have too much data.

In fact, the only data we have, and I've looked in various places, including the recent observer, including WrestleTix, which has nothing really right now, and

everything else, WrestleNomics.

The only information we have is what AEW has said.

And they're saying it's about 14,000.

Okay.

I wouldn't argue with that based on the look of it because they had the entrance blocked off the end of the arena and everything else looked full.

So I think it's fair to assume it's somewhere between 10,000 at minimum and that.

I don't think that's unfair.

They're doing great business in Mexico, running that building four times this week, drawing crowds like that.

I'm hopeful that the AEW crowd doesn't fucking come in and kill their business.

Well, you know, my question, though, is more about the makeup of the crowd, because

it was a crowd with a lot of heat, the way you would imagine a crowd in Arena Mexico was.

We always hear that Arena Mexico has a good amount of tourists visiting Mexico City amongst the crowd.

And also the crowd seemed pretty aware of a lot of the main things happening in AEW and certainly the personalities.

And you could tell by the

So, I mean, that's the other thing.

Adam Page,

you know, I guess that's my question.

Without knowing anything, I wonder what the makeup of the crowd was.

What

traveled for this?

Did people travel there?

Was there a good number?

I don't think they would have had a ton of tourists on a Wednesday night.

I think that's a weekend thing.

And the tourists wouldn't necessarily be up on AEW anyway.

This was probably more of a,

I don't know how the Mexican hardcore audience consumes their knowledge.

are they on the internet wrestling sites you know down there is that the the crowd that's that does that are they you know it in some way

keeping up with

wrestling is is there a mexican version of the really die-hard internet aew fan base in the united states is the question i'm making or asking and i would imagine you know,

that that was a large part of the audience as they promoted it down there.

The magazines,

the magazines and newspapers down there are still big with wrestling, are they not?

In terms of news, I don't think, I haven't heard that they get TBS or TNT in Mexico, and one would think that that would have been brought up in all this conversation.

Yeah, again, I don't know enough.

That's why I'm asking the questions.

I don't know.

Well, god damn it.

I just

asked asked some questions too.

And then I saw a picture.

And again, correct me if I'm wrong, anyone out there who likes to correct me.

I saw a picture that I believe was a ticket to this event that someone in the arena was holding up and they took a picture of it.

And it was like CMLL

making fun of WWE and AAA because whatever it was in Spanish, it translated to something along the lines of tradition cannot be sold.

And in the whatever it said in Spanish, they made sure to have the letters WWE.

And then what really stood out is AAA, A-A-A.

When all of a sudden you see that in the middle of a word for no reason, like it was a little message, a little shot from one to the other.

Jesus.

Well,

they're prickly down there.

But anyway,

so the hangnail did the promo, and then he walked out.

And then it was time

for the first match of the evening, Brian, where I've got to admit I saw something

that it's been

53 years now that I've been watching wrestling and I've never seen before.

A match that was so crowded that the partners and the teams couldn't even stand on the ring.

A 14-man tag team match started.

I'm not making this up.

Bandito and Templario and Atlantis Senior and Jr.

and Adam Cole and Brody King and Danny Garcia

wrestled Dax Harwood, Chi-Chi-Chi-Chia,

Kyle Felcher, take a shit, Lance Archer, Josh Alexander,

and

Volar Jr.

Volador Jr.

Volador Jr.

Volador, whoa.

No, no, no, that's Volar.

Volador wasn't junior.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Volador Jr.

Volador Sr., I should say.

Well, just Volidor is what we call them.

He was a legend of Triple H.

Yeah, he wouldn't have been senior until there was a junior.

You know what?

I'm ought to just come out that way.

A fucking guy like 20 years old, have his gimmick as dipshit senior.

And they go, well, who's goddamn junior?

I ain't had him yet.

See, the trick would be to find someone who's like 20 years old who's going to come out as the masked dipshit junior.

But if their body didn't look so young, but they were young.

So then you get like 60 years out of them because no one knows exactly how old the mass wrestler is so then dipshit senior can have multiple generations of dipshits after that i think you're talking about atlantis now

oh uh volador

no you're talking about atlantis now with multiple generations of dipshits because

holy crap

so apparently the only person that lucked out was cash wheeler didn't make it there was travel problems for a few of the boys they had to do a couple substitutions and poor cash was supposed to be in his thing.

This match was a fucking train wreck.

You know what?

If you had it on mute, you would have no idea what was going on because everyone's just standing in the ring, but it's not like in the lumberjack match position.

It was so

there was one, if there were one guy from, well, there were, there was,

if they was one guy from each team in the ring wrestling, there was one more guy from each team on the apron in the corner where the partners are supposed to be.

And the rest of them just stood on the floor down on, like the manager.

This is the manager position for a team where I would have been managing.

And so it was no secret who might get tagged in next

because it's the only one you could reach.

And then I wore out to fast forward on this thing.

How long?

This must have been 20 minutes long.

And it just was endless people in and out and

doing things back and and forth.

And

finally, after however long, everybody

just dove all over the place, and half the people in the match fought off.

And Dax was left in the ring with Atlantis, who is as old as the actual city of Atlantis.

When he lived in Atlantis, you could lay in your backyard and get a sunburn.

It looked like the, do you remember when they had the fight with Angelo Mosca and his Canadian Football League rival at the reunion when they were both 80 and on canes and walkers?

Oh, the guy knocked Angelo Mosca right out.

Yeah.

Well, that's because Angelo didn't see it coming because he was trying to park his walker.

That's what this looked like.

This fucking guy, I said he looked like a baked potato with a lucha mask on, but he's throwing these punches and his fist is kind of open.

Either that or arthritis won't allow him to close it, but they're just weak and it's he's stiff, not stiff like

stiff in the way that he's landing blows hard, stiff in that his body parts will not move.

He looks like the goddamn 10 man before he was oiled.

And poor Dax then kicks the shit out of him

and does several things to him and then picks him up off the ground, holding him by the head, and had to say something to him,

possibly like Amigo, this is the finish.

And Atlanta small packaged him and beat him one, two, three.

It's out of 14 fucking guys,

including

on the other team, a couple guys that don't even work in AEW regularly.

They had to have a senior citizen that you said he was 62.

Goddamn Bull Curry was moving better at 65.

He beat Dax Harwood just because why not everybody else does?

First of all, was this the not that this justifies anything, was this the payoff to the angle last week where FTR beat up Atlantis and Atlantis Jr.?

Well, apparently.

Just to be in the middle of it.

It wasn't even supposed to be like FTR versus them.

It was just this giant match.

No, they were going to be on opposite sides with five other partners each, but they shot an angle where Dax was beaten up twice by a fucking AARP recipient

so that they could blow it off by having the fucking oldest guy in the history of the world beat Dax Harwood in a 14-man tag team match.

The fans were really happy, and I'm sure this was a lot of fun in the room.

But again,

and I'm sure a lot of AEW fans loved it, but to me, I'm sick of the multi-man matches.

I'm sick of either, you know, four-way matches or just multi-man teams.

And AEW has been doing it non-stop, especially.

Yeah, and just random and random and mixed up.

And, oh, we'll have this group of three team with this group of four

against then the other guys.

And we'll say, well, we'll throw the one substitute in because nobody will notice.

And you couldn't really tell.

Yeah, and if you're doing the whole Arena Mexico thing, where are the trashy dancers and the furry midgets?

Like, that's part of the show.

Wait, I didn't know they had trashy dancers and furry midgets.

Actually,

I might rather see the furry dancers and the trashy midgets.

I think that's one of the highlights of watching from Arena Mexico is what the fuck's happening over there.

It's like over here, there's wrestling.

Sabado Igante to get from the back to the ring.

You have to go through that.

Can you see any of the dancers' fur?

No, the midgets have fur.

They're furry minis.

Well, anyway, the next match on the card.

Mark Briscoe versus our friend from the land of the rising sun, Oblada.

It's like he's on propofall.

I started watching on purpose at the start.

Normally, I just, I know they're going to beat poor Mark Briscoe.

I know he's going to work his ass off.

This fucking guy offends me as a professional that he's going to show up and ass off like this, that he can't even be, he can't be arsed, as they say over in the United Kingdom.

He can't be fucking bothered to try.

Even if he's so hurt and broke down, he can't take bumps.

He can't try with his face.

He can't try with his body language.

He can't try with some emotion.

He's got no speed.

He's got no movement.

His shit has no snap.

He has no facial expressions.

He takes the bumps like he's made of paper mache.

And on one,

he took one bump, and I call it that, through the ropes to the floor where he was going to land on his feet anyway, but he went through the ropes slower than I.

assumed you could actually do that type of thing.

It was almost like he wasn't really moving.

i've never seen a lazier more boring unmotivated motherfucker in wrestling history than this okada right at this particular moment whether he was great in the past or not

it is ridiculous for anybody when he goes to nose to nose with somebody

And the people chant, holy shit, they only got part two right.

It ought to be bullshit.

We got to watch this guy stink the joint out with another son of a bitch and take a billionaire's money for sleepwalking through the why are the boys putting up with this?

Why the fuck?

Okay, if the fans don't want to complain, are any of the boys saying, don't book me with this fucking guy?

Because it's bullshit.

I'm not going to fucking work with a guy that won't do any more than this.

It's not like he's made any fucking difference in their business.

Regardless of whether you think AEW business is good, bad, or indifferent,

Okada has made the same impact on it as Stokely.

And Stokely tries harder.

So finally, Okada hit him with a tombstone,

didn't cover him.

pulled him up and hit the shitty clothesline to beat him.

Isn't the tombstone traditionally the most feared move and most devastating move in Lucha Libre and people are disqualified for doing it and the recipient is carted out in a fucking ambulance?

Did they just come in here, try to the cathedral of Lucha Libre and just shit all over their big fucking move?

That was my first thought too.

And again, I think it was an automatic disqualification if the referee saw it.

And also, that was just if it was a pile driver let alone a tombstone which i guess inherently supposed to be more dangerous than a pile driver what when and hold on here now what is the lucha name for the tombstone the martinet

was that what it was back when their wrestling was good too like ours used to be till it got up in both countries i don't know the point being

If you're supposed to be so authentic to Lucha Libra, they just went in and took a shit on their big move, didn't they?

Maybe the modern Lucha experts,

have they ruined it for you down there too?

Let us know.

And then they beat Mark up some more,

him and Don Fallus.

And they were an hour into the program at that point.

You know what the problem is, too?

Mark Briscoe getting booked like shit and losing every single match, no matter who he's against,

doesn't hurt,

hasn't hurt to this point how over he is.

And I think that gives a booker false security that I could just beat him.

I could just beat anyone to all these guys over and over again.

It doesn't matter, but it matters.

And, you know, Mark Bristol is getting bigger matches.

He doesn't win any of them.

You know, I'm not even saying push him big right now because I don't know if you should, even though I like him because of the way he's been booked.

But.

Well, that's the thing is

he stays over because he works hard.

He has an incredibly appealing gimmick that appeals to any kind of wrestling crowd.

He's got a ton of personality.

And the problem is not

Tony shouldn't be looking because Tony's not a good booker and not an experienced booker.

Well, a guy in Briscoe's position right now,

you don't look at how.

good he's over and say, well, I can do that with anybody.

He should be looking and saying, My God, if I hadn't fucked this up two years ago when I had the chance, how good would he be?

Over

it's more the fact that this guy's been shot numerous times in both legs and has still crawled across the desert on his belly.

Imagine what he could have done with both legs.

That's the problem

is that Tony's not smart enough to see that.

I agree.

but anyway then

we came to the star of our show at least it was the star of this show

and boy again what

mjf they're keeping him on his toes and maybe this will keep him from having any kind of cognitive decline when he's older that he's got to be this nimble and be able to think on his feet to duck and dodge and move away from all the obstacles and the various projectiles that they're putting in his path and swinging at him and flinging at him and trying to get something out of the most trying of situations.

MJF versus Mystico.

And Brian was Mystico was Sin Cara in the WWE and we weren't watching it, right?

That was that long ago.

Well, the original Sin Cara because then when they fell out with him, they replaced him with a different guy as Sin Cara.

Yes, but he was the first Sin Cara.

The original.

And yeah, we weren't watching that shit.

So I can pretty much say that this is the first full-length Mystico match that I really watched and paid attention to.

But he is,

has been.

Is he as big as he used to be down there?

He was the big star down there.

He was a big star from the moment he debuted in the gimmick.

And then he went to WWE.

I believe CMLO replaced him with a different Mystico because that was their gimmick.

They just wanted to keep using the gimmick.

He returned to Mexico after WWE fizzled out as, was it Caristico, a combination of Sin Cara, Cara, and Mystico.

Didn't get nearly as over.

And then he returned to CML,

got his old gimmick back.

And I believe he's in the middle of a run where he's actually like one of the best drawing cards in the business.

Again,

okay.

Well, and again, this illustrates again why that these two products are oil and water, it's very hard to mix them

because Mystico is the biggest star that this company has in Mexico, and they treated him that way.

The fans went berserk when he came out.

Oh, what about that song?

They're all singing with him.

And well, it sounds like an air supply hit from 1982.

I've never heard entrance music like that, but they knew all the words.

And then you've got MJF, who is again,

everybody says, oh, Cornette won't admit that MJF is the shits.

Well, he's not the shits.

He's never been the shits.

What he's been is horribly booked and diminished and devalued.

But I'm not going to say he's the shits because he's not.

And he's a smart kid and he knew that he was up against

a daunting challenge here.

And I think he did probably the best you could hope for to get out of it.

But the point is, that's why we said last week, if this was a match for Mexico, MJF can go down there and be a heel and fall on his ass and get beat and,

you know, fucking just stooge for this guy all night long.

And it's great because that's for Mexico.

But for the United States, where MJF's primary value to this company is in an English-speaking market with his promos and his pay-per-view matches and et cetera,

how the fuck is he going to have a match with this guy without looking like a fucking idiot?

And they pretty much pulled it off, but there were still points because

Mystico is rotten.

However, and I mean, rotten people have gotten over before in wrestling, and you work around their limitations.

And that's what

MJF was doing here.

But it still, you know, it illustrates that if a guy this rotten can get over this good,

I don't know how it happened.

He's not unnaturally large or unnaturally a better performer than, or even as good a performer than a lot of the other Luchadors.

I don't know what kind of charisma he has because he didn't speak and I wouldn't be able to understand him anyway.

But goddamn, he's rotten.

The timing, the basics,

the psychology.

The clapping.

The clapping about the clapping.

So, so MJF was calling it.

He was keeping it simple at the start.

He was working as a heel.

He was putting Mystico shit over, but not letting it get too complicated so that old Mystico got lost in the weeds of the thing

that's where i noticed i might have said this to you off the air wherever they got that ring from

the bottom rope was like six inches off the goddamn mat every mjf kept getting stuck trying to roll out he'd try to take a powder and you know get some heat with the people and he's stuck under that goddamn bottom rope i've never seen

several people got stuck over the course of the night i don't

i don't know but nevertheless

i mean mjf would would do some heel shit.

He'd hide behind the hurts and then he'd sucker Mystico, but Mystico would fire back and MJF would cut him off again.

And what they ended up doing,

which was probably the smartest thing, was making more of the match about

conflict between MVP and MJF.

MJF has taken plenty of time to heal the people, work the crowd,

because they were hot and he's wearing red, white, and blue.

And the United States colors will get you heat almost everywhere in the world these days.

But they made it about MVP screaming at him, stay on him, take him seriously, stay on him.

And during the break, the Hurts Syndicate had interfered from ringside, but MVP was still frustrated that MJF wouldn't be more aggressive.

And

so they made that part of the story, wherever they're going with MJF and the Hurt Syndicate,

at least this is part of it.

And this cold match is serving some kind of purpose to the American audience.

Again, I say, you know, they kept it at a fairly slow pace most of the time, so it didn't get too sloppy.

But, you know, it's not fair to judge this as a match because MGF can't have a match with this guy, like with a punk or a Danielson or something.

So

I think they did good by getting something out of it, as I said, for the American audience in the story.

And then the people in Mexico, if they like this guy, he looked like a million dollars

compared to probably what he normally looks like with, you know, somebody not controlling this thing.

I thought MJF was going to have to scream, block it.

He was trying to get the guy to block something like three times.

And finally, he just, he cuffed him about the fucking head to get him to listen.

Mystico's comeback was lackadaisical.

It didn't make sense as far as a big big explosion of emotion.

His basics are horrible.

His timing is blah.

He took forever.

Every time he went for something, he's too busy clapping in the middle.

He went for a moonsault.

MGF rolled in and Mystico was going to land on his feet, but he came in so tight, he landed with one foot on MGF's leg and fell on his ass.

And they

at that point, they did an awkward back and forth.

And that's what I wrote.

This is going too long

and it's dragging.

And I think at that point,

apparently, one of the crew members may have told MVP something, who told the referee something, like, please get them out of here.

But

MJF took a walk up the ramp, Mystico took off after him, and MJF tombstoned him on the ramp.

And now it's the second tombstone of the night.

And by the way, again, if they had a producer, we were talking about agent reports and producers of matches earlier.

I questioned when they did a tombstone in the ring, and it wasn't the finish when that's a big deal in Lucha.

So they give this fucking guy

45 minutes later a tombstone on the ramp.

Why didn't somebody tell Okada not to do a fucking tombstone?

Idiots.

So

MJF goes to the ring and wants a count out.

And at four, Mystico sat up like he was the undertaker.

And he was in the ring at eight.

And I wrote, this won't stop.

The first, if they went 20 minutes, well, they went 17 minutes bell to bell.

I wrote it down.

So the first

12 or 13 weren't the worst thing in the world.

Then he has to start putting this fucking idiot over.

They balanced gingerly on the top rope for quite some time, making sure they didn't fall off so that Mystico could arm drag MJF off the top rope, and that was phony as fuck.

Mystico got the arm bar, but MVP had the referee, so MJF

got Mystico with a nutshot

and got a two count.

So now Mystico's been on the ball machine at the gym.

So then

They stood up and MJF kicked Mystico in the balls in front of the referees so that he could get disqualified.

So I can only assume, because MJF is not an idiot,

that this little goofy prick

didn't enjoy just the idea of getting up after a tombstone on the stage and beating the count

and then doing all this other shit

to him

and then

fucking getting

kicked in the balls.

He had to survive the first ball shot.

Because why on earth would MJF have hit him in the nuts twice unless Mystico insisted on kicking out of one of them?

So then they all three beat Mystico up.

And then MJF goes for the match or the match, the mask,

and he grabbed it and just snatched it off his fucking.

I mean, I've pulled panties off easier than that,

especially when I was wearing them myself.

But there was no struggle.

There was no goddamn.

I've got the mask by both hands on top, and he's trying to hold the chin, and I'm pulling.

And the people, oh my God, don't do it.

And he grips it out.

He just grabbed it, pulled it off.

And Mystico covered his face.

And then here came, and I don't feel bad about this.

I don't know who here came

because three masked guys came out.

And the announcer said, Well, there comes Bandito and Tim Plario and

they're here.

They didn't know who the other one was.

And they came out and distracted MJF and the Hurt Syndicate, Lashley and Shelton,

while Kevin Knight and Hong Kong Fui came from the back of the ring.

got on the top rope and dropkicked both Shelton and Bobby when they turned around, missile dropkick off the top rope.

This is another reason why I believe they apparently don't have producers.

Because

what happens

if two guys turn around

and get missile dropkicked off the top rope by two different people coming off the same or the different turnbuckles on the same side of the ring, where are they going to bump?

They're going to bump straight backwards into MJF's legs.

Lashley almost broke MJF's legs.

How could you call that verbally and not fucking see that coming a mile away?

You had to have them turn and spin to the left and to the right, respectively, so that the guys giving the missile dropkicks could have jumped off and dropkicked them at a straight angle, and then they fall sideways next to each other in the middle of the ring.

And the guys that got drop kicked can go towards the turnbuckles,

not fucking

caddy cornered crossways because then you're putting both the guy, nevertheless.

So then they almost broke MJF's legs,

and then

the hurts tried to roll out and they kicked

MJF in some kind of fashion,

and

awkward,

and everybody just rolled out.

And that was

he did the best he could with this guy.

It was the highlight of the show.

It was the highlight of the show.

Well, but that's you know, it stole the show, but it was petty theft.

It,

I think, if the guy had apparently not insisted on being Superman, or if some way Tony Khan had not insisted on make this guy Superman,

What he had done up to the point where they went down the aisle and

did the tombstone, it was just starting to drag.

If they'd have got out of it right there with the

ball kick and the DQ and the whole nine yards,

I think it would have been wonderful.

It still wasn't bad, but goddamn this guy, Mr.

Co.

What the?

That's what you can't

without a long build and a reason and some smoking and mirrors and a better worker on one side, you can't book your top guy or one of your top guys in your company against the top guy from another company and show it to both audiences when one guy is the shits.

I don't know why they had to have this.

Do you think it drew in Mexico?

Because I mean, MJF versus Mystico for a ratings draw in the United States of America.

What the,

at all?

Anything?

Well, we'll see see what happens with the ratings here.

MJF and the Hurt Syndicate typically are a highlight of the programming in terms of ratings.

And in Mexico, I'm sure it was a big deal.

Mystico is the biggest star.

This had the most heat of anything by far.

I mean, that's the story of the match, really, to me.

Well, that's because it's Mystico.

But I'm saying, did it add to the gate in Mexico to have Mystico advertised versus MJF?

I couldn't tell you.

I don't know.

But you know what?

I get stressed, Brian, when I start thinking about these things, people making bad decisions, bad choices, people potentially being injured because they don't know what they're doing.

It just stresses me out.

Sometimes I need to relax.

I need to kick back.

I need to feel the breeze of a blueberry.

And I need to unwind and enjoy the moment, but I don't need to get a hangover, Brian.

And you don't want to drink any of that alcohol because that'll make you one of those winos where you lay around all day in a city park somewhere drinking a ripple out of a brown paper bag and nobody wants that do they you kicked the ripple habit you got off the ripple nipple you don't want to go back there do you uh no i didn't have a ripple nipple habit but i do think that most people don't aim to become winos if that was your question

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all right brian on with the show because i have a very

a very honest question to ask you if you can tell me i didn't have time to google this.

How much is 4 million pesos?

Oh, you know, I meant to do that too.

They said it, but I don't want to get that wrong.

4 million pesos.

Ladies and gentlemen, they had a match,

a four-way match, of course, it had to be,

where the winner would get 4 million pesos.

4 million pesos.

And U.S.

dollars, 208,743 dollars 60 cents

now how much again 208 thousand

seven hundred and forty three dollars

sixty cents

so it's not as impressive as it sounds with the four million but

what the fuck ricochet versus ho legram

versus leo rush versus masquerada dorito

why would

why would anybody think that you would have that match and just say, oh, the winner gets $200,000?

What kind of

Vern Gagne's $50,000 AWA battle royals used to raise fucking eyebrows?

What the.

And again, all this was

a Mark Booker given four of his really smaller but athletically gifted children a chance to play in front of the big crowd.

And, well, the reason for the match, because there has to be a reason for the match, is the winner gets 4 million pesos.

There needs to be a reason for the match that people might actually understand or give a shit about, first of all.

Second of all,

this thing with entrances was 20 minutes.

And yes, it was one of the more ridiculous exhibitions of team gymnastics that you're ever going to see.

But

they've got a 14-man tag team match at the start of the show.

They've got a 10-man tag team match to close the show.

They've got these goofy stipulations everywhere, and they got to gimmick this up too with the 4 million pesos, just so the kids get to play.

And by the way, and old Ricochet,

somebody,

I don't know, Brian, if you probably saw that people were actually taking a clip from the match with Lashley and Benjamin against Kevin Knight and Hong Kong Fuyi last week, where the kids were blowing shit left and right, the alley oops and the jumping up and not throwing anything.

And it made the hurt syndicate look bad because they were trying to work with these guys, give them shit, and they couldn't do it.

The AEW fans were putting that same clip up on Twitter going, see, the hurt Hurt Syndicate, they're not working with these guys and

they're not good as these guys.

They thought it was their fault.

And then when

I put out a tweet saying this is part of the problem

that the AEW wrestlers will never get any better when the fans and each other, they're all telling themselves it's not their shortcomings.

It's the fault of the occasional actual pro that wanders in.

And of course, the kids were out of position, and Shelton was like, Well, is somebody going to hit me with something?

I'm ready to take a bump, and all these things.

So when I tweeted that, I said, Unless they realize the problem,

they ain't going to do anything about it.

Some guy tweets, Hey, Ricochet, what about this?

And Ricochet wrote back,

Who cares what he thinks?

And I saw that and I had to,

you know,

I don't have a lot of fucking time, but I had to say something.

I wrote him back.

I said, with a blistering comeback like this, no wonder you're the king of comeback tweet deletion.

Why didn't Tony hire you your own writer too?

I love comeback tweet deletion.

It's such a nice.

Well, I mean, that's what he does.

He tweets something out his ass.

It's not really particularly witty and generally pisses somebody off.

And somebody that he works for tells him to take it down.

But nevertheless, that was what this was is, you know,

20 minutes of the children getting to play in front of the big crowd and somebody, I don't know who won 4 million pesos.

You don't know who won?

I didn't really pay attention to notice.

Who won?

I don't know either.

Well, there you go.

I thought you would know.

Who do you think won?

Let's look it up real quick.

Well,

now one would think that Leo Rush didn't win.

Normally, if this was America, Ricochet would win because it's hologram and masquerada Dorito.

But since it's Arena Mexico, Hologram, I bet Hologram won.

All right.

Well, let's find out.

Going to the notes from the wrestling news, I apologize.

The gardeners just arrived off schedule.

We've talked about this.

They're They're not gardeners.

They're lawnmowers.

They're just mowing.

They're not fucking planting flowers and fertilizing the goddamn seeds so that they hook up to the sky.

Hologram want a four-way.

There you go.

Had to be that way.

Mama says it bees that way sometimes.

It had to be the luchador that Tony created himself?

Well, one would think if it was, you know, if

besides the fact that there were two luchadors, one of them probably wanted hologram is the one that Tony created, where Dorito is just the one that Tony snacks on when he's stoned.

Then

we got the CML women's title

with Mercedes, Moon, and Zeuxis.

And I'm sorry if you think we're going to spend any time on this, but Brad, I will say again,

she won their belt now.

She, what is she got?

Like six belts?

They keep feeding this fucking

idiot's ego.

We're giving her all these belts, and that's why she thinks that her shit's any good.

Talking, she's the biggest female

waste of money.

She equals Okada on the other side.

If you put the two of them together, they're a money pit.

But I think she's going going to have to get a bigger team because even a camel couldn't carry all those belts.

You saw who's on her team now.

Did you see the news this week about who she's dating?

Well, I didn't know she was dating members of her team.

I thought they're just the ones that couldn't find her way out of the woods.

But who she word came out this week, she tweeted at or Instagram at or whatever the fuck, a picture of her with someone, the face covered.

She's dating the beast Mortos, Frank the Lawyer.

That's the new power couple in AEW.

Stay tuned, ladies and gentlemen.

Let's see where this goes.

Mercedes and the Beast coming soon.

Mercedes and Frank.

What a, what a, just a couple of crazy kids out to make their way in this big, wide, wonderful world.

Well, she won this too.

So, you know, she doesn't do a job even in a foreign country with the other favorites.

She won all the belts.

And then Tony Storm came in and German suplexed her.

And then the referees were right there

Because,

goddammit,

you know, it's one thing when Moxley and his bunch comes out and tries to pour Drano down people's throats, or there's active beatdowns of major stars that go on for minutes at a time.

But when these girls get in a fight, we got to send some shit out there to pull them apart.

All righty, are you ready for a brief commentary on the main event of the evening, Brian?

And by the way, this was a two and a half program that still overran, as we mentioned.

They were already well past 10 o'clock when they got this

sorry state of affairs in the ring, the 10-man tag team match.

Let me see if I can keep track of these teams.

You had

Will Osprey, Samoa Joe, Powerhouse Hobbs, Swerve Strickland, and and Shipoopy

with Prince Nana in the corner, taking on

Frank Mortis Esquire, attorney at law,

Dick the Boozer, Wheeler Useless, and the Kookamunga Kids with their corner person, Marina Schaefer.

And the reason why that Frank was in the match was because Claudio

apparently was on the same flight or car or

burrow or whatever as

Cash was, and he wasn't there either.

And that was the main event.

Did you notice the one difference in Dick the Boozer and the Boer Horseman's presentation this time around, Brian?

The very glaring difference?

Other than the beast Mortos suddenly joining their group now that he's part of it.

Other than possibly someone coming in in a helicopter to land on top of you.

Again, they were supposed to be here yesterday, but it rained, so they're here now.

They didn't come through the arena.

Their adventures, they came.

What's there an arena they may actually get knifed in?

They don't come through the arena.

Exactly.

You know, when all of the people are like, oh,

we love all this phony, silly wrestling.

And Moxley can act like a badass.

But when there's a very possible chance that they could just be disemboweled on the way to the rig, they come down the ramp like everybody else

so

with i mean i can't tell you i didn't again watch a lot of this because it's just the same thing over and over and you know what you're getting

but

in principle in in generalities

it's the same thing with these two

And because they have position, they get to determine how everybody else in the match acts,

whether they can work or not, whether they're in the ring with talent or not, the Kookamunga kids are going to have this nonsense match.

And everybody just runs in and does everything over and over.

But one part illustrated that.

At one point,

and this, again, this is another reason why everybody looks stupid and why people can't get over, and why I know on one side, Samoa Joe probably, if he hasn't just given up and said, oh, fuck it, he probably wanted to kill somebody because he's the one on that side that's smart enough to know that they were being buried.

But the Hardley boys will get in the ring and do it two-on-one, not a spot, but spots, two-on-one spots with Osprey forever.

Not only in front of the referee, who was the corpse referee, the Buckaroos' little handpicked stooge that lets them do whatever they want.

Doesn't know how how to do it any other way.

He's the shittiest referee in the world.

But they do it not only in front of the referee, but in front of Osprey's four able-bodied partners that are standing on the apron 10 feet away, watching their partner get beat up two-on-one by the heels without one of them making a goddamn move to do anything about it.

You know why?

Because that's the spot that's called.

So they have to stand there with their dicks in their hand, looking like idiots to the entire entire arena

while

these two simpletons beat up the babyface and then let him make his own comeback by leaping up and giving them both cody cutters whereupon

the

the pie-faced one matt maddie

He takes a bump from the Cody cutter, the double Cody cutter, and he jumps right up to his feet and then runs over to the ropes and jumps through the ropes and lands on his feet, completely fine with no expression on his face because he's running to get into the position he's supposed to be in next.

Because soon as he and his brother line up at ringside in the same spot and grab each other's arms to brace themselves for no apparent reason, Swerve rolls in the ring, runs away from them.

to the far side of the ring, bounces off the ropes, and it runs and does a FOSBERIE flop

onto them

because that was the next spot that was called, and they had to rush and get there in time.

It's an endless circus performance of tumbling midgets and fucking dancing bears.

And, you know, most of the time they end up in the position they're supposed to be in, but at never at any point do you get the idea this is any kind of wrestling match or contest.

It's children in their backyard in

Western Kookamunga

playing on a trampoline.

And this went forever.

And they overran the 30-minute overrun.

And then

finally,

they do whatever the fuck they do in the goddamn match.

I don't even care anymore.

I was sent the clip so that I could catch up on the missed finish.

But then here comes Adam Page after the match.

And he and Moxley just get in the ring and have the face off.

And then they start trading fake forearms

to build this big stadium match.

And then

they do the spot where

Paige is going to buckshot.

Dick the boozer,

but the buckaroos are supposed to stand up in the back and Pie Face is going to get buckshotted, but he wasn't in the right place.

So Moxley's standing around rubber-legged in the ring while Paige is trying to figure out a way not to stand up and do the buck shot.

He's looking like, did my boots slip off?

And finally, when he sees Nimrod Jr.

get in the right position,

he comes over the top with the buck shot.

Moxley ducks and he clotheslines.

his former friend whose brother goes, How could you do that?

Well, don't don't get in a fucking way.

And then everybody just

left.

And the announcers,

I will say this, and then I will let you comment on anything in this last segment you care to.

But the announcers are trying to sell, oh, and Paige and Moxley and what's going to happen with his former friends and all this other thing.

And Brian, you know, because I was sent the clip on YouTube.

And you know how as soon as a YouTube clip is over with, an advertising message will pop up pretty immediately.

Yeah.

I swear to God, to cap off this journey through hysteria that was this tag team fiasco or this television fiasco with all these multiple tag team matches.

The announcers finally say,

we'll see you back right here next week on Dynamite.

And boom, the spot kicked in.

The number one secret to regular BMs.

That's something.

And that was the best part of the show.

What

you can't, by the time that they do anything that's supposed to promote a match that they've got coming up at a big show or a stadium or whatever.

It's at the end of the show where you've seen everybody do everything.

Everybody's done everything in this fucking segment.

And it's just what

this was just, like I said, the best way I can describe this is you go to the circus and they've got the tumbling clowns and there's like 12 of them and they're all doing their routine.

The end.

Well, that was AEW Dynamite and we'll do the full rating.

I see, I see.

You didn't have any fucking comments to make on that final segment.

What am I going to say?

What am I going to say?

The young bucks.

The young look worse than ever in terms of just appearance-wise, like not, you know, you can always say, oh, they didn't play wrestlers, but at least that one that was going bald, looked like he was kind of in shape.

He looks like complete shit now.

The other one's just smaller and frumpier than ever.

Well, as they're, they're getting

pagey, pasty and pudgy as they enter their 40s.

And they were never athletes to begin with.

So they never fucking went to a gym.

I'm allowed to say that because I was never an athlete either.

But in all honesty, honesty most of my work looked better than the buckses

i didn't do flips i just did wrestling stuff and we'll have more about this story on the drive-through because the quarter hours are not in as we are finishing the recording now but the overall number is being reported by dave meltzer oh well well then let's take this with a grain of assault mine Well, I have to think he has a source here that must have given him this.

It was probably named Tony Khan.

AEW from Mexico City, 736,000 viewers.

Oh, I'm having a hard time believing that, aren't you?

Doesn't include Max.

Biggest 25 to 54 number since April 2024.

Brian,

why

would over 100,000 more people watch this show than did last week's or the week before or the week before with what they had advertised here?

I don't know.

I'm dying to see the quarter hours.

That's why we can't do a real segment on this until we see the actual proof in the port.

Has some ongoing tournament that's been going on for the past four or five months suddenly come to an end?

Well, the NBA's winding down.

Yeah, I mean, that's what you could say.

Yeah.

I got to hear more details on this.

Well, we will have more details on the drive-thru in a few days, but that was AEW Dynamite Grand Slam from Mexico City at Reno, Mexico.

Yes, and not

the gardeners in back of you you

that I'm still hearing now.

You've talked me into it.

Anyway, folks, we're done for today, but we'll be back with more in just a few days on the drive-thru and continue all these things we've been doing.

And until then, for Brian, I am Jim.

Thank you.

Fuck you.

Bye-bye, everybody.

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